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Explore insights, tutorials, news and more from top experts for navigating technology trends and industry innovations.
October 9, 2024 in AWS, Cloud, Insights

IAC and CDK

Written by: Bojan Zivic, Senior Consultant Traditionally, it was the task of engineers to build the infrastructure to a determined specification, whilst developers would deploy applications to said servers using…
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October 9, 2024 in AWS, Cloud, Insights

Keep your environment in step with technology: leveraging next-gen managed services

This blog kicks off a series of articles focussing on the Cloud Managed DevOps Service at CMD Solutions. The series will focus on the “Customer Journey” and will include foundational…
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June 16, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

What is DevOps? A System Engineer’s journey and perspective

Introduction What is DevOps? It's a question that I remember asking myself before getting into the specific IT field and truly understanding what the answer was. I’m reminded of a…
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June 16, 2024 in Cloud, Data, Digital, Insights, Security

What Apple’s OpenAI deal means for your enterprise security

Apple’s announcement that ChatGPT will, it appears, be free on certain iPhones, iPads and Macs has sparked concerns in some quarters about the threat of an “unacceptable security violation”. The…
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May 22, 2024 in Cloud, GCP, Insights

How AI is revolutionising financial crime prevention: highlights from a Mantel Group event, in collaboration with Google Cloud

As the financial industry grapples with the complexities of combating money laundering and financial crimes, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers unprecedented opportunities for innovation and efficiency when it…
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May 21, 2024 in AWS, Cloud, Insights

AWS Summit Sydney 2024 and the rapid evolution of GenAI

Written by Harish Suresh Who says GenAI can’t be fun for everyone? As we gathered at AWS Summit Sydney 2024, it was clear that we were part of a pivotal…
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May 15, 2024 in AWS, Cloud, Insights

GitHub Actions Runner on EKS Using Karpenter – Part 2

Published October 10, 2023 Written by Praveen Kumar Patidar Introduction Greetings! This is the second part of our GitHub Actions Runner on the EKS series. As mentioned in Part 1, we…
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May 15, 2024 in AWS, Cloud, Insights

GitHub Actions Runner on EKS Using Karpenter – Part 1

Published October 10, 2023 Written by Praveen Kumar Patidar Introduction GitHub Actions serves as a robust mechanism for automating repository workflows in an organised, efficient, and transparent manner. It empowers…
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May 8, 2024 in Cloud, GCP, Insights

Decoding Generative AI Investment: How To Understand The Right Questions, And The Risks

Written by Simon Poulton In April, while at Google Cloud Next, I found myself seated through yet another presentation about AI (this being number 30-something), and I couldn’t help but…
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April 10, 2024 in AWS, Cloud, News

Mantel Group awarded AWS Consulting Partner of the Year ANZ for 3rd time, flags surge in financial services cloud adoption

10 April, 2024 — Mantel Group has been awarded the AWS Consulting Partner of the Year for ANZ for a third time, while flagging a surge in cloud uptake by…
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April 9, 2024 in Cloud, Insights, News

Mantel Group wins Google Cloud Services Partner of the Year for APAC and Google CloudSales Partner of the Year for ANZ

Melbourne, 8 April 2024 — Mantel Group has been named Google Cloud Services Partner of the Year for APAC, and Google Cloud Sales Partner of the Year for ANZ in…
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April 5, 2024 in AWS, Cloud, Insights

Cloud Adoption: Cutover to AWS and automation of an on-premise Windows workload – Part 2

Cloud Adoption: Cutover to AWS and automation of an on-premise Windows workload – Part 2 Author Mark Matthews, Principal Consultant at CMD Solutions November 14, 2022 Overview In Part 1 of the…
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March 22, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Customer Central: Revolutionising Managed Services with AWS-Powered Insights and Efficiency

Written by Cass Zara In the dynamic realm of Managed Services and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), the need for a centralised hub to manage customer information and streamline operations became…
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March 21, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Account switching methods that every cloud engineer needs to know

