Monocept

How do you ensure faster and more efficient client acquisition? Digital agent onboarding is a crucial ingredient to ensure that your clients are happy and satisfied from the onset.

When a new client makes the decision to sign up with any agency, this is usually a huge moment filled with many emotions, questions, anxieties, and nerves.

Some such questions would be:

Did we make the right decision?

Will this agency deliver everything they promised in the sales process?

Can we hit the ground running with some positive results?

How long would it take this agency to get us where we want our company to be?

To address all these questions and jitters, you need a proper client onboarding process. Typically, you may already have a manual system in place that formalizes your working relationship, gathers important information and sets expectations.

But then you want to reduce every risk of future miscommunications and disagreements, and show your clients that you pay attention to detail. The digital onboarding process might be the answer and is fast becoming the default way to onboard not just clients but internal teams. Digital transformation is a must for every business as it presents the means to find tools that make life easier and painless. Still, you might wonder – how does it work?

In this guide, we will explain everything you need to know about the digital agent onboarding process, especially its benefits to banking, financial services and other companies. That way you can make the best decision to implement a painless, and stress-free process that quickly transforms new clients into long-term customers.

What is digital agent onboarding?

Digital agent onboarding allows companies and organizations to incorporate users and customers in a fast, secure and automated way to streamline their customer onboarding process.

In lay terms, you can sign up new customers and employees from the onset and continue their journey online without having them physically visit your office. This is why digital onboarding is also called online or remote onboarding.

Client, or customer onboarding refers to activities performed during the acquisition of new customers alongside subsequent interactions that complete that customer’s lifecycle. It could also include activities that encompass reviewing clients and expanding existing relationships with the addition of new products and services. Hence the client onboarding process isn’t a once and over job for new customers but will continue to impact the complete client lifecycle.

Why is digital onboarding transforming businesses?

Before now, the onboarding process would involve clients providing data either in-person or through the mail, thereby kickstarting an expensive and time-consuming process. Every client may have to go through a multitude of processes across different departments including, operational, credit, and legal, thereby creating a confusing scene.

This traditional manual onboarding is inconvenient. Think about manual handling, lengthy due diligence, and interference from different stakeholders. Departments may also send conflicting documents to one another.

This type of onboarding process for both new and existing customers costs your company a lot of time and resources and is quite tedious. These paper-based systems can also make the process feel impersonal, making the customer feel undervalued.

Again, as regulations continue to evolve, there is a need to revisit your processes time and time again to update the onboarding process.

Looking at all of the different limitations of a manual system,  it’s no wonder a growing number of businesses and enterprises, especially in the banking and financial sectors are capitalizing on the latest technological advancements to provide superior onboarding services.

In this time and age, where your potential clients are online, a secure and digital onboarding solution is a must-have.

Benefits of migrating to digital onboarding

Migrating to digital agent onboarding can only bring tremendous value and benefits to your business. Digital agent onboarding enables skillful management of your onboarding process so that your team and customers can enjoy a better partnership.

Digital agent onboarding processes can also enable companies to introduce new products and services to their existing customers, with better interactions and results.

Beyond the use of the cloud, the onboarding process today also integrates blockchain, digital identities, Artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics, Strong customer authentication, and data collaboration. For instance, companies can use AI monitoring to supervise the client onboarding process, thereby solving problems in real-time.

In the same vein, companies can use blockchain to create a secure, decentralized ledger that manages customer data, allows users to access their information, and makes it easier to define a client’s risk profile and preferences. Co-browsing, video chat, and chatbot solutions enable real-time interactions as well.

In the end, a well-organized onboarding process increases customer satisfaction, boosts revenue, and ensures your customers see you as an experienced trustworthy service provider. Other benefits of a digitalized onboarding process include:

1.   Satisfied employees

With a digital agent onboarding process, your employees no longer have to be actively involved in the mundane and routine aspects of the onboarding process. This dramatically reduces workflow and ensures they have time for other more important tasks that validate their roles and responsibilities. Hence they become less stressed about the job and more productive.

2.   Saves customers time

Your customers today demand an onboarding process that takes hours and days, not weeks. They are busier than ever and do not like repetitive interactions, too much paperwork, and time-consuming interactions. Going digital will drastically cut down onboarding time and ensure they can enjoy an automated onboarding process with minimal points of interaction.

Furthermore, a study by Forrester shows that 66% of adults believe valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to offer a good online customer experience. Hence, the convenience of a shorter onboarding time will also empower your customer experience and help you avoid losing potential customers, especially in the last stages of client-acquiring processes.

3.   Transform your brand image

A faster onboarding process that is fully digital enables new customers to have a positive impression of your brand. They will see your brand as trustworthy, and professional. The faster onboarding process will also help validate your expertise and enable you to outperform your competition, especially those who have yet to implement digital onboarding solutions.

4.   A sense of being valued

A quicker onboarding process will also enable your customers to feel valued and heard. They will love the convenience of interacting with your brand from their comfort zone. Typically, your digital onboarding process may also involve them becoming part of a forum, group, or having a live chat with a company representative. Again, the use of smart analytics and artificial intelligence will help you better understand your client’s needs and convenience so you can offer channels and processes that are most suitable for them. All these are unique touch-points that will further personalize their experience and make them feel valued and important.

5.   Targets the complete customer lifecycle

A digital onboarding experience ensures that your customer’s information and preferences remain the same regardless of the channel used in accessing your service. This further eliminates friction across digital and physical channels. Already, your customers expect this unified and prolific experience across all products, LOBs, and services as the first interaction is no longer enough to sustain the relationship. With a digitalized system, you can achieve that 360-degree view and beyond.

6.   Limits room for error

Providing an enhanced experience to the end-user also demands capturing and defining all client data and information accurately. Digital onboarding typically uses digital documents and signatures that will eliminate physical back-and-forth documentation to maintain consistency and accuracy across all touchpoints. This, in turn, creates a swifter and safer experience.

7.   Compliance, control, and transparency

A digitalized onboarding process is highly important to meet the strictest and rapidly evolving robust risk and compliance. It also ensures that your brand becomes more transparent about customer data and how they use it. Besides these benefits, it will also drastically reduce cost, boost productivity, eliminate waiting times and barriers. Combined, these benefits are highly important to the financial industry.

8.   Avenues to implement robust security

A manual onboarding system creates serious security gaps that have led to a high number of fraud cases. By contrast, digital onboarding platforms use digital identity solutions that add extra layers of trust and security, thereby helping your business mitigate identity fraud and other cybersecurity threats.

9.   A more sustainable way to grow your business

A study from Harvard Business Review showed that  80% of executives affirm that an increased focus on onboarding offers a notable and positive impact over the life of the contract for revenues, client referrals, and client renewals. Furthermore, 63% of customers will consider your onboarding program when making a purchasing decision.

All these clearly show the need to develop an exceptional onboarding process.  Ultimately, most of your customers today are digitally savvy. Hence, an automated client fulfillment process that starts off each client engagement clearly and consistently will drive tremendous value to your brand and give you the edge over your competitors.

How Monocept speeds up and simplifies digital agent onboarding

Monocept was founded to help businesses find and eliminate all frustrations in their onboarding process by implementing a modern and seamless onboarding solution that empowers your unique business environment.

Our digital onboarding solutions lower barriers to digitalization, with plenty of room for flexibility and customization. That way, no matter your market, resources, or size, you can create a comprehensive onboarding process that helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers from the onset, improve conversion rates, and make educated risk-based decisions.

