Software outsourcing trends in 2018

A report has found outsourcing leads the way in which firms across the globe conduct their businesses.

According to a study by RSK Business Solutions, regulatory updates, immigration law and government policies have had a large impact on the way businesses outsource.

Moreover, outsourcing contracts hit an all-time high last year at US$88.9billion. The study found that the US represents the largest market involved, with the UK coming second over having 80% of all outsourcing contracts commissioned across European nations.
“Over the last few years, we have seen a consistent increase in the demand for software services both in the US and UK,” says Praveen Joshi, Managing Director of RSK Business Solutions, in light of the company’s study.

Outsourcing destinations

“Currently the skill gap is widening due to a shortage of development resources as the direct impact of Brexit in the UK and recent changes to immigration policies regarding H1B visa in the US. This is leading businesses to look at other options, such as offshore software development.”
India represents one of the most inexpensive outsourcing destinations, followed by Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Both the UK and the US have a strong relationship with India. The UK is the largest G20 investor in India. The country invests more in the UK than Europe entirely.
Furthermore, spending on IT services is estimated to amount to US$1003billion worldwide by the end of this year. According to the global services company Arvato, the value of IT outsourcing has witnessed a 63% increase year-on-year (YoY) to £22.63billion.

Data security

Data security is another consideration for the future of the IT outsourcing landscape across the globe. Ongoing developments around data security will continue to remain a prime concern for both businesses and individuals.

The European GDPR also shows how globalisation has affected the outsourcing market. Businesses must ensure they review current outsourcing arrangements to determine the ‘risk-gap’.
Arvato also found that outsourcing contracts worth £3.91billion were signed in the first half of 2016. Interesting, this was before the Brexit-vote date which represented a 19% YoY rise.
Written by Leah Alger

Source: http://www.softwaretestingnews.co.uk/software-outsourcing-trends-in-2018/

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Q&A: Why should I outsource to Vietnam?

4 Advantages of Vietnam’s Engineering Workforce

 

1. Vietnam Young Population

Vietnam has 91 million people and about 64% are young (from 18 – 32 years old). This is a very good population base from which good programmers can be developed. Moreover, Vietnamese people tend to be smart and they love the computer. More and more student choose Computer Science as their major in University, to be a developer in a software outsourcing company seem to be an attractive career to the young, earning a high salary and good working environment.

2. Good Infrastructure

Vietnam is a small country with 2 big cities including Hanoi Capital and Ho Chi Minh city. It is easy to realize that Ho Chi Minh city has a relatively very good infrastructure in terms of roads, internet bandwidth and basic services. Many foreigners from US, UK to Korea have moved to Vietnam and stay for long or build up their “home” here. The internet wifi is almost free and fairly cheap. Ho Chi Minh city has more than 100,000 young developers in 2017, who works full-time as software or mobile developer.

3. Adjustable Culture

Related to national culture, Vietnam has a good blend of tradition-Asia culture and western culture. Compare to India or China, Vietnam is more comfortable to stay in. If you have a chance to Ho Chi Minh City, you might notice that we have a western town (Bui Vien Street), China town (Nguyen Trai street), Korea town (Near Tan Son Nhat airport) and many kinds of restaurant, bar and club.

However, it’s important to mention Programming Culture, Vietnamese programming environment very impressive, they are hard working, diligent and a little more creative and extrovert (consultative) than other Asian locations.

4. Safety Place

“There are no safety warnings from the US government and we felt completely safe in HCMC and traveling around in nearby areas. The only warning we were given multiple times was to watch out for our cell phones – Andy Hilliard, Prez of Accelerance”

3 Reasons to hire Offshore Development Company in Vietnam

1. Lower cost

First of all, the average salary of Offshore Development Company in Vietnam is relatively cheaper compared with the world and adjacent countries, including India, Thailand, and China. In china, worker’s salary is double to Vietnam and contract to US, Canada or Australia, the hour labor cost in Vietnam is much cheaper. while 1 hour of Vietnamese developer cost about 12$ – 18$, US developer cost ten times higher.

2. Highly Skilled Work Force

In addition, Vietnamese developers of Offshore Development Company access to a highly skilled workforce, especially in Software Development (Vietnamese people are generally smart, hardworking, and the percentage of people with IT background is higher and higher). Moreover, to adapt global economy, The number of Vietnam offshore development Start-up company and SME are increasing day by day, they often founded and manage by experienced senior developers, enhancing a rich source to any kind of customer, even that is a local shop or big4.

3. English

Furthermore, when it comes to learning English, a sincere push for education from the Government and Family keep being heavier in 2017. Because people believe that English is the ticket to success, you don’t need to worry about language while working with Vietnamese Software Development Company. Vietnam is so pro-English that wealthy families send their kids abroad in High School. As a result, the kids adopt English as their first language and consequently English culture as their dominant culture. There are some kids have lost touch with their Vietnamese identity yet know they will never be true Brits, Australians or Americans. The result is that even the kids who don’t have the money to study abroad learn English very well in Vietnam, there are English schools on every corner.

