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Nadya’s Hot Chocolate Bombs: yummy for the tummy – theday.com

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

New London Ah, the 16-year-old about to get her license. The cognitive wheels begin to grind, eventually arriving here: What good is a license without a car, right? Thus, the scheming begins.

Hit up mom or dad? Maybe start taking the trash out without even being asked? Broker a deal with the grandparents instead?

Or you could be Nadya Murphy and make your own bombs.

Meet Nadya: an honor student, lacrosse player and junior at the New London Science and Technology Magnet High School. Her idea The Hot Chocolate Bomb has become a bit of a cottage industry of deliciousness, much to the delight of her customers. Not only is she making money toward her first car, but she's even donating some of it to the New London Community Meal Center.

"I found the whole Hot Chocolate Bomb thing on Tik Tok with my aunt," Murphy said. "We thought it would be fun to experiment with because we saw they were pretty trendy. It's an easy way to earn money. I really want that car."

The Hot Chocolate Bomb: a chocolate shell in a mug with hot chocolate mix, marshmallow, hot milk and various toppings. Result: a ball of hot chocolate that kids (and adults) love.

"I bought some to take to Thanksgiving," New London Board of Education member Elaine Maynard-Adams said. "The kids loved them. Then at night, we made the adult version with homemade Kahlua. Let me just tell you how good they are."

Murphy's business originates on her "Nadya's Hot Chocolate Bombs" Facebook page. At specific times, Murphy posts a link as to dates and times they'll be on sale. Everything is sold out of their house contactless now in the age of COVID. They even deliver to New London, Groton and Waterford.

"We sold a little over 350 last week," Murphy said. "We sold out in an hour. Our last sale (before that) was at the New London Holiday Market pop up sale and we gave 10 percent ($200) to community meal center. My family and I were thinking about the holidays and how fortunate we are. We thought giving back would be a nice thing to do."

There's even an educational component to this that Murphy didn't necessarily see coming. She's in the computer science pathway at school.

"I actually take an accounting class," Murphy said. "A couple of concepts I've learned in accounting have become applicable to real life. I'm learning the basic steps of having a business, how sales work and having different accounts. Transferring money, transactions, things like that I'm seeing it in real life and it's helping me in class."

Murphy has to pay for chocolate milk used to make the shells, hot chocolate mix, marshmallows, sprinkles, candy cane bits, bags to package them and business cards. Not cheap.

"This wouldn't be possible without my aunt, Brenda De Los Santos," Murphy said. "She helps me manage everything from my Facebook page to my business cards. Once I get my car I will be chauffeuring her around for the next year probably."

This story hits virtually every happy note on the staff. Hard not to root for this kid. She's working for everything she wants and has, even if unwittingly, discovered a way to tie school to real life. And her product hot chocolate is something we can all pretty much agree is yummy.

"We're thinking of doing a couple more sales," Murphy said. "The demand will go down as it gets warmer. People will have to check the page to know. It's been fun. And a lot of work. But I know cars aren't cheap. That would be a pretty large burden to have my family try to pay for. So why not try to make it myself?"

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro

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Crick Named Mathematical Sciences Distinguished Alumnus Of The Year – The Chattanoogan

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

Dr. David Crick is the recipient of this years 2020 Distinguished Alumnus Award for Lee Universitys Department of Mathematical Sciences.

The department is deeply impressed with Dr. Cricks numerous successes in engineering and computer science related businesses, said Dr. Blayne Carroll, chair of Lees Mathematical Sciences. He has a commitment to excellence that we hope to foster in all of our students, and we are proud to call him an alumnus of our department.

Dr. Crick graduated from Lee in 1983 and currently works as a senior architect at Rivet Logic Corporation in Virginia.

After receiving his mathematics degree from Lee, he went on to earn a Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in information and computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He completed his postdoctoral study in transportation analysis from Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

The announcement of this award took place during Lees virtual Homecoming celebration last month.

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Accurate Neural Network Computer Vision Without The ‘Black Box’ – Duke Today

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

DURHAM, N.C. -- The artificial intelligence behind self-driving cars, medical image analysis and other computer vision applications relies on whats called deep neural networks.

