Alibaba has announced that is going to undertake a restructuring of the company, with the aim of better adapting to a constantly changing and evolving environment. The process will end with the division of the company into six different companies or business groupseach with its own structure, to adopt a holding company structure.

Each of the CEOs of the six spin-off entities will report their plans and progress to a board of directors, and will take full responsibility for the performance of the company they oversee. The decision, which the company has described as the largest restructuring of the company’s governance in its history, “will empower all divisions to become more agile, improve decision making and get faster responses to market changes“, according to him Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang.

Furthermore, Zhang has also stressed that “the market is the best definitive test, and each business group and company will be able to independently seek financing, and go public when they are ready«. This means that the reorganization means doing away with the corporate structure that Alibaba has used for years, based on a “middle platform” in which different divisions share middle managers and administrative and management positions, which they reuse in different departments, what is done for data and business purposes.

From now on, these positions will occupy different positions in the different companies into which Alibaba will be divided, and the parent company will only retain the positions necessary to comply with the obligations of listed companies. As divisions become more independent, resources will become compartmentalized, almost certainly leading to redundancies. However, this need not lead to redundancies, as some departments will need to increase their staff as they evolve.

The new structure implies that the staff and managers of each independent subsidiary company will have a greater incentive with their respective stock option plans. In addition, it will offer flexibility to Alibaba companies to go public in different jurisdictions, whose approval processes can vary greatly between them.

The six subsidiary companies into which Alibaba will be divided are as follows: Cloud Intelligence Group (dedicated to cloud computing, its CEO will be Daniel Zhang himself), Taobao Tmall Commerce Group (local retail businesses), Local Services Group (on-demand businesses, such as food delivery), Cainiao Smart Logistics (Logistics), Global Digital Commerce Group (overseas retail businesses, including Lazada), and Digital Media and Entertainment Group (video streaming and the like).

Users of electronic devices handle a huge and varied amount of data on a daily basis -files, photos, video, music, games, etc.- that must be easily accessible and properly maintained to avoid negative consequences, should these data is affected by any of the many risks to which they are exposed. These consequences generate great frustration for private users and their implications in the business environment can even impact operations and revenue generation.

Toshiba recalls that, despite this and as different studies show, still today the majority of people do not back up their data on a regular basis and, what is even more worrying, a large proportion of the population never backs up security, leaving them exposed to the threat of data loss.

On World Backup Day, which is celebrated every March 31, Toshiba advocates for a 3-2-1 backup strategy. The 3-2-1 rule consists of making three backup copies of the data, on two different storage media, and hosting one of the copies off-site, generally in the cloud. This approach is also the one promoted by the organizers of this day, which gains weight year after year and whose objective is to make individuals and companies aware of the importance of backup copies and to promote the adoption of this practice on a regular basis.

Reasons for regular backup

Raising awareness about the reasons for adopting the practice of regularly backing up data is a priority for Toshiba. Among these reasons is the fact that electronic products, including laptops, smartphones and tablets, are a target for criminals and can be stolen, along with the data stored on them. And, in addition to running the risk of being stolen, these devices can also be accidentally misplaced.

An additional reason is found in the proliferation of malware. According to Statista figures, the number of malware attacks continues to rise, approaching 6 billion a year.

On the other hand, electronic devices, especially at the end of their useful life, can fail. And don’t forget human error either, which remains one of the causes of data loss given the ease with which saved files can be mistakenly deleted.

Formulate a backup strategy

Although there is no single formula for backing up, there are several factors that must be considered before determining the regularity of backups, the most appropriate storage methods, and where to locate storage resources.

As for the type of storage, although users turn to USB flash drives for their portability and convenience, external hard drives (HDD) are a more robust option, with higher capacity and faster operation. Budget, performance, capacity, interoperability, and security will affect HDD selection, as will aesthetics and form factor.

It should be noted that if the user chooses a solution with the automatic backup configuration function, he will not have to worry about performing them himself. After configuring how often files/folders should be backed up, it will be done automatically.

Helpful backup tips

As Toshiba shows in this video, there are several ways to maximize your backup strategy, starting with determine your frequency. Thus, for creatives continually adding new materials to their storage pools, and for consultants dealing with business-critical information, frequent backups are a must: a backup every few days, or at least once a week. . For students doing research projects or papers to deliver, it is also important to make periodic copies so as not to risk losing the result of many hours of work.

