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Until now, edge computing was only building up use-cases. In 2021 and beyond, novel business models will come up that power the deployment of the edge in production. Organizations will find new ways to leverage the enhanced computing power and storage available closer to where the data is being generated and will appreciate the network saving achieved by not having to transmit data continuously between the cloud and the devices on the frontlines.
Today, the telecom industry has become an enormous data repository with access to uber-sensitive customer data. They are also the platforms upon which digital lives revolve so that any service outage or loss of data can trigger significant inconvenience for the end-users and a large-scale disruption of business operations across industries. These aspects make telcos lucrative targets for cybercriminals looking to tamper with data and networks at scale.
With strict policies like EU-GDPR now in action, telcos – whether in India or abroad – can’t afford to regard cybersecurity as anything less than a critical function. With data security becoming a vital business mandate, a large-scale shift within the telecom industry is predicted towards a security-led method.
In the coming years, we will witness players prop up their defenses against direct threats, like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, along with indirect vulnerabilities like data breaches and internal leaks. The IT frameworks facilitating telecom networks will become more robust. There is also the probability of telcos pushing cybersecurity solutions as part of their service offerings to assure better threat defense for their consumers.
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In the 5G IoT ecosystem, the amounts of data generated by IoT devices and M2M communications will increase exponentially. Therefore, real-time processing of data streams based on big data platforms will be integral for automated decision-making. Such processing is normally executed at the edge and only then sent to the cloud to improve data quality and security
from February to September 2020, DDoS grew by half and was on average 98% higher than it was during the same period a year earlier. Furthermore, around 50 million DDoS attacks happened globally within a 12-month period.high-volume 50 Gpbs + attacks became a pressing issue for businesses lacking adequate protection.59% of the total number of attacks were multi-vector incidents, which organizations are too weak to fight against.the most long-lasting DDoS attack was 5,698 minutes. This equals to 4 days of non-stop attacking. Notably, the key issue with DDoS incidents for the telecom sector is a ripple effect an attack of such magnitude can cause.How Telcos Can Protect Against DDoS AttacksSet up robust Access control lists (ACL) – your first line of defense. Note, however, that ACL has a scaling issue. A rapid increase of temporary ACLs, built to resist a large-scale attack, can have a major performance impact on different router hardware and software, making the overall management rather challenging. Thus, it’s best to write several scripts for automatic router configuration and ACL management.Implement black hole scrubbing – a variation of the block hole filtering technique. In this case, the traffic is redirected to a different physical interface – a scrubbing center – that can weed out the good traffic from the malicious one. A number of software vendors offer such solutions.Real-time DDoS monitoring is a must. The best-of-breed tools are now powered with machine learning functionality, meaning their detection accuracy progressively increases over time.
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Improving Truck Load Utilization Through Continuous Moves
The transportation sector often suffers from poor capacity management, which results in drivers driving empty miles on one of the legs. This, in turn, leads to driver inefficiency, higher handling costs, congestion, and fuel usage, to name a few. Through continuous moves, the empty miles can be eliminated as the same vehicle can be assigned a load to transfer on their return leg.
Successful implementation of this aspect has been showcased by the Blume Global platform through their Street Turns feature. This feature leverages AI to optimize the truck’s capacity usage, thus ensuring efficient use of driver hours of service and reduction of fuel consumption and deadhead distance.
simple process, where the truck is pretty much empty for the return journey from B to A and A to C. However, using AI tools, historical data gathered for various loads can be utilized to generate leads of potential loads in areas near drop-off locations, and carriers can be assigned loads, which are often managed by brokerage services that act on behalf of interested shippers. This will lead to improved truck utilization as the empty mile in is optimized to B to C only.
