If you’re fortunate enough to work in the field of Information Technology (IT), congratulations! You are part of one of the most popular and rapidly expanding industries in the technology sector. 

As an IT professional, you are part of an elite group. You are at the forefront of innovation, change, and progress. You are helping to shape the future of our digital world.

However, let’s be honest and acknowledge the truth that lies beneath the surface. This industry, while exciting and rewarding, can also be demanding, stressful, and intimidating, particularly for those who are just starting out. 

The challenges can sometimes feel overwhelming, and it’s easy to lose your sense of humor and sanity along the way. This guide will provide you with tips, tricks and strategies to help you manage Enterprise IT. It will help you to keep your sanity and sense of humour.

Enterprise IT engineering presents a unique set of challenges that can make problem-solving feel like a daunting task. It can be daunting to approach problems of great magnitude. However, it is important to do so with an attitude of curiosity, enthusiasm, and awe. Embrace your inner detective as you dive deep into the data, cracking the code and unraveling its mysteries.

A mindset that values the journey and progress is beneficial. It can increase problem-solving abilities and make the process more enjoyable. Expecting immediate solutions will not have the same effect. Remember, every byte of information brings you closer to the solution, so savor each step along the way.

In the fast-paced world of enterprise IT, knowledge and technology evolve rapidly. It’s essential to embrace a mindset of continuous learning to stay ahead of the curve. Embrace the opportunity to enhance your skills and expand your knowledge base.

Seek out relevant resources such as online courses, webinars, and industry publications to keep up with the latest trends and advancements. Engage in networking and knowledge-sharing activities, both within your organization and in professional communities. 

By immersing yourself in a culture of learning, you’ll not only enhance your problem-solving abilities but also build a solid foundation for your professional growth.

While individual brilliance is important, success in enterprise IT often relies on effective collaboration. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your colleagues, mentors, or subject matter experts for guidance and support. Tap into the collective intelligence and diverse perspectives within your organization to tackle complex problems more efficiently.

Collaboration not only allows for the exchange of ideas and knowledge but also fosters a sense of teamwork. Embrace the power of collaboration by participating in team projects, attending brainstorming sessions, and leveraging collaborative tools and platforms. Together, you can overcome any challenge that comes your way.

The tech industry is filled with jargon that might be hard to understand if you don’t work in the field. And if you’ve spent any time listening to tech nerds get going, you know the many hilarious acronyms that IT professionals have coined over the years. Case in point:

• • PICNIC — Problem in Chair, Not in Computer
  • PEBCAK — Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard (a personal favourite of mine)
  • RTFM — Read the “freaking” manual

However, that’s no reason to stop there. There are specific acronyms in the tech industry whose meanings are unclear or whose abbreviations don’t correspond with the actual technologies they represent. In an effort to rectify this situation (and because it was funny to do so), we found some common IT acronyms to better represent their actual meanings.

• • BBS — Bizarre Beeping Sounds
  • BSOD — Bummer. Serious OS Disaster
  • COBOL — Crazy Old But Operational Language
  • DHCP — Disconnection Headaches Causing Problems
  • DSL — Decidedly Slow Link 
  • HTTP — Head To This Page
  • HTML — Hieroglyphics, To Machines Legible
  • JPEG — Just Pretty Electronic Graphics
  • MTBF — My Thing’s Breakdown Forthcoming
  • MS-DOS — My Starter “Down-Memory-Lane” Operating System
  • SSD — Super Speedy Disks … or if you have a small budget, Spend Some Dollars
  • WWW — Wealth of Weird Websites

sData Science is a high-stress field, and it’s easy to become bogged down in the seriousness of it all. However, it’s essential to remember not to take yourself or the situation too seriously. 

Mistakes and challenges are inevitable, and it’s far more productive to approach them with a sense of humor and fun. Laughing at yourself can help you gain perspective and make the task seem less overwhelming and daunting. Here is a funny story to help you laugh at the exciting world of IT:

My computer is not yours

Me: XYZ technical support, how may I assist you?

