Here are the top five strategies to streamline desktop support troubleshooting time when preparing to advance your DEX initiatives.

The Importance of True Real-Time Data

Before starting, consider that your team can’t fix what they can’t see. The issue may not just be within your company’s process but in the data itself. Most DEX vendors collect data in minutes, leading to missed events between intervals or when averaged over time. If you are receiving data in minutes, IT will miss vital information, resulting in a lag in response time. This can contribute to a surplus of tickets and confusion about the true source of the problem. Finding a data collection system that offers true real-time visibility is the key to truly enabling IT teams to identify and address issues before they impact productivity and security. Once your team has this actionable data, they can analyze the top five ways to reduce your desktop support troubleshooting time.

Step 1. Implementing Proactive Notifications

Proactive notifications, such as those alerting to potential issues like application downtime or connectivity issues, can be a game-changer. Empower your IT teams with these tools, so the issues get addressed before they escalate, therefore ensuring a seamless digital experience for employees and reducing the need for reactive troubleshooting.

Step 2: Prioritize the Problems with Problem Scoring

Prioritizing issues that impact DEX can be daunting but are extremely important. Ease the process by presenting a consolidated score of performance metrics. These metrics are calculated by highlighting the most significant impact areas, guiding IT teams to direct their attention effectively. Consider implementing a scoring dashboard across various domains, including VDI and DaaS, physical desktops, desktop applications, vulnerabilities, patch management, unified communications, and SaaS and web applications. Dashboards are invaluable tools that provide a comprehensive overview of system health and drill down to a specific problem.

Step 3: Incorporate GenAI

Collecting lots of troubleshooting data and representing it with a score is a powerful method for interpreting data differently. While data can be exported as a CVS, or custom reports can be created, sometimes, you need to get quick answers on the fly. Incorporating a secure, natural language, using a GenAI feature will enable your teams to receive information immediately, represented in unique and informative ways, significantly reducing response times and improving service quality.

Step 4: Add Script Actions

Scripts can be a powerful way to retrieve detailed troubleshooting data from a remote device. However, getting any script to run on a remote device can be problematic as most companies lock down their machines so that employees cannot edit or run scripts. It may also be difficult for IT to run a remote script on behalf of an employee without the full picture. One option to securely incorporate script actions is adding a DEX service to your IT budget. Look for a DEX solution that provides a versatile range of methods for running a script on a remote device and supports various script languages that can run on any platform. Ensure the solution can also provide and store the results in a secure database that your IT team can easily access and understand for future analysis that can inform proactive actions.

Step 5: Enable Remote Control

When problems arise, so much can be lost in translation. Often, IT needs to remotely troubleshoot a user’s desktop, but traditional remoting tools can disrupt employees’ workflow and impact productivity. This is often due to the employees’ base knowledge of the issue at hand. Consider implementing a remote control feature so your IT team can quickly find and troubleshoot the issue at hand, seeing what the user is experiencing without hampering productivity. To make remote troubleshooting more efficient and help users get back up and running as quickly as possible, consider a multifaceted approach to accessing a user’s computer remotely.

The Key: Why Automation Completes the Process

Automation is vital to your DEX process. According to IDC, “by 2027, 90% of organizations will augment operational roles with automation technology, elevating employee engagement and unlocking a predicted 30% increase in worker efficiency.” Since many computer problems are recurring, implementing automation will empower IT teams by streamlining the discovery process and supporting rapid issue remediation. Incorporating automation to your proactive notifications (alerting) within script actions will also ease issue detection and within seconds, allow a corrected script to be executed. Together, these tips can not only empower your team but pull them out of the IT support ticket weeds. As a result, you can move beyond simply supporting your company initiatives, to also decreasing employee burnout and creating a more productive team.

Maintaining optimal performance and swiftly resolving technical issues is critical for the future of any business. Surveys tell us that organizations that have optimized their DEX see a 25% reduction in employee turnover and DEX tools have shown to lead to a 20% increase in employee engagement. While it is clear that DEX solutions will boost your business, it is not always “one size fits all” when finding the right solution. As long as you incorporate a solution that proactively manages endpoints, applications, and user experiences while providing real-time data collection, proactive notifications, and comprehensive scoring dashboards, you and your IT team will find a streamlined troubleshooting process to be an achievable reality.