Loosely modeled on the brain, these consist of layers of interconnected neurons -- mathematical functions that send and receive information -- that fire in response to features of the input data. The first layer processes a raw data input -- such as pixels in an image -- and passes that information to the next layer above, triggering some of those neurons, which then pass a signal to even higher layers until eventually it arrives at a determination of what is in the input image.

But heres the problem, says Duke computer science professor Cynthia Rudin. We can input, say, a medical image, and observe what comes out the other end (this is a picture of a malignant lesion, but its hard to know what happened in between.

Its whats known as the black box problem. What happens in the mind of the machine -- the networks hidden layers -- is often inscrutable, even to the people who built it.

The problem with deep learning models is theyre so complex that we don't actually know what theyre learning, said Zhi Chen, a Ph.D. student in Rudins lab at Duke. They can often leverage information we dont want them to. Their reasoning processes can be completely wrong.

Rudin, Chen and Duke undergraduateYijie Bei have come up with a way to address this issue. By modifying the reasoning process behind the predictions, it is possible that researchers can better troubleshoot the networks or understand whether they are trustworthy.

Most approaches attempt to uncover what led a computer vision system to the right answer after the fact, by pointing to the key features or pixels that identified an image: The growth in this chest X-ray was classified as malignant because, to the model, these areas are critical in the classification of lung cancer. Such approaches dont reveal the networks reasoning, just where it was looking.

The Duke team tried a different tack. Instead of attempting to account for a networks decision-making on a post hoc basis, their method trains the network to show its work by expressing its understanding about concepts along the way. Their method works by revealing how much the network calls to mind different concepts to help decipher what it sees. It disentangles how different concepts are represented within the layers of the network, Rudin said.

Given an image of a library, for example, the approach makes it possible to determine whether and how much the different layers of the neural network rely on their mental representation of books to identify the scene.

The researchers found that, with a small adjustment to a neural network, it is possible to identify objects and scenes in images just as accurately as the original network, and yet gain substantial interpretability in the networks reasoning process. The technique is very simple to apply, Rudin said.

The method controls the way information flows through the network. It involves replacing one standard part of a neural network with a new part. The new part constrains only a single neuron in the network to fire in response to a particular concept that humans understand. The concepts could be categories of everyday objects, such as book or bike. But they could also be general characteristics, such as such as metal, wood, cold or warm. By having only one neuron control the information about one concept at a time, it is much easier to understand how the network thinks.

The researchers tried their approach on a neural network trained by millions of labeled images to recognize various kinds of indoor and outdoor scenes, from classrooms and food courts to playgrounds and patios. Then they turned it on images it hadnt seen before. They also looked to see which concepts the network layers drew on the most as they processed the data.

Chen pulls up a plot showing what happened when they fed a picture of an orange sunset into the network. Their trained neural network says that warm colors in the sunset image, like orange, tend to be associated with the concept bed in earlier layers of the network. In short, the network activates the bed neuron highly in early layers. As the image travels through successive layers, the network gradually relies on a more sophisticated mental representation of each concept, and the airplane concept becomes more activated than the notion of beds, perhaps because airplanes are more often associated with skies and clouds.

Its only a small part of whats going on, to be sure. But from this trajectory the researchers are able to capture important aspects of the networks train of thought.

The researchers say their module can be wired into any neural network that recognizes images. In one experiment, they connected it to a neural network trained to detect skin cancer in photos.

Before an AI can learn to spot melanoma, it must learn what makes melanomas look different from normal moles and other benign spots on your skin, by sifting through thousands of training images labeled and marked up by skin cancer experts.

But the network appeared to be summoning up a concept of irregular border that it formed on its own, without help from the training labels. The people annotating the images for use in artificial intelligence applications hadnt made note of that feature, but the machine did.

Our method revealed a shortcoming in the dataset, Rudin said. Perhaps if they had included this information in the data, it would have made it clearer whether the model was reasoning correctly. This example just illustrates why we shouldnt put blind faith in black box models with no clue of what goes on inside them, especially for tricky medical diagnoses, Rudin said.