User: I have some difficulty in locating some files on my computer, it seems I am not able to open any files

Me: Sir, could you please check whether you are able to get the Desktop screen.

User: Yes, now what?

Me: Can you open My Computer?

User: How can I open your computer?

The field of enterprise IT engineering, encompassing data visualisations, technology companies, and analysing data, is a dynamic and ever-evolving landscape. As professionals in this field, we bridge the gap between computer science and business needs, driving innovation and progress within tech companies. 

While the challenges we face can be immense, it’s crucial to approach them with a sense of humour and embrace different types of humour. This not only helps maintain our sanity but also fosters a positive and creative work environment. By combining our technical expertise with a lighthearted approach, we can unlock new possibilities and make significant contributions to the data-driven world of enterprise IT.

Almost overnight, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated businesses into the future of work. Employers were forced to figure out how to allow workers to work remotely from anywhere at any time.

Based on experience and the benefit of hindsight, the new work model of the future will likely be a hybrid that combines the best aspects of both worlds. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone can take a step back and investigate this new future a little more thoroughly from a global standpoint. 

Many professionals experienced the freedom that remote work can provide as a result of the pandemic. Employee connection and co-operation, higher productivity, increased flexibility and possibilities for learning and growth are some of the advantages of hybrid work. Many organisations have grown to appreciate the benefits of remote work while maintaining a solid commitment to in-office collaboration and culture creation.

Businesses had to build a digital workplace that functions like a machine; to do this, they needed the appropriate tools, like Nakivo Backup & Replication, which prevents unauthorised security breaches.

Tamia Eckersley, Junior Product Manager at Data Sciences, said: “With Nakivo Backup & Replication, you can reliably protect your virtual, physical, cloud and SaaS environments, ensure the consistency of application data, increase backup performance and reduce backup size.”

There are many ways to accomplish this; for example, Nakivo supports the following backup types.

• Microsoft 365 Backup: Creates incremental backups of Microsoft 365 data in Exchange Online, Teams, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, which can help save space, time and money, all while ensuring the desired level of data protection.
• Backup to cloud: This backup service primarily ensures data recovery during a DR event. It sends backups to public clouds like Amazon S3, Wasabi, Backblaze B2 and Azure Blob Storage.
• Global deduplication: Deduplicate backups across the entire backup repository, regardless of the platform.

You can also quickly restore virtual machines (VMs), files and application objects from backups using Nakivo Backup & Replication by doing the following:

• Instant physical to virtual (P2V): Instantly recover physical machines from backups as VMware vSphere VMs.
• File share recovery: Recover entire file shares and specific files/folders inside shares to a custom location on SMB/NFS shares, send via e-mail or download to a browser.
• Universal object recovery: Recover individual objects by choosing a recovery point and mounting VM disks from the backup directly to another machine.

Not only that, but Nakivo also includes integrated site recovery functionality that allows you to manage disaster recovery and perform VM replication. Site recovery creates a disaster recovery workflow that ensures business continuity and availability.

Last but not least, Nakivo uses tools like native change tracking to detect changes without reading the entire source data, create faster incremental backups and throttle backup data transfers by configuring global or per-job bandwidth rules, particularly during working hours. These features can reduce network load by as much as 50% while doubling backup, replication and recovery speeds.

Matthew Odgers once said: “The sole reason we are in business is to make life less difficult for our clients.” And that is precisely what we have been doing for the past 10 years at Data Sciences Corporation.

If you would like us to help you backup, replicate, instant restore, recover and monitor in a single pane of glass, then what are you waiting for? Contact us now.

Digital twins feel thoroughly futuristic. The concept conjures virtual copies of advanced aircraft engines, cutting-edge manufacturing plants or tomorrow’s smart cities.

The digital twin is a living and evolving copy of tangible assets. Yet thanks to advances in the underlying technologies and more accessible computing resources, we can apply digital twins to a wider range of use cases, such as managing IT estates.

The sprawling and complicated layers of today’s physical technology infrastructure are a perfect opportunity for digital twins to show what they can deliver today.