Source: Sưu tầm

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Q&A: Which is the best software outsourcing company in Vietnam?

Some IT software outsourcing companies in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam are very good, but rate is quite premium: 18–25USD/hour.

They are: CMC, Saigon Technology Solutions, TMA Solutions, FPT…

You should research carefully to find the best fit to your business. Using some keywords such as: how to do software outsourcing, what is software outsourcing to learn more about the industry.
You should determine your budget, time to the market, engagement model and software development methodologies before researching the best suitable IT outsourcing companies in Vietnam. ;)

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The Benefits of Big Data Analytics Integration With .NET Development

Microsoft .NET is a robust and widely acclaimed development framework with comprehensive functionalities to build large and complex applications. Enterprises across the world have come to realize the significance of Big Data integration which has induced great demand for .NET services. Software built with .NET are facilitating big data analytics. For example, accumulating web log data, user clicks and impressions from an app, telemetry from IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and more. Big data analytics are generally initiated by batch processing the enterprise Big Data assets.
With several technologies offering Big Data integration services and claiming to be the most powerful, .NET stands apart with its ability to enable the integration seamlessly and strategically. Also, the fact that the Power BI, Microsoft’s popular data analytics software with Hadoop is an open ecosystem for the world, makes Big data analytics integration with .NET more appealing.
Enterprises looking to process massive data volumes to get better insights and take quick, informed actions are partnering with an ASP.NET web development company to harness the potential of this technology. To make the most of the highly flexible and scalable big data technologies, one can couple .NET with IIS Server to achieve significant business growth. Some of the considerable advantages of Big Data integration to build .NET solutions include:
Take More Informed Business Decisions: Managing complex business processes isn’t an easy feat. It is just as challenging as answering numerous customer-specific questions such as what customers need, who are the potential ones, why do they prefer a specific brand or solution at a given time and many more. Before Big Data’s inception, the answering, compiling and analyzing the simplest of queries took about a mont’s time for businesses to define the right criteria. Also, the burden grew, questions became more complex, making the task more challenging and time-consuming. Later the data intelligence tools simplified the process of answering questions. It has made the entire process more robust by shortening the period from months to weeks, days, hours and even minutes.

Ensure Data Accuracy: By integrating big data with the question-and-answer process to drive better business decisions, an enterprise not only gets a holistic view but a more accurate view of all the answers. However, processing large data volumes involve an inherent risk if the data accumulated is incomplete or incorrect. It can result in misinformed or somewhat uninformed business decision making. However, big data has significantly minimized these risks by enabling a complete and more accurate view of data.
Beyond the benefits listed above, Big Data integration also empowers the millennial generation employees by simplifying the software and web development lifecycles through .NET. They can even leverage a variety of platforms for easy to create reports and presentations. For businesses that can execute Big Data integration with .NET development successfully, it could lead to high profits and substantial breakthroughs.
Source: http://customerthink.com/the-benefits-of-big-data-analytics-integration-with-net-development/

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When AI Met DevOps: Machine Teaching

One of my favorite quotes about artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t from a data scientist or tech industry analyst. It’s from a doctor.

