Skinny-shaming

 Is it unfair to say that skinny-shaming cannot be deeply hurting and demoralizing, causing the self-esteem of its victims to be abased? Who says this form of discrimination can’t affect its targets as much as fat-shaming does? Since documentation for this group of people is very sparse, you cannot measure the magnitude of their predicament. But with people, in today's world, becoming more alive to other discriminatory practices, such as against individuals for their sexual orientation or for just being simply ‘different,’ other forms of ‘subtle’ social exclusion could also be taken note of in the future.

Israel & Iran cyberwar spills over to impact civilian lives

 A cyberwar broke out between Israel and Iran, beginning April 2020. It is now threatening to affect the lives of civilians in these two countries, besides in the US and other nations. Before the situation gets out of hand, let’s see how it can be mitigated and brought under control.

How cyberwars began affecting civilian lives

It all began in April 2020 when an Israeli water pumping station’s systems were compromised as a result of a cyberattack, leading to the breakdown of individual pumps. The source of this attack was traced to Iran. In what was said to be an act of retaliation, weeks after this incident, Israel-based hackers attacked a port in Iran, giving rise to the first-ever state-sponsored cyber war, wired.com quotes Lotem Finkelstein, a director of Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity company, as saying.

This was the flashpoint for a new trend of cyber warfare where infrastructure was targeted, disrupting the daily lives of millions of people in these two Middle Eastern nations. It intensified further this year when a team of hackers, belonging to Black Shadow, allegedly backed by Iran, made public intimate details of around a million users of the widely used Israeli LGBTQ app, Atraf, according to France24.com. Meanwhile, on October 26, 201, Iran’s 4,300 gas stations were affected due to a reported cyberattack. The Asian nation blamed the US and Israel for this violation.  

Earlier, on July 9 and 10, 2021, cybercriminals reportedly interrupted Iranian train services by posting bogus delay announcements on digital billboards that read “Long delays due to cyber attacks. More information: 64411.” The phone number is said to be of the office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader.

The hack attacks targeted Iranian infrastructure across the board, taking into consideration the targets. They reportedly were carried out by actors, with the apparent backing of certain nations, as well as by nonaligned and loose cyber attacking units. The intent has, however, been unequivocally the same, causing turmoil and disorder that adversely impacted the ordinary citizens and business houses in this dysfunctional and autocratic Islamic nation.

Hack attacks affect the US and Australia

On the other hand, the United States has also been bearing the brunt of cyberattacks. It warned Iran for attempting to hack the computers of the world’s richest nation’s crucial infrastructure networks, including hospitals and voter registration systems.   

Stating that diplomacy has been better between nations in the Middle East, Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, is of the view that different nations are showcasing their capabilities in an attempt to create a new kind of power balance in this region.

But Iranian cybercriminals are said to be involved in nefarious activities in various Western nations. The IT security officials of the US, the UK, and Australia, on November 17, stated that state-backed hackers have upped their activities against healthcare and transport organizations in the US and Australia since March 2021.

What measures should the governments take to protect their cyberspaces?

Before things spiral out of control for all the people who are at the risk of getting affected, it is incumbent that Western countries, like the US and the UK, should act sagaciously and save the world from further misery. They should have in place regulations by engaging with non-state actors and taking forward with all earnest diplomatic proposals with Iran.

The need of the hour for the governments is to equip themselves with strong cybersecurity defense systems so that they can continue to deliver essential services to their citizens round-the-clock seamlessly. These mechanisms will ensure that cybercriminals, wherever they are operating from, are given no iota of a chance to target technology that supports the delivery of such services.

They could begin by deploying penetration testing services, armed with the advanced tools and technologies, that circumvent the security of the corporate networks having state-of-the-art security controls. These should be in line with industry standards and must be able to comply with several regulatory requirements including PCI DSS 11.3. Penetration testing of such types will be then in a position to detect threats, which hold certain IT systems and applications to ransom, that allow hackers to access confidential information.  

How will short videos help develop your business?

Video marketing is being increasingly viewed by businesses across the world as a popular tool for digital marketing owing to various factors.

·        Recording videos have become inexpensive these days, thanks to smartphones.

By infusing creativity, you can make short videos that engage audiences whom you wish to target, enabling easier conversion of them into your customers.   

Let’s see what the other reasons are that go into making video marketing a powerful online marketing tool. 

A video, obviously, conveys more to an audience than written words as it allows you to visually showcase your products or services to your prospective customers.

Besides helping in business promotion, this powerful marketing medium can also be used to educate and update your customers about your new products/services on websites, as well as on social media channels.    