Introduction Using multi-account strategy is the best practice in AWS, which has been adopted by many organisations. In my observation, a lot of cloud engineers still use Incognito mode to…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Using Local Zones to Deliver Low-Latency Cloud Performance in Australia and New Zealand

For many years, placement of cloud infrastructure on the AWS cloud was limited to Regions and the associated Availability Zones. This has changed in recent years with the announcement of…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

How to set up a Local Kubernetes Cluster with miniKube for Local Development on MacOS

Setting up a local Kubernetes environment locally can sometimes be a struggle, especially when trying to access workloads to test your application’s functionality. In this article I will show you…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Using Terraform to create secure IAP tunnels on GCP with conditional IAM policies

Summary This post will detail how to create a secure IAP (Identity Aware Proxy) tunnel to a VM (Virtual Machine) inside a VPC without requiring a public IP address or…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Troubleshooting 4 common errors when calling Google Cloud Run from App Script

Overview Cloud Run, a serverless compute platform managed by Google, has become a popular way to run containerised apps. Recently, I worked on a project where I had to send…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Introduction to Linear Regression with BigQuery ML

Overview Recently, Google announced the release of BigQuery ML, an analytics service for building machine learning models using data stored in BigQuery. BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse designed for…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Managing Multiple AWS Accounts with Org-Formation

The Challenge We need to create an AWS Organization with multiple Organizational Units (OUs) and accounts. But that’s not all! It will need to support different types of workloads, be…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Connecting with EC2 Instance Connect

In a world where everyone talks about serverless and containers, it’s easy to lose sight of improvements to the ‘old’ ways. EC2 instances are still an essential part of many…
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March 5, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Cloud Adoption – How to easily migrate and automate an on-premise workload – Part 1

Overview We understand every customer and organisation is unique in its own way. The decision an organisation takes to start their cloud adoption and modernisation journey of their environment to…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Create a Squid Proxy in Google Cloud

Introduction The idea is simple: spin up a Squid Proxy, point your browser to it and use it to give you a fixed, knowable IP address that can be added…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

How CDK simplified ECS Blue/Green deployments

Introduction It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that containers brought a massive change to the industry, where scaling applications moved from scaling servers, to scaling individual container replicas within…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Securing a Redis Server in Kubernetes

Redis is an open-source, in-memory data structure store or a key-value store used as a database, cache, and message broker. It offers a rich set of features that make it…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Why the AWS Melbourne Region is a good thing for APRA-regulated businesses

We’re now in the second half of 2022, which means that the new Melbourne Region for AWS can open up any day now, so it’s a good time to have…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Azure Virtual Desktop 101. Benefits, Typical Architecture and How It Integrates With Nerdio

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is an enterprise Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution which enables businesses to provision Windows virtual machines, complete with support for Office 365 and other business…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Detecting Machine Learned Anomalies in Real Time Foreign Exchange Data

Dataflow Financial Services Anomaly Detection For code snippets and paths to files in this blog post, check out our github repository. The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, is a popular…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

​⁠Tips & Tricks Of Apple MacOS Instances On AWS EC2

Written by Praveen Kumar Patidar Background The mobile and application development space has seen rapid growth in the last decade. Primarily on iOS and Android platforms – for example, Apple…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Applying the 3 Musketeers pattern to any Terraform deployment

Introduction When it comes to managing various environments utilising an Infrastructure As Code (or IAC) language such as Terraform, there can be surrounding complexities around interoperability. Let’s take the example…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Why the AWS close-account API is a big deal

Once in a while AWS releases a feature that people have been demanding for a long time, and they did so again when they added the ability to close accounts from…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Databricks on Azure with Terraform

Overview This post aims to provide a walk-through of how to deploy a Databricks cluster on Azure with its supporting infrastructure using Terraform. At the end of this post, you…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

How To Build An AI Object Detection System with Azure Custom Vision

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not new concepts, you may have heard these buzz words thrown around and mentioned on various products or services. These concepts can…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