“Every IT manager wishes they had a crystal ball,” says Werner Coetzee, Business Development Executive at Data Sciences Corporation. “IT systems are complicated, with a lot of variables. You can monitor things in real-time, have historic reports and pull all those things together. But it’s very, very difficult to spread that across multiple technologies and get cohesiveness. Digital twins work very well for such complex environments.”

Digital twins are helping IT teams understand the sprawling architecture that power today’s technological world, such as servers, networks and their appliances.

This idea has gained significant traction in the cyber security world. As companies started using digital twins to model systems such as server farms and cloud implementations, security teams are using these simulations to test security changes. While we visualise a digital twin as a copy of a specific piece of equipment, it can represent more sprawling assets, such as networks, servers and even cloud deployments.

At the entry level, digital twins are handy for monitoring and they are starting to prove themselves for more complex uses, says Coetzee: “Teams already document much of an estate, but that ends up in spreadsheets and manuals. Digital twins are becoming the living, breathing version of that process that can mature to do even more. They are helping IT teams with preventative measures; not just maintenance, but also security, efficiencies and such.”

It can be relatively easy to copy software environments for testing purposes. But duplicating hardware estates is an entirely different matter – a long-standing problem for IT managers and architects. Digital twins offer a solution, and the standard modern enterprise already has several foundation blocks to create virtual copies of their physical systems.

A digital twin for IT estates is not an obscure idea, so why don’t we hear more about it? Blame the hype behind digital twins, which sound very futuristic and unattainable to most enterprises. But we have it wrong, says Coetzee: “There’s the preconception that a digital twin is only a digital twin once it’s fully autonomous, running simulations and feeding data back into the system, giving us predictable areas and stuff like that. That is the future goal, but that isn’t where they start. There are several maturity stages for digital twins.”

Level one is a descriptive representation of the asset, such as a network. Companies already have performance and schematic data for such assets, which a level one digital twin brings together in a visual representation. Level two is more informative, adding sensory and operational data to establish an evolving copy of the asset in real-time. Level three starts to deliver predictive qualities and insights, and level four is the final stage of high-level automation and what some dub the “frictionless enterprise”.

Many large organisations have the capacity to realise stages one and two, says Coetzee: “They might actually already be utilising some form of digital twin concept within their organisation, especially in the IT field. They can get the fundamentals in place and then start maturing those levels so that those insights can become a more fundamental part of organisational decision-making.”

Where should companies start this process? Digital twins require some infrastructure and skills investments. Coetzee cautions against a big bang approach. They should focus on specific use cases where they can clearly define the value they expect.

Digital twins can deliver fantastic value through clarity and reduced risk, but “before you make any investment, really understand the reason why you’re doing this and the type of value that you want to show the organisation. It could be a system, processes, specific assets. All that is possible.”

When we hear about digital twins, we think of large industrial plants or maintaining heavy machinery. Yet they are incredibly well-suited to grasp, study and test the challenges and opportunities of a complex IT environment – and enterprises already have the data to make their first moves towards this capability.

The only constant is change!

Recently one of our Oxidecloud customers highlighted to me the not insignificant process of upgrading your private custom deployment of GitLab.  GitLab is a great platform for building your DevOps CI/CD pipeline, source code repository and version control system just to mention a few of the feature rich platform geared for application development and code delivery.

As with any software platform the constant is change, changes to security, new features and bugfixes are part and parcel of the software game. The same goes for a DevOps platform such as GitLab.

Depending on how you have deployed GitLab you will most likely have to use a manual process to upgrade. Such as this one: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/#installation-using-docker

There are numerous checks and process that need to be done to ensure a smooth and successful update.  This is usually a relatively smooth process but dependant on the complexity of the GitLab install and the version you are on it can very quickly become a significant process that may is a bit less smooth.

Let’s not forget that manual process is subject to human error, and no matter how much we try to mitigate that portion of the process the risk is always there for a finger error to slip in and make a turn what should have been a quick upgrade, into a journey that requires a full fellowship to be established and resembles a hike to Mordor.

What if we could upgrade GitLab like a mobile App?

