IPI SOLUTIONS NIGERIA LIMITED

Job Title: WEB DEVELOPER                                                    

closing date: Friday 28th of June, 2019

Location: Surulere, Lagos State.

Job Summary:  We require an outstanding Web Developer responsible for designing, coding and modifying websites, from layout to function and deep understanding of WordPress, WHM and WHMCS.

Core Competences

Database

• Understands complex database concepts as well as the implications of different database designs.
• Effectively employs many different database design techniques.
• Possesses demonstrated work experience with more than one relational database management system.

Programming Languages

• Demonstrates expert knowledge of .net
• Creates XML schemas.
• Good knowledge of HTML, CSS, C- Sharp, PHP, and ASP.Net.
• Understands the benefits of the various programming languages.

Architecture

• Possesses significant knowledge of the Company server and Internet systems architectures.
• Creates well designed, reusable objects.
• Understands browser specific compatibility issues.
• Understands the benefits of the various design methodologies and object oriented environments.

Qualifications

• A good degree in a relevant field.
• 1-3 years of proven experience in Web Development.
• Must have deep understanding of WordPress, WHM and WHMCS.

Skills/Competencies:

• Good interpersonal skills
• highly motivated,
• well organized,
• detail-oriented,
• Must be creative and innovative, and possess good time management skill.
• Ability to multi-task, and work under minimal supervision
• Ability to work long hours to meet deadlines.

Interested candidates should forward their CV to careers@ipigroupng.com Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

At IPI SOLUTION NIG LTD, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are doing this by building an intelligent cloud, reinventing productivity and business processes and making computing more personal. In all of this, we will maintain the timeless value of privacy and preserve the ability for you to control your data.

This starts with making sure you get meaningful choices about how and why data is collected and used, and ensuring that you have the information you need to make the choices that are right for you across our products and services.

We are working to earn your trust every day by focusing on six key privacy principles:

• Control: We will put you in control of your privacy with easy-to-use tools and clear choices.
• Transparency: We will be transparent about data collection and use so you can make informed decisions.
• Security: We will protect the data you entrust to us through strong security and encryption.
• Strong legal protections: We will respect your local privacy laws and fight for legal protection of your privacy as a fundamental human right.
• No content-based targeting: We will not use your email, chat, files or other personal content to target ads to you.
• Benefits to you: When we do collect data, we will use it to benefit you and to make your experiences better.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise Edition delivers enterprise ERP capabilities within a single, cloud-based business application. Supply chain, financials, sales and purchase orders, inventory, production, and distribution processes are seamlessly connected all in one app. You gain the visibility and digital intelligence your organization needs to optimize operational efficiency, deliver outstanding customer experiences and accelerate growth.

Financial management

Create more efficient processes, deliver robust reporting and analytics, and ensure regulatory compliance across 34 countries, in 60 different languages.

• Decrease time to value and facilitate faster, more confident decisions using roll-based workspaces with embedded analytics
• Adapt to changing business requirements by tailoring chart of accounts, dimensions, and rules
• Provide checks and balances using process automation, encumbrance, budget planning, budget control, and three-way matching
• Efficiently track values and reduce reporting errors by automatically managing capitalized assets
• Meet public sector requirements for encumbrance and budgeting

Manufacturing

Bring agility and efficiency to your manufacturing by using an integrated solution that optimizes production planning, project management, operations and activity scheduling, and cost management.

• Create your ideal manufacturing mix and support your manufacturing processes throughout the supply chain
• Optimize manufacturing principles for each product family, including make to stock, make to order, pull to order, configure to order, and engineer to order
• Accelerate your manufacturing material and finished goods flow with advanced warehouse management, handheld scanner support, and transport management
• Optimize scheduling across the organization with a unified resource model and scheduling engine
• Improve product quality and output by identifying and resolving issues through real-time insights

Supply chain

Digitally transform your supply chain with advanced warehouse and inventory management to optimize visibility and fulfillment, product insights, material sourcing, and integrated logistics.

• Optimize fulfillment and reduce costs by synchronizing commerce across sites, warehouses, and transportation modes
• Enable faster response to customer demand by seamlessly orchestrating order-to-cash processes
• Streamline procurement costs and gain more control by automating procure-to-pay processes
• Get insight and control across all sites and warehouses
• Automate prospect-to-cash processes by integrating with Dynamics 365 for Sales

Cloud services

Get real-time information on almost any device. Simplify and accelerate business process changes, seamlessly integrate with legacy systems, simplify global compliance, and scale elastically.

• Get flexible cloud and on-premises deployment options that comply with industry regulations and use datacenter investments
• Enable rapid business transformation
• Cost-effectively support your IT needs
• Grow at your own pace

Add prebuilt, customizable, applications

Do even more with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations using AppSource

• Enhance your ERP systems and processes by integrating add-on applications from Microsoft and our partners.
• Do more with your Dynamics 365 data. Easily create custom applications that connect with Dynamics 365 to solve your exact business needs—with little to no additional code development.

 

In July 2017, we released Microsoft 365 Education to do two critically important things: Improve the education experience for students and teachers, and avoid overburdening or over budgeting IT. Microsoft 365 Education combines the tools, capabilities and services that students, teachers, and IT teams need to be more effective and efficient – and it packages them together at an affordable cost.

Here’s more information you should know about Microsoft 365 Education:

• It includes Office 365 Education, Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS)
• Intune for Education, included as part of EMS, is designed specifically for devices management in schools
• Minecraft: Education Edition adds an immersive, learning experience in a game students love
• The student-use benefit saves schools money by providing student licenses at no additional cost when institutions purchase for faculty and staff

To better understand the value of Microsoft 365 Education, we commissioned a study conducted by Forrester Consulting to identify and measure the educational and financial outcomes realized by schools that adopt Microsoft 365 Education. I wanted to share some of the outcomes from that research that really got me inspired. These results show the impact Microsoft 365 Education has made on the students and teachers who used it.

Here’s what Forrester discovered, by the numbers:

84%: The amount of time saved when setting up classroom devices (this translates to about 2.5 hours per device),

216: The number of reclaimed hours per teacher, per year.

$51: The amount of money saved per student via the student-use benefit.

Forrester conducted interviews with school leaders, IT directors and educators across five school districts in and out of the U.S., each with their own set of unique challenges in meeting the demands of their districts. Four key themes emerged from the study. Forrester also included some of the quotes they collected from our customers during the interviews.

Improve student outcomes

“We have seen a 10% improvement across the board – test scores, competencies, and concurrent enrollment participation. And, it is only our second quarter using Microsoft 365.”

A 10% increase in test scores in under 180 days! Forrester’s research found that schools choose Microsoft 365 Education because they want to give students the modern tools they’ll need to be successful. Forrester found that Microsoft 365 Education enhanced student engagement, gave those students anywhere-access, and helped them develop 21^st century workplace skills.

Fuel classroom efficiencies

“Nothing replaces good teaching, and Microsoft 365 gives teachers the tools they need to be better at their jobs.”