Jeff Johnson is the product marketing manager at ControlUp.

The post Five Ways to Reduce Desktop Support Troubleshooting Time appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Productivity plays a huge role in a company’s financial health. Recent data from McKinsey & Company shows that productivity has barely grown in the U.S. (1.4%) since 2005. They also estimate that boosting U.S. productivity represents a $10 trillion opportunity.

Few teams feel the effects of unproductive work quite like IT. Their teams are typically small, and yet their work is overwhelming and mission-critical to keeping businesses moving forward. For instance, countless SaaS applications are now integral to the operations of every company, and yet one, often lean team is responsible for their upkeep and management.

That makes IT operations a potential bottleneck. Unsurprisingly, according to Evanta (a Gartner company), CIOs say increasing efficiency and productivity are top priorities for 2023.

The Manual Trap

SaaS applications, from project management, CRM and collaboration to MarTech and expense tools, are inseparable from our daily work. And our IT stacks are continuously increasing, with companies worldwide using an average of 130 apps in 2022.

My experience in the IT space has taught me that most IT teams still manage SaaS applications manually, attempting to track their licenses, users, and renewals via spreadsheets and provisioning/deprovisioning access to applications one by one. These bandwidth-crunched teams are wasting valuable (and expensive) time completing important yet mundane and repetitive tasks that are humanly impossible to keep up with – and, therefore, prime candidates for an automation-driven productivity boost.

The Onboarding/Offboarding Bottleneck

Two of the most time-intensive IT operations are onboarding and offboarding employees from SaaS applications.

Consider this scenario: A company is growing rapidly, hiring to fill the gaps they have across their organization to keep up with the high volume of work required to hit their increasing targets. Maybe they bulk-start new employees on one specific day, every two weeks.

If they have five employees starting on that day, IT first needs to receive the information that those employees are starting. They need to learn what departments those employees will work within and what tools are required for their roles. From there, they must provision access to those applications per employee and application. Endless Slack messages, clunky application backends and likely incomplete information eat up their day.

By the time they finish provisioning that group of new hires, the next group is likely just about to start. Any failures along that scattered onboarding process create a less-than-ideal onboarding experience and derail a new employee’s initial productivity.

On the flip side of this process is offboarding employees.

Manual offboarding requires IT to work with a departing employee’s manager to learn what apps they used (a less than scientific endeavor, particularly when you consider that many employees subscribe to apps on their own without others’ knowledge), and then manually deprovision them from every application. Beyond the time sink for IT, there is also a risk factor — failing to deprovision an employee from even one could leave sensitive company information accessible.

While handling these critical tasks in this manner is inefficient, it’s also indicative of the wasteful nature of manual IT operations. IT pros are highly technical and talented. Having them spend their time on tedious tasks distracts them from working on higher-value projects.

Related: ChatGPT-Like Microsoft 365 Copilot Will Be Coming to Microsoft Productivity Apps

Increase IT Productivity Through Automation

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured automation to deliver efficiency, an increase from just 20% of organizations in 2021.

Despite that, Torii’s  survey of over 200 IT professionals found that less than half of respondents have fully automated most tasks, and only 13% reported great success with automation.

So what’s stopping IT from automating? Time: 58% cite insufficient staffing or time as significant challenges in automation implementation. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

The only way forward is through investing in tools that help manage their SaaS stack, that also include intuitive automation capabilities.

Investing in any old automation, won’t cut it either. In the context of IT, how that automation integrates and interacts with your SaaS stack is key.

Solutions such as SaaS Management Platforms, with automation built-in, provide the visibility IT needs to understand their SaaS stack and associated users and costs, as well as with the actionability required to manage it.

For the onboarding/offboarding bottleneck, this means automatically discovering and surfacing every application in use at your company, first and foremost. From that point of centralized visibility, you can create workflows that automate previously time-intensive tasks (and eliminate the chance of things falling through the cracks) to free up your IT staff’s time (and improve results).