Video marketing has now become an essential ingredient of digital marketing services for businesses of all types, with a joint study by Vidyard, a video marketing company, and Demand Metric, an Agile Marketing Software platform, stating in 2020, that 83% of all vendors and sellers held the view that videos had become more crucial than before to their marketing efforts. Other surveys suggest that videos have helped increase the traffic to websites of businesses by over 50% and their sales by more than 33%.

In addition, videos give businesses the advantage of engaging with audiences much more easily across multiple mediums, aiding them in converting and retaining new customers more successfully.

Post-Covid, more people are making decisions on buying while staying at home. But they have to see for themselves how effective a product/service of a company is. This is where video marketing plays a critical role in sales. 

It is also a fact that video marketing helps increase the rankings of business houses on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yandex, among others. So, if a company uses better search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, alongside video marketing, it will most definitely profit by increasing traffic to its site and expanding its customer base.        

How blockchains help the mining industry adhere to ESG standards?

Most mining companies are guilty of not adhering to environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, which are principles that mandate them to be environmentally friendly and fair in their dealings with their employees, partners, clients in the locations where they function. 

These companies must adhere to these standards because they determine their social credibility rankings during the process of producing a mineral. If they are high, they will, in turn, encourage investments from venture capitalists and others through various instruments like mutual funds. In addition, they also play a key role in exhibiting to governments all over the world and civil society how responsible these firms are being to the planet Earth by implementing sustainable growth strategies.

Though some mining companies are striving to be socially responsible, they are facing hurdles, especially due to supply chain issues, causing them to view their value chains in a manner that is not very transparent. This is largely due to the fact that it is unviable for them to put in place tracking mechanisms. 

From time immemorial, mining companies have been not able to keep track of their sellers and sources of minerals. Moreover, if they want to gain ESG compliance, the process involved is tedious and, at times, too expensive.

But such issues cannot be an excuse for these companies to overlook ESG compliance. They have to show themselves as ethical and respectful of citizens’ rights in their supply chain management in order to achieve enduring success and to be deemed trustworthy.  

With the mining industry worldwide becoming aware of the importance of complying with the improved ESG standards, transparency in reporting here may soon become the norm. Besides, it would help companies in this sector to move ahead by cutting costs significantly and improving productivity, leading them to benefit immensely. To achieve wholesome success, it is, thus, necessary for mining companies to invest money and resources in the supply chain.   

ESG compliance in the mining industry will also ensure that all minerals will henceforth be priced as per the carbon emissions they release during their making. The least harmful of the minerals will then be priced higher than those that are not. Such a practice will enable companies to make only those products that are eco-friendly. 

Right now, climate change is a major problem that has to be addressed. It is causing a lot of damage to our ecosystem and is leading to earthquakes, tornadoes, melting of ice cap mountains. In an upshot, it is disrupting our routine climate cycles. 

Climate change is /caused by emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and fluorinated gases. Among these, carbon dioxide emissions alone account for 81 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to the US EPA. Since the mining industry is one of the main GHG emissions contributors, it has to shoulder the responsibility of cutting them down significantly

The cause of carbon dioxide emissions can be both deliberate and inadvertent in most industries. They are inevitable when manufacturers use heating or cooling procedures, combustion equipment, vehicles, industrial discharges, etc. These emissions are classified as globally as Scope 1.

Falling under Scope 2 are GHG emissions occurring at the premises where generation of electricity, cooling or heating takes place. 

Scope 3 encompasses all emissions from sources that neither possessed nor directly under the control of the companies under question. 

How blockchains come to the rescue 

It has now been proven that blockchain plays a pivotal role in ensuring that ESG criteria are being met. If ESG data is connected to blockchain, it removes opacity from sustainable processes, moving companies to embrace best practices. 

This is because blockchains prosper in backdrops where many stakeholders with diverse and disparate interests operate, even though there may be challenges to their partnerships due to incompatible interests. 

As blockchains can gather data from diverse sources and databases, they can optimally be made use of across various reporting requirements of an industry. Moreover, this technology enables the data layer to be assigned with time and date and makes it resistant to interference.

Cryptography is used to connect all transactions taking place in blockchains. Owing to this, it is possible to establish the clear origin of data across the product life cycle to ensure clarity.

Using blockchain, companies have begun tracking minerals, like gold, diamonds, cobalt, etc., to certify that they are being made using ethical practices. So, during that process, there do not affect the interests of any human on the planet.