Well, if you host your GitLab platform on OXIDE Cloud powered by Jelastic, you can do just that. Upgrade your GitLab environment with the click of a single button, just like you may do on your mobile device.

You see not only can OXIDE deploy a fully functional GitLab environment faster than you can say “Automated Installation of Pre-Configured GitLab!” (Ok, maybe a few minutes longer…).

But, once the 2 containers preinstalled with Docker has generated and installed Gitlab server, a self-signed SSL certificate and shared the certs with the Runners via a NFS volume, registered the Runners with the GitLab server and deployed a separate container registry via docker-compose.yml, you have a working GitLab platform in under 10min.

This usually, in many cloud platforms, is the easy part and almost everybody can do this.

At Data Sciences Corporation, we are always looking for new technologies to help solve future problems. This means that we partner with innovative technology companies to help us achieve our goals. One such partner is VAST DATA. VAST DATA is democratising fast access to all data.

VAST DATA, through its announcements on the 6th April 2021, are looking to shake-up the way customers purchase and consume storage enterprise flash storage. Traditional storage vendors generally sell customers purpose-built hardware with their software, which is either sold separately or as an appliance. Further to this, VAST suggests that storage vendor will markup the hardware cost to the customer and then provide license modes based on the total capacity of the hardware. This means customers are paying a premium for commodity hardware and software costs for capacity they are not using.

The storage business model, reinvented for savings, simplicity and choice

VAST’s Gemini program completely overhauls this way of thinking, purchasing and consuming storage technology by disaggregating the commodity hardware from the software and therefore delivers on the promise of software-defined-storage (SDS). VAST achieves this disaggregation by firstly allowing customers to purchase the hardware, via their VAR’s, directly from the hardware manufactures at cost.

An infinite storage lifecycle

Secondly, Gemini provides customers with a usable capacity subscription license model based on customers actual capacity requirements (purchased in 100TB) and is independent of the underlying capacity of the hardware.

This means that there is no longer the traditional association between hardware and software and the connective costs between them. Customers now have the option to procure – at cost – the hardware they require to service their business while only paying software subscription costs for what they consume. The announcement of Gemini further supports VAST’s strategy in terms of their “Infinite storage lifecycle”.

A Trusted Copilot

Lastly, VAST also announced its Co-Pilot program which provides a personalised service engagement between the customers and VAST. This program is designed to ensure that support is managed as efficiently as possible and reduces the time to resolution, making the customers operational teams more efficient.

If you would like to find out more about a product that delivers on cost visibility and buying power for hyperscalers to build their own clouds, reach out to us at Data Sciences by emailing us: info@datasciences.za.cloudlet.cloud or call us on +27 861 777 372.

The problems surrounding rightsizing in cloud computing might have you feeling confused. This blog will help you to make sense of the Rightsizing solution & the advantages of cloud computing.

What is rightsizing in cloud computing?

There are lots of cloud service providers all over the world, and finding a good one is not a problem. Nowadays, the bigger challenge is to request the right amount of resources, ensuring that it is enough to handle the variable load without overpaying for the unused resources. This operation is more tricky than you can assume at first glance.

“Rightsizing is a process of reserving the cloud computing instances (containers, VMs, or bare metal) with enough resources (RAM, CPU, storage, network) to achieve a sufficient performance at the lowest cost possible.” – Ruslan Synytsky ~ Jelastic

Modern technologies can assist by automating resource allocation and its cost assessments. This means that you don’t need to guess how much resources should be reserved. Historically, the rightsizing process was an educated guess which relied on the experience of the developer or system administrator. Due to the dynamic nature of the web applications, rightsizing is often a continuous procedure with periodic adjustments.

Understanding Rightsizing Problem in Cloud Computing

The importance of choosing the correct size of the instances for your applications

For most organisations, the reason is money. Cloud computing resources are costly, so the aim is to minimise infrastructure-related spending as much as possible. However, if savings on the resources cause performance issues or even downtime, then the business will sacrifice profit. Manoeuvring between optimising spends and keeping performance at an acceptable level is the problem that the rightsizing process intends to solve.