The teams work appeared Dec. 7 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

This research was supported by funding from MIT-Lincoln Laboratory and the National Science Foundation (OAC-1835782).

CITATION: "Concept Whitening for Interpretable Image Recognition,"Zhi Chen, Yijie Bei and Cynthia Rudin. Nature Machine Intelligence, Dec. 7, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s42256-020-00265-z

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4 reasons your business needs to switch to cloud servers – TechEngage

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

If your business is still running on local servers in this advanced age of technology, it is time for you to give it a second thought. Cloud computing is on the rise, and in the past few years, many businesses have moved their data to cloud servers. The main reason behind this is those cloud servers are easy to manage and have plenty of benefits. More than 90% of businesses running their functions online are already using cloud computing, including your competitors. So, if you do not want to be left behind and want to speed up your business process, it is time for you to switch to cloud servers. In this article, I have mentioned a few reasons that will convince you to use Cloud Servers for your business; lets take a look:

One of the major reasons businesses switch to cloud services is that it helps them save money. Once you have moved your business to cloud storage, you would not have to worry about spending money on any costly hardware. You would not need any local servers anymore, and you wont have to pay for its maintenance either. The cloud company you will be using will take care of the maintenance, which means less hassle for you.

If you end up losing your business data on in-house servers, you will have to go through a lot of trouble to recover it. In fact, in some cases, you could end up losing your data permanently, and you would not be able to do anything about it. However, by moving your data to cloud servers, you are protecting yourself from a situation like this. Cloud computing offers you plenty of affordable data recovery options, and you are more likely to get all your data back. In this modern age, data is everything, and losing your data could be equivalent to losing your entire business. It is always better to be safe than sorry.

Another great advantage of switching to cloud servers is that you can enjoy more security for your systems and data. It doesnt matter how good your in-house servers are; they are always at a risk of breach and can be taken down easily by hackers. With the cloud servers, the story is completely different as they are extremely hard to penetrate. If your data is just sitting there on a cloud server, you would never have to worry about it following in the wrong hands. You can also use two-factor authentication to make your data more secure.

With your in-house servers, you would not be able to access your data from any place you want. Your options will be very limited, and in most cases, you will have to go to your offices to access the files you need. On the other hand, as cloud servers run online, you will be able to access your business from any part of the world, and at any time you want. If you or your team has to go out a lot in the field, switching to cloud servers is the wise thing.

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Microsoft is designing its own ARM-based processor for Surface and cloud servers – Digital Trends

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

Microsoft is working on designing its own custom processor for its products, according to a report from Bloomberg news. Details are scarce, but the report notes that the new processor Microsoft is working on is in-house and will use ARM-based designs. It could not only be used to power data centers, but also the Surface line of computers.

Though Microsoft already worked with its partner Qualcomm on ARM-based processors for the Surface Pro X and other Windows 10 on ARM devices like the Galaxy Book S, this move also could signal another bigger shift away from depending on Intels processors and Qualcomms partnership.

Microsoft is not alone in making such a move. Apple recently proved that it could successfully shift away from relying on Intels line of processors in favor of its own in-house processor. In November, the iPhone maker announced the M1 CPU, in a new line of MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini models. That ARM-based M1 CPU has been praised for being more powerful, with longer battery life, too.

Previous Microsoft Surface products have all had chips from Intel and AMD. The exception is the Surface Pro X, which features the Microsoft SQ1 and SQ2 chip, which was co-engineered with help from Qualcomm. The Surface Laptop 3, meanwhile, featured a custom Surface Edition AMD Ryzen chip.

Intels Xeon chips power most data centers. AMD dipped into the server market, too, with its EPYC lineup of processors.

Even if the ARM-based chip Microsoft is working on is powerful enough, Microsoft would have its work cut out for itself in shifting to its own custom ARM-based processor, mainly due to issues with the software.

Apple depends on the Rosetta 2 emulation to power certain apps that are designed for traditional MacBooks with Intel processors and not yet updated for the M1 chip. Microsoft only recently tweaked Windows 10 to support both 64-bit and 32-bit applications, and it is still in beta testing. Reports have also shown that Windows 10 performs better on Apples M1 Macs running under emulation than when it runs natively on devices like the Surface Pro X.