With Monocept, you can look forward to a delightful and fully automated client-facing platform that enhances interaction in the onboarding journey, digitizes, automates document workflow, provides clear instructions and instant feedback to your customers, supports a wide variety of ID times, allows for cross-platform and architecture support to fit your existing business processes, and enable compliance with all appropriate regulations. We can also help you implement due diligence and compliance using automation in just a matter of hours. In the end, you will achieve a flexible, cost-conscious, compliant, and effortless customer experience to onboard all clients and employees in a matter of minutes, not weeks.

In this ever-evolving age of technological advancement, businesses around the globe are going all out to stay relevant and have an edge on the competition, and that’s where Monocept comes in. Over the years, it has carved its place in the Industry by helping its clients be at the top of their game.

Monocept is in the business of solving problems, even the ones that look seemingly unsolvable. It’s their strong desire to solve the unknown or ‘X’ that has kept them going from strength to strength.

Monocept has emerged as a technology leader in digital transformation in the last decade, where they have worked with all major Insurance companies in India to build, improve and accelerate their digital journeys and improve their customer experience. Powered by a Team of passionate problem solvers, Monocept has helped customers improve their legacy systems by reengineering them and making them current, saving them huge CAPEX that would otherwise be required to replace the systems.

The problem solving DNA has helped Monocept to identify industry problems and create unique products for its customers. One of the company’s solutions, Redact, is an AI-powered masking tool that automatically masks sensitive data from Aadhar Card documents submitted by users in real time, in compliance with the IRDAI directives.

Another flagship offering is its OCR-recognition tool, Monolens, that eradicates the need for the manual marker process, thereby leaving no scope for human error. It uses machine learning algorithms to extract data from printed forms and feeds it into the system automatically.

And then there is Video365, Monocept’s cloud-based VOD and OTT solution, which enables uninterrupted playback and live streaming on multiple devices without the user having to download any content.

Monocept makes enterprises digital-confident through services like Performance Engineering, Microservices-based Large Scale Architectures, AI/ML, App Modernization, DevOps Services, Quality Assurance, Cloud journey, and more. These services have also played a crucial role in helping countless companies pave the way for the future.

Today, as Monocept celebrates 10 years of solving problems, it’s thrilling to note that over the last decade, the company has delivered over 250+ projects, served 45+ enterprises, and helped 350+ employees!

“At Monocept, we are passionate about our work, our people, and our clients. Our strong desire to exceed expectations is what drives us, and that is something which will never change” says Monocept’s founder and CEO, Manav Gaur.

How do you ensure faster and more efficient client acquisition? Digital agent onboarding is a crucial ingredient to ensure that your clients are happy and satisfied from the onset.

When a new client makes the decision to sign up with any agency, this is usually a huge moment filled with many emotions, questions, anxieties, and nerves.

Some such questions would be:

Did we make the right decision?

Will this agency deliver everything they promised in the sales process?

Can we hit the ground running with some positive results?

How long would it take this agency to get us where we want our company to be?

To address all these questions and jitters, you need a proper client onboarding process. Typically, you may already have a manual system in place that formalizes your working relationship, gathers important information and sets expectations.

But then you want to reduce every risk of future miscommunications and disagreements, and show your clients that you pay attention to detail. The digital onboarding process might be the answer and is fast becoming the default way to onboard not just clients but internal teams. Digital transformation is a must for every business as it presents the means to find tools that make life easier and painless. Still, you might wonder – how does it work?

In this guide, we will explain everything you need to know about the digital agent onboarding process, especially its benefits to banking, financial services and other companies. That way you can make the best decision to implement a painless, and stress-free process that quickly transforms new clients into long-term customers.

What is digital agent onboarding?

Digital agent onboarding allows companies and organizations to incorporate users and customers in a fast, secure and automated way to streamline their customer onboarding process.

In lay terms, you can sign up new customers and employees from the onset and continue their journey online without having them physically visit your office. This is why digital onboarding is also called online or remote onboarding.

Client, or customer onboarding refers to activities performed during the acquisition of new customers alongside subsequent interactions that complete that customer’s lifecycle. It could also include activities that encompass reviewing clients and expanding existing relationships with the addition of new products and services. Hence the client onboarding process isn’t a once and over job for new customers but will continue to impact the complete client lifecycle.

Why is digital onboarding transforming businesses?

Before now, the onboarding process would involve clients providing data either in-person or through the mail, thereby kickstarting an expensive and time-consuming process. Every client may have to go through a multitude of processes across different departments including, operational, credit, and legal, thereby creating a confusing scene.

This traditional manual onboarding is inconvenient. Think about manual handling, lengthy due diligence, and interference from different stakeholders. Departments may also send conflicting documents to one another.

This type of onboarding process for both new and existing customers costs your company a lot of time and resources and is quite tedious. These paper-based systems can also make the process feel impersonal, making the customer feel undervalued.

Again, as regulations continue to evolve, there is a need to revisit your processes time and time again to update the onboarding process.

Looking at all of the different limitations of a manual system,  it’s no wonder a growing number of businesses and enterprises, especially in the banking and financial sectors are capitalizing on the latest technological advancements to provide superior onboarding services.

In this time and age, where your potential clients are online, a secure and digital onboarding solution is a must-have.

Benefits of migrating to digital onboarding

Migrating to digital agent onboarding can only bring tremendous value and benefits to your business. Digital agent onboarding enables skillful management of your onboarding process so that your team and customers can enjoy a better partnership.

Digital agent onboarding processes can also enable companies to introduce new products and services to their existing customers, with better interactions and results.

Beyond the use of the cloud, the onboarding process today also integrates blockchain, digital identities, Artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics, Strong customer authentication, and data collaboration. For instance, companies can use AI monitoring to supervise the client onboarding process, thereby solving problems in real-time.

In the same vein, companies can use blockchain to create a secure, decentralized ledger that manages customer data, allows users to access their information, and makes it easier to define a client’s risk profile and preferences. Co-browsing, video chat, and chatbot solutions enable real-time interactions as well.

In the end, a well-organized onboarding process increases customer satisfaction, boosts revenue, and ensures your customers see you as an experienced trustworthy service provider. Other benefits of a digitalized onboarding process include:

1.   Satisfied employees

With a digital agent onboarding process, your employees no longer have to be actively involved in the mundane and routine aspects of the onboarding process. This dramatically reduces workflow and ensures they have time for other more important tasks that validate their roles and responsibilities. Hence they become less stressed about the job and more productive.

2.   Saves customers time

Your customers today demand an onboarding process that takes hours and days, not weeks. They are busier than ever and do not like repetitive interactions, too much paperwork, and time-consuming interactions. Going digital will drastically cut down onboarding time and ensure they can enjoy an automated onboarding process with minimal points of interaction.

Furthermore, a study by Forrester shows that 66% of adults believe valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to offer a good online customer experience. Hence, the convenience of a shorter onboarding time will also empower your customer experience and help you avoid losing potential customers, especially in the last stages of client-acquiring processes.

3.   Transform your brand image

A faster onboarding process that is fully digital enables new customers to have a positive impression of your brand. They will see your brand as trustworthy, and professional. The faster onboarding process will also help validate your expertise and enable you to outperform your competition, especially those who have yet to implement digital onboarding solutions.

4.   A sense of being valued

A quicker onboarding process will also enable your customers to feel valued and heard. They will love the convenience of interacting with your brand from their comfort zone. Typically, your digital onboarding process may also involve them becoming part of a forum, group, or having a live chat with a company representative. Again, the use of smart analytics and artificial intelligence will help you better understand your client’s needs and convenience so you can offer channels and processes that are most suitable for them. All these are unique touch-points that will further personalize their experience and make them feel valued and important.