The dynamic and unpredictable nature of the load, which depends on the end-users’ activity on your website, service or application, makes it difficult to find the golden mean that covers all cases. Resource usage estimation is done based on the monitoring of the recent application activity, and some margin is added to handle unexpected user influx and load spikes.

After the initial rightsizing, you still need to keep tracking your application performance to ensure that prediction is correct and resources are utilised efficiently. This means that, both the deficit and significant amount of idling resources, indicate a non-optimal choice of the cloud infrastructure size.

Technical and Business Consequences

Why is the problem of right-sizing so hard to solve?

Cloud computing is delivered in the form of virtual machines (VMs). VMs are not very flexible in terms of vertical scaling. Often, you’ll need to move your workload to a completely new VM to adjust the available resource limit within a single instance. The migration process is not automated. It is time-consuming, and can cause downtime. You are often forced to get a bigger VM, to suit your needs.

The vertical scaling step for virtual machines at many cloud service providers is rather big (every new machine is twice larger than the previous). The pricing policy is directly tied to the size of the ordered VM regardless of the real consumption. In addition, some cloud vendors can oversell your allocated, but idle, resources to other customers. This means that you are paying for resources but not protected from performance degradation.

To sum up, the lack of right-sizing has two main consequences:

• Overallocation leads to inefficient utilization of the cloud infrastructure and overpayment for resources that are not actually used; and

• Under-allocation results in resource shortage that causes performance issues or even downtime of the hosted projects, and thus leads to poor end-user experience, loss in number of clients and revenue losses.

Rightsizing Solution and the advantages of cloud computing

Let us analyse how to find the solution to the rightsizing problem and find that sweet spot between overallocation and resource shortage. Manual rightsizing is not a fool proof solution. So, we are going to rely on the tools offered by modern cloud hosting providers to automate the process.

Here are features you should aim for in order to automate the rightsizing of your project instances:

• First of all, the cloud hosting should be able to run containers with granular resource allocation. The smaller the resource increase step  the better, as it allows choosing the required instance size more precisely.

• Look for modern cloud infrastructure, where unused resources are returned to the shared pool and thus are not charged. Such an approach (so-called pay-per-use) allows to set high scaling limits and handle load spikes without constant overpayment.

• Automatic vertical scaling (adjusting the number of resources within the same container on the fly) can help you to save a lot of time and effort. Dynamic resource provisioning based on the application needs is the must-have feature for solving the right-sizing problem in the best possible way.

With a cloud hosting provider that meets these requirements, you’ll just need to set a maximum resource limit for your instance, and the rightsizing “magic” will be done automatically. Thorough investigation of the market while looking for the cloud provider that suits your needs is definitely worth your time. And don’t hesitate to request new technological and business solutions from your current hosting service providers, as the functionality to overcome the right-sizing problem is already available, and you have a full right to benefit from it.

If you want a better option for your organisation’s needs with full flexibility and freedom of choice with turnkey PaaS for developers, then look no further than OXIDE PaaS, powered by Jelastic, which is brought to you by Data Sciences Corporation.

In this blog we will discovery the way in which Inuvika OVD Enterprise, delivers Windows and Linux applications, making remote working easy and convenient.

Your company has implemented a blended model of remote working and decided that you may work at the office and at home. At first you thought, “Great! I can do as I please.”

The home office is free from meetings, interruptions, singing happy birthday to a colleague and arguments over who left the dishes in the sink.

A couple of months later and now you feel like you do not want to attend another online meeting…

Large corporates report a marked boost in productivity, along with other benefits, that will result in many adopting a “blended” model of allowing employees to work from both the office and home in future. 

According to Business Insider South Africa “the work-from-home shift during the coronavirus pandemic has brought surprising benefits to companies. Workers are more productive, healthier, and happier. Companies like Shoprite and RMB are looking at longer-term “blended” options of allowing staff to work from home at least part of the time.”

Despite this, it is fair to say that working from home has been both comforting and stressful.

We chatted to individuals across various industries such as Banking & Finance, IT, Fashion & Retail and Media, who shared common frustrations.

