Posted in Commentary with tags Foxit on December 11, 2024 by itnerd
Foxit, a leading provider of innovative PDF and eSignature products and services, helping knowledge workers to increase their productivity and do more with documents, today announced Xseed Solutions, a leading software development company, has transformed its document management processes by implementing Foxit’s integrated eSign and PDF solutions, resulting in significant operational improvements and accelerated growth.
Xseed Solutions, an innovative software development company led by CEO Mateo Bervejillo, had already established a firm foothold with a team of creative developers and prestigious clients like Coca-Cola. However, as Xseed aimed to expand its operations, it encountered a significant hurdle: its current electronic signature software needed to catch up with its growth plans. Realizing the need for a more robust solution to support their expansion, Mateo and his team set out to find a new electronic signature software – landing finally on Foxit eSign.
The transition to Foxit’s comprehensive platform has enabled Xseed to consolidate its document management processes into a single, unified solution. Foxit has provided Xseed with an electronic signature solution that not only offers a comprehensive suite of sending, signing, and completion features but also allows users to create, edit, share, and store PDFs in a unified, secure, and workflow-friendly environment. Foxit’s flagship products, PDF Editor and eSign, combine to give customers like Xseed the power to complete important forms and contracts faster and easier than more popular industry names — and at a more affordable price.
The implementation process, described by Bervejillo as “beautiful,” has yielded immediate results. Xseed has experienced enhanced team collaboration, streamlined workflow processes, and improved client satisfaction. The user-friendly interface and 24/7 expert support have also contributed to rapid adoption across the organization.
The success of this digital transformation initiative has positioned Xseed Solutions for continued growth and reinforces the company’s commitment to leveraging innovative technology solutions to enhance business operations.
To learn more, please read the Xseed Solutions case study here:
Posted in Commentary with tags OVH on December 11, 2024 by itnerd
Console Connect, PCCW Global’s on-demand platform and automated network for intelligent data movement, is now available from the newest Toronto data centre ofOVHcloud, a global cloud player and the European Cloud leader, broadening secure cloud access for businesses in Canada.
Located in one of North America’s most dynamic innovation clusters, the expansion enables more businesses to rapidly move data between OVHcloud, enterprise locations, devices and other clouds using a trusted solution on a single on-demand platform, accelerating hybrid and multi-cloud adoption in Canada.
Businesses prioritizing uninterrupted access and data protection can now quickly configure highly available redundancy through OVHcloud Connect (OCC) Provider via Console Connect, backed by the extended PCCW Global private network.
For highly critical workloads requiring a private network SLA, Console Connect and OVHcloud can establish a highly available private extended network to access critical workloads hosted in two OVHcloud data centers in Canada.
Console Connect became a new global OVHcloud Connect partner last year. Since then, it has added on-ramps to OVHcloud in Montreal. By expanding its presence to Toronto, Console Connect allows enterprises to interconnect OVHcloud’s data centres in the two Canadian cities within minutes via its private automated backbone.
Whether seeking redundancy, security or speed, the Console Connect platform is a strong fit for companies looking for a more efficient, secure and cost-effective way to turn up a private connection between any cloud provider to OVHcloud, migrate their data securely and then tear the connection down when complete.
ServiceNow and Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the expansion of their strategic partnership, unveiling cutting-edge AI-driven capabilities to help businesses streamline operations and compete on a global stage.
Highlights for Canada:
Expansion to Canada in 2025: This partnership’s growth into Canada will deliver enhanced value to industries such as telecom, technology, finance, education, and retail.
Canadian Enterprise Success: Companies like Bell Canada are already leveraging this collaboration to achieve significant cost savings and outstanding results. John Watson, President, Bell Business Markets, AI and FX Innovation notes, “By harnessing the Now Platform’s advanced automation and AI capabilities powered by AWS, we are driving operational excellence and delivering even greater value to our customers.”
Critical Moment for Canada: With AI adoption in Canada still at just 35%, this announcement is poised to break barriers to productivity and drive comprehensive digital transformation across the country.