EKS Fargate – Github Actions Runners

Running a CI/CD platform using your own runners can be daunting. Not from an implementation perspective, but more so from a scaling perspective. You may be asking, “How will our…
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March 4, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

A No Ops Approach to Auto Healing Dataflow Pipelines with Site Reliability Engineering Principles

Here’s a No-Ops take on applying modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles to developing an auto-healing capability for Dataflow pipelines in production on The Google Cloud Platform. In this article,…
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March 3, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

AWS and Patching: Easily keep your instances up to date

This post is part of a series about Cloud Managed DevOps Service at CMD Solutions. This time however, we lift up the curtain a bit and show you how some…
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March 3, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Why We Dropped ECS in Favour of EKS

When undergoing Application Transformation, choosing a container orchestration solution is something almost every organisation using AWS will have to go through at some point. Having implemented a few Elastic Container…
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March 1, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Implementing AWS end user computing for Oil Search

Company Overview Secure, scalable defence-in-depth and compliant AWS foundation Scalable VDI solution to support graphics intensive applications Access to high performance computing without location and physical hardware restraints Papuan Oil…
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March 1, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Making the most of a ‘Lift and Shift’ Cloud Migration

Of all of the seven Rs of cloud migration, “lift and shift”, or “rehost”, is perhaps the easiest to do, yet in many people’s opinion provides the least benefit. As…
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February 28, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

Google Cloud Data Fusion comparison with existing solutions

I’ve always enjoyed seeing tools that make tasks easier. Tools that bring more non-technical users close to specific areas like Machine Learning and Data Engineering, abstracting technical details and allowing…
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February 23, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

AWS IAM and Set Theory: How do permissions in AWS really work?

Do you and your colleagues have trouble keeping your IAM policies up to date? It is possible to write powerful policies that will grow with your changing requirements. We just need a little…
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February 13, 2024 in Cloud, GCP, Insights

4 Key Challenges Facing The Financial Services Industry

How embracing the cloud turns threats into opportunities Expectations around customer service have changed dramatically in recent years. Driven by round-the-clock access to services, apps, and tools across work and…
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January 22, 2024 in Cloud, Insights

AWS Lambda vs. ECS vs. EC2: A Comprehensive Performance and Cost Analysis

Written By: Illia Kavaliou (Principal Consultant) Mantel Group   One of the most debated topics in the AWS cloud community is how to choose the right compute service for applications…
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December 11, 2023 in Cloud, Insights

Round up from Microsoft Ignite 2023!

Last month, Microsoft held their annual Ignite conference, where a range of new features were announced. In this blog post, We’re going to share just some of the new releases…
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December 7, 2023 in Cloud, Insights

AWS Control Tower APIs at re:Invent 2023

By Colin Andrews re:Invent 2023 had a lot to live up to if it wanted to be compared with the previous year’s slue of AWS Control Tower announcements. While it…
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October 19, 2023 in Cloud, Insights

Evaluating a CNAPP platform

by Cian O'sullivan The trend to develop and deploy cloud native applications; that is applications and software developed to operate in cloud environments; is generally well established and well understood.…
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July 4, 2023 in Cloud, Insights

Migrating 34 business-critical applications to AWS

Highlights A large resource company migrated a range of applications to AWS with the help of Mantel Group. The migration led to improved agility, project delivery, and improved data integration…
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April 27, 2023 in AWS, Cloud, Insights

The Pro’s and Con’s of using AWS MSK Serverless

Written by Sinnappu Jeyakumaran Our team recently did a tech assessment on AWS MSK Serverless, which automatically scales compute and storage resources so you can stream and store Apache Kafka…
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October 10, 2024 in Data, Insights

What is an AI Factory and do I need one?