5.   Targets the complete customer lifecycle

A digital onboarding experience ensures that your customer’s information and preferences remain the same regardless of the channel used in accessing your service. This further eliminates friction across digital and physical channels. Already, your customers expect this unified and prolific experience across all products, LOBs, and services as the first interaction is no longer enough to sustain the relationship. With a digitalized system, you can achieve that 360-degree view and beyond.

6.   Limits room for error

Providing an enhanced experience to the end-user also demands capturing and defining all client data and information accurately. Digital onboarding typically uses digital documents and signatures that will eliminate physical back-and-forth documentation to maintain consistency and accuracy across all touchpoints. This, in turn, creates a swifter and safer experience.

7.   Compliance, control, and transparency

A digitalized onboarding process is highly important to meet the strictest and rapidly evolving robust risk and compliance. It also ensures that your brand becomes more transparent about customer data and how they use it. Besides these benefits, it will also drastically reduce cost, boost productivity, eliminate waiting times and barriers. Combined, these benefits are highly important to the financial industry.

8.   Avenues to implement robust security

A manual onboarding system creates serious security gaps that have led to a high number of fraud cases. By contrast, digital onboarding platforms use digital identity solutions that add extra layers of trust and security, thereby helping your business mitigate identity fraud and other cybersecurity threats.

9.   A more sustainable way to grow your business

A study from Harvard Business Review showed that  80% of executives affirm that an increased focus on onboarding offers a notable and positive impact over the life of the contract for revenues, client referrals, and client renewals. Furthermore, 63% of customers will consider your onboarding program when making a purchasing decision.

All these clearly show the need to develop an exceptional onboarding process.  Ultimately, most of your customers today are digitally savvy. Hence, an automated client fulfillment process that starts off each client engagement clearly and consistently will drive tremendous value to your brand and give you the edge over your competitors.

How Monocept speeds up and simplifies digital agent onboarding

Monocept was founded to help businesses find and eliminate all frustrations in their onboarding process by implementing a modern and seamless onboarding solution that empowers your unique business environment.

Our digital onboarding solutions lower barriers to digitalization, with plenty of room for flexibility and customization. That way, no matter your market, resources, or size, you can create a comprehensive onboarding process that helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers from the onset, improve conversion rates, and make educated risk-based decisions.

With Monocept, you can look forward to a delightful and fully automated client-facing platform that enhances interaction in the onboarding journey, digitizes, automates document workflow, provides clear instructions and instant feedback to your customers, supports a wide variety of ID times, allows for cross-platform and architecture support to fit your existing business processes, and enable compliance with all appropriate regulations. We can also help you implement due diligence and compliance using automation in just a matter of hours. In the end, you will achieve a flexible, cost-conscious, compliant, and effortless customer experience to onboard all clients and employees in a matter of minutes, not weeks.

C L I E N T B A C K G R O U N D

The client is US-based 120-year-old computer hardware, Software and Electronics Company that provides products and services that enable businesses to connect interact and transact with their customers. Its main products are self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, and automated teller Machines check processing systems, barcode scanners, and business consumables. With its software, hardware, and portfolio of services, client enables more than 300 million transactions daily across the retail, financial, travel, hospitality, and telecom and technology industries. The company had $6.41 billion in revenue in 2018 with an employee strength of 34K+.

P R O B L E M S T A T E M E N T

Disasters are unpredictable and can happen at any point causing disruptions to the normal Clearing house operations. The above operations brought the SCH to the point at which the PCH encountered disaster, after which the SCH takes over to continue with the normal clearinghouse operations.

APPROACH

Disaster Recovery operations application was developed to perform the following: Failover of web application and database services on the SCH (Secondary Clearing House) Recovery of data.

BENEFITS

After the primary site encounters a disaster due to natural or human induced reasons, the ECPIX Disaster Recovery Application helped to:

>>Shift clearing house operations to the secondary site

>>Restore and recover the clearing house operations at the secondary site

>>Restore operations at the primary site

>>Switch clearing house operations back to the primary site

Selecting the best cloud service provider is a careful decision, dependent on a variety of factors. You may already know that choosing the right vendor demands understanding your specific business needs.

If you already have that checklist of specific requirements and minimum expectations, then the next step is assessing potential providers and comparing one against the other to select the best cloud vendor that delivers optimum value and benefits that your organization expects from the cloud. In this article, we will discuss about the main difference between microsoft azure vs amazon aws.

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS; The Basics

What is Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud service platform owned by Microsoft. At inception, it was called Windows Azure and today, offers a range of cloud solutions ranging from storage to networking, analytics and computing. At its core, Azure is both an Infrastructure as a Service offering and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Azure is especially powerful due to its parent company, because only a few companies can offer as much infrastructure support as Microsoft. However, Azure came after AWS although the parent company Microsoft predates Amazon.

What is AWS?

AWS is also known as Amazon Web Service and like it’s parent company offers a robust toolset that keeps growing at a heightened pace. AWS has also been in the cloud computing market for over 10 years, which is why it remains the frontrunner. Currently AWS leads the cloud services market, with an annual operating profit margin of over 25% and over $12.22 billion in 2016. Nevertheless, AWS is categorized as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Microsoft Azure vs AWS: Similar Core Features and Services

The first thing you might realize when comparing Azure vs Aws is that they both seem to offer similar systems that solve similar sets of problems. Both have a lot of common elements that define them as public cloud services such as auto-scaling, compliance, identity management, instant provisioning, security, and self-service.

Azure offers four service categories including:

●       Compute

●       Performance

●       Networking

●       Data management and databases

In the same vein, AWS offers four service categories including:

●       Compute

●       Networking

●       Database

●       Content delivery and storage

However, when you dig deeper, you realize that there’s actually a lot of differences across each of these categories which is why a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft Azure vs AWS is important. For instance, AWS delivers more depth with over 140 services across developer tools, storage, mobile, analytics, database, and computing. This might be due to their long years of experience. However, each also has unique advantages that might be suitable for one organization but be a loss for the next.

Computing Power and Scalability; Azure vs AWS

Computing power is a basic requirement for every IT team. This is because you need a cloud service provider that can offer enough horsepower to meet your office demands daily and especially high-traffic periods.

On the grounds of scalability, you will love that AWS uses elastic cloud computing (EC2), which means your available resource footprint can shrink or grow on-demand, with a local cluster offering only an aspect of the resource pool available on all jobs.

AWS EC2 users can either choose pre-configured machine images (MIs), configure their own virtual machines (VMs), or customize their own machine images. So, users can choose the number, size, and memory capacity of their virtual machines. This is also alongside other services like EC2 container services, Autoscaling, AWS lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk for app development.

In contrast, Azure users can pick a virtual hard disk (VHD) to create a virtual machine that may be pre-configured by them, Microsoft, or a separate third party. For scalability, this system relies on virtual scale sets.

So the difference here is that Azure VMs will pair with other tools to deploy applications on the cloud, while AWS EC2 can be customized to a wide range of options.

Storage

You also require adequate storage for successful cloud deployment. In this aspect, both AWS and Azure offer almost equal capabilities.