The first of which being the difficulty of finding a work-home balance due to their personal space now being their office. “When do I log off?”, “Do I have to respond to every mail I see after hours?”

Others find working from home to be more distracting.

However, the most prominent challenge experienced by every individual we chatted to, was connectivity and system access issues. They have expressed this as the source of their frustration and an occasional productivity inhibitor.

While you are sitting there feeling sorry for yourself because working from home did not live up to your expectations, there is good news!

Read on…

We, at Data Sciences Corporation have the technologies and partners available to achieve productive remote working. One such partner is Inuvika who aims to enable and increase remote working efficiency, from any device.

Inuvika OVD Enterprise delivers Windows and Linux applications and shared desktops to users on any device, anywhere. It is a robust virtualized application delivery platform that centralizes data and applications and protects sensitive corporate information.

For businesses, Inuvika provides improved data security by centralizing applications and data processing within your on-prem or public cloud. It provides granular-level user policy management allowing administrators more control over who may access the data and what they may do with it.

It also accelerates digital transformation in organisations by easily implementing BYOD (bring your own device) by providing on-demand access to Windows and Linux applications on any Mac, Windows or Linux PC; iOS/Android mobile device.

Commercially, organisations will lower their IT infrastructure costs by delivering centrally managed virtual workspaces to users.

Individuals’ connectivity and system-lag challenges become a thing of the past – with Inuvika, user sessions and applications are launched in seconds and they get to experience applications in a full Windows or Linux shared desktop, integrated into the user’s local desktop, or on a Web portal.

Want to know more?
Our team will be happy to explore the benefits Inuvika may bring to your organisation, as it has for many of our existing customers. Visit our website today and find out how your organisation can benefit https://datasciences.za.cloudlet.cloud/contact-us/

Data Sciences Corporation has built a strong brand identity within our customer base by leveraging next generation infrastructure technology underpinned by world-class services. Over the past eight years, this strategy has helped create a successful business model, which has allowed to grow our customer and technology base to maintain relevance within an ever changing market dynamic.

As we continue to innovate and better understand our customers challenges, it has become apparent that business is demanding more agile solutions, which leverage cloud benefits for both on-prem and off-prem consumption. The key concept underpinning this is that business wants to purchase, consume and retire technologies “as-a-service” rather than continuing with the traditional model of ownership. Whether our customers want to consume infrastructure, database or applications as a service, they are looking towards innovative partners like ourselves to assist them on this journey into new operating models. 

After several years of research and listening to our customers we have developed a product which we believe will greatly assist our customers in transforming their technology requirements to meet their business needs. The team has been hard at work over the past 3 years ensuring that we can deliver a Platform-as-a-Service offering that our customers can simply and easily consume both on-prem and off-prem in a cost effective manner. Further to this, we have heavily invested in this product’s development through time and money and hard work to ensure that when we launch this product, it will be ready for production workloads.

Therefore, we are extremely excited to announce the launch of OXIDE as our first “Multi-Cloud Platform as a Service” offering to our customers. We believe that OXIDE will dramatically transform our customers’ infrastructure, database and application delivery model making them more agile and cloud-centric.

What is OXIDE PaaS (Platform as a Service)?

OXIDE leverages next-generation technologies, which gives customers a simple and cost-effective way to procure, consume and dispose of technology. Further to this, OXIDE offers our customers consumption elasticity based on the current and future business requirements for Production and DevOps workloads in a simple and easy way, making their business more operationally and cost efficient. Whether its technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, PHP, Java, WordPress, Ruby or “as-a-Service” models for Infrastructure, Container, Platform or Database then OXIDE is the one-stop-shop solution for all of our customers.

At Data Sciences we believe that OXIDE will truly help customers to transform into a cloud-ready and cloud-based business model in the most simple and cost effective way. Whether customers opt for an on-prem delivery approach or leverage our cloud enabled platform, Data Sciences will always be there to tailor a solution based on their specific business needs.

If you want to learn about the connection between Data Sciences Corporation and OXIDE, please visit OXIDE Platform as a Service and afterwards, start your free 14-day trial on the OXIDE Platform.