Posts Tagged "AI & IOT"

As a nonprofit professional, you’re constantly seeking ways to maximise productivity and efficiency to further your mission.

In today’s digital first world, consumers expect personalized, relevant, and engaging content at every interaction. Brands today are channelling substantial investments into creating compelling content to enhance engagement and drive conversions. Astonishingly, despite these significant investments, many brands find themselves with limited visibility into the performance of their content across diverse channels and campaigns.

Data centers have emerged as a crucial component of the IT infrastructure of businesses. They handle vast amounts of data generated by various sources, and over the years have transformed into massive and complex entities. Of late, data analytics has emerged as a necessary ally for data center service providers, powered by the growing need to improve parameters like operational efficiency, performance, and sustainability. In this blog, we will discuss the different ways in which data analytics and AI/ML can help enhance data center management and empower data center service providers to deliver better service assurance to end-customers.

How data analytics and AI/ML can help service providers in data center optimization

Today, data center service providers are leveraging data analytics in various ways to optimize data center operations, reduce costs, enhance performance, reliability and sustainability, and improve service quality for customers. They employ a variety of methods to collect data from colocation, on-premise and edge data centers, which include physical RFID/EFC sensors, server, network and storage monitoring tools, security information and event management (SIEM) systems, configuration management databases (CMDBs), API integration, and customer usage data. The data collected is then fed into a centralized monitoring and analytics platform, which uses visualization tools, dashboards, and alert systems to analyze the data and generate insights.

Furthermore, by integrating IoT and AI/ML into data center operations, service providers are gaining deeper insights, automating various processes, and making faster business decisions. One of the most critical requirements today is for analytical tools that can help with predictive assessment and accurate decision-making for desired outcomes. This is achieved by diving deep into factors such as equipment performance, load demand curve, overall system performance, as well as intelligent risk assessment and business continuity planning. Selection of the right tools, firmware, and application layer plays a major role in making such an AI/ML platform successful.

The relationship between analytics and automation from the perspective of data centers is rather symbiotic. Data centers are already automating routine tasks such as data cleaning, data transformation, and data integration, helping data center service providers free up resources for more strategic analytics work, such as predictive modeling, forecasting, and scenario planning. In turn, data analytics provides valuable insights that enable data centers to implement intelligent automation and optimization techniques. This may include workload balancing, dynamic resource allocation, and automated incident response.

Here are some of the key areas where data analytics and automation have a significant impact:

