Tag: Obsidian Systems

With cyber threats rising and compliance standards tightening, organisations face growing pressure to revisit their data protection strategies. The era of treating backups as a box-ticking exercise is over. Backups only matter if you can recover fast and reliably. Resilience today must include both backup and recovery. Whether you are a bank, retailer or healthcare provider, you must assume that one day your systems will fail.

At the end of March, a critical security breach was discovered within the upstream source code of XZ Utils, a collection of open-source tools and libraries for the XZ compression format. The breach affected versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 and spanned nearly three years. The potential disastrous implications of this breach, and any other, underscore the importance of continued vigilance in patching all software used in a business environment.

The normalisation of a distributed workforce has seen some companies fall short when it comes to maintaining effective communications with their employees. Engagement between workers was always taken for granted in traditional office environments.

Cloud-native technologies have become fundamental in helping enterprises drive innovation faster than before. The likes of Kubernetes, Docker, and serverless functions are the central building blocks when it comes to how applications are created and deployed, regardless of whether it is for a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment.

Obsidian Systems was approached by a leading South African healthcare solutions provider to optimise its customer complaints system that was wholly reliant on email which resulted in service delays and a negative end user experience.

Technology has permeated all facets of business. Today, it has become less about the bits and bytes and more about unlocking the efficiency of processes, improving the customer experience, and better understanding data to deliver on the company strategy.

With the range of digital communication channels now available, the question of whether or not e-mail will become obsolete is relevant – but ICT and digital professionals believe that email will always continue to serve as a fast, simple, efficient and accurate means of communication.

This year, open source will become even more fundamental to the success of companies as they transition to fully-fledged digitally-led businesses. In the coming months, proprietary software will lose relevance as local organisations start embracing the likes of the cloud and containers to deliver value and capitalise on growth opportunities.