Valentine’s Day is a great day to reflect on something we are grateful for and the things we love. Even though not all of may get to spend time with a special someone one or will be giving or receiving chocolates and roses, there are still many other things to love, including Cloud Computing. Cloud is always there for you: Like the ones we want in our lives, Cloud solutions are available 24/7*365 days, with several Cloud-enabled technologies offering guaranteed uptime in their Service Level Agreements. Cloud is what you want it to be: In comparison to certain on-premise technologies, the Cloud doesn’t burden the enterprise while transitioning costs to operations. This means organizations can spend less time in cost and more time in innovation. Cloud brings people closer: Employees usually collaborate on projects and over email discussions, leading to cluttered inboxes. With Cloud collaboration solutions and platforms, your team can now collaborate or work in real time and on the go. They give you choices: Cloud gives multiple options for organizations to be more flexible; one such option is the multi-Cloud strategy. Multi-Cloud implementation is when organizations have multiple Cloud services running in one architecture which helps them increase flexibility and innovation possibilities. They support your goals: Cloud is the perfect partner one could hope for. From collaboration, ease of access, to being extremely economical, it has impacted how other innovations are created and scaled with the adoption of DevOps. As operations increase in scale, some organizations are adopting Cloud-native PaaS platforms to accelerate development and achieve result-oriented goals faster. If you have strong feelings for trying out our Cloud services or if you want to find ideal solutions for your IT needs, feel free to contact us. We are not running any sale on our Cloud services because you can’t put a price tag on true love; however, we might be able to get you the BEST POSSIBLE DEAL!

For less than $20,000 in Bitcoins, any hacker can have access to some 617 million online account details stolen from 16 hacked websites.  Account records from this multi-gigabyte databases consist mainly of account holder names, email addresses, and passwords.

These passwords are hashed or encrypted and need to be cracked before they can be used. These databases, depending on the sites, consist of user information such as location, personal details, and social media authentication tokens. By far, there are no payment or bank card details published in the black-market sale listing.

Hijacked databases of the following websites can be purchased from the Dream Market cyber-souk, located in the Tor network:

• Dubsmash - 162 million accounts, MyFitnessPal - 151 million accounts, MyHeritage - 92 million accounts, ShareThis - 41 million accounts, HauteLook - 28 million accounts, Animoto - 25 million accounts, EyeEm - 22 million accounts, 8fit - 20 million accounts, Whitepages - 18 million accounts, Fotolog - 16 million accounts, 500px - 15 million accounts, Armor Games - 11 million accounts, BookMate - 8 million accounts, CoffeeMeetsBagel - 6 million accounts, Artsy - 1 million accounts, and DataCamp - 700,000 accounts.

The hacker claimed to have exploited the security vulnerabilities within web apps to gain remote-code execution to extract user account data. All of the databases are right now being promoted separately by a single hacker on the dark web, as per reports.

Read More: The Register

The major news in recruiting for the year 2017 was undeniably AI, and with its increasing adoption this trend is only expected to increase in 2018.

By working with tools like ATS, recruiters have used technology to make their jobs easier, faster, and better or in other words highly efficient. Employees are the company’s most important asset, which makes talent acquisition strategy the foundation for ongoing success.

AI is capable of considering a probable employee for a particular position by looking at candidate’s background and matching up with those workers by identifying certain qualifications, educational history, work experience and other factors that consider a candidate has the background to emulate the top performers at your organization.

According to a study by Harvard Business Review, it was found that 44% of businesses incorporate AI into their IT functions, and 19% use AI to predict their customers’ future purchases and present them with suitable offers. Businesses are also beginning to see the benefits of AI in recruitment. According to Ideal, 96% of senior HR professionals consider that AI can highly leverage talent acquisition and retention.

Here's how AI can help:

1. In Posting Jobs: AI can use programmatic advertising technique which gives the user the ability to place highly targeted ads in front of the targeted audience based on their browsing history, online activity, and cookies. Cookies can be used to track candidates who visit career pages, allowing us to compile records of what other pages they’re browsing and what type of jobs they're looking for.
2. Sourcing candidates: AI, in the form of machine learning, sources, and qualifies candidates online in resume databases such as CareerBuilder, Indeed and Monster for recruiters to follow-up with. The process often uses Sentiment analysis which comprises of the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, subjective information. It can also help recruiters in creating job descriptions with keywords that attract a more diverse candidate pool.
3. Resume screening: Manually screening resumes is a fairly tedious task, however, by using the machine learning ability AI screening can be automated by learning what existing employees’ skills and qualifications are. By assigning certain rules and triggers, conversations related to specific hiring or job queries and receive instant answers can be automated.
4. Messaging and data collection: Chatbots that use natural language processing to collect data from candidates, in form of screening questions, chat responses, answer FAQs about the job, and schedule an interview. Information from a candidate collected by the chatbots is then fed into a job portal/s or sent directly to a human recruiter to follow up with the candidate. This process reduces the need to respond to emails, phone calls, and text messages without compromising on candidate experience.