For example, the system can detect which department new hires work in and automatically provision access to the applications they’ll require. Equally for offboarding, when an employee leaves — since you’re aware of every application they’re utilizing, the same platform can automatically deprovision them once triggered by your IDP or HRIS.

These are just small examples of the automation opportunities for IT, but when you compare them to the manual alternatives, it’s easy to imagine the productivity gains you can garner.

As companies continue looking to save costs, greater productivity could fit the bill — as it improves the value of every dollar spent.

By better using time, you’ll enable your organization to optimize resource use and focus on the objectives that drive revenue. Those that invest in productivity now stand to earn more from the efficiency gains of the future.

The post Now’s The Time to Focus on IT Productivity appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Like other tech giants, the company used its event to make important announcements in generative AI to help accelerate its enterprise adoption with Red Hat OpenShift AI, as well as several new capabilities in its automation platform Ansible.

The company is also focusing on simplifying management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and securing the software supply chain.

Let’s look at the more notable announcements from the Raleigh, North Carolina-based tech firm’s announcements at its Red Hat Summit event in Boston, Mass.:

Red Hat OpenShift AI and Generative AI

According to Red Hat, the company is building and expanding upon the capabilities of OpenShift and OpenShift Data Science with OpenShift AI to give IT operations leaders, data scientists and developers a unified solution to train, serve, monitor and manage the lifecycle of artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models and applications.

The company says Red Hat OpenShift AI underpins the generative AI services of IBM watsonx.ai, IBM’s new AI platform designed to scale intelligent applications and services across all aspects of the enterprise.

Red Hat says OpenShift AI solves a few key issues: the infrastructure-intensive training of AI models and requirement of specialized platforms and tools before serving, tuning and managing the model. OpenShift AI provides the infrastructure consistency across training, deployment and difference, the company says.

OpenShift AI provides a standardized foundation for creating production AI/ML models, as well as running the resulting applications, along with the ease-of-use and cloud-to-edge deployment options of OpenShift, the company says.

OpenShift AI provides several technology partner offerings, including Anaconda, IBM Watson Studio, Intel OpenVINO and AI Analytics Toolkit, NVIDIA AI Enterprise and Starburst, as well as 30 additional certified partners as part of the OpenShift ecosystem.

Customers with regulatory and compliance requirements, including air-gapped and disconnected environments can use OpenShift AI on -premises, while customers can also develop models in the public cloud and deploy them on-premises or at the edge, the company says. This provides a unique hybrid MLOps environment that enables collaboration between IT, data science and application developers, the company says.

According to Red Hat, new enhancements to OpenShift AI include deployment pipelines for AI/ML experiment tracking and automated ML workflows, model serving with GPU support for inference and custom model serving runtimes, and model monitoring to help organizations manage performance.

Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant

OpenShift AI, Red Hat says, is the base of IBM’s new AI enhancements including IBM Watson Code Assistant, to deliver domain-specific AI to IT organizations and developer teams.

This is done by bringing IBM Watson Code Assistant to Ansible, giving users the ability to write Ansible Playbooks with AI-generated recommendations. This new service is designed to help drive consistent and accurate automation adoption across an organization, the company says.

According to Red Hat, Ansible Lightspeed is the next phase of its Project Wisdom initiative, making it available to users, contributors, customers and Red Hat’s partner ecosystem. The service integrates with Watson Code Assistant, which will be available later this year. This allows access to IBM foundational models to quickly build automation code.

Event-Driven Ansible

Sticking with the IT automation theme, Red Hat also announced Event-Driven Ansible, a scalable solution designed to expand how organizations activate automation as a reliable strategy across the hybrid cloud.

The solution, slated for availability in June, is for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 customers; is designed to connect infrastructure and application observability tools with enterprise-grade Ansible automation, helping IT teams to pre-determine and define rules to initiate automated responses to situations like unresponsive system processes or unauthorized access requests.

