What to Consider When Navigating a New Digital World : Best Strategy

There are now vehicles that have built-in features you’re unable to access unless you pay a subscription fee. “The Cloud” almost does subscription right, in that the cost of subscription tends to be less than the cost of on-site ownership of associated hardware over time. However, it does put a middleman between you and infrastructural tech. If you’ve got a server-array on-site, that’s expensive, you need space, you’re spending money on electricity, proper tech professionals are necessary to assure proper functionality, and you’ve got to upgrade servers in terms of software and hardware incrementally to retain effective functionality. Best practices recommend replacing them totally every 3 to 5 years.

Cloud Usages ( Pros and Cons from Monetary Angle ) –

Meanwhile, with the cloud, Software as a Service, Hardware as a Service, and Platform as a Service (SaaS, HaaS, and PaaS) basically surrogate what servers traditionally do. So you can just pay for the service and access operational details through an end-user portal like a laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

The difficulty is unless you pay more for a “private” cloud, you’re sharing space on a massive server array with thousands or millions of others. You don’t really own the digital premises you’re paying for, you’re renting. This technological decentralization has made more options available for more diverse customers, but now you have to rely on a third party.

Provided that the third party is competent and incorruptible, there’s no problem with that. But if you’re in IT, you know roughly half the IT economy comes from “black hat” IT. So no matter how effective a cloud provider’s decentralized “rental” services are, you’re always taking a risk.

A Strategy That Can Work ( Solution ) –

It’s not just hardware that’s doing this to you these days. Now even Microsoft Office and Adobe products require an ongoing subscription. Even if you paid for a program before this trend began, you’ll have to update eventually, and when you update, you’ll get locked out unless you pay the subscription fee. Thankfully, there are workarounds.

PDFTron offers options to view Microsoft Word documents in Angular Viewer even if Microsoft Office isn’t installed. Basically, the viewer uses Javascript to make Office files tangible. If you’ve just lost access, this can be a lifesaver. Additionally, there are “freeware” programs that surrogate Microsoft Office functionality, such as LibreOffice.

There are a few points that can be beneficial for us from a Monitory and Scalability angle. Let’s start exploring them.

1. Avoiding Subscription Services

The bottom line is, if you’re going to make the most out of your budget in tech, you want to either avoid subscription services or utilize workarounds. The difficulty is, our economy’s decentralization extends to basic infrastructure, and that’s by design. The powers that be want a totally decentralized economy. We may reach that point eventually, and it will mean not owning anything as an individual or business. Whether or not this is going to be a positive situation is hard to determine. A good idea is to hedge your bets in advance.

Accordingly, it’s ideal to own operational infrastructure for your business, be it large or small, wherever possible. Sometimes you can’t be given the competitive necessity of innovations like the cloud. However, where you can retain ownership, this is advisable. Means of interacting with files through secondary software are a good start.

2. Optimization in resources with AI-ML enable tool –

There are multiple tools in the market that applies Artificial Intelligence – Machine Learning to optimize the operational cost whether on a cloud or on-premise platform. It ultimately improves customer satisfaction by making the tool experience more personalized and performance-oriented.

Thanks

Data Science Learner Team