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Dedicated server or cloud server: which one to choose? – Business MattersBusiness Matters

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

Before making a decision, the most appropriate way to resolve this dilemma is to understand the differences between dedicated server and cloud server.

Some issues must be very well clarified, such as the way of functioning, the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. It is also necessary to understand on what occasions one or another technology is more suitable.

Below, we will show in detail the answers to each of these questions. Thus, you will be able to visualize the best option for your business.

First, you need to understand what a dedicated server is. Basically, it is a computer that allows remote access to files and software. In other words: we are talking about a physical machine, also known as Bare Metal.

Maybe the best example of dedicated server is Proto Compute. This is a dedicated server specifically designed for high performance operations, data security, IP Pool, and stability. Proto Compute provides various features such as reboot, boot-up control, shutdown, and so on. These features make it easy for users to remotely control and configure the operating system. This dedicated server works on Supermicro based systems. Supermicro based system that supports both hot and less critical cold storage. Proto Compute is provided by Heficed, a high-tech server provider company.Dedicated servers are very popular with companies that manage large amounts of data but dont want to lose any privacy.

The term dedicated is used to determine that only one customer has access to the hardware. Not to mention that the server is configured according to the companys needs. This option is still frequently adopted, as it allows a high density of resources in a unitary environment. This means cost savings.

Suppose a machine occupies only one unit in the data center, for example. But it is possible to put up to 528 GB of memory, with 8 SSDs of up to 3.8 TB each. This option is indicated for those who intend to implement their own virtualization or in cases in which a large acquisition of resources is required on a single machine.

This service option provides some advantages to companies. See the main ones below!

As the server is dedicated, all resources are used only by the contracting company. Therefore, all your performance can be used exclusively this is an important feature for businesses that need high performance in processing and IOPS.

Another considerable benefit of this technology is stability. Since all resources are centralized, their operation is also simpler. But, as it is an equipment that works in isolation (stand alone), it is not always possible to maintain the redundancy of all components when a hardware problem occurs.

There is the redundancy of cards, controllers and sources, for example. However, in the event of a complete hardware loss, the entire environment will be unavailable. Cloud environments (IaaS), on the other hand, work with a greater contingency for the loss of hardware, enabling a wide availability of resources.

Security is also seen as a major advantage in this model of servers, since only authorized persons can access the system. However, when concentrating the entire operation of the company on a single server, people should be given unrestricted access, since it is not possible to restrict it by specific parts of the environment. This is a feature easily configured on targeted servers.

Before we talk about the advantages of using the cloud, lets quickly conceptualize it. The term infrastructure in the cloud or virtual data center is used to refer to infrastructure resources created through virtualization, for the purpose of performing data processing. Thus, when hiring a cloud computing service, the customer does not pay for equipment, but for virtual resources that are capable of processing and storing different workloads.

Cloud servers offer a number of benefits, as you can see below:

This feature allows the customer to increase or decrease the computational resources of his service according to the business need.

Because it offers the possibility to scale resources, the cost is an attraction of the cloud. This is because you pay only for the services that are actually used. In addition, there is a reduction in the amounts referring to investments in hardware and software from a proprietary data center.

Cloud servers have features that enable high availability in critical cases. Thus, when there are technical problems, new sections are created, maintaining all the characteristics of the environment. Imagine that you have several applications in a single system, such as e-mail, ERP and database. In this case, the cloud offers a greater guarantee compared to dedicated servers, on which all applications would be stopped. But if they are on a cloud server, they will maintain their availability.

The choice between the two models must take into account the needs of the company both technological and financial. The cost of the dedicated server is lower, however the cloud can be segmented, which makes it more accessible, in addition to offering greater availability. What each company must do is identify the profile and which of the two solutions is best suited to its business.

There are situations in which the best alternative is a compromise between both options. If you have a database that needs a high concentration of resources, you can choose a physical server in order to have the benefit of density. The other services that talk to the database are hosted on virtual servers, taking advantage of segmentation. Before deciding on the best option, it is necessary to make some considerations. No matter where the server is: in the cloud or in the companys own data center, the big difference is related to spending on resources.