When an event is trigged, the solution automatically executives the desired action via Ansible Playbooks or direct execution modules, with the ability to chain multiple events together into more complex automation actions, Red Hat says.

Event-Driven Ansible integrates with event sources form third-party monitoring, observability and IT tools, including Cisco ThousandEyes, CyberArk, Dynatrace, F5, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic, Palo Alto Networks, with additional partner integrations to follow.

Supplementary Red Hat-developed content is available for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Insights, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and ServiceNow, the company says.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux management

To help organizations better manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is launching new capabilities in Red Hat Insights to give IT teams more insight and management tools to find and resolve IT issues much faster across the hybrid cloud. The tools are available through any browser via console.redhat.com and are designed to unify the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments in a single user interface, the company says.

According to Red Hat, these expanded capabilities build on the information provided by existing Red Hat Insights’ predictive analytics, which can detect potential bugs, misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities using Red Hat’s expertise in running Linux platforms in critical production environments.

The enhancements allow IT administrators to fix bugs without needing Red Hat Satellite Server and act on server groups simultaneously using patch templates, as well as build standardized operating system images that comply with organization-specific requirements.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service

According to the company, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service is a new service that brings together Kubernetes-native security capabilities with a fully Red Hat-managed offering to help organizations take a security-forward approach to building, deploying and maintaining cloud-native applications regardless of the underlying Kubernetes platform.

The managed service supports both Red Hat OpenShift on private and public clouds and non-Red Hat Kubernetes services across major cloud providers, including Amazon EKS, Google GKE and Microsoft AKS, bringing security coverage to containerized applications regardless of where they are deployed.

Organizations can scale security capabilities across multiple clusters, whether on-prem or in the cloud while lowering operational costs by reducing the learning curve for implementing Kubernetes-native security without sacrificing necessary capabilities or enforcement, the company says.

Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain

Red Hat announced its Trusted Software Supply Chain Solution designed to protect against software supply chain vulnerabilities. The company says two new cloud services, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline and Red Hat Trusted Content, are joining in preview mode the existing Red Hat software and cloud services, including Quay and Advanced Cluster Security (ACS), to advance the successful adoption of DevSecOps practices, and embed security into the software development lifecycle.

Essentially, Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain allows customers to more efficiently code, build and monitor software using proven platforms, trusted content and real-time security scanning and remediation.

The solution allows customers to import git repositories and configure container-native continuous build, test, and deployment pipelines via a cloud service; inspect source code and transitive dependencies auto-generate Software Bills of Materials and verify and promote container images via a release criteria policy.

Visit the Red Hat Summit newsroom to learn more about these announcements and others.

The post Red Hat Summit 2023 Releases: AI, Automation, IT Management, Security appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to a study from enterprise automation software firm UiPath, employees largely view AI as a tool to help them do their jobs and relieve burnout as they are asking to do more with less.

Specifically, 60% of respondents to a UiPath survey say AI and automation can address burnout and job fulfillment, and 57% of employees view employers that use automation to help support employees and modernize operations more favorably that those that don’t leverage AI.

The New York City-based firm says 28% of employees report being asked to more work with less support as organizations reduce headcount in response to a looming economic recession. That is leading to 29% of workers globally reporting feelings of burnout.

Those feelings of burnout are felt more in younger generations, as 41% of Gen Z respondents and 34% of Millennial respondents reported burnout, compared to just 25% of Gen Xers and 16% of Baby Boomers. With those younger generations set to replace older generations and become business leaders, burnout levels could rise.

While companies like Microsoft, Google, UiPath and others have been presenting AI tools as a solution to burnout and helping workers be more efficient, some organizations have blatantly said that they plan to replace some jobs with AI, including BT and IBM.

Nevertheless, 60% of respondents say AI will help reduce burnout and help them do their jobs better, with younger generations reporting higher levels (69% of Gen Zers and 63% of Millennials, 51% of Gen Xers compared to 44% of Baby Boomers) of reception to AI-powered automation.

When asked what they want to change with the help of automation, 34% of respondents said they wanted more flexibility in their work environment, 32% said they want more time to learn new skills, and 27% said they want more time during the day to focus on critical tasks.