In their research, Forrester identified that both teachers and students use Microsoft 365 Education to get more done in the classroom. For example, Microsoft 365 Education’s automation freed teachers from having to manage ongoing administrative tasks (thus giving them more time to develop personalized learning for their students).

Overall, these teachers reclaimed up to 216 hours of their time per year. With this much extra time, students and teachers were able to modify resources, assignments, and experiences to meet individual learning styles.

Accelerate educators’ goals

“We are providing more online courses and webinars for staff than ever before using Skype for Business. We also use Skype for Business for curriculum conference calls.”

Teachers used Microsoft 365 Education outside the classroom to enhance decision making, collaboration and professional development. They set up Teams to share knowledge and collaborate while keeping even the most remote members in the loop. They used Power BI to combine and visualize data for better problem solving. They remotely participated in teacher training to offset travel costs.

Save IT time and money

“There were no security events on student devices this year. In the past we had them every week. Technicians would have to re-image a machine or clean it up. Cleaning it could take several hours.”

According to Forrester, IT appreciated the time-saving and cost-reducing capabilities built into Microsoft 365 Education. For example, Microsoft 365 Education made it possible to reduce the need for infrastructure, simplify device set-up and management, provide students licenses at no additional cost, decrease integration challenges with built-in features, and meet stringent security and privacy requirements.

By moving to Microsoft’s secure data centers, IT could use the money saved on infrastructure maintenance to pursue higher value projects. These costs were also predictable thanks to low-cost SaaS fees. The comprehensive licenses were also incredibly helpful because they included device rights, management control, and security features which helped enhance IT efficiency at no additional cost.

Intune for Education was used to reduce the time it took to fully configure a device by 84 percent (or 2.5 hours per device), and those organizations that purchased licenses for all of their faculty and staff received student licenses at no additional cost (via the aforementioned student-use benefit), a savings of $51 per student per year.

Additionally, schools used the savings from the student-use benefit to buy more devices, helping improve their device-to-student ratios.

It is exciting to see the value Microsoft 365 Education can bring to schools, both inside the classroom and outside of it. If you have recently moved, or are planning to move, to Microsoft 365 Education, Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study is a helpful tool that provides you with a framework to evaluate the potential benefits and costs of adopting Microsoft 365 Education.

Efficient collaboration and communication are vital components in the success of every business. Office 365 makes it easier than ever to work smarter, not harder, so you can do your best work. With Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as well as other productivity apps, you can redefine how you communicate and collaborate.

Work Anytime, Anywhere

Capitalize on the evolving mobile workforce as your business grows. With the Office apps’ integration with Microsoft OneDrive for Business, you can access documents from anywhere, pick up where you left off on whatever device you were working on last, and even coauthor with others when you are on the go.

Synchronize Business

Stay on the same page with distant partners and offsite employees with cloud storage. Cloud storage synchronizes information across different devices with cloud storage so that you and your colleagues are always viewing the latest version of a file no matter where you’re working or what device you’re using.

Real-time Collaboration

Adopt Microsoft OneNote shared notebooks to provide a centralized place where your team can share all project information, including photos, videos, drawings, typed or handwritten notes, screen clippings, and web pages.

Social Connection

Respond more quickly to changing market conditions by supporting open communication – no matter where people work. Connect remote employees and enhance collaboration with Yammer, an enterprise-grade social network.

Simplify Meetings

Conduct meetings more efficiently and productively with Skype for Business. Skype for Business HD video calling, co-authoring, app sharing, and presentations allow the members of your team to actively participate in meetings from anywhere. Skype for Business IM also enables team members to initiate IM chats, share documents, or set up online meetings with just a click or two.

Valuable Insights

Use business intelligence tools that transform dense company data into easily digestible insights that help make informed decisions. Treemap and waterfall charts make it easier to visualize complex data, and they can be published directly to Microsoft Power BI from Excel. Power Pivot features can also help you map different data sets with drag-and-drop ease, and calculate hundreds of millions of rows of data with analysis functionality.

Contribute at the Same Time

Edit and contribute to documents at the same time as your team with real-time co-authoring. When you work together on a Word document, you will see everyone’s edits to text and formatting exactly when they are made. Use the version history to refer back to snapshots of the document throughout the editing process.

Cost Efficiency

Free up time and make the most of your IT budget with Office 365’s cloud-based delivery model reducing, infrastructure costs and eliminating the need for time-consuming implementation, licensing headaches, and software support.

Read more at: https://www.ipigroupng.com/microsoft-office365/

IoT opens a new era for secure, smart cold chain asset management

It used to be that the only solution available for you to monitor and manage your cold chain was for your freight technicians to toss a data logger in the center of each outbound pallet and hope for the best. The shipment was passed from the third-party logistics firm to distributors, to warehouses, past freight forwarders, onto last-mile distribution, and finally on to the pharmacy and patients. Your visibility was minimal while your exposure to drug waste or potential counterfeiting was high.

Microsoft and Wipro envisioned a better solution. One that that would help ensure the cold chain was maintained from production to delivery to customers. And one that would limit issues like counterfeiting.

We worked with a top 20 global pharmaceutical company to develop Titan Secure, a digital supply chain and anti-counterfeiting platform. The platform was built with Microsoft Azure Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. See the Titan Secure reference architecture below to learn more.

“Azure IoT technology enabled us to develop a real-time IoT solution that provided the alerts and analytics needed to maintain the cold chain and decrease counterfeiting costs for pharmaceutical customers,” explained Sujan Thanjavuru, Head of Life Sciences Strategy & Transformation, Wipro, Ltd. “We worked with our customer to customize the sensors and develop a user interface that made it easy for managers to understand the state of their pharma shipments in real time. The result was an easy-to-use dashboard that provided valuable insights.”

“Azure IoT brings greater efficiency and reliability to customer value chains with world-class IoT and location intelligence services,” added Tony Shakib, IoT Business Acceleration Leader, Microsoft Azure.

Imagine a future with reduced counterfeit

Fast forward: imagine you’ve implemented Titan Secure from Wipro. Now, your outbound freight technician slaps a small, flexible bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon sensor onto each box of medication, which is paired with the FDA and EMA-compliant serial number and barcode. The sensors measure temperature, humidity, shock, vibration, and tamper data. They generate geospatial alerts in real time in the event of a temperature excursion or potential counterfeiting attempts. The information is stored in and displayed from Azure. Data is transferred on the backend using Microsoft blockchain, but shipping operators don’t need to know what that means to use it. On an easy-to-use, interactive map and dashboard, technicians can easily track each individual box of your company’s product as it’s shipped from your outbound warehouse all the way to the pharmacy. Your managers receive an alert when a shipment is predicted to get too hot, so that you can call the third party and fix the problem before the shipment has to be destroyed. Once you notice tampering within one of your shipments, you’ll find out quickly what’s happened and how many boxes have been affected.