Vihan Patel, October 2024 AI Factories should be able to lift the volume, success, value, and speed of AI innovation within organisations. CommBank’s decision to set up an AI Factory…
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July 8, 2024 in Data, Insights, News

Databricks Summit 2024 – Our Roundup and Key Takeaways

Written by Emma Bromet & Rich Glew Held over four days from June 10 to 13 in San Francisco, the Databricks Data + AI Summit 2024 brought together more than…
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June 16, 2024 in Cloud, Data, Digital, Insights, Security

What Apple’s OpenAI deal means for your enterprise security

Apple’s announcement that ChatGPT will, it appears, be free on certain iPhones, iPads and Macs has sparked concerns in some quarters about the threat of an “unacceptable security violation”. The…
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June 13, 2024 in Data, Insights

Elevating Data Quality with Automated Testing Frameworks

Written by Danny Wong (Senior Solutions Architect Databricks), Petr Andreev (Senior Databricks Engineer, Mantel Group), Nicholas Anile (Senior Data Scientist, Mantel Group) Introduction At a time when groundbreaking technological advances…
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June 10, 2024 in Data, Insights

AI Has Expensive Taste In Wine

Written by Isaac Taylor - This article was first published in M2 MagazinePrepping for a boardroom lunch, veteran event coordinator Anna asked ChatGPT to pair wines with the meals and…
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May 1, 2024 in Data, Insights

What is Data Mesh? A recipe for big success or a hot mess(h)?

There is a revolution in organisational design development brewing in the data industry. Borrowing from the same mantra of ‘decentralisation’ that has sparked innovation in blockchain technology and Web3, “Data…
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April 22, 2024 in Data, Insights

Generative artificial intelligence in education: No stuffing this cat back in the bag

What the TEQSA review of AI action plans means for universities, institutes and colleges The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency wants to see action plans to address risks stemming…
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April 16, 2024 in Data, Insights

Banks poised to lead generative AI innovation; cloud adoption accelerates

Banks have a longer breath to sit out the generative artificial intelligence innovation phase using their strong balance sheets, which gives them a strategic advantage. Mantel Group’s ongoing market research…
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April 4, 2024 in Data, Insights

Optimisation in Data Science – Mathematical v’s Machine Learning approaches

Written by Alex Essebier, Vivian Mai and Sahil Bahl Most organisations face everyday problems that can be solved faster and more accurately by machines. A prime example is the area…
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April 4, 2024 in Data, Insights

How to Evolve Towards a Unified Approach to Data and AI Governance

Written by Dhivya Kanagasingam In today's digital age, data and artificial intelligence (AI) have become the driving forces behind innovation and success for organisations across various industries. However AI, with…
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March 28, 2024 in Data, Insights

Utility meter reading on mobile devices using machine learning

Pretraining The pretraining bit was added recently with the release of spaCy 2.1 and allows the use of Language Modelling with Approximate Outputs (LMAO), or training of a transformer for…
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March 20, 2024 in Data, Insights

A quick guide to forecasting in Qlik

If you’re looking to conduct some form of forecasting in Qlik, look no further! While Qlik Sense doesn’t quite have an out-of-the-box forecasting function, in most cases a quick and…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

Process mining: Your guide to choosing the right tool for your use-case

How can we dig insights from a flood of information? With every company now leveraging platforms and tools to run their workflows, data shortage is not an issue and it…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

Agile Discovery Phase: The Ultimate Guide

“Discovery” is a term used to describe an introductory phase of a project focused on aligning expectations, exploring assumptions and agreeing on goals and scope. Those in the know often…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

Data Storytelling: what is it, best practice and a framework

There is more data available than ever before but companies are struggling to use it. Data storytelling can help.  Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created globally. It’s…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

How to Become a Data Scientist in Australia – Learn from Mantel Group’s experts

Once coined the sexiest job of the 21st century, data scientist has become one of the most popular job fields in recent years, as organisations of all industries have come…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

What is Data Thinking? A modern approach to designing a data strategy

First let’s start with the question: Why do you need to consider a strategy for your data? An abundance of data and computing sources has unlocked tremendous potential. The idea…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

What are the differences between a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer?