When it comes down to specifics, employees want automation tools to help with largely technical tasks, including analyzing data (52%); inputting data/creating datasets (50%); resolving IT/technical issues (49%); and running reports (48%), UiPath’s report finds.

In a statement, UiPath’s chief people officer Brigette McInnis-Day said workplace disruption and economic factors don’t have to result in employee burnout, and using AI and automation for some of that work can help.

“Businesses that deploy AI in an open, flexible, and enterprise-ready way are best positioned to attract and retain the types of employees that will help them thrive in an automation-first world,” McInnis-Day says. “Automation is a key differentiator for companies to attract and retain by empowering employees and driving engagement.”

The post Report: Employees Want AI, Automation to Help Alleviate Burnout appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Statista, the global contact center market is expected to grow to 496 billion US dollars by 2027. This growth can be attributed to a variety of factors (such as increasing use cases, new technology, an increase in remote work, etc), but perhaps the primary reason is that businesses have realized that contact centers serve as the front door of a business, and are often the first point of contact for potential new customers or existing ones. There is a renewed focus on improving the contact center experience, as a singular interaction with a contact center agent can make or break how a consumer perceives a brand.

In the past, contact centers have been perceived as a challenging experience for consumers. Calling into an organization’s support center could take hours, including multiple transfers, challenges with language barriers, accidental dropped calls, and unresolved questions. Consumers today are demanding more from their contact centers and, in good time, technology has evolved to change this dynamic. New contact center tech is increasingly leaning on natural language processing and AI to rethink how businesses interact with consumers — and it’s making a profound difference.

With this in mind, it’s important to know what contact center technology is available, what the benefits are and what is best suited for individual use cases.

Related: IT Leaders Should Prepare for Generative AI in the Enterprise

Understanding AI Technologies in Contact Centers

The AI Revolution is upon us (with AI being used to write code, create pictures, generate responses, etc.), and the desire for high-quality AI technology has proliferated to the contact center. According to a recent Customer Contact Week market survey, AI is a major priority for companies when evaluating contact center platforms. Fortunately, there are a variety of AI technologies already in place, and it’s up to decision makers to decide which is best for their business.

Agent Assist

Some of the most powerful contact center technology is aimed at making contact center agents more efficient and effective in their roles. Often referred to as “Agent Assist,” cutting-edge contact center technology will guide agents throughout an entire call with a customer. Generative AI and advanced natural language processing technology can even analyze a call in real time and prompt agents with hints and tips on how to best respond to a customer. Guided workflows can be applied to help the agent walk a customer through a specific process, such as placing an order. It can also identify sentiment and tone to know if a customer is getting angry, sad, or is satisfied with their experience, and can guide the agent on how to best respond to their sentiment.

Additional contact center offerings are focused on managers. Historically, it has been a challenge for managers to properly work with and coach hundreds of agents — a task that becomes near impossible in a remote work setting. Modern contact center technology can provide managers with unprecedented visibility into agent performance and behavior. This includes alerting, real-time online coaching, and workflow optimization. These capabilities help identify the crucial elements that can empower performance improvement among agents.

Chatbots

Furthermore, chatbots (often referred to as virtual agents) have become even more popular. Often occurring as a pop-up on a website or app, chabots enable consumers to get their questions answered without having to phone a contact center. Chatbots typically focus on simple, straightforward questions (such as location, hours, or login issues). Additionally,  new AI tools have made it easier for organizations to identify which use cases are best suited for chatbots, and create highly customized bots for their customers to interact with. Not only does that increase the effectiveness of the chatbots, but it also improves the customer experience by only automating what makes sense.

Contact Center Technology Benefits

Unsurprisingly, advanced contact center technology can have a profound impact on agents, managers, and customers alike.

Agents are empowered to be more productive, and can better respond to customer requests and get through calls more efficiently. Real-time guidance empowers agents to say the right thing at the right time, and reduces the amount of time spent searching for answers to certain questions or challenges.