The cost of 528 GB of memory on a dedicated physical server is much less than the lowest value that a cloud server can reach, the same goes for SSD storage. This means that you can have a fast, lower cost and high quality environment, but without so much availability guarantee. This is the single point of failure.

Anyway, choosing between physical dedicated servers or cloud server is a decision that requires great care on the part of the company. It is necessary to consider a series of issues, such as the operation of the two options, the advantages of using each technology and all its benefits. Thus, it will be possible to choose the alternative that offers the most benefits to the business.

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Cybersecurity expert: After Russian hack, common security tools, including cloud-based multi-factor systems, shown to be less effective in preventing…

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

Bertrand Cambou, a professor of nanotechnology and cybersecurity at Northern Arizona University, is available to discuss what went wrong in the Russian hack attack revealed this week and what organizations, including the U.S. government, can learn from the attack. Cambou is a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors and is an invention ambassador of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Bertrand Cambou

Media coverage has mentioned two specific methods the hackers used:

According to Cambou:

The use of these products is inherently risky; cloud-based email services should not be trusted for security andsensitive operations. In general, software tools with mandatoryupdates can be used as Trojan malware. These updates are forced on the client devices without authentication, and the servers havethe upper hand and are able to shortcut security.

The weak link for massive attacks is the server or cloud having the authority to infect terminal devices at large scale. Tools like MS Duo have the objective to block malicious users, not malicious cloud services.

It was reported that SolarWind customers often use Microsoft'sDUO multi-factor authentication, which did not prevent the attack.

Due to the recent attack, the information already stored on the cloud is as suspicious, and all government personal computers with the monitoring system should be quarantined, with the assumption that worms were potentially planted in the software stack. In both cases the users were interacting with contaminated networks. This is a really bad situation.

Recommendation:

Implementtwo-way authentication, which is much more secure than cloud-based multi-factor.The objective should be both to prevent a bad server to play and block malicious users.

Earlier this year, Cambou hosted industry and military partners on a multimillion-dollar cybersecurity project. Learn more about the grant from the U.S. Air Force.

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Remote and cloud-based systems to be ruthlessly targeted next year – Help Net Security

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

Home networks, remote working software and cloud systems will be at the center of a new wave of attacks in 2021, Trend Micro predicts.

Cybercriminals in 2021 will particularly look to home networks as a critical launch pad to compromising corporate IT and IoT networks.

As we begin to enter a post-pandemic world, the trend for remote working is likely going to stick for many organizations. We predict more aggressive attacks to target corporate data and networks, said Jon Clay, director of global threat communications for Trend Micro.

Security teams will need to double down on user training, extended detection and response and adaptive access controls. This past year was all about surviving: now its time for businesses to thrive, with comprehensive cloud security as their foundation.

The report warns that end users who regularly access sensitive data (e.g. HR professionals accessing employee data, sales managers working with sensitive customer information, or senior executives managing confidential company numbers) will be at greatest risk. Attacks will likely exploit known vulnerabilities in online collaboration and productivity software soon after they are disclosed, rather than zero-days.

Access-as-a-service business models of cybercrime will grow, targeting the home networks of high-value employees, corporate IT and IoT networks. IT security teams will need to overhaul work from home policies and protections to tackle the complexity of hybrid environments where work and personal data comingle in a single machine. Zero-trust approaches will increasingly be favored to empower and secure distributed workforces.

As third-party integrations reign, Trend Micro also warned that exposed APIs will become a new preferred attack vector for cybercriminals, providing access to sensitive customer data, source code and back-end services.

Cloud systems are another area in which threats will continue to persist in 2021, from unwitting users, misconfigurations, and attackers attempting to take over cloud servers to deploy malicious container images.

Cybercriminals will continue to go where the money is seeking the greatest financial returns on their attacks. Organizations and security teams must remain nimble and vigilant to stay ahead of criminals.