We can evaluate carriers’ performance based on linear factors like on-time arrival, cost/unit weight, time to ship, etc. This is a very generic method of allocation of load to the shipper. The efficient method is to schedule a shipper based on the load type, cost, and available time factors. This is fathomable and feasible if we develop a continuous DataOps pipeline with an artificial intelligence model enabled on it. ML algorithms such as Gradient Boosting or Random Forest can train the model over the training set of the historical data. To reduce bias, the results can be aggregated from several iterative output models. The outcome is a list of carriers ranked in the order of their f1-score. It was observed that among all the features or factors dialed in, quantity distribution, weight distribution, total distance, and geographical locations tend to stand out as decisive features over time.
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Companies may put off the expansion of their vendor bases for two reasons: the process of new supplier enrollment is time-consuming, and further managing multiple relationships and contracts is complicated. Vendor management software is designed to cope with both problems at once.
VMS has an easy and clear self-registration process for vendors that saves your procurement staff from unreasonable efforts to collect all the required information about new suppliers. With VMS, you can pre-qualify vendors against your critical requirements like an ability of a vendor to produce goods under your brand or to ship products to certain countries.
All in all, using a vendor management system, you can obtain all the necessary vendor information (such as bank details, regulatory data, capacity details, etc.) in a fast and error-free way for approval. The sooner you onboard new vendors, the faster you start getting value from your cooperation.
A vendor management system brings increased visibility into all transactions with your vendors. You can, for example, detect hidden costs or note discrepancies in payment details reported by a vendor (e.g., exaggerated pay rates). Besides, when integrated with accounting software, a VMS system can enable automated invoicing, allowing your business to cut costs associated with manual invoice processing and get rid of mistakes caused by manual data entry.
An effective vendor management system helps you reduce operational costs, assess vendor risks more accurately, and facilitate supplier search and onboarding. If you feel hesitant to go into VMS implementation investment right now and need to get a better understanding of the business value it can bring, you can start with a free demo from different VMS providers and get real experience with the tool. And if you are looking for professional help in implementing a vendor management system, don’t hesitate to contact ScienceSoft’s team.
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The threat group behind the attack is highly sophisticated, and it has been determined from analysing the TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) that the attack involved infecting the Codecov’s CI/CD pipeline, gaining access to thousands of customer networks in the process, in a bid to steal user credentials and export customer data in user continuous integration environments.
Codecov state that, with the infected credentials, ‘services, datastores, and application code could be accessed’.‘Supply chain, phishing, and ransomware attacks reflect a broader trend that cyber criminals want to exploit multiple organisations through a single point-of-attack.’ – Eva Velasquez, CEO Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC)
The attack was made public knowledge in April, but it is said that reports of interference had been made as early as the 31st of January, three months prior.
Rapid7 have reported that the Bash uploader was used on a CI server that the company applied to text and build tooling internally for their Managed Detection and Response (MDR) capabilities, and infiltrated source code repositories for MDR, internal credentials. They report that the breached source code subset was used for internal tooling.
Rapid7 were notified of the breach via an email from Codecov app. Since then, Rapid7 report that these repositories have now been rotated and the customers have been alerted about the data breach and that the attackers may have downloaded source code repositories.
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IPA mimics activities carried out by humans and, over time, learns to do them even better. Traditional levers of rule-based automation are augmented with decision-making capabilities thanks to advances in deep learning and cognitive technology. The promise of IPA is radically enhanced efficiency, increased worker performance, reduction of operational risks, and improved response times and customer journey experiences.”
5G also complements other emerging technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things) and AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) to further drive digital transformation both internally within an organization and externally in customer engagements.
Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS)
While 5G promises a whole new equilibrium of enhanced customer experience that was never witnessed before, measuring its QoE remains a puzzle.
The 5G architecture implements end-to-end network slicing to ensure QoS for all the new use cases. To meet service specific performance objectives, virtual networks are created that receive dynamically allocated end-to-end virtual resources. Emergency services would receive a high priority slice when compared to other less critical services, thus ensuring higher QoS.
By applying the concept of intelligent automation in the software testing lifecycle to achieve intelligent test automation, the digital-first organizations can build a process that is embedded with next-generation technologies and is robust enough to tackle continuous changes.