When asked if AI would eventually replace radiologists, Dr. Curtis Langoltz of Stanford University pithily replied “No, but radiologists who use AI will replace those who do not use it.”
 This great insight is highly applicable to IT. Yes, there are many ways we can use AI methods to fully automate a broad range of DevOps tasks. Companies, including CA Technologies, are actively involved in the development of solutions that enable our customers to do exactly that.
 Algorithmic machine learning, however, doesn’t just empower systems to perform tasks and solve problems autonomously. It also makes them great active partners with human beings. In fact, much of what machines learn they also wind up teaching.
 The synergy between AI and human radiologists, for example, stems in part from the fact that digital systems can differentiate about 200 levels of gray in a diagnostic image—compared to only about 16-20 that are discernable by the human eye. Train an AI system with enough images, and that precise cognitive power can more effectively detect that something is going on.
 But for the most effective diagnostic process, you don’t just depend on that detection alone. You use that detection to empower a human diagnostician who can apply a broad understanding of pathologies and deep experience with the complexities of individual patients to deliver the highest quality care.
 In DevOps, we can do the same. We can use AI to capture insights that teach us how to continuously optimize our workflows and processes. We can also use our AI learnings to push our work up higher on the value chain.
 More specifically, the synergy between AI and human intellect can:
 Make development smarter. The speed, quality, and efficiency of development pipelines can be affected by all kinds of subtle factors. A less-than-optimally designed API, for example, can be a small but chronic stumbling block to everyone who has to use it. Scrum outcomes can be undermined by anything from a particular type of technical challenge to a nascent personality conflict.
 By capturing a rich set of DevOps metrics and applying machine learning to those metrics, development leaders can discover process bottlenecks and skilling shortfalls. They can better coach individuals and promote team collaboration. The result: a better working environment that facilitates digital agility for the enterprise and higher satisfaction/retention for valuable employees.
 Make ops smarter. Enterprises are running increasingly volatile and complex workloads on increasingly hybridized infrastructure. At the same time, the tolerance of internal and external users for latency and outages continues to approach zero. There are also real costs associated with performance problems.
 The elastic capacity of public and private cloud does much to help with workload volatility. But adding cloud capacity also has its costs—and end-to-end application performance often depends on back-end systems that are not cloud-based. So not every performance issue can be solved by simply throwing more capacity at it. Nor should it be, if a rearchitecting can fix a bottleneck less expensively.
 Here again, AI can teach us a lot. We can uncover opaque interdependencies in processing load and data throughput. We can spot conditions when it may make business sense to throttle cloud costs that aren’t cost-justified. We can even better understand the real-world conditions—whether patterns in customer behaviors or our own marketing programs—that are driving our demand spikes and troughs. All of this helps us deliver consistently responsive digital experiences at a cost that makes good business sense.
 Make security smarter. AI is already being broadly implemented in security solutions such as endpoint protection and threat response to automate the detection and neutralization of anomalous activities in the enterprise environment. But effective multi-layer security isn’t just about finding and stopping exploits. It’s also about building applications that are themselves inherently less vulnerable to hacking. This is the essence of DevSecOps.
 AI has huge potential value here. We are writing a rapidly growing volume of increasingly sophisticated code. It is very easy for subtle vulnerabilities to hide in that code. As our development practices become more complex—often including multiple contractors—it becomes more difficult to understand exactly where and why these vulnerabilities were introduced into our code. Machine learning can teach us the answers to these questions, so we can more proactively secure our data and our businesses.
 It’s especially interesting to consider what may happen as we start to apply AI to DevSecOps across our organizations, as well as within them. More diverse inputs enable machine learning to discover more factors that impact code pipeline performance. By aggregating our knowledge about how we build, deliver and secure our code, we are all likely to benefit with better practices and stronger guardrails.

Source: https://devops.com/when-ai-met-devops-machine-teaching/

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The Internet of Things: Getting Smarter about Securing Smart Technologies

Machine identities are not being secured in the same way as human identities online, resulting in a lack of encryption across networks, among other things. When two machines can talk without encryption, or are communicating between two networks unencrypted. The unencrypted activity leaves ample opportunity for an attacker to eavesdrop on the traffic and conduct a variety of attacks.
To counter this exposure to cyber crime, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) should be the foundation of security for machine identities. This allows IoT devices to authenticate, ensuring secure and encrypted communications from the get go. For Industrial IoT, PKI enables trust, privacy for all the different components, safety for employees and integrity of the data.

Security for the Internet of Things is Improving

As awareness of the importance of PKI increases, industrial IoT is becoming more secure. There is now a security framework for Industrial IoT machinery that is connected to the Internet: “Industrial Internet Security Framework” (IISF) report. This is a critical milestone for IoT, as there will be money and funding behind this initiative which aims to create a standard for the industry. Smaller IoT manufacturers that do not have the money to invest in building secure devices themselves can adopt the framework.
The framework breaks up security of Industrial IoT into a high-level security domain, such as the business, endpoints, isolation techniques, protecting communications, security monitoring and analysis.
The framework explains a process isolation model, which separates business, operations and security processes from each other. This addresses the concern that compromising any component of the processes within an operating system may form a foothold for further attacks. This leads us full circle back to securing identities. As each process can be seen as a unique identity, it is important to securely authenticate IoT devices at all levels.

3 tips for Security at Home

To secure your own device at home, start by segregating it from the rest of the network. Most home routers can create a ‘guest’ network, which allows a ‘guest’ user to access the Internet without connecting to your other personal devices on the network. This would, in effect, create a sandbox for your device, so it can connect to the Internet, without compromising the network and your other devices.
If a device comes with a default password, this should alwaysbe changed. Ignore this and within seconds of connecting to the Internet, your new IoT device will be attacked. There are thousands of automated scripts that scan the Internet for such devices and will automatically start password attacks as soon as they find one. So, changing the password before connecting it to the Internet isn’t just a good idea, it’s compulsory.
Once you have your IoT device connected to the Internet, you should check if there are any updates available for your device. If there are, it’s likely some of them are security patches, so you should install these as a matter of course.
The Internet of Things has had a bad start where security is concerned. However, with the help of this framework, we should be seeing an improvement in security for embedded devices. The question though, as IoT devices proliferate within large organizations, will things get worse before they get better?

Source: https://securityboulevard.com/2018/08/the-internet-of-things-getting-smarter-about-securing-smart-technologies/

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