Manage your cold chain in real-time

What does this mean for your company? Wipro’s Thanjavuru explained, “Pharmaceutical companies can now digitally transform their cold chain management. They can monitor temperature and telemetry data through the entire product journey, view analytics and alerts within the Titan Secure dashboard for visibility including anti-counterfeiting support, and – with cloud connectivity – information about the shipment is available in near real-time.”

Simple sharing and seamless collaboration

Engage and inform your organization

Build cohesion and inform your employees throughout your intranet. Drive organizational efficiency by sharing common resources and applications on portals. Tell your story with beautiful communication sites. And stay in the know with personalized news in SharePoint home and the SharePoint mobile apps.

Harness collective knowledge

You’re just a click away from what you are looking for, with powerful search and intelligent ways to discover information, expertise, and insights to inform decisions and guide action. SharePoint’s rich content management, along with valuable connections and conversations surfaced in Yammer, enable your organization to maximize the velocity of knowledge.

Transform business processes

Accelerate productivity by transforming processes—from simple tasks like notifications and approvals to complex operational workflows. With SharePoint lists and libraries, Microsoft Flow, and PowerApps, you can create rich digital experiences with forms, workflows, and custom apps for every device.

The safety of students, faculty, and staff on campus or on school grounds has become a high priority in many countries. With a shocking number of crimes, arrests, and incidents reported every year, it is hard to ignore the need for a comprehensive system to keep everyone safe.

The effects

Our schools should be a place to teach and learn, free from crime and violence. But unfortunately, when incidents occur, it can have a lasting and sometimes permanent impact far beyond the shock of the initial moment. Not only are he individuals directly involved forever changed, but the effects can be felt by the bystanders, the teachers, and the school itself long after everyone else has moved on. The lasting effects of victimization vary. They can range from feelings of loneliness and depression, to an increase in truancy and a decrease in academic performance. Some students become violent or drop out of school altogether. Teachers can be deeply impacted by an incident, even if it didn’t directly happen to them. They can become professionally disenchanted with their jobs and some may leave the profession altogether. Like you, safety is one of Microsoft’s main concerns when it comes to education institutions. A well executed plan that helps mitigate violence and the affects of violence is the first and best place to focus.

Microsoft Partner Solutions support campus safety

Smart cameras

Smart cameras do more than just watch people or places. Using real-time video analytics, it is now possible to pinpoint specific faces, key in on
unwanted or suspicious behavior, and pay closer attention to relevant areas at relevant times, while ignoring the immaterial data.

Smart cameras can:

• Mix local intelligence with centralized data storage and analysis to deduce usage patterns.
• Use facial, emotion, gender, age, individual, and object recognition  to track attendance.
• Automatically recognize concerning behavior like fighting or a person lying on the ground using machine intelligence.

Access control

It has become more important than ever to be able to control and protect specific locations on campus. By integrating advanced security technologies with smart networking capabilities, you can now limit and monitor who has access to what, when. This ensures the right people have access to the right
spaces at the right times.

Access control can:

• Control access to buildings, dorms, labs, offices, and more without changing lock cores.
• Seamlessly integrate identity and credentials without major upgrades.
• Institute visitor management systems to help monitor and protect everyone on campus.

Emergencies

The ability to respond quickly and efficiently to an incident is much greater when security personnel receive all the information they need to act. When
seconds matter, this system was built to offer quick response times and easy-to-deploy emergency and
evacuation notifications.

Emergency systems can:

• Create alerts for a number of emergency and non-emergency situations that can be delivered rapidly to students, staff, faculty, and parents.
• Use geolocation to enable community members to check in, confirm they are safe, and pinpoint the exact location of a problem.
• Summon help just by tapping with GPS-connected panic buttons apps.
• Find the closest, most qualified person to respond to an incident with quick dispatch.

Anti-bullying

Bullying takes many forms. Non-physical forms
of bullying are some of the toughest to identify.
Bullying, no matter the form, has the power to leave
a victim feeling powerless. With the right programs,
students, parents, teachers, and staff can address or
even prevent bullying in their school.

Anti-bullying programs can:

• Monitoring student emails and other forms of communication by filtering for keywords related to bullying.
• Implement Digital Citizenship in Action tool kits in the classroom and make yourself more aware by reading the online bullying study commissioned by Microsoft.

Cloud-Native applications are apps that make full use of the benefits of the Cloud Computing revolution. These are the applications which are born and raised in Cloud as against their on-premise counterparts. The idea is to replace the capital investment & man-power required to run Enterprise data-center with limitless computing, on-demand & pay-as-you-go services provided by Cloud. With the changing market dynamics, one can gain competitive advantage by quickly bringing ideas to market using the cost-effective cloud-native approach.

To take good advantage of Cloud benefits, one needs to ensure that the application design is decoupled from a physical infrastructure. Also, the application should be segregated into services and tiers, and each one of them should be developed & run independently. Here are the key characteristics that define Cloud-Native Applications.

1. Multiple Services – Each application can further be broken down into services called Microservices. These services co-operate with each other although it appears to the end customer that they are accessing a single application.
2. Elasticity – The application and all its services should scale in-out & up-down in case the demand increases. This dynamically managed services ensure efficient usage of resources.
3. Resiliency – Services are resilient if they can survive outages and failures and remain online. Also, they can make good use of the automated fail over and Disaster recovery mechanisms available in Cloud.
4. Composability– Each service is designed in a way that it can be consumed by other applications. This is generally done through APIs which have well defined behaviors.

The reason why Cloud-Native application are beneficial sets in the following reasons:

1. Auto-Scalability: By using the micro-services, cloud-native applications can scale services independently and automatically. This happens automatically most of the time so one doesn’t need to manage them on a daily basis.
2. Speed of deployment: With the use of Continuous delivery and deployment, one get faster feedback and delivery resulting in faster shipping of applications..
3. Independence: Microservice architecture enables applications to be built independently of each other. They can be updated, managed and deployed individually.
4. Cost: : Applications that are built and run on the Cloud typically cost less because you pay only for what you use. Resources can be created and deleted on demand without leaving any overhead to manage them.

Outlined below are few steps in which Enterprises can get started with Cloud Adoption:

1. Change Management plan – The first step towards adopting Cloud would be to create a Change Management plan. Every change involves risk and so to mitigate the risks & migrate app smoothly without causing any bottlenecks, a detailed plan is a must.
2. Thorough testing – Once the plan is set, one may test a low-risk app selected from the app repository. Migrate the app and then carry-out a thorough testing. Once the test runs are successful, try the more riskier ones and then move them one at a time.
3. Marketing the Adoption strategy-The next step would be to market this adoption strategy to the internal team so that people are aware and ready for change. Create a training and implementation plan to help the team. Sharing best practices and engaging with the team also helps in developing a culture to adopt Cloud-native quickly.
4. Standardize the platform –The last step would be to standardize the platforms after gaining significant experience with the tools and platforms used for Cloud adoption. This ensures that only the platforms that works best for a specific organization are used. Thus, saving time taken in trying tools that don’t work.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is flexible, easy to use, and engineered to fit your business. The CRM marketing solution enables your team to plan, execute, and measure campaigns across channels, from start to finish. Transform every touchpoint into a marketing opportunity and harness the undiscovered potential within your customer base to market more effectively, improve productivity, and gain actionable insight into your marketing campaigns.