As blockchain technology advances, the logic that is inherently more complex can be inserted into transactions that can be recorded and verified. Then, by automating commercial logic where different parties are transacting, it is possible to finalize instantaneously transaction logic to facilitate any number of transactions. As any logic can be embedded into transactions, so can be sustainability data. Later on, the same rule can be used as a standard for transactions to be executed automatically. 

Associates in the network certify all blockchain transactions because they are recorded, allowing the data to be validated publicly. It can be determined how reliable data is by ascertaining the origins of the data documented on the blockchain. 

By using automation along with the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain will be able to come up with a completely trustworthy data source, without leaving any room for ambiguity.

Smartphones vs smartwatches

Since smartwatches are worn on our wrists, they need not be carried separately like smartphones. They have sensors, using which health readings (heart ratings or calories expended) can be recoded quite accurately. Its users can send or answer messages, play songs or get directions while travelling, etc.   

Despite all these features, they are not as wholesome as smartphones. For instance, you cannot check your emails, click photographs or browse Google for information on smartwatches. You can use them only as accessories for specific purposes. They, in fact, only complement smartphones.          

All About Incident Managements

 

What is incident management?

When important equipment of an organization is down, affecting its productivity drastically, it is an incident. What incident management does is address such situations effectively so that the affected party is back in business again. There are other kinds of sticky situations firms can find themselves in, and these IT disruptions can harm their operations and lead to their losses.

That is the reason incident management is extremely critical to the functioning of any organization across the world. If it is in place, a company can resolve glitches and, in the bargain, salvage the situation for itself and its customers.

It may be referred to by different organizations as call management, request management, or ticketing management.

What exactly is an incident?

A single event that causes one of the organization’s services to not perform as it should is known as an incident. If an incident is occurring repeatedly, ITSM tools that have the capability of using routine solutions are used to immediately fix them. Most companies give precedence to resolve incidents depending on how critical they are for their clients by determining how much it would affect them.

It is, therefore, not unusual that they get down to resolving high-priority incidents as quickly as it is possible for them. Similarly, less severe incidents are kept on hold until more serious ones are handled.

How does one  distinguish changes & problems from an incident?

While an incident impacts only one of the IT services of an organization, a change affects activities where the IT equipment of one or all departments has to be replaced. According to IT Service Management (ITSM), a problem entails frequent disruptions to an organization’s entire IT ecosystem. In such a scenario, the problem is registered in its ITSM tool, and a team commences to determine the core issue.

How is incident management related to ITIL?

As per the ITIL charter, in the stages of the Service Operation lifecycle, incident management is one of its components.  In the ITIL guidelines, it is one of the five lifecycle stages. The Service Operation agenda aims to use the solid best practices that are applied to shore up services for quick response.

Best practices for incident management

Mirat, with its longstanding experience in incident management, is one of the past masters in the incident management processes. Here, we will underline the most important ones.

Every organization must log all incidents in one tool, no matter what their criticality is and irrespective of what type of customer has launched a complaint. When it sticks to this thumb rule, the organization can keep tabs on each of its incidents so that it can hasten the fixing process. It would be better if the said organization works with fields that are regularized as per its systems. It could also automate updates of emails to reduce the time devoted.

All firms must ensure that there exist no mandatory fields lying unfilled. They should goad their partners to follow this procedure by filling out all mandatory fields very strictly. It helps them especially when they come out with reports and to resolve incidents as accurately as they can.

All organizations must ensure that they are keeping their categorizations healthily. They can eliminate categories and subcategories that certain of their customers may hardly use in their ITSM tools. It is better to use ‘Other’ options as sparsely as possible.

It is important to stick to a team that is abreast of all innovations in this field. They should make it compulsory for each of their customer service team members to adhere to the same troubleshooting processes from the moment they commence a process. It will help organizations to be certain that this organization’s service quality is consistent.

Organizations should use recognized solutions after they log incidents. They should register successful processes for incidents that recur.

The advantages of incident management

Here are some of the major advantages of using an incident management system.

It improves efficiency and, therefore, results in better outputs. When people handling the service desk stick to the tried and tested processes for tackling each incident, it leaves no room for ambiguity.  

When customers get incident management services that are intelligible and transparent, they are aware of what is transpiring as and when with the tickets raised by them.

Services provided through incident management software are guaranteed to be of quality. There is no way for your customer support executives to miss out on any tickets waiting for resolution in a mailbox. As the customer support staff has the capability of sorting out tickets depending on the level of cruciality of each one of them, the first priority is accorded to the most high-profile incidents, helping its customers to gain confidence about the reliability of its IT services.

When a company logs all incidents on its incident management platform, it acquires significant awareness through supervising and reporting.