Managers also benefit because not only do their teams of agents perform at an elevated level, but they also have increased visibility into how their agents are working and communicating with customers. This enables them to properly coach agents and ensure that they are interacting with customers as best they can.

Of course, the primary beneficiary of this newfound productivity is consumers. Calling into a contact center becomes much less frustrating for consumers when their questions or challenges are quickly resolved, and are immediately transferred to the agent best fit to respond to their needs.

From a business perspective, modern contact center technology leads to happier customers, which can have a tremendous impact on brand reputation. It can also prompt increased sales (as agents become incredibly more efficient and effective). In fact, according to Forrester, increased effectiveness in the contact center through technology can lead to billions in sales.

Tips on Choosing the Right Platform

There are a variety of worthy contact center organizations, platforms and technology providers available that all have the ability to transform how a contact center functions. Choosing the right one will really come down to industry needs and evaluating the technology that will have the biggest impact on a business.

For example, contact center technology can be tremendously beneficial to organizations like airlines who are constantly interacting with customers and navigating last-minute changes. Healthcare and insurance industries also lean on contact centers to navigate an influx of appointments, calls and sensitive-questions. Almost every industry can benefit from an effective contact center, but the technology needs will vary.

When evaluating different offerings, consider what will make the most tangible impact immediately and always think customer-first.

Scott Kolman is the CMO at Cresta, where he oversees the overall positioning, promotion and branding of Cresta’s real-time intelligence platform for the contact center. Kolman has an extensive background in the marketing and promotion of SaaS and enterprise software, and is a recognized professional with expertise in cloud contact center, customer experience and customer service. Prior to joining Cresta, Kolman held leadership positions at Five9, Genesys, Synchronoss Technologies, SpeechCycle, Amdocs, Lucent Technologies and Octel Communications. Kolman is deeply involved in the contact center industry, and has previously spoken at various conferences including CCW, ICMI and Aragon Transform

The post The ABCs of Contact Centers: The Tech Driving Modern Customer Experience appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The Instabase platform uses deep learning and low-code tools to unlock unstructured data by digitizing, classifying, extracting, and validating the content trapped in documents, and then enabling the end-to-end automation of mission-critical processes. Many of the world’s largest financial institutions, insurance companies, governments, and enterprises rely on Instabase to extract value from their unstructured data to improve customer, employee and risk management outcomes. The net result is that Instabase customers can free up capacity, reduce operating costs, reduce the risk of human error and cut their customer response times down to just seconds.  

“We are proud to now be available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to bring the transformational benefits of the Instabase platform to a wider market of users. Our shared customers now have a simplified procurement process, in addition to a faster time to value of Instabase’s industry-leading artificial intelligence capabilities and automation platform,” says Joe Ramieri, vice president of growth at Instabase. 

Instabase can ingest any document format from any source, be that SharePoint, Azure Files, or a Microsoft Outlook email inbox. The Instabase platform runs safely and securely in the customer’s Azure instance with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and provides enterprise-grade governance and control. Instabase is designed for scale and throughput, and to give users the lowest total cost of ownership.

“Microsoft Azure Marketplace lets customers worldwide discover, try, and deploy software solutions that are certified and optimized to run on Azure,” says Jake Zborowski, general manager, Microsoft Azure platform at Microsoft. “Azure Marketplace helps solutions like the Instabase Platform reach more customers and markets.”

The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. The Azure Marketplace helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.

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BlackByte ransomware group disables security products

Cybersecurity firm Sophos has released a new report that details how threat actors behind the BlackByte ransomware gang uses a sophisticated technique to bypass security products by abusing a known vulnerability in the legitimate vulnerable driver RTCore64.sys. This includes disabling over 1,000 drivers on which security products rely to provide protection.

The technique is growing in popularity, with at least two other known reports of threat actors using vulnerable drivers to kill antivirus and other software to bypass security products and deploy ransomware.

Read Sophos’ blog for more information.

Google to provide U.S. Army with Workspace

Google announced a new partnership with the U.S. Army that will see the company’s Public Sector division provide up to 250,000 personnel with the Google Workspace suite of productivity and collaboration solutions. This comes after the launch of Google Public Sector in June, which is focused on helping U.S. public sector entities in federal, state and local governments accelerate their digital transformations.