AWS’s storage depends on machine instances, which are virtual machines hosted on the AWS infrastructure. Therefore, storage remains fixed on individual instances, with temporary storage allocated once per instance and destroyed once you terminate the instance. You can also get block storage (that works like a hard drive) attached to an instance. You can also get data archiving via Glacier, and object storage via S3. Hence, Azure’s storage capabilities are remarkably eligible.

Both Azure and AWS provide all the basic features such as server-side data encryption and REST API access.

In contrast, Azure offers temporary storage using block storage and D drive via Page Blobs for VMs with Files and Block Bobs doubling as object storage. Azure provides two storage classes; Cool and Hot. Cool storage is cheaper but there’s additional read and write expenses. AWS, on the flip side, offers S3 Standard and S3 standard infrequent Access.

While AWS

Nevertheless, both AWS and Azure support Big Data, relational databases, and NoSQL. Both also offer unlimited allowed objects, but Azure limits object size to 4.75TB while AWS limits it to 5TB.

Databases

AWS and Azure offer comprehensive database offerings which serve your needs whether you choose NoSQL offering or relational databases.

However, while Azure’s SQL database is dependent on Microsoft SQL, Amazon’s relational database service (RDS) spans across six popular database engines including Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, MariaDB, and Amazon Aurora.

Both systems support relational and NoSQL databases and are highly durable, and available with easy automatic replication.

Nevertheless, AWS provides more instance types but Azure’s interface and tooling are easier to understand and navigate across diverse database operations.

Network and Content Delivery

Finding a secure and isolated network with superb network performance is one of the critical concerns for your organization. This is both a privacy and security issue.

AWS allows users to create their own isolated private network through AWS’s virtual private cloud (VPC). This private network utilizes elastic load balancing during networking and API gateways for cross-premises connectivity

Inside a VPC, you will have plenty of options such as creating route tables, network gateways, subjects, and private IP ranges.

Azure offers a different approach. Azure uses a virtual network instead of a VPC. So users can create private IP ranges, network gateways, subnets, and isolated networks. You will need a VPN gateway for cross-network connectivity. A load balancer and application gateway handle the load balancing.

Nevertheless, Azure and AWS offer firewall solutions and options to augment your on-premises data center into the cloud without compromising on your data.

Pricing structure

Pricing is also an important factor but shouldn’t be the basis of your comparison of Microsoft azure vs amazon AWS.  What you would love is that Azure and AWS offer introductory tiers to test how their systems integrate with your on-premise software. Both also offer a pay-as-you-go pricing structure so you can change or end your contract at any time. However, there is still a notable difference in their billing structure.

Microsoft Azure charges per minute with short-term commitments so you can choose between prepaid and monthly charges. Azure also allows you to choose BT MPLS ExpressRoute pricing which means you can expand your private business network into the cloud with just the functionality you require at a price you can afford at the time.

In contrast, Amazon web services (AWS) charges per hour purchasable instances as:

●       On-demand (pay for what you use)

●       Reserved (reserve an instance for up to 3 years with upfront costs based on use

●       Spot (bid for additional capacity)

Azure Benefits and Drawbacks

Microsoft Azure stand’s out because it adapted its pre-existing on-premise solutions for the cloud. This means if your organization already uses Office, Windows Server, SQL Server, Dynamics Active Directory, Sharepoint, and lots more, it’s quite easier to integrate with Azure than AWS. If you are already an existing Microsoft customer, you will also enjoy delightful discounts on Azure. However, Azure is a younger program, which means it’s less enterprise-ready than AWS.

AWS Benefits and Drawbacks

As said earlier, AWS has been around for over 10 years and is today a market leader in cloud services. As the first on the scene, you will enjoy a more mature service. It also has pre-existing infrastructure that most competitors don’t. However, AWS’s pricing structure might be a downside for some companies. It’s difficult to understand its pricing structure thereby making it more challenging to manage costs.

Microsoft Azure vs AWS: Which is the best cloud service, provider

There’s no clear winner between both cloud service providers as they continue to release attractive new products and integrations. Therefore, the choice between both would depend on the needs of your organization. Nevertheless, AWS provides an intuitive system and easy-to-read documentation making it an easy platform to deploy and start using from the get-go. In contrast, Azure might be the preferred choice especially if you already use Microsoft on-premise solutions.

What is Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise Architecture defines the principles, vision, standards, and roadmap to guide organizations towards operations and management systems and technologies. Enterprise Architecture Services will, therefore, proactively and holistically lead enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and evaluating the execution of change towards designed business outcomes and vision. EA ensures that business plans, strategies, processes, and vision are optimized and aligned to investments in people, systems, and technologies.

Enterprise Architecture offers the basis for driving diverse business initiatives, particularly business innovation and transformation, by allowing organizations to respond, manage and adapt to disruptions caused by the market or external environment. EA oversees investments, assurance, and governance, enabling business entities to understand their organization and its capabilities and operations.

Layers of Enterprise Architecture

There is no shortage of EA frameworks in the IT industry, with each framework possessing different strengths and weaknesses. An EA framework establishes a common practice of creating, interpreting, analyzing, and using architecture descriptions within a specific application or stakeholder community domain. Using an Enterprise Architecture framework streamlines the process of creating and maintaining architectures at all layers (e.g., enterprise architectures, cross-cutting technology domain architectures, functional business segment architectures, and solution architectures) and enabling organizations to leverage the value of architecture best practices.

In reality, Enterprise Architecture is unique to every organization but possesses some common elements. Here are four commonly accepted enterprise architecture domains:

· Business Architecture (BA) domain — describes the necessary structure, behaviors, and motivations of an enterprise to deliver the business vision. BA, therefore answers the questions; WHO and WHAT. WHAT defines the organization’s goals, vision, and strategy to guide the creation of business capabilities and processes. WHO represents the execution of those business capabilities or services.

· Application architecture domain — The Application Architecture (AA) illustrates individual applications and their relationships and interactions with core business processes of the organization. Application architecture offers answers to the approach taken to implement business capabilities or services.

· Data architecture domain — addresses the structure of an organization’s physical and logical data assets and data management resources. This offers knowledge about customers using data analytics to improve business processes continually.

· Technology architecture domain — illustrates the hardware and software required to implement the business, application, and data services.

Benefits of Enterprise ArchitectureManage Complexities

Enterprise Architecture allows enterprises to identify and evaluate risks, challenges, and opportunities.

Strategic Alignment

Enterprise Architecture application services provide businesses with a strategic and holistic approach to align vision, principles, standards with a firm understanding of your application and technology roadmap.

Enable Innovation

EA helps enterprises manage change and adapt to disruptions while facilitating new concepts and technologies such as IoT, blockchain, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize your business model.

Maximize Returns on Investment

Enterprise Architecture application services help organizations redesign the chain of activities, services, and products, with fewer rooms for mistakes, leading to high-end efficiency and effectiveness. This, in turn, helps optimize costs and maximize returns on investment.

Better Relationships and Design Making

Enterprise Architecture Application Services ensures a higher level of IT standardization while fostering stronger relationships and inter-dependencies with limited rooms for miscommunication and misunderstandings. This empowers decision-makers to implement sound business and operation models, further moving the enterprise away from silo-based thinking and systems.

Why Choose Monocept For Your Enterprise Architecture Application Services?

Enterprise Architectures aims to provide an organization with a design that perfectly aligns business entities, properties, and relationships between themselves and the external environment. Do realize that even the most basic events can trigger the need to redesign using Enterprise Architecture Application Services.

On-premise to cloud migration is not just a technical change but a cultural one. Moving to the cloud transforms your business fundamentally across day-to-day operations, talent acquisition and development, budgeting, and even end-user productivity.