• Enhancing operational reliability: Data analytics, AI/ML and automation can enable data centers to ensure optimal performance. This involves using predictive maintenance, studying equipment lifecycles for maintenance, and incident history analysis to learn from past experiences. In addition, AI/ML-driven vendor performance evaluation and SLA management incorporating MTTR and MTBF further strengthen operations. Leveraging these metrics within the ITIL framework helps data centers gain valuable operational insights and maintain the highest levels of uptime.
• Performance efficiency: Data centers consume a substantial amount of energy to power and maintain desirable operating conditions. To optimize services, track hotspots, prevent hardware failure, and improve overall performance, modern data centers analyze data points such as power usage, temperature, humidity, and airflow related to servers, storage devices, networking equipment, and cooling systems. Prescriptive analytics can take this a step further by providing recommendations to optimize utilization and performance.
• Predictive maintenance: Predictive analytics is a powerful technology that uses data to forecast future performance, identify and analyze risks and mitigate potential issues. By analyzing sensor data and historical trends, data center service providers can anticipate potential hardware failures and perform maintenance before they escalate, with advanced predictive analytics enabling them to improve equipment uptime by up to 20%.
• Capacity planning: Businesses today must be flexible enough to accommodate capacity changes within a matter of hours. Data center service providers also need to understand current usage metrics to plan for future equipment purchases and cater to on-demand requirements. Data analytics helps in optimizing the allocation of resources like storage, compute, and networking while meeting fluctuations in customer needs and improving agility.
• Security and network optimization: Data centers can use analytics to monitor security events and detect vulnerabilities early to enhance their security posture. By analyzing network traffic patterns, data analytics tools help identify unusual activities that may indicate a security threat. They can also monitor network performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize data routing.
• Customer insights: Data centers collect usage data, such as the number of users, peak usage times, and resource consumption, to better understand customer needs and optimize services accordingly. Analytics helps providers gain insights into customer behavior and needs, enabling them to build targeted solutions that offer better performance and value. For example, through customer-facing report generation, organizations and end-customers can gain valuable insights and optimize their operations. Additionally, analytics accelerates the go-to-market process by providing real-time data visibility, empowering businesses to make informed decisions quickly and stay ahead of the competition.
• Environment sustainability & energy efficiency: Data centers have traditionally consumed significant power, with standalone facilities consuming between 10-25 MW per building capacity. However, modern data center IT parks now boast capacities ranging from 200-400+ MW. This exponential growth has led to adverse environmental impacts, such as increased carbon footprint, depletion of natural resources, and soil erosion. Using AI/ML, performance indicators like CUE (Carbon Utilization Effectiveness), WUE (Water Utilization Effectiveness), and PUE (Power Utilization Effectiveness) are analyzed to assess efficiency and design green strategies, such as adopting renewable energy, implementing zero water discharge plants, achieving carbon neutrality, and using refrigerants with low GHG coefficients. For example, AI/ML modeling can help data centers achieve 8-10% saving on PUE below design PUE – helping to balance environmental impact with an efficiency better than what was originally planned.
• Asset and vendor performance management: The foundation of the AI/ML platform lies in the CMDB, which comprises crucial data, including asset information, parent-child relationships, equipment performance records, maintenance history, lifecycle analysis, performance curves, and end-of-life tracking. These assets are often maintained by OEMs or vendors to ensure reliability and uptime. AI/ML aids in developing availability models that factor in SLA and KPI management. It can provide unmatched visibility into equipment corrections, necessary improvements, and vendor performance. It can also help enhance project models for expansion build-outs and greenfield designs, accurately estimating the cost of POD (point of delivery) design, project construction, and delivery.
• Ordering billing and invoicing: AI/ML plays a vital role in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of order, billing, and invoicing processes. Its impact spans various stages, starting from responding to RFPs to reserving space and power, managing capacity, providing early access to ready-for-service solutions, facilitating customer onboarding, and overseeing the entire customer lifecycle. This includes routine processes such as invoicing, revenue collection, order renewal, customer Right of First Refusal (ROFR) management, and exploring expansion options both within and outside the current facility.

Selecting the right data analytics solution

The implementation of data analytics and automation through AI/ML requires careful consideration as several parameters, such as data quality and level of expertise play a crucial role in delivering efficient end-results. To succeed, businesses need to choose user-friendly and intelligent solutions that can integrate well with existing solutions, handle large volumes of data, and evolve as needed.

At Sify – India’s pioneering data center service provider for over 22 years, we continuously innovate, invest in, and integrate new-age technologies like AI/ML in operations to deliver significant and desired outcomes to customers. We are infusing automation led by AI/ML in our state-of-the-art intelligent data centers across India to deliver superior customer experiences, increased efficiency, and informed decision-making, resulting in more self-sustaining and competitive ecosystems. For example, leveraging our AI/ML capabilities has been proven to lead to over 20% improvement in project delivery turnaround time. Our digital data center infrastructure services offer real-time visibility, measurability, predictability, and service support to ensure that our customers experience zero downtime and reduced Capex/Opex.

How do Sify’s AI-enabled data centers impact your business?

• Person-hour savings: Automation of customer billing data and escalations resulting in up to 300 person-hour savings in a month.
• Reduction in failures: Predictive approach for maintenance and daily checks yielding up to 20% reduced MTBF, 10% improved MTTR, and 10% reduction in unplanned/possible downtime.
• Cost savings: Improved power/rack space efficiency and savings on penalties to deliver up to 8% reduction in customer penalties by maintaining SLAs and 10% reduction in operating cost.
• Compliance adherence: Meeting global standards and ensuring operational excellence and business continuity.

To know more about our world-class data centers and how they help enterprises expect positive business outcomes, visit here.

What if human beings could better their brain, built across millennia through evolution? Gourav looks at the possibility of just such a technology and its implications.

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We all think, act, react, ponder, decide, and memorize with the help of our brains. It is a very intriguing, interesting, and exciting part of our human body and contributes drastically to our human ecosystem.