What’s New:
Enhanced GenAI Workflows: A new connector enables seamless use of multimodal models developed and trained on Amazon Bedrock, powering advanced Generative AI workflows on the Now Platform.
Automation & Integration Upgrades: New solutions for managing security incidents and procurement are available on AWS Marketplace, simplifying complex enterprise needs.
This partnership represents a milestone in the collaboration between ServiceNow and AWS, combining AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities with ServiceNow’s innovative solutions to empower businesses to maximize cloud value, enhance digital experiences, and redefine GenAI-powered workflows.
For more details, you can read the full press release, here.
Over the weekend I had the chance to drive an electric vehicle. I’ll talk about the specific electric vehicle later this week. But today I want to talk about the charging experience. Now my condo doesn’t have a charger of any sort. Which meant that I had to rely on public chargers anywhere that I found them. In advance of this, I downloaded the Flo app onto my iPhone and loaded it with some cash. That way I could access and pay and charge whenever I needed to.
I picked up the EV on Friday at noon in Mississauga. The EV had 100% in the battery or 350 KM of range. I then shuttled my wife to an appointment that was about 20 minutes away. And from there, I went to see a client in midtown Toronto. And then I took my wife to dinner in west end Toronto and then home. The next day I drove from my home in west end Toronto to the northern part of Toronto to see a client. By that point, I was at 66% of range and my wife suggested that we charge it as we were planning on going to the Elora Christmas Market the next day in order to test out one of the key features of this specific EV. So after I was finished with the client, I went home to pick my wife up and then drove to Sherway Gardens as that shopping mall had a number of charging stations including a DC fast charger. And at the same time we could have dinner and do some shopping while the EV charged. But that didn’t work out so well because the DC fast charger was in use, and though there were four level 2 chargers at Sherway Gardens, one was in use by a Tesla who was using it because the Tesla Supercharger station was full with a line up, there was no way I could get the EV into any of the available chargers without hitting a car or a pillar. What also didn’t help is that Apple Maps indicated that there was a second Flo facility at Sherway Gardens. But when we drove to it, it didn’t exist. So we ended up changing our plans and going to a Flo charging station about a kilometre away at a Canadian Tire as that had the only other DC fast charger in the area. It was completely empty so we were able to drive in, plug in, and then walk 120 meters to a Boston Pizza to have dinner and wait for the EV to charge. Now I have nothing against Boston Pizza, but that was not the dinner that my wife and I had in mind.
After stretching out dinner for as long as we could to give the EV a chance to get to 100%, this is what it cost us:
That doesn’t factor in $65 for dinner for what it’s worth. But at least we were able to drive home which was about 5KM away with 100% charge in the EV.I should also mention that this DC fast charger promised 50 kWh of charging speed, but I never saw anything above 40 kWh.
The next day we went to the Elora Christmas Market which was a 110 KM drive from our place. To save as much battery as possible, we put the car into its power saving mode which would use more regenerative braking. Thus topping off the battery whenever I hit the brakes by maybe 1% at most. In hindsight I shouldn’t have bothered. The majority of the drive was on highway 401, which meant there was no braking. Thus this move while well intentioned was likely irrelevant. In any case, the drive took us from 100% down to 68% by the time we arrived. Now we had used the Flo app to figure out where the charging stations were in Elora, and the town had about 12 of them. But they were all level 2 chargers which meant that they would charge the EV slowly. To give you some perspective, a 10% to 80% charge with a level 2 charger would take about 8 to 9 hours. But we were going to be there for a few hours so it didn’t really matter as we had a significant about of range left in the vehicle. After walking around the market for a few hours and having a couple bites to eat, this is what we ended up with in terms of the cost of charging the EV:
So spending $5.20 got us from 68% to 88% over three hours. Not fast, but at least it was cheap. As an aside, if you have a level 2 charger at home, you’ll likely get the same speed but pay less as you could schedule charging for non peak hours for example to keep costs down and accelerate your ROI.