Therefore, it requires a careful approach to determine the best ways to leverage new cloud capabilities and modernize applications towards harnessing the full benefits of the cloud. Most literature only provides a snapshot of the best practices alongside checklists to guide your steps on that complicated journey.

Many companies begin to run into various problems because they lack understanding of the best practices (especially regarding security and performance) during development and working in the cloud environment.

We’ve handled diverse on-premise to cloud migration projects and have put together some of the top areas to consider during this complex journey.

1. Invest in container technology

Naturally, you may already think of containers as storage boxes, which might house code, software, and other connected components. In terms of cloud computing, containers are highly popular from the standpoint of application development. First, they are not dependent on your server and its operating system and will not go down if the server does. In truth, if your server goes down, you can easily spin a new server to work with the same container, which minimizes hassles and downtime.

Containers are also portable, allowing you to quickly move data and applications from one environment to the next without compatibility issues. They also favor rapid testing and development and will have no overhead or complications associated with configuring and managing underlying servers and operating systems. Finally, containers are scalable, which means you can replicate what’s on them an infinite number of times.

2. The need for a multi-cloud strategy

Many organizations assume that moving to the cloud is an all-or-nothing process and may think they only need one vendor. In truth, the most successful on-premise to cloud migrations feature a multi-cloud strategy and hybrid cloud configuration. So, in some instances, some organizations might do better with one significant migration of data to the public cloud, followed by series of smaller migrations across multiple cloud platforms depending on their organizational goals, priorities, and critical projects.

Other organizations may place only limited data within the cloud and use their private data servers for critical sensitive and proprietary applications.

A lot more organizations might prepare using different providers for different specific functions. For instance, they might choose to use the Google cloud platform for retail operations while warehouse management goes to AWS. These are different multi-cloud strategies, yet a few other organizations might engage in cloud migration over a long time as their projects and priorities evolve.

3. Don’t forget that security changes

On-premise meant that your technical support, development tools, and data infrastructure resides on-site with all projects – coding, testing, configuring, and validating proper security settings happening in a centralized manner. So, development projects would typically take weeks, but such projects might only take an hour or a day to set up with the cloud.

Still, the greater ease and speed of development, testing, and deployments of applications that come with the cloud are not without challenges.

First, your current IT staff will require additional cloud training as the cloud infrastructure reduces their skillset to the barest minimum. Not everyone will have the same level of knowledge and experience accessing the cloud or working with public cloud environments. This exposes your organization to significant risks, including such as improper port settings and misconfigurations. You must realize that even the simplest mistakes can expose your organization to diverse kinds of cyber threats and attacks.

Secondly, you must carefully assess the relationship between you and your cloud provider on cloud security as you both share responsibilities regarding the security of your data and applications. Typically, it might mean that your cloud provider bears the brunt of security for all their infrastructures within their physical brick and mortar facilities while you are in charge of securing all your own data and applications. So, you must read the fine print of your contract to determine your respective roles.

4. Build a unique business case

As said earlier, on-premise to cloud migration will bring about positive alongside negative business impacts. Therefore, as said before, getting into the cloud shouldn’t be your central objective.

So, it’s essential to be clear about the critical business differentiators, risks, and critical drivers for your specific business. Here are some questions you must answer while building your cloud migration strategy;

Is your primary objective improving customer experience, or do you want greater speed in IT operations?

What about improving internal efficiencies?

Do you want to migrate to achieve rapid response to changes in technology?

Do you need a cloud migration partner that brings expertise to the table?

How will you manage your cloud security needs?

What are the implications of your migration plan to your existing legacy applications?

There are many more questions to be answered. They will determine whether you need to implement a ‘lift and shift strategy’ or ‘re-code or ‘re-architect; your applications adapt to newer technology.

It might also mean leveraging container technologies or not. However, you must not also forget the need for new cloud security protocols.

In the end, on-premise to cloud migration is not as simple and straightforward as the name implies. Many organizations assume that it’s a simple one-shot bulk transfer of all existing data and infrastructure. It’s essential to re-invent your mindset to ensure that all logistical, cultural, technological, and staff-related challenges are well-addressed to prevent future severe setbacks from the onset.

On-premise to cloud migration is not just a technical change but a cultural one. Moving to the cloud transforms your business fundamentally across day-to-day operations, talent acquisition and development, budgeting, and even end-user productivity.

Therefore, it requires a careful approach to determine the best ways to leverage new cloud capabilities and modernize applications towards harnessing the full benefits of the cloud. Most literature only provides a snapshot of the best practices alongside checklists to guide your steps on that complicated journey.

Many companies begin to run into various problems because they lack understanding of the best practices (especially regarding security and performance) during development and working in the cloud environment.

We’ve handled diverse on-premise to cloud migration projects and have put together some of the top areas to consider during this complex journey.

1. Invest in container technology

Naturally, you may already think of containers as storage boxes, which might house code, software, and other connected components. In terms of cloud computing, containers are highly popular from the standpoint of application development. First, they are not dependent on your server and its operating system and will not go down if the server does. In truth, if your server goes down, you can easily spin a new server to work with the same container, which minimizes hassles and downtime.

Containers are also portable, allowing you to quickly move data and applications from one environment to the next without compatibility issues. They also favor rapid testing and development and will have no overhead or complications associated with configuring and managing underlying servers and operating systems. Finally, containers are scalable, which means you can replicate what’s on them an infinite number of times.

2. The need for a multi-cloud strategy

Many organizations assume that moving to the cloud is an all-or-nothing process and may think they only need one vendor. In truth, the most successful on-premise to cloud migrations feature a multi-cloud strategy and hybrid cloud configuration. So, in some instances, some organizations might do better with one significant migration of data to the public cloud, followed by series of smaller migrations across multiple cloud platforms depending on their organizational goals, priorities, and critical projects.

Other organizations may place only limited data within the cloud and use their private data servers for critical sensitive and proprietary applications.

A lot more organizations might prepare using different providers for different specific functions. For instance, they might choose to use the Google cloud platform for retail operations while warehouse management goes to AWS. These are different multi-cloud strategies, yet a few other organizations might engage in cloud migration over a long time as their projects and priorities evolve.

3. Don’t forget that security changes

On-premise meant that your technical support, development tools, and data infrastructure resides on-site with all projects – coding, testing, configuring, and validating proper security settings happening in a centralized manner. So, development projects would typically take weeks, but such projects might only take an hour or a day to set up with the cloud.

Still, the greater ease and speed of development, testing, and deployments of applications that come with the cloud are not without challenges.

First, your current IT staff will require additional cloud training as the cloud infrastructure reduces their skillset to the barest minimum. Not everyone will have the same level of knowledge and experience accessing the cloud or working with public cloud environments. This exposes your organization to significant risks, including such as improper port settings and misconfigurations. You must realize that even the simplest mistakes can expose your organization to diverse kinds of cyber threats and attacks.

Secondly, you must carefully assess the relationship between you and your cloud provider on cloud security as you both share responsibilities regarding the security of your data and applications. Typically, it might mean that your cloud provider bears the brunt of security for all their infrastructures within their physical brick and mortar facilities while you are in charge of securing all your own data and applications. So, you must read the fine print of your contract to determine your respective roles.

4. Build a unique business case

As said earlier, on-premise to cloud migration will bring about positive alongside negative business impacts. Therefore, as said before, getting into the cloud shouldn’t be your central objective.