Drive Results

Integrate marketing planning, budgeting, and tracking across all channels, including email, digital, social, SMS, and traditional.

Manage projects, digital assets, workflows, and approval processes across your team and other departments and agencies all from a single platform.

Target Your Marketing Efforts

Use natural language queries to instantly segment customers or prospects. Create highly targeted lists and associate them with campaigns. Set up personal or public data for reuse.

Easily share target marketing lists with colleagues or vendors. Export lists into multiple formats for bulk email or direct mail communications.

Improve Lead Scoring

Capture and store responses and leads in one place for easy tracking and assignment. Score and assign responses using predefined algorithms. Instantly assign leads with full interaction history to the right sales person.

Track responses across communication channels, linking them to campaign and lead sources. Convert responses to leads and opportunities.

Automate Workflows

Boost productivity with personal, team, or organizational workflows. Send event-based marketing messages to customers, like happy birthday or anniversary messages.

Dynamically assign tasks to the right person using configurable rules. Accelerate approvals using predefined workflows. Set alerts and reminders of campaign milestone to inform appropriate people.

Mobility-Optimized Platform

Access and act on customer data from any type of device. Track budgets and push through approvals while on the road. Update or create campaigns on the fly.

Update, qualify, or assign leads while on the road. Analyze responses, leads, and campaign ROI with rich offline reporting.

Measure Pipeline and Revenue

Measure your marketing success with key performance indicators. Track key campaign indicators with built-in reports. Identify trends and allocate resources with powerful predictive analytics.

Proactively create offers with 360-degree customer views. Compare campaign effectiveness to future campaign decisions.

Benefits

• Engage customers with personalized, multichannel campaigns
• Increase sales-ready leads with advanced lead management and lead scoring
• Strengthen your marketing and sales synergies by providing sales teams with visibility into the marketing calendar and provide actionable input
• Connect with customers and prospects through embedded, contextual social tools
• Measure pipeline and revenue across every marketing investment to get a true view of your ROI

Mobile Backend as a Service (mBaaS) provides a way to connect the mobile apps with the cloud storage and data processing system. It enables plethora of backend capabilities to support highly-functional mobile apps. Microsoft’s Azure Mobile App Service – Azure mBaaS – is one of the leading mBaaS system that power the Enterprise Mobility Solutions. It consolidates enterprise Active directory, single sign-on, integration with databases, Push notifications, Social media integration as well as Offline-Sync features, all in ready to use stage. It adds necessary security layers to the mobile system. Azure mBaaS protects intellectual property and avoids exposure of business logic to mobile clients eliminating the hacking probabilities.

Here are the major advantages that Azure mBaaS as a system offers:

• Faster Time-to-Market: Minimizes the operations overhead and reduces difficulties in deploying the mobile applications on cloud
• Efficiency gains: Reduces the backend system development time & cost, and the maintenance cost as well.
• Handles growth & maintenance of Application: It brings-in single stack containing important and common 3rd party API resources eliminating the need to fetch them individually.
• Secure & Scalable: It provides infrastructure package that deals with security, performance, scalability, and other operational headaches.
• Optimized for Mobile devices and Tablets: Data and network optimization for mobile applications, and minimized fragmentation troubles across multiple devices and platforms.

Azure mBaaS driven Enterprise Mobility Solution for Real-time Supply Chain Visibility

A Leading UK’s Food Services Company deliver high-quality food items to customers of varied business like restaurants, cafes etc. To make the business process more efficient and intelligent, client wanted to automate the delivery process. The drivers would deliver food through mobile devices, which are connected to the IoT devices like Bluetooth printers and Bluetooth temperature sensors mounted in trucks. They wanted a mobile app that can communicate with these IoT devices and notify the drivers about the chiller & freezer temperatures of food items. The client’s main focus was on performance optimization since drivers would be delivering food items at multiple places at the same time and that the data sync should occur simultaneously for multiple devices.

A strong, powerful mobile backend system can solve these business challenges and serves as a critical component in the Enterprise Mobility solution. Azure Mobile App Service was leveraged as the backend system to enable offline behavior, security, cloud storage notifications and many other backend functionalities. Azure mBaaS helped in optimizing performance of mobile apps to help drivers in delivering food items at multiple places and at the same time. In addition, it also helped in synchronizing data simultaneously for multiple devices. Xamarin Mobile App framework was leveraged to develop the Windows and Android native mobile app. With the mBaaS driven Enterprise Mobility Solution, the food Services company managed to serve more than 30,000 customers and provided high-quality user experience.

A great SAP architecture on Azure starts with a solid foundation built on four pillars:

• Security
• Performance and scalability
• Availability and recoverability
• Efficiency and operations

Designing for security

Your SAP data is likely the treasure of your organization’s technical footprint. Therefore, you need to focus on securing access to your SAP architecture by way of secure authentication, protecting your application and data from network vulnerabilities, and maintaining data integrity through encryption methods.

SAP on Azure is delivered in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud model. This means security protections are built into the service by Microsoft at the physical datacenter, physical network, physical host level, and the hypervisor. Therefore, for those areas above the hypervisor (e.g. the guest operating system for SAP), you need to undertake a careful evaluation of the services and technologies you select to ensure you are providing the proper security controls for your architecture.

In terms of authentication, you can take advantage of Azure Active Directory(Azure AD) to enable single-sign-on (SSO) to your S/4HANA Fiori Launchpad. Azure AD can also be integrated with the SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) to provide single-sign-on to your SCP services which can also be run on Azure.

Network Security Groups (NSG) allow you to filter network traffic to and from resources in you virtual network. NSG rules can be defined to allow or deny access to your SAP services, for instance, allowing access to the SAP Application ports from on-premises IP addresses ranges and deny public Internet access.

With regards to data integrity, Azure Disk Encryption helps you encrypt your SAP virtual machine disks where both the operating system and data volumes can be encrypted at rest in storage. Azure Disk Encryption is integrated with Azure Key Vault which controls and manages your encryption keys. Many of our SAP customers choose Azure Disk Encryption for their operating system disks and transparent DBMS data encryption for their SAP database files. This approach secures the integrity of the operating system and ensures database backups are also encrypted.

To dig further into topics of interest in the security area, you can refer to our Azure Security documentation.

Designing for performance and scalability

Performance is a key driver for digitizing business processes, and having a performant SAP application is crucial for end users to work efficiently without frustration. Therefore, it is important to undertake a quality sizing exercise for your SAP deployment and to right-size your Azure components – compute, storage, and network.

SAP Note #1928533 details the SAPS value for Azure Virtual Machines supported to run SAP Applications, and within the links below you can attain the network and storage throughput per Azure VM type:

• Sizes for Windows Virtual Machines in Azure
• Sizes for Linux Virtual Machines in Azure

The agility of Azure allows you to scale your SAP system with ease, for example, increasing the compute capacity of the database server or horizontally scaling through the addition of application servers when demand arises. This includes temporarily beefing up the infrastructure to accelerate your SAP migration throughput and reduce the downtime.

