Somewhat lost in our collective excitement about the end of the year 2020 – and many hoped, an end to all the unpleasantness associated with that year – was the fact that 31 December 2020 also marked the end of an important period in internet history: the Adobe Flash era.
“Reach out and touch someone.®”
A few years ago, a story made the rounds confirming what many people suspected: The vast majority of thermostats on the walls in commercial buildings don’t do anything.
Data has become the lifeblood of any modern enterprise. Making decisions on the basis of hunches and intuition can be valuable (assuming your hunches are correct most of the time). But to operate a medium- or large-size business, you need solid data and a way to extract actionable meaning from that data. Effective use of data is central to many companies’ digital transformation initiatives.
In the beginning, enterprise data lived on database storage servers and file servers in a company’s onsite data center. Although this arrangement gave company leadership peace of mind that their data resided safely within their metaphorical “four walls,” it was also a source of IT challenges:
One of the cool things about being a software developer is there’s always something new to learn. New programming languages, new frameworks, new development methodologies, new techniques.