So, it’s essential to be clear about the critical business differentiators, risks, and critical drivers for your specific business. Here are some questions you must answer while building your cloud migration strategy;

Is your primary objective improving customer experience, or do you want greater speed in IT operations?

What about improving internal efficiencies?

Do you want to migrate to achieve rapid response to changes in technology?

Do you need a cloud migration partner that brings expertise to the table?

How will you manage your cloud security needs?

What are the implications of your migration plan to your existing legacy applications?

There are many more questions to be answered. They will determine whether you need to implement a ‘lift and shift strategy’ or ‘re-code or ‘re-architect; your applications adapt to newer technology.

It might also mean leveraging container technologies or not. However, you must not also forget the need for new cloud security protocols.

In the end, on-premise to cloud migration is not as simple and straightforward as the name implies. Many organizations assume that it’s a simple one-shot bulk transfer of all existing data and infrastructure. It’s essential to re-invent your mindset to ensure that all logistical, cultural, technological, and staff-related challenges are well-addressed to prevent future severe setbacks from the onset.

When working with DevOps methodology, companies often focus on 'collaboration,' 'continuous testing,' 'integration, 'automation,' 'continuous deployment,' etc.  

However, one key ingredient and perhaps the most essential is often overlooked – continuous monitoring. DevOps methodology creates the avenue to be more efficient and agile, which gains any business an edge in a highly competitive business environment. Unfortunately, the quicker the deployment pipeline accelerates, the higher the resistance encountered from growing 'chaos' formed due to the faster operational speed.

Therefore, even as automation and agile leadership principles control this chaos for continuous delivery, there are also higher chances of confusion in the production environment. Therefore, a successful DevOps implementation needs to take care of the risks of becoming the next bottleneck.

Without Continuous Monitoring and real-time visibility, it becomes difficult to achieve success with the DevOps implementation.

Yet, the majority of organizations overlook this vital aspect, which serves as protection against critical outages. The statistics further confirms it:

·         Over half of Fortune 500 companies suffer downtime of about 1.6 hours every week. This is about 83 hours a year of having systems and applications not working.

·         Over 98% of organizations stay that an hour of downtime requires more than $100,000

·         23% downtime that manufacturing businesses face originates from staff negligence and human error.

·         About 63% of financial businesses use a third-party monitoring tool to identify and recover from issues quickly.

All these points to the vitality of monitoring systems, applications, and resources in DevOps methodology.

What is Continuous Monitoring in DevOps?

At its core, Continuous Monitoring (CM), also called Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM), is an automated operation where DevOps personnel observe and detect security threats and compliance problems in all phases of the DevOps pipeline. Beyond the DevOps, Continuous Monitoring expands to the entire IT infrastructure. Therefore, Continuous Monitoring helps organizations detect, monitor, and study critical metrics and find ways to resolve them in real-time.

Benefits of Continuous Monitoring

1.    Greater network visibility and Transparency

CM enables DevOps teams to achieve clarity on the IT infrastructure's state through automated data collection and analysis. This ensures that DevOps teams can identify significant trends and resolve all possible outages in real-time.

2.    Meaningful insights

The right CM strategy enables organizations to gain relevant insights and a clear picture of their business performance. Therefore, for many organizations, Monitoring becomes an active force against critical losses in revenue or credibility. DevOps consulting teams will also work alongside organizations regarding testing use cases and validating particular user journeys.

3.    Identify and resolve issues quickly

CM implements an alert system that quickly notifies on all IT incidents, including minute issues. DevOps methodology relies on this process to ensure that the right people can implement timely and effective fixes. Moreover, because it does not depend on manual testing, it minimizes time spent on issues. Furthermore, timely response enables effective handling of functional stop-gaps or security threats, reducing damage and allowing quicker system restoration to optimal operational levels.  

4.    Improves user-experience

One of DevOps' most critical activities is ensuring that your applications and resources perform well to meet your end-users' needs. Continuous Monitoring allows timely identification and restorations while ensuring seamless communication between operations and the development team. It further provides that organizations can improve user-experience using production data.

5.    Managing and maintaining applications

DevOps teams understand that applications must always be up, running efficiently, and improving over time. Continuous Monitoring enables organizations to keep up with market trends while maintaining seamless collaborations between operations and development teams.

6.    Faster Deliveries

DevOps teams can use continuous Monitoring to make sure all changes or new updates do not hamper the health of databases, applications, and other resources. This is why it remains a critical center in the DevOps methodology. It is especially beneficial for developers and operations teams because they will have to perform a complete backtracking to determine root causes of all issues without it. Such practices only end up high time consumption every time we release an upgrade. The time and additional resources involved will be wasted every time; the root cause ends being a false alarm.

Concluding thoughts

 Today's business landscape is rapidly changing. With every tremendous IT advancement, organizations have the mandate to be proactive in mitigating production problems, application availability, and lots more. Continuous Monitoring is beneficial to DevOps teams, working with real-time data in public and hybrid environments. It also aids in implementing and fortifying various security measures such as root cause analysis, incident response, threat assessment, and computer and database forensics. It also enables general feedback on the overall IT setup health, including deployed software and offsite networks.

Every conversation about DevOps and cloud computing has to acknowledge one universal truth: while adopting one is good for business, adopting both in a way that they function with synergy is the distinguishing factor between organisations that are considered disrupters and leaders in the digitally transforming world we inhabit. According to a 2017 report by Freeform Dynamics based on a survey of over 900 IT professionals, while only 20 percent responders said that their company was using both cloud computing and DevOps to meet their software delivery objectives, they showed 81 percent better performance than the slow movers that were used as a baseline. Conversely, the company that used only DevOps or cloud computing, recorded a 52 and 53 percent increase in performance. It is clear, then, that the integrated adoption of DevOps and cloud can take companies on the fast track to software success.

There are several important benefits to such a combined approach:

Ease of automation

One of the most important aspects of infrastructure management, and a key factor that determines the success of a product by decreasing the time to market for a software is automations. With the help of cloud computing, processes can be automated faster, while at same time making it more efficient, error-free, and reliable. All of these make it possible for developers to deliver a performant, high-quality software in a shorter period of time.

Automation of IT processes goes a long way in modernising and optimising them, enabling better management of infrastructure. The IT processes that can be easily automated using cloud computing are provisioning, building, running test cases, compiling reports from the data collected from test results, etc.

Faster deployment

When IT processes are automated with the use of cloud computing, they enable organisations to deploy the code faster. However, error-free and customised deployment requires the use of DevOps practices. With the help of the DevOps approach, businesses can solve their infrastructural issues by building custom logic and defining capabilities with the help of the latest and sophisticated tools.

Better monitoring

One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing for DevOps teams is that cloud providers make it possible for all important tools required for a project in one centralised place in cloud form. Tools related to monitoring, backup, automation, or infrastructural services are all readily accessible to developers for use. Given the importance of these tools in ensuring the success of a software, DevOps practices can be used to monitor and track the latest versions of these tools, triggering custom alarms and alerts, so they can be optimised and used more effectively.

Replication of servers and environments for testing

Every cloud service provider offers some form of backup mechanism, in case of unexpected non-performance of the application. Despite the existence of a backup, in the absence of DevOps led automation, the servers will need to be launched manually to restore the backup. This can affect poor customer experience and loss of faith in the reliability of the business.

Cloud-native app development focuses on developing cloud-focused resources for organizations to leverage well-recognized business value. However, it is also about migrating mission-critical legacy apps to the cloud.

