Blog Archives

What is GDPR compliance?

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of standards that companies that handle data in the EU need to be compliant with. 25th of May 2018 is the date when these standards need to be met. After the 25th, companies that do not meet these standards of data privacy can be fined severely. Organizations involved in data processing of any sort need to be aware that the regulation addresses them directly in terms of the obligations it imposes. The GDPR emphasizes transparency, security and accountability by data controllers, while at the same time standardizing and strengthening the right of European citizens to data privacy.

Is my company GDPR complaint? How to check?

By reviewing your data policies. The most important things that you need to focus on are:

A) Reviewing data personal privacy rights
B) Learn about legal grounds of data processing
C) Change your consent request
D) Research child consent policies

Can I get help with this? What if I need assistance with getting GDPR compliance?

Of course. And Radix can help you with that. We help in two ways.
The first is consultation services. Our experts can help you revise your data handling policies and get them up to date with the standards required for GDPR.
The second is providing you with GDPR compliant solutions. Encrypted, safe and hosted in state of the art Swiss datacenters, these solutions are GDPR compliant and can help you with your data handling processes.

If you have any questions about GDPR compliance or our solutions, please contact us at info@radixcloud.com

We are very happy to announce that we will be a part of Job Fair – Skopje again this year!

Together with our internship program named Crowd Cloud Camp we will be at stands 6 and 7 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology on the 4th and 5th of April. People of our staff, as well as some of the interns that have been a part of Crowd Cloud Camp will be there to talk to you about the things that have been going on it CCC for the past year, opportunities for students as well as programs that we include in CCC.

We hope to see a lot of young minds of the Skopje area that, and we are looking forward to the new batch of brilliant minds that will be a part of Crowd Cloud Camp.

Starting a company involves many firsts. First customer, first invoice, first ad, and of course, your first website. Very often, creating your first website requires many hours of effort to get it just the way you want it, as well as knowledge of web design. Unfortunately, after this first initial phase, most companies stop paying attention to their website, even today. In today’s digital world, this can reflect very badly on your business and as a result, you could lose sales, you won’t be able to have any brand visibility etc. Here are 5 reasons why maintaining your website and your web presence are important:

1. Your site is your window on your business

Everybody enjoys window shopping, and a website provides people with the ability to window shop any type of business. They can get an idea about your services or products and also learn more about your company and your team. It is important that they get to see the most up to date view of your company, otherwise they will get the wrong idea about what you are able to do. Regularly updating your site and keeping it active will ensure that people have an up to date view on your business and that you are still active. Customers today make informed choices, and your maintaining your website can enable them to be informed about your services or products.

2. Stay ahead of your competitors

If you aren’t keeping your website up to date, then it is very likely that your competitors are. If they are not, then you have a huge opportunity to take advantage of. People want to see modern webpages that have current and up to date information. If they see an older site that hasn’t been updated in many years, they will not stay on that page. They will simply visit the next one in the list and if they have an up to date page, they will stay there. It’s not just the information you present, it’s the way you present it that matters.

3. Stay Relevant on Search Engines

Search engines like to present new information. If there are 5 different sites that are promoting the same type of product, but only one has updated their website, this one will be presented before the others. Maintaining a blog on your website or regularly updating your products and product descriptions can go a long way to ensure that your pages stay relevant on search engines. Adding new features will also enable you to stay more relevant.

4. Stay in touch with your community

Your website can provide you a lot of information about who is visiting and how they came to your site. This information can help you find new leads and new places to advertise. Regularly updating your website will ensure that people continue to visit your site, and also share your site with other interested people. The information you can gather from these visits can be a very important tool for your marketing and sales team.

5. Stay Active

An active website lets people know that your company is open for business and available to support the needs of their customers. Updating the look and feel of your website with the new trends, maintaining the information and articles, and posting to your blog and social media outlets also ensures that your company looks professional and knowledgeable in the space that you are working in. Companies that do not maintain an active website look old and not in touch with their customer base. Keep an active website and grow your customer base. This is also very important with the previous point- staying in touch with your community.

Maintaining your website is essential to businesses today, especially now that most people do their product research on their mobile devices. If your site isn’t ready for today’s user requirements, or not cater to their desired user experience – you will most likely lose business.

We are very happy to announce that the website for оur latest joint venture with our partner VisualGest called RadixVisualGest or RVG is finally up and running!

RVG combines the best of both worlds, Radix’s development, mobile and web services, as well as the next generation ERP system of VisualGest.

This partnership is based on our mutual experience of providing services to clients in a truly global model. Both companies have a history of providing premium services to companies of all sizes, services that are uniquely created to optimize their business processes. So with that in mind, we have ventured together to combine a unique ERP system along with the best in support and development, striving to create solutions that will bring companies closer to their customers, suppliers and markets.