Read more about Google’s partnership with the U.S. Army and Google Public Sector here.

Infrastructure automation growth on the horizon

Gartner analysts predict that 85% of infrastructure and operations leaders currently without any full automation expect to become more automated within the next three years, and 70% of organizations will implement structured automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency by 2025.

The research and analysis firm’s survey found that automation is most used in application deployment, workload automation and end-user device deployment. However, just 22% are automating patching and vulnerability remediation despite 70% of those who are automating those functions find it impactful for the business.

Read more about Gartner’s survey of infrastructure and operations automation here.

These are the vulnerabilities Chinese hackers are exploiting

If your organization is at risk for targeted cyberattacks from Chinese-backed entities, you should review the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) list of top vulnerabilities being actively exploited by China state-sponsored hacking groups. The list of 20 vulnerabilities includes just bugs published from 2019 and on, and feature some of the most well-known bugs in recent memory.

The list includes the Log4j bug discovered at the end of last year, along with vulnerabilities from popular vendors such as Microsoft, Atlassian, VMware, Cisco and more.

Read CISA’s advisory for more information.

Google Cloud, HCLTech expand partnership to accelerate digital transformations

HCLTech and Google Cloud are expanding their partnership to scale HCLTech’s capacity to support digital transformation and deliver migration, system modernization and professional services for enterprise customers. The expanded relationship includes two new offerings: the new Google Cloud Global Migration and Modernization Factory ad the HCLTech Cloud Acceleration Team that both aim to help customers gain value from their cloud investments sooner.

Learn more about the Google Cloud, HCLTech partnership here.

The post This Week in IT: Sneaky Ransomware; Google, Army Partnership; Digital Transformation; Chinese Hackers appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The expansion includes products in select Industry Cloud base licenses. Salesforce says the new offering with enable businesses to complete more tasks with fewer resources, boost efficiency and deliver better customer experiences at scale.

With companies facing uncertain economic times with inflation, supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, any new efficiency helps, says Salesforce. Industry-specific automation can replace tedious, manual tasks.

At least 86% of senior IT leaders say the experience an organization provides its employees and customers is as important as its products and services. Meanwhile, four out of five senior IT leaders agree that improved customer-facing and employee technologies are critical for their organization to compete.

A study from Salesforce’s MuleSoft and Vanson Bourn showed that 91% of organizations say they they need automation technology, but only 23% have fully implemented automation across business functions.

Salesforce Flow for Industries

Users of Salesforce’s Flow for Industries can create intelligent process automation unique to their specific industry. According to Salesforce, these new tools help customers with the following:

• Create better customer and employee experiences: OmniStudio enables organizations to build branded, dynamic customer interactions and employee workflows fast. Flow easily connects them with enterprise data and applications, without code.

• Easily manage rules and actions: Business Rules Engine allows organizations to simplify and automate processes such as pricing discounts, care management or financial planning with declarative setup, management and evaluation of rules. Using a no-code interface, organizations are empowered to build, test and execute rules before they are integrated.

• Save time and resources: Document Generation gives organizations the ability to automatically generate and share documents using a no-code template designer, while Intelligent Form Reader uses optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically read and extract document data, unifying the end-to-end management process, and freeing up time for higher-value work.
• Simplify data management: Data Processing Engine helps organizations create definitions to transform data across multiple sources then surface that to customers within a workflow.

The Flow for Industries suite of automation products is generally available now. These tools are free to base license holders.

Learn more about the new Flow for Industries on Salesforce here.

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NaViSense gathers and processes anonymous customer attributes using off-the-shelf or existing camera sources and edge computing devices such as RPi4. This technology also collects the dwell time of people in front of a display, as well as a variety of other attributes, such as their estimated age and gender, the brand of clothing they are wearing, traffic trends and more.

Watch: Collaboration 2.0 — Where Are We Now?