Many consider legacy apps as a pejorative for ‘old and out of date.’ Nevertheless, legacy apps are truly about importance, value, and something worth keeping. In reality, legacy apps or mission-critical legacy apps (MCLAs) are business applications that usually have tremendous impacts on revenue, profitability, delivering products and services, managing finances, and client relationships.

They often have crucial business processes, valuable algorithms, and essential data. Therefore, legacy apps are vital to any core business.

Some good examples are electronic medical records (EMR), accounting systems, and enterprise resource planning ERP) systems.

Looking at their vitality, it becomes vital that migrating legacy apps to the cloud is essential. This migration is really about preserving their value while leveraging the advantages of the cloud.

Challenges of migrating legacy apps to the cloud

Therefore, when businesses consider migrating to the cloud, they are focused on reaping benefits such as increased speed and agility, scalable economies, avoiding capital to variable expenses, predictable costs, getting rid of fees to run and maintain data centers, and expanding to the global scene.

All these benefits apply whether we are talking about a small start-up or large enterprise.

Still, whether you are migrating to new premises, conducting a significant organizational change, closing a data center, or merely replacing existing infrastructure, legacy migration is tricky to move to the cloud. This is especially so for four main reasons:

1.    Orientation

Mission-critical legacy apps are designed to assume resiliency in their underlying hardware such as storage failsafe, network, and server to mitigate chances of application outage. So because they are not born in the cloud, they are usually termed ‘dumb apps on smart hardware.’

2.    Different principles

Cloud expects your IT team to build automation to mimic smart hardware resiliency using complex automation, scripting, and failure plans. Some clouds even offer system resiliency without changing or altering the apps. So clouds are designed with different principles.

3.    Pricing models

Cloud environments offer dynamic pricing models. Therefore, because MCLAs are not born in the cloud, they usually generate network traffic that makes them cost-prohibitive to run on clouds as charge tolls become incredibly high.

4.    Performance sensitivity

Digital transformation is fast transforming a significant number of businesses. For businesses primarily driven by data, it is crucial to becoming a remarkable digital entity, with optimized costs and efficiency. Success today is a complex process involving addressing ever-changing business and users’ needs, applying the right tech solutions, and building secure and stable applications. Technology is off-course at the frontiers and controlled by programming. However, it is crucial to choose a technology that meets your data-driven business goals and challenges to impact your growth and success significantly.

This is why it is important to choose the latest and proven development technology. On the grounds of programming, there are multiple languages. However, Python technology stands out from the crowd.

Python has been used for over 30 years and is still one of the most dynamically growing languages today. Regardless of your business size, Python technology is the solution to your complex business needs because it is known for its versatility. It presently powers a great list of the world’s most prominent platforms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Spotify, and Uber. However, you may wonder — what makes Python different, especially for data-driven solutions?

As a python development company, we’ve over time witnessed plenty of insights on the usefulness of Python. Therefore, this article talks about its many benefits and a lot more.

1. Supports Businesses of all sizes

Python is an excellent choice, whether you own a small business or a conglomerate. It also drives efficiency regardless of the time pressure and helps corporations develop complex applications with the highest security standards.

2. Seamless integration

Python can be easily integrated with many other frameworks, programming languages, external services, and existing infrastructure elements. Developers will also enjoy the enormous power to implement diverse internet protocols, scripting language, and data formats. In the end, you achieve a program that runs on diverse operating systems using the same byte.

3. Simplified Data Structures

Python technology comes with a built-in list and advanced structures, making it incredibly easy to harness a high data typing level. That means it ultimately reduces the need for more extended code, which significantly reduces time. What’s more, data structure combinations in Python are adequate for further implementations in richer structures. The result is that you can harness Python as a powerful tool for data science. Whether for analytics, artificial intelligence, or machine learning, Python offers incredibly better data manipulation and repetitive tasks automation than other technologies.

4. Enriching ready-to-use solutions

Python is so easy to read, write, learn, and debug. What’s more, python technology has a vibrant and enormous community that has created thousands of open source libraries. Therefore, you have a greater advantage of building flawless products efficiently and often without beginning from scratch.

5. Stable, secure, and battle-tested

Python technology is an excellent choice for creating diverse financial applications dealing with sensitive data. It is a stable and trusted technology, well-founded on a high level of security capabilities. What’s more, Python fits so well with other web and application interfaces, thereby efficiently reducing your task.

6. Versatile, multiple usabilities, and efficient

Python technology is incredibly known for its astonishingly great usage across diverse software development technologies. There is a vast range of use from operating systems to language development, prototyping, enterprise, and business applications, operating systems to applications. It is also incredibly suitable for making scientific applications and game development. Therefore, the product and functionalities you have in mind, Python, make it easier to quickly achieve your goals.

Overall, Python is a high-level dynamic programming language, offering a remarkable versatility for rapid and robust development. You can harness Python’s power to meet industry practices, security needs, business goals and handle projects of practically any size. It’s no wonder companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google use Python for a vast range of solutions, including task automation, deep learning, machine learning, AI, data science, and lots more.

We work with organizations seeking growth, and agility to build the next generation of services. Get In Touch to talk with our experts or mail to [email protected]

Video on demand is fast becoming the most acknowledged trend for online content delivery. According to a report, VOD streaming platforms are ramping up to 155% year-over-year viewing times.

It is no longer news that people prefer video to other kinds of content, including articles, emails, and infographics. Still, evidence shows video will only grow bigger as more people are beginning to access the internet. Cisco Systems predicts that video demands will grow higher as internet-connected devices grow, with over 70% of the world’s own mobile devices, further increasing demand for 4K/UHD content.

This rise of video is not entirely on the entertainment scene but is already leveraged by broadcasters, small and large brands. Video on demand is riding the frontiers, especially for one major reason — the ability to offer content to the audience whenever and however they choose to view it. Therefore, Video on Demand offers seamless efficiency, convenience, and cost optimization in a single package.

In this article, we take a look at what video on demand is and its great benefits. We will also share insights on how to choose the right VOD solution for your brand.

The Role of Video on Demand

VOD or video on demand is about accessing content using online libraries. Traditionally, consumers can only view content from broadcast media outlets and channels, according to the media outlet’s schedules. With VOD, consumers can now view anytime they want with a great range of compatible devices. Video delivery platforms are systems that host and share those contents to consumers. They use content delivery networks (CDNs), globally distributed servers offering fast and dependable content delivery to audiences and businesses. Hulu, Disney+, and Netflix are popular VOD delivery platforms. However, companies on the other hand, require VOD solutions offering monetization, security, and hosting features. Some VOD solutions come with live-streaming features, but VOD streaming is entirely different from the latter, as VOD requires previously recorded content.

With VOD, consumers enjoy the convenience of streaming videos instantly without full access to the content. They can also restart, pause, rewind, forward without reduced video quality, performance, or excessive buffering.

On the business side, professional VOD solutions provide full control over how and where you wish to distribute your content. You can choose from many monetization options such as pay-as-you-go, sponsored ads, or subscription-based viewing. Brands can also harness data insights on their consumers’ behaviours to refine their content delivery strategy for maximum ROI.

Choosing The Right VOD Hosting Providers

However, harnessing the full benefits of VOD requires selecting the right video-on-demand hosting provider. But first, to make that choice, you need to consider the factors driving your choice. Monetization, device support, content delivery network, and cloud infrastructure are the primary conditions to consider. Next, custom branding options, white-label, ease of use, and scalability, are some features to drive your choice.

