Console Connect and OVHcloud expand cloud access in Toronto

Posted in Commentary with tags 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 & AWS Unveil New AI Capabilities to Transform Enterprises

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 11, 2024 by itnerd

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.

I Lived With An EV For Three Days… And Charging It Is Less Than Optimal If You Don’t Have A Charger At Home

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 11, 2024 by itnerd

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.

Cybersecurity Projections For 2025 From A CISSP

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.

Artivion Gets Pwned In What Sounds Like A Ransomware Attack

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 10, 2024 by itnerd

On Monday, medical device manufacturer Artivion filed documents with the SEC disclosing a cybersecurity incident they discovered on November 21 forcing the company to take some systems offline.

Artivion says the cybersecurity incident has caused “disruptions to some order and shipping processes, as well as to certain corporate operations, which have largely been mitigated.”

In the 8-K filing, the company also said the “cybersecurity incident” involved the “acquisition and encryption” of data but has yet to confirm the nature of the incident and no ransomware gang has taken credit for the incident.

Artivion manufactures implantable tissues for cardiac and vascular transplant applications, has manufacturing plants in Georgia, Texas and Germany, and ships products to over 100 countries.

Emily Phelps, Director, Cyware had this to say:

  “Healthcare organizations, including medical device manufacturers, face unique challenges in securing their operations against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The ability to effectively manage and share threat intelligence is crucial to mitigating the impact of such incidents, especially in a sector where disruptions can have life-altering consequences for patients. By adopting a more collaborative and intelligence-driven approach, healthcare entities can identify threats earlier, enhance their defenses, and build resilience across the ecosystem. Cybersecurity isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a collective responsibility that demands real-time information exchange and proactive coordination to safeguard critical processes and data.”

It will be interesting to see what data was swiped and what happened to that data. I say that because this sounds like a ransomware attack, and when that happens data is almost always swiped. This one clearly requires me to keep an eye on it.

City of Penticton partners with TELUS SmartEnergy

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 10, 2024 by itnerd

Residents of Penticton are the first in Canada to receive an exclusive, free 12-month subscription of TELUS SmartEnergy, a solution that will help residents manage their home energy use and save up to 15 per cent annually on their energy bills. As global demand for electricity continues to climb, the City of Penticton – which operates its own electric utility – is taking proactive measures to ensure its services remain sustainable and cost-effective. This partnership with TELUS empowers residents with technology, devices and information they need to improve their energy efficiency and lower their power bills. Penticton residents are invited to participate in the free 12-month subscription of the app-based TELUS SmartEnergy, plus they will receive a smart thermostat and two smart plugs for just $25, representing more than $350 in total savings in both the subscription and devices. 

“A recent survey of our residents found that 84.3 per cent are motivated to take steps to reduce their electrical bills. This pilot project with TELUS is an opportunity to provide Penticton’s electrical customers with the tools to become more aware of their daily energy usage,” says Penticton Mayor Julius Bloomfield. “Not only can it help residents save on their bills, but it benefits the community’s entire electrical grid and supports our climate action targets.”

TELUS recently launched SmartEnergy to address rising electricity demands in Canada that are currently outpacing the capacity of our energy grids. TELUS SmartEnergy helps Canadians conserve energy, while saving money on their energy bills and reducing their environmental footprint, all through one simple app. By connecting compatible smart devices like thermostats and plugs to TELUS’ intuitive SmartHome+ app, subscribers can:

  • Automate home temperature settings, power down unused devices, and create personalized routines for your household.
  • Monitor home energy consumption with daily, weekly, monthly or yearly insights, including tips to maximize savings. 
  • Participate in energy-saving events to reduce strain on the energy grid during peak usage times by automatically powering down connected devices or temporarily adjusting the thermostat temperature, all while earning TELUS Rewards. 

Penticton residents can now sign up for this exclusive SmartEnergy offer. For every SmartEnergy subscriber, TELUS is planting four trees per year on their behalf to further benefit the environment. To sign up or learn more about SmartEnergy, visit telus.com/penticton.