We then drove home and at that point I had to go out and find another DC fast charger as I was expected to return the EV the next day with a full charge. At the time, I was at a charge level of 65%. So I drove a few kilometres away to Bloor West Village in Toronto where a city parking lot had an available DC fast charger as I could see if it was in use from the Flo app. And while it charged, I had to find something to do. So I ended up walking around Bloor West Village for over 90 minutes and came back to the EV when it was 100% charged. This is what it cost me:
Two notes on this charging experience. First, it was faster as the charger claimed to do 62 kWh and I actually saw it doing that speed. Second, it was cheaper than the Flo DC fast charger that I went to on Saturday even though the charger was run by ChargePoint which is a Flo partner. That I found interesting. I then drove home and the next day returned the EV with 95% of a charge.
So, what did I learn from this experience? Well, a number of things:
If you don’t have a charger at home, don’t bother buying an EV: I say that because every time I needed to charge, I needed to drive out, find a charger, and then find something to do while the EV charged. That is going to get frustrating very quickly. Thus if you’re going to get an EV, you need to get a level 2 charger at home and charge overnight or any time the EV is not in use. The only scenario where I can see someone who doesn’t have a charger at home deciding to buy an EV is if their workplace has a charger, or they had easy access to one. But unless that’s free or cheap, it’s not worth doing in my opinion.
DC fast charging is useful but expensive: The two times that I used a DC fast charger, the cost was more of less the same as half a tank of gas for my daily driver which is a gas powered SUV. That means that any cost savings that could potentially come from having an EV would disappear. That means that DC fast charging is for convenience or necessity.
What the above means is that for a lot of people, such as people who live in apartments and condos, an EV is not a realistic option unless said apartment or condo makes provisions for EVs. By that I mean installing level 2 chargers. While some are doing that, it’s a capital cost that I don’t see the majority of apartments and condos doing unless there’s a critical mass of EVs out there. That’s going to be a problem as EVs maybe make up 10% of the market, which isn’t anything close to critical mass country.
The only way to address that barrier to entry is to make EV chargers, specifically DC fast chargers more widely available. If I were to look at where DC fast chargers were located relative to my home, this is what I see:
That’s a #fail. Chargers have to be as ubiquitous as gas stations. On top of that the EV that I was driving was capable of charging at 115 kWh. But the two DC fast chargers were not capable of charging at anywhere near that speed. Given that a lot of EVs are capable of charging at 100 kWh or faster, DC chargers need to do that. That would take the charge time to sub 1 hour most cases. And at the same time make EVs a viable option for many and drive adoption. Especially to those who don’t have a charger at home. Because nobody has a gas station at home because there’s a gas station usually within easy reach most people. EV charging needs to be just like that.
So based on this three day experience, my wife and I won’t be getting an EV. But if the charging infrastructure improves, or we get access to a level 2 charger, we might change our minds. Hopefully the needle moves on that front as I think EVs will eventually be the future of vehicles. We just need to have the infrastructure to allow as many people as possible to fully embrace the future.
Posted in Commentary on December 11, 2024 by itnerd
Here’s some 2025 predictions from Larry Schwarberg, CISSP, Vice President, Information Security at The University of Phoenix
The rapid adoption of AI will cause inadvertent data exposures
The growing popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has business leaders trying to find as many use cases as possible in hopes of improving service delivery and operations. In most cases, the use cases surpass the cyber security team’s ability to implement appropriate governance and controls. With a sense of urgency and the lack of a mature governance program, employees may be using open-source AI for internal business cases. The increased risk will be inadvertent data exposure due to limited knowledge of training a large language model (LLM). For risk mitigation, business leaders should partner with Privacy, Cyber Security and Legal to implement a governance model before pushing wide use of AI within the organization. The governance model begins with a sound policy that provides flexibility for innovation and allows for oversight of major AI projects.
Ransomware attackers will target centralized services and data lakes
Some of the ransomware attacks in 2024 have shown that attackers are focused on wider impact, which produces a sense of urgency to pay ransoms. When attackers focus on a centralized service provider, the impact is much greater than an attack focused on a single organization. Service providers have SLAs and penalties which can force the consideration to pay the ransom instead of attempting to recover on their own. Several notable attacks in 2024 have proven that attacks on service providers and large databases provide a goldmine for hackers. Additionally, attackers may begin targeting cloud service providers who are likely to host large organizations in various industry verticals. Organizations should ensure their business continuity plans, and disaster recovery plans have contingencies if their service providers become unavailable. Incident response plans should also test the executive team on scenarios where a ransomware group may exfiltrate personal information from their service provider and attempt to negotiate additional ransom for the data they have in their possession.