It is also still a mystery as to how our brain, one of the most complex systems found in nature, functions.

Imagine an artificial copy of our human brain that can do the same without our help. If such a machine is created, then the boundaries between a human and a machine would grow thinner bringing to the fore its advantages and disadvantages.

The Brain and Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland did exactly that when they thought up a project called Blue Brain Project aimed at creating an artificial brain. This project was founded by Henry Markram in 2005.

What is Blue Brain Project?

The Blue Brain Project is bleeding-edge technology research that aims to reverse engineer a typical human brain into a computer simulation. Blue Brain can think, act, respond, make quick decisions, and keep anything and everything in its memory.

It means that a computer can act as a human brain taking artificial intelligence sky high. The simulations are carried out on IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer, hence the term Blue Brain.

Why do we need this?

Today, we function based on our brain’s capability to respond to different situations. Some people make intelligent decisions and take actions as they have an inborn quality of intelligence. But this intelligence dies when we die. Imagine if such intelligence can be preserved to help the future generation.

A virtual or an artificial brain that can provide the required solution for the stated problem. Our brain tends to forget trivial things that mean more like birthdays, names of people, etc.

Such a brain can help us by storing this information and aiding whenever necessary. Imagine uploading ourselves onto a computer and living inside it.

How can this be made possible?

The information about the brain needs to be uploaded into the supercomputer to perform like a brain. So, retrieval or studying of this information is paramount. This can be made possible by using small robots called nanobots.

These bots can travel between our spine and brain to collect important data. These data contain necessary information such as the structure of the human brain, its current state, etc.

A human brain takes inputs from the sensor throughout the body, and it interprets these inputs to store in the memory or to respond to the desired output.

The artificial brain does a similar job by taking inputs from a sensory chip and it interprets these inputs by associating the input with the value stored in one of its registers which corresponds to different states of the brain.

The Blue Brain Project – Software Development Kit helps the users to utilize the data from the nanobots to visualize and inspect models and simulations. The SDK is a C++ library that is wrapped around Java and Python.

The Einstein Connection

When people think of genius, the list most assuredly includes Albert Einstein. For years, different scientific researchers have been trying to find the mystery behind his genius brain. Imagine if Einstein’s brain could be recreated with the help of the Blue Brain Project. Many intriguing inventions and discoveries could be made. Such intelligence would shape many generations to come. 

The Blue Brain Project has many merits such as non-volatile memory that can store anything and everything permanently, and the capability to make intelligent decisions without the presence of a person. This research can help in curing a lot of psychological problems.

If such technology comes to people, they would be dependent on these systems. This can open the door wide open for hack threats which can pose a real danger to people. People might be fearful of using such technology and it can culminate into large resistance.

The Author’s Views

Intelligence is a quality that has always been associated with humans. Now artificially many intelligent systems and tools are available that aim to better people’s lives.

If Blue Brain technology reaches humans, everyone’s life will be enriched.

But people might get too dependent on this technology which will culminate in catastrophic problems for the human psyche. However, if used properly this technology can add new layers to human life than being a replacement.

Explained: How even the simplest of day-to-day activities are deeply influenced by ML & AI. Will it become a life-changer?

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On any given day, a regular human being does several activities which are performed ritually and without fail. From cleaning to eating and drinking and finding our way across our environments, human life involves many activities that are deemed Activity of Daily Living, or ADL. We have performed these activities in the past without any technological help or advice. Throughout human history, man has invented many a tool to improve the execution of these ADLs, and our current age is no different. Technologies such as ‘Machine Learning’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ have enabled many advancements to our lifestyle. Some assist us, however there a few that we need to be cautious about.

Let us stride through these ADLs one by one by following a simple activity timeline of a person’s one-day life as we discover how Machine Learning is shaping human life.

Morning – 5 AM to 10 AM

A day for us typically starts with several activities. Brushing, eating, washing, etc., are a few morning routines that we follow in our day-to-day life.

A day begins by waking up from sleep. Nowadays smart devices such as wrist-fit bands, and smartwatches tell us more about our sleep. These devices take leverage of AI and Machine Learning to provide accurate results with improvement. They help us to improve our sleep quality and behavior which in turn improves our health.