We recommend you leverage virtual machine accelerators for your SAP application and database layers. Enable Accelerated Networking on your virtual machines to accelerate network performance. In scenarios where you will run your SAP database on M-Series virtual machines, consider enabling the Write Accelerator durable write cache on your database log volumes to improve write I/O latency. Write Accelerator is mandatory for productive SAP HANA workloads to ensure a low write latency (sub ms) to the /hana/log volume.

Use Premium Storage Managed Disks for the SAP database server to benefit from high-performance and low-latency I/O. Be mindful, that you may need build a RAID-0 stripe to aggregate IOPS and throughput to meet your application needs. In the case of SAP HANA workloads, we cover storage best practice within our documentation, “SAP HANA infrastructure configurations and operations on Azure.”

ExpressRoute or VPN facilitates connectivity for on-premises SAP end users and application interfaces connecting to your SAP applications in Azure. For production SAP applications in Azure, we recommend ExpressRoute for a private, dedicated connection which offers reliability, faster speed, lower latency, and tighter security. Be mindful of latency sensitive interfaces between SAP and non-SAP applications, you may need to define migration “move groups” where groups of SAP applications and non-SAP applications are landed on Azure together.

Designing for availability and recoverability

Operational stability and business continuity are crucial for mission critical, tier-1 SAP applications. Designing for availability ensures that SAP application uptime is secured in the event of localized software or hardware failures. In the case of productive SAP applications, we recommend the virtual machines which run the SAP single points of failure, such as the system central services A(SCS) and database are deployed in Availability Sets or Availability Zones, to protect against planned and unplanned maintenance events. This also applies to the SAP Application servers where a few smaller servers are recommended instead of one larger application server. Operating system cluster technologies such as Windows Failover cluster or Linux Pacemaker would be configured on the guest OS to ensure short failover times of the A(SCS) and DBMS. DBMS synchronous replication would be configured to ensure no loss of data.

Designing for recoverability means recovering from data loss, such as a logical error on the SAP database or from large scale disasters, or loss of a complete Azure region. When designing for recoverability, it is necessary to understand the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of your SAP Application. Azure Regional Pairs are recommended for disaster recovery which offer isolation and availability to hedge against the risks of natural or man disasters impacting a single region.

On the DBMS layer, asynchronous replication can be used to replicate your production data from your primary region to your disaster recovery region. On the SAP application layer, Azure-to-Azure Site Recovery can be used as part of an efficient, cost-conscious disaster recovery solution.

It is essential to carefully consider both availability and recoverability within the design of the SAP deployment architecture. This will protect your business from financial losses resulting in downtime and data loss.

Designing operations and efficiency

Your move to Azure also presents an opportunity to undertake an SAP system rationalization assessment. Do you need to move all SAP systems or can you decommission those which are no longer used? For example, Microsoft-IT decommissioned approximately 60 virtual machines as part of our SAP migration to Azure.

In terms of efficiency, focus on eliminating waste within your SAP on Azure deployment. Post go-live, review the sizing. Can you reduce the size of your virtual machine based on utilization? Can you drop disks which are not being used?

De-allocating or “snoozing” of virtual machines can bring you tremendous cost savings. For example, running your SAP Sandbox systems 10 hours x 5 days, instead of 24 hours x 7 days would reduce your costs by approximately 70 percent in a pay-as-you-go model. Where your SAP application needs to run 24 x 7 opt for Azure Reserved Instances to drive down your costs.

Establishing infrastructure manually for each SAP deployment can be tedious and error prone, often costing hours or days if multiple SAP installation are required. Therefore, to improve efficiency it makes sense to automate your SAP infrastructure deployment and software installation as much as possible. Embrace the DevOps paradigm using infrastructure-as-code to build new SAP environments as needed, such as in SAP project landscapes. Below, some links to give you a head start on automation.

 I feel it is critical that we all take a moment to look beyond our personal experiences and consider what more we can do to make all students feel confident and in control of their learning. We must recognize the global call for digital tools that adapt to the individual’s needs, so that every student of every ability can learn and grow every day.

We know educators want to make their classrooms inviting for every student, but there are time-consuming challenges along the way. Research indicates that 73 percent of classrooms have students with reading levels spanning across four or more grade levels, while 72 percent have special education students, along with students who have temporary and permanent disabilities. Inclusive technology is not a narrow mission for the few, but a broad goal for us all.

Whether it’s a student controlling a screen with their eyes, or creating a document with their voice, there’s an inclusive form of learning possible for every student. The Microsoft Education resources below can help you save time as you make your classroom inclusive for all:

Tools that help you empower students to do their best work

Microsoft Office 365 Education, free for students and teachers, and Windows 10 offer built-in accessibility capabilities to personalize learning experiences and enable independent reading and writing for students with cognitive, visual, physical or other disabilities.

1. Ease of Access settings in Windows 10:
   • Allow people with ALS and other physical disabilities to control Windows with their gaze, using Eye Control.
   • Allow people with blindness and low vision to work through the combination of zoom and screen narration capabilities with Narrator and Magnifier.

• Make the screen easier to see for those with color blindness, thanks to Color Filters.

2. Educators and students can rely on Learning Tools to:
   • Have any webpage, ePub/e-book, PDF or document read aloud with simultaneous highlighting of the words on screen.
   • Adjust font and line spacing to reduce visual crowding.
   • Personalize how many lines of text are in focus.
   • Show breaks between syllables to improve word recognition.
   • Have parts of speech highlighted to improve writing quality.
3. Learning, writing and design features in Office 365 can:
   • Enable people with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, to write effectively. Editor in Word and Outlook for PCs offers advanced spelling, grammar, and writing style recommendations. It can also show synonyms alongside spelling suggestions that can be read aloud.
   • Let people type via voice with Dictate in Office 365 applications such as Word, PowerPoint and Outlook for PCs.
   • Allow people with limited reach or sight to create professional and polished presentations. PowerPoint Designer automates the design of slides.
   • Save considerable time for screen reader and keyboard users with Tell Me, which lets them perform actions in applications without navigating the command ribbon.
   • Make it possible for people with visual impairments to understand images inserted into documents. Automatic alternative text in PowerPoint and Word for PCs uses computer vision to provide descriptions for inserted images.
4. Microsoft offers several free, inclusively designed mobile applications and add-ins for Office that can be helpful for students of all abilities, including:
   • Office Lens, a mobile scanner with Optical Character Recognition
   • Seeing AI, an iOS application that narrates the world around you
   • Dictate add-in for Outlook, Word and PowerPoint for voice typing and translation
   • Presentation Translator for automatically captioning and transcribing presentations in real time

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises report server with a web portal in which you display and manage reports and KPIs. Along with it come the tools to create Power BI reports, paginated reports, mobile reports, and KPIs. Your users can access those reports in different ways: viewing them in a web browser or mobile device, or as an email in their in-box.