After establishing the regularity, it is necessary to keep backup scheme fixed. Often people mean well, but after a while they abandon the scheduled backup schedule. It is also recommended perform incremental backups between primary backups. In this type of backup, only the changes made to the data since the last full backup are saved; which speeds up and simplifies the process.

Together with the definition of a backup strategy, it is also necessary to think about data recovery Since, in the event of an incident, it will be essential to know how to restore them. This should be taken into account before and not after the data loss has occurred.

It is also very important to be aware that having all the data in one place will make it very vulnerable. In the event of a fire, flood, or theft, even if data has been duplicated and stored on two different devices, both could be lost at the same time. For this reason, Toshiba is a great supporter of the 3-2-1 backup strategy and considers it vital to have a third backup in a different location. This will require storing the data, in addition to the cloud, on an external hard drive, such as the Advance model of Toshiba’s Canvio family.

Finally, Toshiba reminds that, before carrying out a full backup, it is prudent perform a cleanup of stored data. Documents and applications that are no longer relevant should be removed, as well as temporary files and cookies, which will only take up space unnecessarily. This practice will speed up backup procedures and allow storage capacity to be available for future needs.

The technological company of Spanish origin Orizon, makes advances to guarantee the technological performance of large companies which it serves. So much so that it has recently presented the second generation of its BOA platform with which it intends that its start-up and full performance be available in the third quarter of the current year.

Orizon has made it known that the changes and updates that they have carried out, and that they will have in a short space of time, will make the new BOA 2 a benchmark in the market placing it in a strategic point.

As extracted from the Orizon statement, the new edition of BOA, engine of the Orizon Performance Operation Center (PoC), “constantly monitors the behavior of the software of large organizations from different perspectives and from the dynamic concept, that is, while running, as opposed to the classical concept of static quality. And so during its operation, the solution detects problems and inefficiencies of, for example, availability, response times, infrastructure consumption or ANS compliance, and proposes actions to take advantage of improvement opportunities.

BOA 2 in the cloud environment

With an investment that the company estimates to be around 1.8 million euros, the Spanish company intends to focus and provide services in the cloud environment. With BOA 2, companies will also have backup in the cloud, with a exhaustive and real-time monitoring of the behavior of your applications, platforms and infrastructures found in these ecosystems. Orizon had previously focused on mainframe systems, batch processes and other on-promise environments.

In the words of Orizon’s CEO, Ángel Pineda, “the growing complexity of infrastructures, especially with the expansion of cloud and hybrid environments, has meant a disaster in terms of costs for many companies urgently seeking how to manage the performance of their technology in the current frameworkbut ensuring at the same time the quality of the service and cost control”.

The new update It will have a series of technical components which, thanks to its ability to analyze from the source, puts it ahead of other tools that only detect errors but do not provide solutions. These components to which they allude are the data capture model, the algorithmic capacity to order information, analyze behavior, detect and solve problems, and the learning capacity of the solution.

concept date lake

Regarding the data capture model, the company specifies that it is based on the concept of ‘data lake’ or data lake, which will achieve extract, store and process large volumes of data without any limits by size or origin and thus be able to order, analyze and correlate them to allow the greatest technological performance of large companies.

But how are these functions performed? For this, they use a series of their own algorithms for information processing, on the one hand Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as a storage repository and on the other hand Amazon EKS for the execution of kubernetes. The orientation of BOA 2 offers maximum usability, it is very cost effective for customers and gives levels of productivity since it can process large volumes of information in a very short time.

algorithms

The role of algorithms is very relevant, and it is that thanks to the use made of them, 80% of the platform’s functionality is fully automated. According to Orizon itself, these algorithms will allow ordering and correlating information, solving incidents and problems by analyzing the behavior of software from different perspectives and also its constant capacity for learning and evolution that will allow BOA 2 to make recommendations in advance.

From Orizon they affirm that constant measurement will be the key to continuous optimization, which is why BOA 2 will offer more than 150 KPIs (key performance indicators) aligned with the priorities that each company has.