It helps an organization honor all its service level agreements (SLAs) as the process of incident management procedures gives it more awareness about them. It allows it the opportunity to act where it is necessary.

Mirat’s core competence lies in offering top-quality IT incident management services. You can contact us if you want to use these services.

Basics to leveraging ITIL processes for an IT company

 

Basics to leveraging ITIL processes for an IT company

About ITIL

One of the most popular IT Service Management frameworks in the world, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides an organization the focus necessary and its employees a road map to promote professional change in its IT services, besides providing the makeover and maturity. With it, efficiency can be enhanced and successful service levels can be attained. A primary reason for ITIL's productivity is that it is vendor-neutral, ensures that best practices are followed and allows forming of a charter that can be easily comprehended by the management which intends to implement it. Axelos, born out of a collaboration between the British government and Capita Plc, is credited with developing the ITIL framework.

In the age of technology, technology and business are interdependent. In such a scenario, for an organization to be efficient and successful, its business goals and IT competencies must be progressive.

Relationship between ITIL and ITSM

ITIL is nothing but an existing framework of ITSM. Owing to this, the ITIL process ensures stability. While ITSM stands for what an organization must achieve, ITIL lays down the process to realize it.

ITIL lets organizations operating in the IT sector monitor, manage and provide technical services within. If implemented properly, the ITIL process assists in achieving productivity and also improves the satisfaction of the organization’s personnel.

The five stages of the ITIL V3 life cycle

The ITIL V3, which was initiated in 2011, has a lifecycle constituting 5 stages that are as follows,    

 ITIL Service Strategy

ITIL Service Design

ITIL Service Transition

ITIL Service Operation

ITIL Continual Service Improvement.

Service Strategy lays stress on identifying the strategy of an organization so that it can serve its customers well and describes the manner of achieving them. In this stage, the aim is to allow an organization to function tactically.

The focus of Service Design is to realize the Service Strategy by creating and developing new service offerings. It alternately improves the existing services of an organization.

Service Transition’s objective is to bring all its service offerings under one umbrella and to make sure they are examined before being incorporated. It also evaluates the quality of a service or a product before it is up and running.

Service Operation’s thrust is to ensure that solid best practices are being put in place to aid responsive services. Included in this stage are an organization’s incident management and its customer service offerings.

It is the mandate of Continual Service Improvement to improve the capability and productivity of the IT processes and services of an organization. This final stage of the lifecycle constantly ensures that the other four stages are enhanced.

Six rules for deploying ITIL successfully

The six strategies for successfully implementing the ITIL process are as follows.

a)    Modify certain ITIL processes wherever required

b)    Educating an organization’s personnel on ITIL procedures

c)    In addition to IT practices, deploy as per processes

d)    Encouraging change

e)    Hiring the team for a project

f)     Elaborate the ambit of the complete project

An organization’s IT employees need to be given proper training in ITIL tenets and procedures so that they understand clearly their roles and responsibilities in implementing the processes. This will improve their capabilities and productivity, satisfy customers of the organization and improve its ROI. Before this is done, an organization should identify areas where improvements are needed and begin to deploy ITIL only for the processes in those specific areas.

Although many vendors in the marketplace vie to offer software packages that comprise ITIL, they would not be applicable to all organizations. Each organization’s ITIL requirements would be unique.  It is, therefore, essential for each company to customize implementation as per its IT processes.

While deploying the ITIL framework, an organization would need to transform the methods, functions and responsibilities of its workforce. The staff should be given sufficient motivation to embrace change proactively and tweak their work responsibilities accordingly.

No matter how effective certain processes are, they are dependent on the people who carry them out. It is necessary, therefore, to hire people who are convinced about ITIL.

After analyzing the hurdles in the IT processes, an organization should strive to resolve them. It needs to assess the hardware and software requirements needed to implement the ITIL processes by coming up with a budget to implement them.

Using ITSM software to transform an organization’s service desk  

Bringing about a major change in the customer service desk of an organization can be made a reality by embracing cloud technology and developing the capability to develop software that is centralized for its customer service department.

It should incorporate incident management to keep tabs on requests from customers, to automatically allot tickets to an expert in that area and the progress achieved here should be shared via automated emails throughout the organization.

It is crucial for the organization that is implementing the ITIL initiatives to identify who is using what assets and which of them need to be replaced.

Finally, the organization needs to place a request, go to the drawing board and assess properly the entire workflow within it.

Mirat follows all the mentioned ITIL processes to the T. If your company requires help in its implementation, don’t hesitate to contact it.