For more details, visit RVG.

And stay tuned for more news!

Recently, we discussed the challenges that we saw in 2016 and how we saw Cloud evolve from 2015 to 2016. We thought it would be a good idea to discuss how we will be dealing with the challenges of 2016 and what we hope to see as trends in 2017.

1. Train and Reinforce Expertise
   
   

A lot of companies have invested in very advanced and complex Cloud solutions, but are only using a small fraction of the features. The base solution is typically very easy to start using, but the advanced solutions require some expertise in the solutions. In addition, it is often quite complicated to migrate your data onto the new solution. But having all your companies’ data available is extremely beneficial. Finding the right partner, with the right expertise, will be very important in 2017 to ensure that you get the most out of your investment.

As the Cloud gains even more momentum in 2017, companies will not only look to improve their ROI from using the Cloud solutions, but they will also look to taking complete advantage of the Cloud solutions that they have adopted. This is exactly why Cloud experts will become a much more important part of the IT industry in 2017.

2. Redefine our Monitoring and CMDB

Your operations team needs a new way to be able to manage Service Levels and also keep track of IT resources. Any ITIL based organisation is dealing with a lot of issues related to the business using Cloud solutions. Ensuring that you have the right monitoring solutions, and also the right CMDB solution integrated with the different providers you are working will be key for operations.

3. Build DevOps

DevOps has been considered a tool for companies that Develop applications. But it is also a very advanced tool for the operations team. In fact, most operations teams will get more use out of DevOps tools than Development teams will. As companies get more used to the new Cloud based solutions they have started using, they will start having new demands that will be fulfilled by DevOps tools. If you have never researched DevOps, start now to ensure you can keep up with the business.

4. Update Compliance

If you have not updated your compliance documents, this year is the year to do it. There are so many different types of Cloud solutions available on the market today, that basic compliance requirements based on the Cloud of 2010 will simply keep your company in the past. Updating your documents to ensure that the different divisions in your company can take advantage of the tools built for them will be key for businesses that want to maintain agility.

5. Pricing Analysis

For many companies, the price of their first Cloud solution was not the most critical challenge. They were concerned about security, compliance, just basically if it will work at all. Now that they have moved into the Cloud and see that it works, they are ready to start looking at the cost of the tools they are using. Preparing a pricing analysis tool that will allow the business to easily compare price to features will be an important tool in many projects. As Cloud providers compete to offer the best in solutions, pricing will become a key factor in choosing the right solution.

2017 will be a year where companies build more control around their Cloud solutions, and refine their selection process. As companies become more comfortable with their data on the Cloud, and how they can move data to the Cloud, DevOps will have a much more important role in the enterprise. Advanced DevOps allow data to be move from one service to another, allowing you to ensure you are getting the best price while ensuring compliance of company rules. This will be the cornerstone of IT Operations and many companies will expand the role of DevOps in their companies to meet the challenges of the future.

Cloud Computing continued to grow rapidly in 2016. As we can see here from Synergy Research, the Cloud market is growing at 25% annually. As a company operating in the Cloud market, we definitely saw a lot of new requests for migrations and new Cloud services in 2016. We also saw the services provided by our partners and suppliers increase significantly, making it a lot easier to move companies to Cloud services and provide all the features they need. As we already see from the market, 2017 will continue to grow and new service requests will continue to come in.

During 2015, we saw Cloud become an accepted solution in most enterprises, and in 2016, we saw most of our customers opt for Cloud solutions over classic delivery options. The following are the challenges that we saw our customers deal with the most:

1. Lack of Resources / Expertise

This is a problem that many companies have with Cloud solutions. Very often, we visit a company who has purchased and is using services on the Cloud, but they have not yet migrated their data into the new solution and they are not yet using all the features available to them. To be able to fully take advantage of these solutions, it is important to work with experts to be able to enable all features and integrate all your businesses data in the tool.

In 2016 we spent hundreds of hours migrating data of companies of all sizes to Cloud services that they have purchased, but did not have a full understanding of their use and features. This is why we provided a lot of consulting services as well.

2. Security and Compliance

The main issue with security that we have to do with ensuring that users are following the companies’ standard security practices for company data. Starting to use a Cloud solution can happen very quickly, often before anybody from IT has heard about it. Most users are not able to understand if what they are following company rules or not. It is important to have a process in place to manage these decisions and ensure that data is safe.

For the past couple of years we have developed several solutions to fit the latest security standards in the Cloud industry. One of them is Buncro a file sharing and collaboration platform that we have had great success with in the past year, providing it to clients that need to share their data, but still need premium security while doing so.