Comparing Power BI Report Server

Power BI Report Server is similar to both SQL Server Reporting Services and the Power BI online service, but in different ways. Like the Power BI service, Power BI Report Server hosts Power BI reports (.PBIX) and Excel files. Like Reporting Services, Power BI Report Server is on premises, and hosts paginated reports (.RDL). Power BI Report Server is a super-set of Reporting Services: everything you can do in Reporting Services, you can do with Power BI Report Server, along with support for Power BI reports.

Licensing Power BI Report Server

Power BI Report Server is available through two different licenses: Power BI Premium and SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance. With a Power BI Premium license, you can create a hybrid deployment mixing cloud and on-premises.

Web portal

The entry point for Power BI Report Server is a secure web portal you can view in any modern browser. Here, you access all your reports and KPIs. The content on the web portal is organized in a traditional folder hierarchy. In your folders, content is grouped by type: Power BI reports, mobile reports, paginated reports, KPIs, and Excel workbooks. Shared data sets and shared data sources are in their own folders, to use as building blocks for your reports. You tag favorites to view them in a single folder. And you create KPIs right in the web portal.

Depending on your permissions, you can manage the content in the web portal. You can schedule report processing, access reports on demand, and subscribe to published reports. You can also apply your own custom branding to your web portal

Power BI reports

You create Power BI reports (.PBIX) with the version of Power BI Desktop optimized for the report server. Then you publish them to and view them in the web portal in your own environment.

A Power BI report is a multi-perspective view into a data model, with visualizations that represent different findings and insights from that data model. A report can have a single visualization or pages full of visualizations. Depending on your role, you may read and explore reports, or you may create them for others.

Paginated reports

Paginated reports (.RDL) are document-style reports with visualizations, in which tables expand horizontally and vertically to display all their data, continuing from page to page as needed. They’re great for generating fixed-layout, pixel-perfect documents optimized for printing, such as PDF and Word files.

Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) is a Microsoft Windows security tool that provides persistent data protection by enforcing data access policies. For documents to be protected with AD RMS, the application the document is associated with must be RMS-aware. Originally known as Windows RMS, the name was changed AD RMS in Windows Server 2008.

AD RMS has server and client components. The server component is made up of multiple web services that run on a Microsoft server. The client component, which can either be run on a client or server operating system, contains functions that enable an application to encrypt and decrypt content, acquire licenses and certificates from a server and perform many other security-related tasks.
Microsoft made significant changes to AD RMS in Windows Server 2012. These changes included an updated set of SQL Server requirements, Server Core support, a remote deployment option and an option to deploy with PowerShell commands.

A “data chaperone”
The idea behind RMS is that the protection you can give to any piece of information is persistent — it travels with the data and can’t be stripped from it arbitrarily. A specific example of this would be an email that could only be opened by the person it’s sent to, and it could not be printed, forwarded or copy/pasted. Another example might be a document that is set to expire; after a certain period of time has elapsed, the document self-destructs and cannot be reopened.

The rules are set and managed on a central server but are also designed to travel with the data in such a way that the rules will still work even when the server’s not accessible or where there is no network connectivity at all. This way, the data is “chaperoned” no matter where it goes.

Individuals or smaller organizations that want to protect data typically use encryption of some kind, but Rights Management Services has some advantages over using standalone encryption. For instance, if you use a public/private key pair encryption system to encrypt a file and send it to someone, the minute they decrypt the file they have unlimited use of it. By contrast, RMS lets you control what can be done with the file even after it has arrived: Each specific action that can be done with a file has its own rules.

RMS also hooks into the operating system on the client side to prevent the protected data from being hijacked out. An RMS-aware application, for instance, does not allow screenshots to be taken of any RMS-protected data.

AD RMS templates support the following rights:

• Full Control: Gives a user full control over an AD RMS – protected document.
• View: Gives a user the ability to view an AD RMS – protected document.
• Edit: Allows a user to modify an AD RMS – protected document.
• Save: Allows a user to use the Save function with an AD RMS – protected document.
• Export: (Save as). Allows a user to use the Save As function with an AD RMS – protected document.
• Print: Allows an AD RMS – the protected document to be printed.
• Forward: Used with Exchange Server. Allows the recipient of an AD RMS – protected message to forward that message.
• Reply: Used with Exchange Server. Allows the recipient of an AD RMS – protected message to reply to that message.
• Reply All: Used with Exchange Server. Allows the recipient of an AD RMS–protected message to use the Reply All function to reply to that message.
• Extract: Allows the user to copy data from the file. If this right is not granted, the user cannot copy data from the file.
• Allow Macros: Allows the user to utilize macros.
• View Rights: Allows the user to view assigned rights.
• Edit Rights: Allows the user to modify the assigned rights.

To deploy Rights Management Services in an organization, you’ll need the following pieces:

• The RMS Server itself (a 2 MB component). The server component is free to anyone running a licensed copy of Windows Server 2003.
• An installation of Windows Server 2003 or better.
• An Active Directory repository.
• An installation of IIS 6.0 or better.
• A database server such as SQL Server or Microsoft Data Engine. (You can use other databases, but they must be able to support Transact-SQL and Microsoft SQL Server-specific function calls.)
• RMS-enabled applications, such as the aforementioned Office 2003, for creating and viewing most protected data.
• Client access licenses for RMS. Every user who creates or views data protected in RMS will need a separate client access license. They average about $37 per user.

The most obvious and widely used RMS-enabled applications are programs in Microsoft Office 2003. You can also make Internet Explorer into an RMS client through an add-on, which allows people to view or print RMS-enabled documents (if they’re allowed to do so), but not edit them. You can protect plain HTML files with RMS using the RMS software development kit (SDK), and then view it in an RMS-enabled copy of IE.

If you have an existing internal application written in C++ that you want to make compatible with RMS, Microsoft provides a software development kit to do that.

The managed instance deployment option combines advanced security features provided by Azure cloud and SQL Server Database Engine.

Managed instance security isolation

A managed instance provides additional security isolation from other tenants in the Azure cloud. Security isolation includes:

• Native virtual network implementation and connectivity to your on-premises environment using Azure Express Route or VPN Gateway.
• SQL endpoint is exposed only through a private IP address, allowing safe connectivity from private Azure or hybrid networks.
• Single-tenant with dedicated underlying infrastructure (compute, storage).

The following diagram outlines various connectivity options for your applications:

Azure SQL Database Security Features

Azure SQL Database provides a set of advanced security features that can be used to protect your data.