Driving agility and quality with Intelligent Test Automation
In an effort to accelerate digital transformation, organizations are adopting the modern software development methodologies of DevOps and Quality Engineering, while shifting Quality Assurance to the left.
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AI-driven predictive analytics are helping telcos provide better services by utilizing data, sophisticated algorithms and machine learning techniques to predict future results based on historical data. This means operators can use data-driven insights to can monitor the state of equipment, anticipate failure based on patterns, and proactively fix problems with communications hardware, such as cell towers, power lines, data center servers, and even set-top boxes in customers’ homes.
In the short term, network automation and intelligence will enable better root cause analysis and prediction of issues. Long term, these technologies will underpin more strategic goals, such as creating new customer experiences and dealing efficiently with emerging business needs. An innovative solution by AT&T is using AI to support its maintenance procedures: the company is testing a drone to expand its LTE network coverage and to utilize the analysis of video data captured by drones for tech support and maintenance of its cell towers.
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) isn’t actually a type of telephone system: it’s a protocol used to enable data packets to be transmitted between devices via the Internet. A SIP telephony system usually consists of internet telephone lines that are attached to a traditional onsite PBX (private branch exchange) telephone system.
VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) systems often use SIP trunking to transmit data, but you don’t need to have a PBX system in order to use VoIP devices. Instead, you can make calls via a remote system operated by your service provider.
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Today U.S. telecommunications infrastructure has little fiber to the premises, although fiber makes up most long-haul and metropolitan area networks. Realizing the goal of fiber everywhere involves a number of problems requiring research. For example, while the cost of optical components is not a significant problem in core networks because the cost is spread across many users, the components represent a nontrivial expense for local access networks, which serve only one user or a handful of users. How can the cost of optical components be reduced sufficiently to make fiber to the home affordable? What architectural approaches offer the best mix of affordability, performance, and evolvability? What are the future applications that will drive the need for increasing bandwidth?
Metropolitan area networks are currently receiving much commercial attention. With today’s abundance of fiber in the core, and with access networks creating larger demands, an important focus of research is to develop architectures that effectively handle ever-greater volumes of optical transmission in metropolitan areas. Core networks themselves will require advances, and as more capability is introduced into the access networks, the need will grow to continue to improve the bandwidth-times-distance product, as will demands to increase the performance of national networks.
Wireless networks provide an even more fertile area for exploration. Access to higher bandwidth, which has spurred growing use of the wired Internet and is now becoming available to wireless LAN users (via WiFi and WiMAX) and fully mobile users (via 3G technology), is basic to the creation of the so-called mobile Internet. There are many opportunities for further progress.
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Because fixed VoIP numbers require an address, and therefore an owner, they’re regarded as more credible than non-fixed VoIP numbers. This affects whether your customers will feel inclined to pick up calls from you.Moreover, scammers tend to prefer non-fixed VoIP numbers because the absence of an address requirement makes it easier to mask their identity. VoIP service providers also tend to charge for fixed VoIP numbers rather than offer free services with a quick signup.
One key advantage of fixed VoIP numbers is that, unlike non-fixed VoIP numbers, they send the exact location of a 911 dialer to public safety answering points (PSAPs)—allowing the call to be traced in an emergency.
A non-fixed VoIP number, otherwise known as a virtual phone number, isn’t linked to a physical address. Non-fixed VoIP numbers have the same calling capabilities as fixed VoIP numbers, and can likewise be used for residential or business purposes.
While non-fixed VoIP numbers aren’t tethered to a geographical location, accounts can be created to serve any desired address. This allows businesses to contact customers all over the world.In addition to establishing a local presence, non-fixed VoIP numbers can bring together remote teams and unify global communications.Non-fixed VoIP numbers are easier to put in service than fixed VoIP numbers. Platforms such as Google Voice and Skype offer non-VoIP numbers in return for as little information as a name, email address, and payment information whenever relevant, although these services are usually low-cost or free.
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