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The ROI of Cloud-Based Email – TechDecisions

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

For years, organizations have been migrating their core technology services to the cloud for increased convenience, mobility and cost savings, and the same is true for cloud-based email services.

Paying a fixed monthly cost for cloud-hosted email represents a far better and most cost-effective solution than paying for the installation, maintenance, upkeep and security of on-premise solutions.

According to Joshua Liberman, president of New Mexico-based IT provider Net Sciences, Inc., the hardware requirements and licensing costs required to install and operate an on-premise email server outweighs the few benefits.

In-house email servers typically require a large upfront capital expense that can be thousands of dollars, and they require enough space in a dedicated server room that could be used for something else, not to mention these rooms need to be outfitted with cooling equipment to keep the equipment from overheating.

Especially for smaller organizations with just a few dozen seats, emptying the pockets for an on-premise solution just doesnt make sense as the total.

The costs are so great that you cant possibly make the argument for ROI, Liberman says.

There are other hidden costs that organizations may not be aware of until its too late, like mail filtering, two-factor authentication, add-on security tools, log monitoring and comprehensive backups.

And then finally, you need somebody or a partner to manage, secure and monitor all of this, Liberman says.

Organizations may need someone to manage the same things if theyre cloud-based, but its a lot less intensive. For some cloud-hosted email providers, plans can start under $10 per user per month.

In addition to the low monthly cost, this makes budgeting throughout the year much easier than if your organization were to continue running an in-house server.

Server hardware depreciates over time, and it isnt cheap to upgrade and replace. And, patching security vulnerabilities can come with additional costs.

In the cloud, however, those duties are handled by the provider.

If youre looking at cost, its not close, Liberman says.

Adding new seats to an in-house server could require additional hardware and space, and depending on how many seats need to be added, additional IT staff may be needed to help manage the growth.

In the cloud, organizations can add capacity with ease.

Its just not an issue in the cloud, Liberman says. Its something you have to build and plan for if youre on premise.

Read Next: Three Reasons Why You Should Invest in Cloud-based Email

IT managers or CIOs who are hesitant to move to the cloud prop up the security of in-house email servers as the reason for their stubbornness to migrate to the cloud.

According to Liberman, that argument can hold up in certain situations, but given how cloud providers have drastically improved their security, this aspect is more or less a wash.

Youll hear pundits in the industry tell you, In the cloud, youre dealing with companies with $100 million security budgets and billions of dollars of hardware spread across the globe. You just cant mimic that.

For the most part, thats true, Liberman says.

However, securing an on-premise sever takes much more work on the end user and their IT professionals and partner than a cloud-hosted solution. That means an on-premise solution will take up valuable resources time and money to secure and maintain.

In the cloud, IT managers are only responsible for ingress and egress, while managers of on-premise servers are responsible for a wide range of duties.

(In the cloud), youre just not responsible for the server farm and replication, Liberman says. Youre responsible for the front door and the back door, if you will, but youre not responsible for the furniture.

Its all your problem if its on premise.

And, in the event of a failure, recovery of an on-premise solution takes valuable time, prior planning and IT professionals that can act quickly to get the business back up and running.

The good news is we dont have to worry about that in the cloud, Liberman says. Recovery, for the most part, is not your problem.

Most businesses unless they have deep pockets to invest in that infrastructure and in-house expertise cant depend on a small team of IT professionals to manage an on-premise server.

In-house IT departments can only be stretched so thin, particularly at small organizations with just a handful of dedicated professionals.

Staffing the helpdesk, setting up workstations, responding to security threats and managing an on-premise server is a tall task. Business leaders who are convinced that they can handle these duties need to be educated.

If they truly do believe that, then it comes down to educating them otherwise, Liberman says.

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The Advantages of Running your ERP Off-Premise During the COVID-19 Era – BBN Times

December 19, 2020 | Author: admin

Are you looking to upgrade your business workflow, especially with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?