• Managed instance auditing tracks database events and writes them to an audit log file placed in your Azure storage account. Auditing can help maintain regulatory compliance, understand database activity, and gain insight into discrepancies and anomalies that could indicate business concerns or suspected security violations.
• Data encryption in motion – a managed instance secures your data by providing encryption for data in motion using Transport Layer Security. In addition to transport layer security, the managed instance deployment option offers protection of sensitive data in flight, at rest and during query processing with Always Encrypted. Always Encrypted is an industry-first that offers unparalleled data security against breaches involving the theft of critical data. For example, with Always Encrypted, credit card numbers are stored encrypted in the database always, even during query processing, allowing decryption at the point of use by authorized staff or applications that need to process that data.
• Threat detection complements auditing by providing an additional layer of security intelligence built into the service that detects unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit databases. You are alerted about suspicious activities, potential vulnerabilities, and SQL injection attacks, as well as anomalous database access patterns. Threat detection alerts can be viewed from Azure Security Center and provide details of suspicious activity and recommend action on how to investigate and mitigate the threat.
• Dynamic data masking limits sensitive data exposure by masking it to non-privileged users. Dynamic data masking helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data by enabling you to designate how much of the sensitive data to reveal with minimal impact on the application layer. It’s a policy-based security feature that hides the sensitive data in the result set of a query over designated database fields, while the data in the database is not changed.
• Row-level security enables you to control access to rows in a database table based on the characteristics of the user executing a query (such as by group membership or execution context). Row-level security (RLS) simplifies the design and coding of security in your application. RLS enables you to implement restrictions on data row access. For example, ensuring that workers can access only the data rows that are pertinent to their department, or restricting a data access to only the relevant data.
• Transparent data encryption (TDE) encrypts managed instance data files, known as encrypting data at rest. TDE performs real-time I/O encryption and decryption of the data and log files. The encryption uses a database encryption key (DEK), which is stored in the database boot record for availability during recovery. You can protect all your databases in a managed instance with transparent data encryption. TDE is SQL Server’s proven encryption-at-rest technology that is required by many compliance standards to protect against theft of storage media.

Get the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility and native virtual network (VNET) support with SQL Database Managed Instance. This option gives you the best of SQL Server, plus the operational and cost benefits of an intelligent, fully managed service. Managed Instance is ideal for migrating a large number of existing SQL Server databases from on-premises or virtual machines to SQL Database.

Use SQL Database advanced data security with virtual networks and near 100% compatibility

Managed instance is a new deployment option of Azure SQL Database, providing near 100% compatibility with the latest SQL Server on-premises (Enterprise Edition) Database Engine, providing a native virtual network (VNet) implementation that addresses common security concerns, and a business model favorable for on-premises SQL Server customers. The managed instance deployment model allows existing SQL Server customers to lift and shift their on-premises applications to the cloud with minimal application and database changes. At the same time, the managed instance deployment option preserves all PaaS capabilities (automatic patching and version updates, automated backups, high-availability), that drastically reduces management overhead and TCO.

The following diagram outlines key features of managed instances:

The managed instance deployment model is designed for customers looking to migrate a large number of apps from on-premises or IaaS, self-built, or ISV provided environment to fully managed PaaS cloud environment, with as low migration effort as possible. Using the fully automated Data Migration Service (DMS) in Azure, customers can lift and shift their on-premises SQL Server to a managed instance that offers compatibility with SQL Server on-premises and complete isolation of customer instances with native VNet support. With Software Assurance, you can exchange their existing licenses for discounted rates on a managed instance using the Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server. A managed instance is the best migration destination in the cloud for SQL Server instances that require high security and a rich programmability surface.

The managed instance deployment option aims delivers close to 100% surface area compatibility with the latest on-premises SQL Server version through a staged release plan.

Key features and capabilities

Managed instance combines the best features that are available both in Azure SQL Database and SQL Server Database Engine.

The key features of managed instances are shown in the following table:

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services that helps your organization meet your business challenges. It gives you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network using your favorite tools and frameworks.

AZURE AS THE RIGHT CHOICE

The use of any tool, language, or framework

Quickly turn your ideas into solutions to get up and running fast—just bring your code. Build applications with the language of your choice, including Node.js, Java, .NET, and use what you already know and love.

Work with the best-in-class development tools for PC or Mac, such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, to increase your productivity with features that let you focus on what matters most: writing great code.

Get mobile apps into the hands of users faster by streamlining the mobile development lifecycle with Visual Studio App Center, including automated builds and testing for cross-platform, hybrid, and native apps on iOS and Android.

Build solutions on the platform that’s hybrid by design

Create a truly consistent experience across your hybrid cloud using comprehensive Azure cloud capabilities. Reduce complexity and risk with the platform, tools, and services designed to work together across your on-premises and cloud environments. Build and deploy your applications consistently, seamlessly manage data, enable anywhere access with single sign-on, and deliver integrated security and management across on-premises and the cloud.

Develop breakthrough apps with built-in intelligence

Take advantage of a comprehensive set of services, infrastructure, and tools to build AI-powered experiences. Build bots that naturally interact with users and built-in advanced analytics tools to make faster predictions.

Use a rich set of Azure data and AI services such as Azure Databricks, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Bot Service to enable new experiences in your apps for human-like intelligence.

Rely on managed service capabilities such as built-in monitoring, threat detection, automatic patching, and backups.

An example of Azure Cosmos DB App 

Strengthen your security with Azure

Reduce your security costs and safeguard your data by hosting your infrastructure and your apps on Microsoft Azure, the cloud foundation that delivers state-of-the-art security. Take advantage of built-in security controls including identity management, and easily identify and respond to threats with the real-time threat detection provided by Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph.

The Chief Executive Officer, IPI Solutions Nigeria Limited, Mr. Adamu Garba II, in this interview with Prince Osuagwu, spoke on how Nigeria can pull out of economic recession and the need for more businesses to adopt cloud for efficiency and improved output.

YOUR company has been spearheading the call for the adoption of cloud computing. What is cloud computing all about?

Cloud is a computing model, where individuals and organisations get to access technology products and services, using any device of their choice by paying for only what they consume. So you may either consume productivity service or platform services like applications or infrastructural services. So, the level of consumption determines what you pay for and in many cases far cheaper compared to current technology systems.

How would you rate cloud adoption by public and private enterprises in Nigeria?

The cloud adoption in Nigeria is exponential because nearly every individual gets to consume cloud services whether consumer based services or enterprise based services. Considering statistics on Nigerians that have internet access, 93 million Nigerians are cloud customers already. Although most of them access only consumer cloud products like Facebook, etc.

What is the value of cloud solutions to business sustainability?

Ultimately, businesses that define themselves to giving the right products or services out there to their customers can only be efficiently sustained when they are sitting on the cloud. For instance, you can’t imagine any business in Nigeria or anyone in Africa that can provide the amount of infrastructural scale and capacity compared to Microsoft data centers worldwide. Furthermore, the degree of business sustainability can be measured by how your products and services are accessible, reachable, always available and can also provide the needed agility in line with your business operations model.

That is why the sustainability of your business today depends on how highly available you are to provide the needed products and services to your customers. All reasonable business services cannot afford any downtime below 99.9% and to our record at IPI it is only Microsoft that can provide such needed agility. So if you truly want your business to be sustainable you have to be on the cloud.

How secure is cloud for business?