TELUS is proud to be a strong supporter of the City of Penticton. Working in close collaboration with our local TELUS Community Boards, TELUS Friendly Future Foundation has donated $122,500 in support of 12 projects located in Penticton since 2018, to charities such as Trails Society of British Columbia, Animal Lifeline Emergency Response Team, BGC Okanagan (Okanagan Boys and Girls Clubs), Community Foundation of the South Okanagan Similkameen and Penticton Recovery Resource Society.

Sage Recognized as a Leader in IDC MarketScape for Remanufacturing Management Software 2024

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 10, 2024 by itnerd

 Sage, a leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), today announce its recognition in the Leaders Category of the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Remanufacturing Management Software 2024 Vendor Assessment[1]. As the U.S. manufacturing sector embraces sustainable practices, remanufacturing is projected to significantly contribute to the $712 billion global circular economy by 2026, promoting resource optimization and waste reduction. 

Sage is supporting these shifts with Sage X3, an ERP solution recognized for its robust remanufacturing capabilities and sustainable product design. Empowering manufacturers to operate sustainably, Sage X3 provides advanced support for new product introduction, traceability, quality control, non-conformance, and disassembly/reassembly work management. These features enable businesses to effectively manage complex workflows, improve quality, reduce waste, and maintain oversight throughout the product life cycle.

Supporting SMBs by Prioritizing Sustainability

SMBs are the backbone of the US economy and play a significant role in reducing global carbon emissions. While not often resourced like their larger counterparts, Sage’s report, Path for growth: Making sustainability reporting work for SMBs, reveals that small and mid-size business are increasingly prioritizing sustainable practices, with 62% actively implementing policies and 16% participating in sustainability practices with global impact.  participating in sustainability practices with global impact.

To find out more about Sage X3 visit here: https://www.sage.com/en-gb/sage-business-cloud/sage-x3/

Aampe deploys 100 million AI agents to power the next wave of personalization for consumer apps, as it raises $18M 

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 10, 2024 by itnerd

While companies building consumer apps and prosumer tools invest heavily in personalizing user experiences through product usage data, teams still manually craft the workflows that deliver those personalized moments. Today, Aampe reveals it has deployed over 100 million intelligent agents into consumer applications running across four continents. Businesses that have deployed Aampe agents include some of the leading food delivery and on-demand apps in South and Southeast Asia, top sports and fitness apps in Europe, as well as major fintech and entertainment apps in the U.S. The agents are managing on the order of 15-200 billion decisions every week that determine product surface interactions. The company is announcing $18M in Series A funding led by Theory Ventures bringing Aampe’s total funding to $27.3M to accelerate the adoption of its agentic infrastructure. Z47 is also participating in the round.

Conventional approaches to personalizing digital products have relied on humans manually creating rules and segments to determine what users see and when. This approach — unchanged for over a decade — requires teams to manually orchestrate the message or product surface that will best serve the end user’s interests, whether they’re making a purchase, evaluating content options, or trying new features. With consumer preferences rapidly and continually changing, the conventional approach creates a massive human bottleneck and non-scalable operational workload.

Aampe’s infrastructure takes a fundamentally different approach: deploying a unique AI agent for each user that continuously learns from interactions and intelligently decides what to show, when to show it, and most importantly, whether to show anything at all. Designed to continuously monitor usage and engagement data, each agent skillfully observes and learns the user’s changing preferences. Agents are then responsible for translating inferences into optimal management of the user’s interactions with the product — enabling genuine 1:1 personalization even for products that serve tens of millions – or more – users every day.

Founded in 2020 by a trio of scientists, Aampe emerged from a unique combination of expertise. Meinshausen, who previously co-founded PaySense (acquired by Prosus/PayU for $185M), met co-founder Schaun Wheeler in a U.S. Army Intelligence Analysis unit in 2009. Along with Sami Abboud, a former semiconductor engineer and neuroscience PhD, the founding team combines backgrounds in cognitive and behavioral science, engineering, and experimentation. They’ve harnessed their specialized backgrounds to design a new AI architecture for user interaction. 