The information collected by NaViSense adds value in that it can be used to improve customer experience and enhance decision-making at airports, restaurants, hotels, office buildings, banks and credit union branches, museums, and numerous retail settings.

Data is power so acquiring and acting on in-depth, real-time customer data—especially through automation and intelligence analysis—are now critical capabilities for these companies. NaViSense leverages these capabilities in meaningful ways by utilizing AI, partner ecosystems, and interactive tools that help these companies make strategic decisions and even automate aspects of their physical environments.

Its computer vision output is analyzed at the edge, and companies can make critical decisions in a matter of minutes. They can also optimize and even automate key aspects of their operations. Through the company’s established goals, NaViSense’s analysis help them identify trends and act upon them in ways that drive meaningful business results.

“NaViSense is an ever evolving, unique building block approach to gathering data and insights, allowing users to customize data sets and leverage off the shelf or existing dash boarding tools, says Kelly Harlin, director solutions marketing & commercialization, “Our customers are responding quite favorably to this approach and solution, as they will continue to be an important part of its evolution.”

Check out Sharp/NEC displays solutions on AV-iQ, here.

This article originally appeared on MyTechDecisioons’ sister-site CommercialIntegrator.com.

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The university’s vision is to be the innovative leader in higher education promoting a revolution in student learning that expands access and opportunities for all. In 2019, Maryville University teamed up with the AI-powered support automation platform Capacity to make its vision a reality by automating incoming inquiries, the staff’s processes, and student’s decisions.

Hiring a digital employee

Maryville University’s online program has been growing at a rate unlike other colleges in the U.S. To keep up with demand and ensure a top-notch experience for its students, leadership decided to introduce digital employees into their current workstreams. Maryville chose Capacity to operate as its digital platform and its first digital employee—Max. 

Capacity’s first assignment—automating inquiries at Maryville University

The team at Capacity took a close look at Maryville’s current workflows, workstreams and processes to determine what could be automated. Max is a simple chatbot interface that Capacity added to Maryville’s orientation site to answer online students’ questions such as, “how can I contact my professor?” or “where is my syllabus?” The goal was to get students’ questions answered 24/7 without human intervention. Rather than emailing the professor or setting up an appointment with the teaching assistant, students could get their questions answered by Max. In just the first week, Max answered 40 student questions at a response rate of 2.7 seconds, giving insight into the category breakdown of students’ questions as an administrative bonus. 

Process automation and student retention

Long term, Capacity plans to automate repetitive existing processes that consume a Student Advisor’s time, so they can focus on strategic projects and one-on-one meetings with students. For example, if a student needs to find a tutor for their Accounting course, they could interact with the Capacity bot, Max, to find out which tutors are available and set up an appointment without interacting with their Student Advisor.

Capacity is also tasked with identifying patterns within student data to determine which students are most likely to drop out of their online classes. For example, Capacity can determine common indicators of student dropouts and keep students enrolled in classes by intervening at just the right time. 

Automating the best decisions

Once Capacity predicts the students who need more support, it jumps into action to help students make better decisions. For instance, if students who don’t log in to the orientation site within 5 days have a higher rate of dropping their courses, Capacity will intervene by sending emails and texts to remind the students to log in and stay focused on their courses. Capacity will also automatically send notifications to Student Advisors, so they can nudge the students as well. Capacity is proactively helping students stay the course from orientation to graduation. 

Capacity helps Maryville University set the curve

Maryville University has high expectations for its first digital employee. Max Capacity will analyze and automate workflows, as well as answer repetitive questions from Maryville’s growing student population. By implementing Max, Maryville University will continue to meet and exceed the needs of its students and stay ahead of the curve. 

Automating tasks and workflows provides Maryville University Student Advisors with more time to spend one-on-one time with students instead of fielding repetitive questions. Ultimately, Maryville University’s focus on automation will ensure that the institution is recognized as an innovative leader in higher education.

“Capacity has enabled us at Maryville to implement the first digital human life coaches in the United States, and also to begin working with and serving students 24/7, 365 days a year,” said Dr. Mark Lombardi, PhD, president of Maryville University, in a statement.

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