Cloud is the most secure platform any business can depend on. Although many companies consider cloud as less secure but it is simply lack of understanding on how cloud services operate. However, any business that is not an Information Technology (IT) business has no business running cloud infrastructure in their business on their own. For example, the reason why you take your money to the bank to save is simply because you are not a banker and you do not have the appropriate structure to secure your money, and the reason why you go to the hospital when you are sick, is because you are not a physician and the reason why you pick your children and put them in schools is because you are not a teacher or a professional trainer.

In a similar fashion you have all reason to put your data in the hands of professionals whose job is to guarantee the confidentiality, security, integrity of the information at any point in time and these professionals work 24/7 to provide the excellent service.

Excellent service

The level of security built around the cloud is unmatched, it is the most secure platform for you to save your data , provided the information you saved is not harmful to the society, and it runs your business than any other isolated data center you can ever think about.

Nigeria is presently in economic recession. Do you see adoption of cloud pulling the country out of recession?

The reason we have sunk into recession is lack of proper planning and adequate use of available resources in administering public services. The way our economy is structured is dependent on a single product (petroleum) to generate our forex whereas our greater goldmine is in the people of the country. Only a lazy country will rely only on natural resources for sustainability. No country has ever depended on only natural resources for its economic growth and sustainability.

The biggest resource Nigeria has is its people. Imagine the Nigerian system investing more in the youths (about 65 percent of the population) and imagine this investment is in technology, the economic activities and the revenue that would turn around the economy will be far bigger than imagined. Each and every young Nigerian is a potential talent, the only thing they need is the resources to empower them and the easiest and most accessible tool is technology and what better technology than the cloud? We need to invest in our youths by encouraging them to be innovative by tapping the power of technology.

Take for instance countries like China and India, none of them has an oil well yet the net investment the people are returning has established them as part a global powers. Companies like Apple, for example generated a gross revenue of $215 billion in 2015 with roughly 66,000 talented employees. That means that 66,000 were able to produce more than half of Nigeria’s GDP because they had enabling laws, convenient environment, encouraging economic and political system.

Think about Nigeria with approximately 200 million people, if the government should empower only one percent at half Apple’s capacity, this number only is more than enough to give us more revenue than oil has ever given us. This is what our policy makers, regulatory agencies and government should be looking into.

So to get out of recession, we need to empower Nigeria’s future by investing a lot in its youths because that is the only asset that Nigeria has that is dependable and we also need to procure technology tools that can check the menace and tendencies of corrupt individuals exploiting the system. The best of all tools is the technology delivered through the cloud that meets all the transparency and accountability standards. The current government stands to leverage on the power of cloud technology in its drive towards job creation and elimination of corruption.

With these tools in place, then the government is working truly towards inclusive economic system that will take us out of recession in the shortest possible time.

The world is shifting towards digitization, how do you think Cloud can help Nigeria to achieve digital transformation?

Digital transformation is actually another term for “fourth industrial revolution”, and fourth industrial revolution is the new global order. This is why individuals and group organizations, both private and public are expected to follow through in realizing their true potentials. No nation or group / individual will succeed in today’s interconnected global economy without going digital.

In a knowledge economy and the information world we live in, the faster your information is available to people or group looking for you or your services or investing in your nation, the more they attest to your probity and diligence in your systems. There is no way a government can succeed without going digital.

Policy makers, regulatory agencies, government executives need to closely work with private institutions or organizations in order for them to achieve alignment with the current global trend.

Read more at:  https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/05/get-recession-need-invest-youths-ceo-ipi-solutions/

Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider, IPI Solutions, recently provided General Data Protection Regulation, compliance to two firms in the country, making it the first indigenous company to do so in Nigeria.

This is on the heels of developments surrounding the application of the new GDPR regulation.

It is in line with the mandate given to organisations for the start up for immediate actions to ensure compliance.

The CTO of the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider, said the company was able to structure precise strategies and implement inbuilt measures that would by default cut across all spectrum required to ensure that strong privacy rights and data are protected and breaches also reported.

This was done being mindful of the lengthy and complex requirements needed to attain the required standard. He said: ”In the wake of the most recent events and developments surrounding implementation of the new GDPR regulation, organisations were not only taken unaware by the said statute but also mandated to initiate immediate actions to ensure compliance.

“Forming part of the major sectors and/or organisations to have been blown and engrossed with the unprecedented burden of aptly responding to the regulation amongst others were primarily legal firms (particularly those having clienteles who are EU members) due to the nature of their business and operational activities which essentially features processing and managing sensitive data and information of clients, most of which are also personal.

“Consequent to attaining the said compliance, two leading indigenous law firms by solely utilizing the technical aids (cloud solutions, consultations and support) both initiated and implemented by IPI Solutions Nigeria Ltd (A 1-Tier Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider) were able to attain the required standard for compliance.

“IPI Solutions as we know is one of the foremost leading 1-Tier Microsoft CSP Partner within the country that have overtime proven their expertise in proffering peculiar technological business solution across all sectors they cover.

“Validating their innovative approach and degree of technological expertise have been the numerous consistent recognition and awards received from credible international bodies.

Examples of which are the IQS Awards Gold Category In Business Prestige And Business Excellence, Innovative Award of Excellence in ICT System Integration, Disaster Recovery And Enterprise Management just to mention a few.

• “Precisely, part of the measures engaged were:
• “Improved data policies and processes to support data subject rights and ensure lawful processing.
• “Tighter controls to manage and protect personal data. “Better governance tools for better transparency, record keeping and reporting. IPI Solutions was able to significantly simplify the whole process for both firms by simply utilizing one of their countless Microsoft cloud solutions (Office 365).
• “The cloud solution in question he said comes along with a Compliance Manager tool which helps to centralize the whole compliance management process and also proffers real time assessment.
• “With the compliance process being a two-way trail between both parties (Microsoft and IT Administrator) sharing respective responsibilities, the compliance manager helps indicate how Microsoft meets its responsibilities and also what is required to be done by the second party (IT Administrator) to attain the required compliance standard.

Furthermore, the tool also enables the ability to modify the dashboard to reflect only regulations applicable to the organization respectively. “With this feature, both firms were availed with the opportunity to be in the loop at all times regarding the necessary actions that would be taken to ensure compliance sustainability and even goes further to proffer suitable avenues upon which pre audits can be prepared.

Affirming this was the success both clients recorded in the recent audit assessment they undertook with international company Mobile. “As data security and privacy, specific tools aiding identity and access management were initiated to enable the protection of information both at the identity and documentation level. Also inclusive were tools to help identify threats and ensure for an apt recovery if there be any case of attack.

“By strategically employing all these measures, we were able to assist both firms in overcoming the complex challenge of attaining GDPR compliance. As a result, saving them strategic partnerships, possible breaches and funds that would have been otherwise lost as a result of being non-complaint. Currently as we speak, the two law firms in question are completely GDPR complaint.”

Read more at:  https://www.vanguardngr.com/2018/07/ipi-solutions-becomes-first-nigerian-company-to-provide-gdpr-compliance/