Rather than using traditional machine learning or generative AI alone, Aampe’s infrastructure leverages a subset of AI called reinforcement learning to enable continuous, parallelized experimentation. Each agent learns and adapts in real time, helping their user manage their attention and make complex choices in a world of material and content abundance. The agents operationalize their decisions by intelligently managing a range of existing product and marketing tools – including data platforms and warehouses, marketing delivery platforms, and product analytics tools, allowing companies to extract more value from their current technology investments.

The company’s privacy-centric approach, using zero-PII storage practices and anonymized behavioral patterns, has already attracted major consumer businesses across Southeast Asia and North America. The company has already deployed over one hundred million (100,000,000) agents for enterprise customers across 4 continents. As Aampe scales, it plans to double its team by the end of 2025, focusing on helping enterprise customers successfully migrate their workflows and adopt agentic infrastructure into their organizations.

Looking ahead, Aampe aims to power the next generation of consumer applications through its easy-to-deploy agentic infrastructure. While their earliest applications focused on on marketing and messaging channels, Aampe has been rapidly extending their agents capabilities to manage the entire user experience—from interface layouts to feature discovery—enabling every interaction to adapt continuously to every user and their preferences at any given point in time

Operational Costs of VDI Outweigh Promised Benefits, say IT workers

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 10, 2024 by itnerd

 Nexthink has announced research showing that Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) procurement and management processes are riddled with contradictions. The survey of 1000 frontline IT workers found that:

  • 92% say the employee experience is an important consideration when choosing a VDI solution
  • However, 91% admit that cost considerations trump performance when choosing a provider
  • 95% believe that VDI offers an equal or better experience than desktops
  • Yet 92% confess that it has primarily been designed to make life easier for IT, rather than the end-user

The cost of these contradictions is significant, with a third of organizations (31%) reporting daily VDI issues that require L3 VDI specialist support, and a further 40% having them on a weekly basis, as L1 and L2 support are often unable to manage the complexity of VDI. This means that, despite a key driver of VDI deployment being the ability to better control costs, enterprises are having to spend huge sums on operationalization and maintenance.

The confusion over VDI is further compounded by the fact that a substantial proportion of these escalated issues were not necessarily specific to VDI. Application functionality failures (54%) and slow performance (47%) accounted for two of the top three most reported issues to IT teams, neither of which are necessarily related to VDI.

In order to address these issues, businesses need a unified view over all VDI sessions with end-to-end visibility and automated workflows to enable remediation with minimal interruption to the user experience. Moreover, having instant insight into where problems are occurring can remove the blame game between functions and enable better collaboration both within IT departments and with the wider organization. 

To find out more about the challenges of VDI management, click here for the full report.

Rogers Xfinity introduces Storm-Ready WiFi

Posted in Commentary with tags on December 10, 2024 by itnerd

Rogers today announced the launch of Rogers Xfinity Storm-Ready WiFi, an innovative new product designed to keep customers connected when there is an outage.

Rogers Xfinity Storm-Ready WiFi brings Rogers advanced network technology together with a device that automatically switches to a cellular backup connection when there’s a network or power outage. The device and battery backup seamlessly keep customers’ homes online so they can work and stream without interruption.

The launch of Storm-Ready WiFi follows the company’s recent introduction of Rogers Xfinity, a suite of in-home services that leverage Comcast’s world-class product and technology platform.

Rogers Xfinity Storm-Ready WiFi delivers:

  • Extended Battery Backup
    Keep streaming for up to four hours during a power outage with a rechargeable battery backup
  • Enhanced Reliability
    Automatically switches to Rogers cellular network when the power or primary internet service is interrupted with real-time connection and battery status notifications on the Rogers Xfinity app
  • Simple Setup and Seamless Integration
    Ready in minutes and seamlessly integrates with Rogers Xfinity Internet
  • Stronger WiFi Coverage
    Device provides enhanced coverage, doubling as a WiFi extender for everyday use, making it our best WiFi Boost Pod ever.

Rogers Xfinity Storm-Ready WiFi is now available for customers in British Columbia, part of Rogers commitment to deliver innovative products to Western Canada and will be rolling out across the country in February. Customers can pre-order their Storm-Ready WiFi device today or visit Rogers.com for more information.