After waking up, we essentially brush our teeth to maintain hygiene and dental wellness. Even in this activity with the help of novel smart wrist devices and smart toothbrushes which use AI and Machine Learning, we study and measure our hand movements, direction, speed, etc., that improve the quality of our brushing which in turns keep our oral health in check. An example of such an application is Oral B Genius X.

Nowadays, washing our hands regularly to maintain hygiene and immunity is very important especially given the COVID scenario around the globe. Many kinds of research have been made to take advantage of the technological development to help in monitoring hand hygiene and give a quality assessment to an individual. Many privatized hospitals have tied up with several industries to implement a smart solution for providing hand hygiene quality assessment. The doctors from these hospitals take advantage of it daily to improve their hygiene and their patients’ as well. An example of such an application is The MedSense Clear system by the MIT Medlab Alumni.

Physical health and maintaining shape have become very underrated due to the new awareness around mental health and its importance. Nevertheless, staying in shape is a very important aspect of people’s lives as it indirectly constitutes mental well-being. Diet planning and eating healthy is something that must be taken care of. With the help of smart mobile and computer applications, we nowadays plan our diet efficiently. With the rise of ‘Machine Learning’, this system is scrutinized, and further research is being conducted to find solutions for problems such as people’s preferences in their eating habits to provide an even better solution.

Mid-Day Activities – 10 AM to 3 PM

Mid-day activities constitute a very wide range of tasks. We regularly use map applications to commute to a certain location. These applications use AI and Machine Learning extensively to provide the best route possible by predicting traffic and other obstacles well before we commute. These applications suggest the best means of transport and the best route to take, they even track and alert us on breakdown of transport services. Examples of such applications are Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc.

Many people work in closed environments either in the office or at home. We are always sedentary, and desk bound. It becomes inevitable to take breaks and go for a short walk and stretch ourselves. And, equally important is to keep ourselves hydrated. With the help of smart devices, we can track the amount of time that we sit continuously. They help us to take a break or even correct our posture if required. Some also help us stay hydrated and suggest improvements based on the environment and atmosphere quality around us. Examples of such devices are Apple Watch, Mi Band, etc.

Evening Activities – 3 PM to 8 PM

Evenings are when we generally try to relax after work and indulge in leisure activities that differs from individual to individual. These activities involve a lot of AI and Machine Learning as it takes advantage of our data right from our preferences to our recent practices. These technology-driven applications and systems need to be handled with utmost caution. We all use the e-commerce facility extensively as it helps us to reduce the time and energy to buy a product as it enables us to shop from wherever we are. This has huge benefits. But we sometimes are ignorant and innocent about the implications that might come. Few applications read our technology usage colossally as they keep track of us more than we know. They improve their recommendation system using this data with the help of AI and Machine Learning and suggest products well before we want to search. If we are not using an official or a recognized application, we are at risk of a privacy breach with the history of our shopping data being stolen or hacked.

Social media applications have invaded our lives. We connect via different platforms to share, exchange ideas and also to relax. However, some of these applications hold sensitive data about us. These applications have plenty of recommendation systems that are constantly updated to feed posts enjoyable to us. But are we compromising on the sensitive data like our name, address, phone number, etc., as well as our preferences that reveal who we are while doing so? An imminent danger to watch out for here is ‘data leakage’. Some of these applications never encode or cipher our passwords. Other activities during the evening include working out, which a few people prefer in the morning too. With the prevailing COVID situation, we have restricted using the gym frequently. Many applications and systems have been created to assist us to work from home. With the help of AI and Machine Learning, they streamline our workout routine.

End Day Activities – 8 PM to 5 AM

End-day activities help us unwind as we call it a day. We perform certain activities as mentioned previously like eating, brushing, washing, etc. Some smart devices assist us by providing an alarm to indicate our sleeping time. This heavily depends upon technology as it tracks our previous sleep history to let us know in what areas we need to improve. These applications help us learn from our sleep pattern, like how much time we spent in deep sleep and so on. This system heavily uses AI and other sensors to read our breathing, heartbeat and measures those accurately to provide insights. Many wristwatches and fit bands provide this feature.