3. Managing Multiple Services

2016 saw many companies move to hybrid Cloud solutions. Very often, this meant using 2-3 public Cloud providers in addition to your private Cloud infrastructure. However, your users still come to you to ensure quality of service and performance. Suddenly, your team is expected to be monitoring infrastructure in multiple locations, global public networks, application performance on VM’s you didn’t create, and in addition control IT costs. Service management has a new level of complexity and must be reigned in.

Many of these challenges are quite new for company IT groups. In the past, IT was able to keep very close control over these topics and ensure that nothing happened without them knowing about it. The new service offerings make it a lot more difficult to be able to manage IT in the same way. 2016 has been a year where Business managers are taking advantage of Cloud services, and IT managers are starting to work and manage these new environments driven by business instead of IT.

Some time ago, we had a request from one of our clients to compile a list of all scheduled reports in their Cognos 10 environment. They had over 2000 schedules which were not maintained, so a lot of the recipients were no longer valid, some schedules needed to be stopped, etc. One way to check the recipients list in the scheduled report is to open the schedule for the specific report and check the To, CC and BCC fields. Given the sheer amount of the schedules, checking the schedules one by one was simply not an option.
What came to my mind was to compile this list from the Cognos Content Store. I started going through documentation, forums and discussions to figure out the needed database tables to construct a query. As it turned out, the Cognos Content Store is pretty much in the shadows when it comes to information about the data stored inside. I did find a lot of threads opened by people facing the same problem. It is not too hard to find a query which would generate a list of scheduled reports with their names rather than IDs, but the bottom line regarding the retrieving the recipients list on all of these places was pretty much the same. They all concluded that in order to retrieve the recipients list, you would need a third-party tool or check the schedules manually. As stated before, I could not check 2000+ schedules, and a third-party tool was a luxury I could not afford. So, I had to figure something out. After extensive digging, I came to the following finding:
Cognos Content Store has a neat table CMOBJPROPS26, and that table has a column DELIVOPTIONS. This column in massive in size, since it contains all kinds of data. When it comes to reports, it contains prompts, delivery formats AND the recipients, if any. Based on a query for the scheduled reports I found, I constructed the following one:
select ob2.cmid, c.name as className, n.name as objectName,
o.DELIVOPTIONS as DeliveryOptions
from CMOBJPROPS2 p
inner join CMOBJPROPS26 o on p.cmid=o.cmid
inner join CMOBJECTS ob on ob.cmid=o.cmid
inner join CMOBJECTS ob2 on ob.pcmid=ob2.cmid
inner join CMOBJNAMES n on n.cmid=ob2.cmid
inner join CMCLASSES c on ob2.classid=c.classid
where ACTIVE = 1 order by objectName
You can export the output of this query to Excel. The DeliveryOptions column will contain a lot of useless information (at least for me in this given situation). To ease the search, I used the nice Find and Replace option to eliminate them, for example, Find burst; and Replace With blank space. Make sure that you put the semicolon in the Find field or you may end up losing some valuable data (for example, if some of the reports have burst in the name, if you do not use the semicolon, it will be deleted as well). In the most cases, the emails are contained in the tag <item xsi:type=”bus:addressSMTP”>RECIPIENT_EMAIL</item>. However, try to find them after you remove all the other data which are not related to the email address. You may even try to adapt the original query to try and narrow down the search, however, I would strongly recommend to use it as is, and spend a bit more time clearing the Excel, rather than risking an entry loss.
If you have any additional questions regarding this, please contact me, and I’ll be happy to reply.
Jana Georgievska
DBA

We are extremely excited to show you the picture below, which has all the necessary info for you to be become a part of our RadixCloud Lead Generation Apprentice Program!

People from Macedonia, feel free to send us your CV!

Our very own Ivan Jankuloski has been ranked second in the Cisco Networking Academy NetRiders Europe, Russian Federation and CIS 2016 CCNA Competition, that was held on 30th of June. In this competition, competitors were engaged in a 100 question – 60 minutes theoretical exam, as well as a practical part which evolved troubleshooting and resolving real networking issues.

By ranking in the top two, Ivan has won a free study trip to Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, CA, where he will learn about Cisco technology from the top experts in the field. We are very happy that he is a part of team Radix. Ivan has been with us for less than 4 months, and he’s already becoming a very valuable member in our team. Here at Radix we always strive to hire the brightest and most hard-working young minds, and Ivan fits this profile perfectly. A young man that has a degree in radiology as well as being a very educated sys-admin. We look forward to have him share the knowledge he will acquire at Cisco HQ.

Official rankings of the competition here.

A picture of a very stoked Ivan Jankuloski below.