Phishing / Vishing will be more believable with the use of AI
AI has created an environment where deep fakes can easily be leveraged for social engineering to gain initial access to networks. These types of attacks can be leveraged in many ways where typically fraud prays on the hearts of their victims, such as natural disasters and other significant events where unsuspecting people want to help through donations. Social engineering via vishing attacks can also target individuals who might think their child has been abducted for ransom. Vishing attacks will also be leveraged to impersonate executives which would be used to target employees into sending funds, providing access, etc. People are the weakest links into a network because of their desire to be helpful. Social engineering attacks using vishing are made easier with the advances in AI and information obtained through social sites. Organizations should build into their awareness programs plenty of training on social engineering and encourage employees to verify non-typical requests.
Insider threat will become more common
Since Covid, where many organizations transitioned rapidly to a fully remote workforce, the risk of insider threat has significantly increased. A malicious attacker could join an organization for intelligence collection or with the intent to gain access to other sensitive information. Insider threat has been a challenge for cyber security teams since you have to determine what is authorized activity versus what is not authorized by a user. Organizations must use the concept of least privilege to perform daily tasks. Risk mitigation for insider threat starts at the screening process. However, in 2024, it has been proven that even mature hiring processes can be defeated by persistent hackers.
Increased focus on zero trust network architecture and passwordless authentication
The concept of Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA) focuses on “trust nothing and authenticate continuously” but does take into consideration the user experience. Organizations are focused on this architecture because the concept continually evaluates that the user and machine are who they say they are, allowing them access to data they have authorization. With the escalation of ransomware attacks, it is important to validate users since organizational networks are no longer defined by a perimeter. Cloud-based technologies and Software as a Service providers have created complexity in system and user trust. ZTNA deploys continual authentication, micro segmentation, continuous monitoring and the least privilege concept.
Foxit Integrated eSign and PDF Platform Enables Xseed Solutions to Streamline Operations and Accelerate Growth
Posted in Commentary with tags Foxit on December 11, 2024 by itnerdFoxit, a leading provider of innovative PDF and eSignature products and services, helping knowledge workers to increase their productivity and do more with documents, today announced Xseed Solutions, a leading software development company, has transformed its document management processes by implementing Foxit’s integrated eSign and PDF solutions, resulting in significant operational improvements and accelerated growth.
Xseed Solutions, an innovative software development company led by CEO Mateo Bervejillo, had already established a firm foothold with a team of creative developers and prestigious clients like Coca-Cola. However, as Xseed aimed to expand its operations, it encountered a significant hurdle: its current electronic signature software needed to catch up with its growth plans. Realizing the need for a more robust solution to support their expansion, Mateo and his team set out to find a new electronic signature software – landing finally on Foxit eSign.
The transition to Foxit’s comprehensive platform has enabled Xseed to consolidate its document management processes into a single, unified solution. Foxit has provided Xseed with an electronic signature solution that not only offers a comprehensive suite of sending, signing, and completion features but also allows users to create, edit, share, and store PDFs in a unified, secure, and workflow-friendly environment. Foxit’s flagship products, PDF Editor and eSign, combine to give customers like Xseed the power to complete important forms and contracts faster and easier than more popular industry names — and at a more affordable price.
The implementation process, described by Bervejillo as “beautiful,” has yielded immediate results. Xseed has experienced enhanced team collaboration, streamlined workflow processes, and improved client satisfaction. The user-friendly interface and 24/7 expert support have also contributed to rapid adoption across the organization.
The success of this digital transformation initiative has positioned Xseed Solutions for continued growth and reinforces the company’s commitment to leveraging innovative technology solutions to enhance business operations.
To learn more, please read the Xseed Solutions case study here:
https://www.foxit.com/resources/casestudy.html and/or watch the video interview with Mateo Bervejillo here:
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