As we get to the end of it, these applications help us save energy and time as well as lead an enriching life.Having said that, we must also be cautious regarding their influence on us. Take precautions and double-check the application for privacy policies. Always use trusted applications, instead of randomly selecting one that might store unwanted cookies to store sensitive data which might lead to an imminent threat. So, what’s your ADL?

In case you missed:

Blue Brain – a tool or a crutch for humanity?

Smart Cities and IOT are largely articulated buzzword in Digital transformation space. Digital transformation is good to have significant change towards betterment of human life style and “way of living”. Digital Transformation is broadly classified into exponential technology growth, Miniaturization, Virtualization and Linking Bio Technology with Information technology. The goal of digital transformation is towards the betterment of human life, one of the finest outcome of digital transformation is Smart City.  IoT devices are the building blocks for the smart city. Smart Cities are becoming a reality, more than 80 cities across the globe are projected to be smart by 2025.  Information Security plays a vital role in Smart City space towards safeguarding the higher levels of confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of the available services and automation process flow in the critical infrastructure, physical security, Transport, Telecommunication System, Government applications, Surveillance system and Inter connected alert mechanism.

IoT devices will obviously make your life easy, from your work place using your smart phone you can open your home door which is 40 Kms away from your geo coordinate. Even you can switch off your home AC, patrol your external sight of your home, get an alert if there is any smoke inside your home (Nest Labs). Even you can water your plant, weed your farm, plant your seed in your Farm house (Farmbot). Precise details about your heart beat zone, calories burn, your fitness information will be flashed in your smart phone screen with a help of a IoT band in your wrist. But there is a negative side too.

Albert Einstein had commented “Technology growth is like the axe in the hands of pathological criminal” Inorganic, uncontrolled technological growth without rationale will always paves way to the path of destruction. IOT and Smart city remains as Blue Ocean in terms of Business opportunity. The market remains untapped, New entrants, Start-ups are making floods of appliances and devices which are connected without a thought basis of Interconnections behind. Kaspersky Organization baptized IoT as “Internet of Crappy things”

IoT devices are evolving without inbuilt security architecture, If the manufacturer designs the security architecture in a chip form and embeds in the IOT the Price becomes unaffordable, due to the market needs and business drivers, IoT devices are incarnated without the security chips, remains affordable and highly Vulnerable. In addition, the IoT devices are not properly tested in security aspects.  A fitness band with lax security architecture in design will expose your personal, location and health related data to the internet world. An IoT Insulin pump and IoT pace maker security breach not only going to affect the confidentiality, but also affect the livability. Cherokee Jeep with a ECU OBD IoT devices had been hacked in United Kingdom and the cybercriminal taken the control of the Jeep and tried to crash the car. A Pace maker IoT device had been hacked and the hacker gained the access of IoT-pace maker and killed the victim. Those incidents triggers lexicographers to coin a new term Cyber-Killing.

Hence the IoT devices call for additional human security perspective along with information security perspective and proves the triadic CIA approach is not suffice.  Fourth factor of livability should be added to form CAIL quartet (Confidentiality, Availability, Integrity, Livability), Since Digital transformation is playing role to linking Bio technology and Information Technology. Stern information Security control must be mandated for the IoT devices, else it will cannibalize the human life.

IoT devices are the building block of the smart cities. driver less train (IoT train), Driver less Tram (IoT tram, Driver less Cars (IoT Cars), Fire Alert system, Fire Suppression system, Water Supply system, All mode of transportation, Government Integrated Applications, Street Lighting System, Transport Control, Crime detection system. Everything will be integral part of Smart cities. The weakness in the IoT devices sums up and endanger the human life, If it is not architected well in Human security and Information Security aspects.

The IoT technologies exposes new risk and attack vectors like IoT Security-Side-channel Attacks, this type of attacks focus less on the information rather it focuses more on how the information is presented. “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it” Albert Einstein. Considering the challenges in this arena the IoT devices vendors, IoT Hardware manufactures, IoT Application developers must include Security   (Authentication, Authorization and Encryption technologies ) in their designing phase, and Security Testing framework for IOT devices must be introduced. Furthermore, IoT Security compliant assaying should be mandated for all IoT devices.

Let’s aspire to have the secure Smart cities built with well-Engineered IoT devices towards the objective of betterment in human way of living.