If so, then let us enlighten you about enterprise resource planning (ERP) which is an automated solution that interconnects all the departments in a business, improving operational efficiency, controlling costs, which in turn leads to increased profits. There are two types of ERP solutions, which are on-premise ERP and cloud ERP solutions. The main difference between the two lies in how the software is deployed and accessed. For on-premise ERP solutions, they are installed on local physical servers that are leased, or owned, by the business whereas cloud-based ERP software is deployed on the cloud and is accessed through the web. In the former, the client is the one who installs the hardware, running the system, and that means handling most of the issues with the software, and in the latter, the cloud-computing provider is the one responsible for running the software. This means that the business owners have some tough decisions to make when choosing the deployment method they want. In this article though, we will focus on the cloud-based ERP solutions by looking at their benefits to the businesses, considering the ongoing pandemic.

Cloud-based ERP software normally consist of a monthly or contracted fee or subscription service. Since the system is run through the web, the business owner doesnt have to invest in physical assets, meaning you will be saving so much money that could be directed to other areas of the business to fight the effects of the pandemic on your business. The system and maintenance costs are included by the software provider as part of the monthly costs. Cloud computing providers also deploy patches, improvements, and service enhancements seamlessly and on a regular basis, thus minimizing the costs and the time required for the small business to benefit from these improvements.

To survive the pandemic, small businesses do need a full-service ERP system, as it will help the business navigate all the disruptions. However, this may not be always the case. There may come a time where you find that you dont need certain specific features, while you need others, depending on the size of the business, mode of production, final product as well other key factors. Now, cloud-based ERP systems offer absolute flexibility in terms of scalability. This is of course keeping in mind that different businesses have different needs, and that means the cloud servers should be able to cater to all these needs. The flexibility saves on cost, reduces training, and shortens the adoption time as well as the learning curve. As the business grows, it can increase the access to the ERP systems by purchasing additional seats from the cloud computing provider, and if there are any features that need to be added, they can be added incrementally.

Cloud-based ERP software is super flexible in that the backup is automated. And in case there is an occurrence of natural disasters, the systems provide an inherent plan for restart since production data, as well as the production system, are still available and accessible. When you compare with on-premise ERPs, businesses have to send data to manually backup the data or send it to a reserve site to realize the same benefit.

One thing about on-premise ERP solution is that you will need to properly set up and maintain everything needed to function efficiently, meaning that if something goes wrong, then the performance suffers greatly. But with a cloud-based solution, the provider will be the one taking care of hosting the solution. And with the knowledge that your system is being maintained by an expert not only gives you some peace of mind, but you are also assured that your ERP should perform at its peak performance. This is exactly what your business needs to have considering all the other disruptions that have been experienced due to the pandemic.

Since cloud-based ERP systems eliminate all the complexities and costs of installing and integrating additional ERP hardware, businesses that adopt them dont need to hire additional staff to support and maintain the application on a regular basis. This is actually a very important benefit since businesses are doing all they can to cut on costs due to the economic impact brought by COVID-19. So, finding an off-premise ERP system that is as agile as Cloud One, which not only helps your business to remain afloat during these uncertain times but also allows you to reduce your spending is by far the best thing that could happen to your business.

Comparing on-premise systems with cloud-based ERP systems, the latter is faster to implement. Unlike on-premise systems, which require a hefty and lengthy implementation process, configuring the technical environment for cloud technology can actually be done in as little as 24 hours. This allows businesses more time to focus on their transformation. You should know that change management as well as business process management do need the same time and resources, regardless of whether you are implementing on-premise or cloud ERP systems.

The thing is, with the ongoing pandemic, your remote-working employees need a cloud ERP more than ever. Cloud ERP systems tend to be more modern and are considerably easier to use when compared to on-premise systems, which means that the employees are quicker to embrace them. This doesnt eliminate the need for training or a communication plan, it just means that there might be less resistance from the employees.

To wrap it up, while there are compelling reasons to implement cloud-based ERP, you shouldnt forget that all technology initiatives do come with certain drawbacks. So, before implementing the technology, make sure that you understand your digital and business needs so as to figure out exactly what strategies and systems you need. As the trend of digitalisation accelerates in face of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not difficult to understand why more and more companies have already opted for enterprise cloud adoption.

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The Advantages of Running your ERP Off-Premise During the COVID-19 Era - BBN Times

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