AI technology is capable of changing many things. However, it still is not equipped enough to remove complete human interaction. AI can help bypass back-end and repetitive processes, ultimately assisting recruiters in finding the right talent. The technology is here but it is not all-encompassing; conducting face-to-face interviews may still promise a satisfactory match than otherwise. While AI can assist in many parts of the recruitment process, the human involvement remains imperative.

In the very near future, most recruitment models will involve AI. AI is already transforming every business vertical; in medicine, AI is taking the role of a clinical assistant to help physicians make faster and reliable diagnoses. Companies like General Electric & Siemens are using AI for monitoring machine fleets and factories.

Artificial Intelligence is also rapidly evolving in the Staffing industry and is bound to change the game of recruitment. Jobinvote CEO, Dan Finnigan said, “If recruiters and companies can learn to pair themselves with a specific AI, they can train it to understand a particular corporate mission and culture, so that recruiters feel like they leverage these chatbots and other similar technology as extensions of their teams, not as replacements for them”. In the words of Cyberpunk author, William Gibson, “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed.”

Cloud is now a basic business requirement; every business in some way or another is harnessing the power of cloud to succeed. Some may choose in-house infrastructure or a private cloud environment, while others prefer public cloud offerings. The fact still remains that companies are relying more on their cloud vendors now more than ever for providing the best services at reasonable rates. However, all too often, that’s not always what’s delivered.

Here are some points to keep in mind while you deal with a cloud vendor in order to get the best deal for your corporate assistance.

1. Review Vendor’s Uptime and Downtime Statistic

Uptime statistics define the time that a cloud service is accessible to its users, those who have subscribed for the cloud provider’s services. Companies often claim that they rarely have outages or they are better in uptime statistics. Don’t let these claims go unchecked. A lot of cloud providers fail to deliver a good uptime, in other words, are not giving to the customer three nines (99.9%) of availability. 99.9% uptime means 9 hours of unscheduled downtime per year which does not count the scheduled downtime that the companies organize for maintenance purposes. Along with availability, it is equally important to have a good response time warranty, i.e., how fast the system is operating when it is up and running. It is of utmost importance to get detailed statistics before signing up with a vendor.

2. Get specifics on Support Levels

Cloud vendors pretty much offer more or less the same support levels with few alterations with names like ‘standard’, ‘essential’, and ‘ultimate’ packages. These packages often do not give detailed information as to how much support each level guarantees. Always remember to ask your vendor a full description of these support levels and specific examples and whether these situations would be covered in the support or not. It is advisable to get the guarantee in the form of an agreement to serve as a record if at all required in the future.

3. Find a point of contact

In case of an issue, you must have a designated point of contact with the vendor, who can resolve it. Many companies try to get past this by introducing a ticketing system. ‘Tell us your problem, and we’ll get back to you when we have a fix’, is an example of a pop-up message and is very common in the industry. A Designated POC would be an ideal alternative to such a message in order to address the issue at hand immediately and to make sure the right people are working to resolve it.

4. Avoid Vendor lock-in and know your Separation Agreements

Cloud vendors may try to get an initial long-term contract with lock-in periods varying from months to years and often levy early termination charges. While choosing a cloud provider it is important to evaluate the Separation Agreements in place. While separation maybe the last thing that comes to mind while choosing a vendor, it is still one of the most important things to consider. It may also be crucial to inquire whether the vendor has the capability to retain your data even after your contract has ended with them, in order to avoid any possible data breaches.

5. Check the Service Level Agreements

SLA is the commitment on availability levels and performance of services offered. There are no specific standards to an SLA and thus it varies from provider to provider. Higher the price of the service, better the performance guaranteed, and this is usually negotiable. It is important to go through the verbiage of an SLA to clearly define vendors accountability and service assurances and choose the best plan according to your requirement with matrices that offer discounts on billing and other penalties if it is breached.

Stay Updated

Last but not least, once you have finalized a provider, do not stop looking for better alternatives. Be up to date with the market and what other providers are offering. If your service doesn’t match with the current market trend, be sure to ask your provider for an updated service and also, for them to inform you about changes in terms and conditions, if any, while your service is still intact with them.

Getting the right cloud vendor is essential for a company’s overall growth. Keeping these checks in mind while evaluating your options will not only help you to find the right cloud vendor but also let you manage your company’s operations unhindered and with peace.