Overall, the best should be a cloud-based VOD platform that can offer consumers uninterrupted playback across multiple devices while protecting your content from unauthorized downloads. Your video delivery system should give you full control over your content, alongside a vast range of monetization options and in-depth analytics to keep track of your content over time. With the right video-on-demand platform, you can create great video content that delivers memorable experiences and maximizes your ROI.

Insurance firms deal with a myriad of documents. From policies to cover notes, certificate of insurance, proposal forms, endorsements, there is plenty to meet demands and needs. These documents are also subject to ever-changing laws, new processes, and the struggle to offer the best insurance solutions. Therefore, it is vital to process these documents accurately and efficiently.

Initially, insurers had to scan and convert paper documents into flattened image files. A process like that requires excellent human intervention and is no match for the large volume of content in the insurance industry. Therefore, unmanageable work delays, errors, and long hours of work were the order of the day. Such practices can also lead to uncontrollable costs, lower profit and lower customer retention. There are also duplicate or multiple processes, alongside many other organizational silos, which further increases insurance operations costs, leading to severe losses for insurers.

OCR And Insurance Documents Digitization

Insurance document digitization is a great alternative. It deals with the hassles of process delays and can even help insurance firms harness deeper data-driven insights to build better solutions. This is why many Governments are beginning to make digitization mandatory for the insurance industry.

OCR in insurance provides an exciting avenue to help insurances achieve seamless control over their tasks. OCR or optical character recognition is a technology that transforms electronic or mechanical scanned or photographic images of printed, typewritten or handwritten text into computer-readable text/images. Presently, the global OCR market is expected to reach US$ 12.6 billion by 2025. Therefore, OCR presents a remarkable list of unique benefits that the insurance companies can enjoy. Here are some of those benefits to help you realize why you need to invest in great OCR software.

Benefits of OCR in Insurance

A unified workflow

Investing in insurance document digitization, primarily through OCR, provides the amazing perks of dealing with large volumes of data within minutes. What’s more, you can easily organize and tag as per your preferences, making it easy to call up any information at the right time. Therefore, OCR eliminates all kinds of errors to boost workflow efficiency. It also ensures data validation and verification, leading to high quality and accurate output.

Safety and security

OCR software can help companies establish the first steps to keeping your documents digitally safe. OCR in insurance can decrease the risks of losing track of policies. It also allows insurers to deal with fraudulent claims efficiently. That way, insurers can effectively reduce losses incurred due to fraud.

Improves customer experience

With automated analytic tools and OCR, customers can quickly analyze scanned copies of insurance policy documents uploaded online to your products and your competitors to make their choice. With OCR, the process will be tedious and inefficient. OCR in insurance automatically scans a significant number of documents to structured and accurate data in a format suitable for deeper analysis.

Boosts customer service.

OCR in insurance eliminates manual paper document scans. This, in turn, gets rid of delays so that customers can enjoy shorter resolution for diverse issues. Claims processing becomes easier and faster because of the quick interface program of OCR software. Your customers can even process their documents in an easy format, ready for use. Therefore, OCR is a great way to increase customer satisfaction and boosts your brand image.

Margins and profitability

Because OCR in insurance eliminates manual data entry mistakes, it results in less time, workforce, and money spent dealing with the mistakes. A minute error usually leads to significant costs in the data capture process. Therefore, OCR insurance document digitization gets rid of all of these costs and boosts your profit margin.

High precision predictions

Optical character recognition transforms bulk data into formats that data analytics, AI, or ML software finds usable. That way, your business can deeply analyze historical data to make predictions on your customer behavior, market trends, and risks. Automated OCR can drive incredible value for your business through meaningful insights for growth and sustainable success.

AI in Testing? Why Do We Need It

AI in testingis a significant trend among testers and has been around for quite some time. A 2020-21 World Quality survey says that over 21% of IT leaders and AI companies conduct assessments to maximize Artificial intelligence potential in software testing. However, you may wonder – why AI? How do AI-powered platforms truly benefit software testers and development teams?

This article looks at these real benefits, alongside artificial intelligence future in Software testing and QA automation.

Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing Automation

Testing automation is already a widely acknowledged tool in modern driving the speed and efficiency of modern QA. With this kind of testing, testers can run thousands of test cases in a short time. It automates repetitive test cases, allows for a faster feedback cycle and better defect detection. Testing automation also reduces test cycle times, enables efficient reuse of test cases, and helps achieve higher control and transparency of test activities. Overall, this kind of testing can help QA specialists make better decisions because they no longer have to handle the heavy work.

However, even with these widely acknowledged benefits, adoption is still low. This is mainly due to its lengthy test configuration. Still, configurations are becoming more complicated due to the demand for faster software releases. Many of these software releases involve complex networks of applications and technologies with conflicting resources and dependencies, which creates a new set of problems that test automation alone, struggles to overcome.

How AI in Testing Solves Test Automation Challenges

AI can overcome these bottlenecks. But how does this work? AI in software testing usually happens through its foundations – machine learning and neural networks.

Machine learning offers predictions and classifications about possibilities based on the data it has. Neural networks recognize underlying relationships by emulating parts of the human brain’s operations. Together or in part, AI can perform the following activities:

1. Classifying testing outcomes as possible defects 2. Identify the tests needed for each cycle of software development. 3. Assessing the possibility of an outcome being a defect 4. Identifying the relationship between the events of testing with outcomes

These actions show that AI can eliminate many challenges limiting efficient software testing. Are you not convinced yet? Here are the full details to help you understand why Artificial intelligence should be a part of your software testing and development cycles.

1. Efficiently Identify Bugs

AI in testing can make it easier to identify bugs early in the software development process. According to IBM’s System Sciences, the cost to fix an error in a product release is four to five times more costly than one discovered during the design phase and over 100 times more than bugs identified during maintenance. Therefore, with earlier detection, AI companies can enjoy significant cost savings.

2. New Approaches To Testing

When developers write test cases, they utilize the possibilities they already know. They often have no time to analyze other potentialities. With Artificial Intelligence, they can analyze project data within seconds to discover new approaches to test cases. It can use the data in your existing QA systems (source codes, test cases, logging, defects, resolutions, and defects) to identify your product’s problem areas. That way, they can harness the most efficient approach to create and manage test data.

3. Handles The Heavy Lifting

Artificial intelligence can script 100 tests in 1/100th of the time; it takes a single person to. Therefore, AI in testing can automate repetitive and mundane tasks in implementing and executing test cases. It also offers reports on code quality and can help organize the entire process. This frees up software testers to focus on more vital activities such as monitoring tests, making recommendations, and offering smarter feedbacks to businesses.

4. Predictive Analysis

Artificial intelligence can use your existing analytics data to identify market trends, buying habits, and customer needs. This allows testers and developers to stay ahead of your users’ growing needs and expectations for better service quality. Therefore, AI in testing can help testers create more specific test cases, leading to remarkable software releases.

Concluding Thoughts

No doubt, Artificial intelligence future in software testing is a tangible reality. Already AI companies are harnessing Ai’s tremendous benefits. In testing, it improves the configuring of test automation tools, boosts their performance, and helps achieve better results. This will, in turn, help testers become comfortable meeting the increasing demands for shorter development cycles. Beyond shorter development cycles, companies have the potentials of reaping remarkable cost savings.

Quality assurance and testing is a high cost for many software companies. In 2018, it took as much as 26% of their IT budgets. Artificial Intelligence can help these companies cut down costs and time. Evidence already suggests that AI might be the missing link that helps companies harness test automation benefits. It opens the pathway for more opportunities for automated testing optimization.