The emergence of Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer roles  From 2013 to 2019, data science postings on Indeed’s website have skyrocketed 256%, demonstrating a growing demand for data science-related…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

Building a data dictionary for Power BI dashboards with Python

In any business, there will be at least one word or metric that has a different meaning depending on which team you’re talking to. As an analyst, it’s your job…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

Epics: What is an Agile Epic?

Introduction If you use or are interested in an agile approach to delivery, “epic” is a term you want to understand. Epics are a way of organising large items of…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

The 5 Vs of Big Data

What is big data? Big data refers to large, complex data sets often contrived from multiple and new sources. The reason that “big data” has received its own term (after…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

Basic Analytics vs Advanced Analytics

What is “Basic Analytics”? Basic analytics, most commonly just referred to as analytics, focuses on understanding historical data. This understanding is achieved by extracting valuable insights from aggregated, clean datasets.…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

What is a Data Platform?

A data platform is an integrated technological infrastructure that empowers organisations to collect, store, process, manage, analyse, and extract valuable insights from massive volumes of structured and unstructured data. All…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

What Is Databricks And What’s It Used For?

While some people are very familiar with Databricks, others might not know as much. We thought it would be a good idea to break down what Databricks is, explore what…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

How to run a hello world program in Databricks – Part 2

Introduction In our previous article, we have seen how to get onboarded with Databricks and run your first hello world application using Spark. The first step involved creating a community…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

How to run a hello world program in Databricks – Part 1

Let's get started In this post, we're going to get you started on Databricks, but first let's take a quick look at the history of big data space. Spark has…
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March 14, 2024 in Data, Insights

Databricks productivity tips and tricks

Databricks is one of the major players in the data space, but some people may still treat it like an optimised hosted service of Apache Spark. It's true that Spark…
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March 13, 2024 in Data, Insights

Navigating the data lake using Rust – Part Two

Introduction In part one of this series, we discussed how Delta Lake has become the standard data format for a lakehouse architecture, and how to create and write data to…
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March 13, 2024 in Data, Insights

Migrating to Power BI: A User-Centred Approach

Written by Brett Thebault At Mantel Group, we've seen Power BI become the go-to business intelligence (BI) platform for many organisations. This isn't surprising. Power BI capitalises on the familiarity…
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March 13, 2024 in Data, Insights

Navigating the data lake using Rust – Part One

Introduction The lakehouse architecture has gained lots of traction in the last few years. The lakehouse simply brings the best of both data warehouses and data lakes. One of the…
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March 11, 2024 in Data, Insights

Securing Vertex AI User Managed Notebooks: Lessons Learned

Written by David Liebert and Michael Diender Background I recently provided technical expertise in a team responsible for deploying, configuring and securing Vertex AI User Managed Notebooks (UMNs) in an…
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March 7, 2024 in Data, Insights

How to implement Data Vault model

Dimensional modelling, also known as Kimball’s star schema, has long been an industry standard for building a Data Warehouse. Under this approach, we load the data into a staging layer,…
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March 7, 2024 in Data, Insights

What is AI?

Let’s clear up one thing: we’re not building the Terminator. AI isn’t a magic spark that will spontaneously occur once you’ve collected enough data. And it’s not something that only…
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March 7, 2024 in Data, Insights

The Australian AI Landscape: A Brief Summary

Introduction The good folks at the National AI Centre (NAIC) have recently conducted a survey of business leaders and AI specialists to help provide an assessment of Australia’s growing AI…
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February 16, 2024 in Data, Insights

Best AI Coding Assistant Tools in 2023

Written By: Ashish Tripathi, Niharika Kargudri & Jenny Li The recent surge in the popularity of AI Coding Assistant Tools is quite noticeable. This is especially true among developers due…
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January 24, 2024 in Data, Insights

What is Data Strategy? It’s more than a technology roadmap

Written By: Christina Evans, Kim Quiñones and Thomas Maas   What is a data strategy? A data strategy sets a clear objective of what companies ultimately want to achieve with…
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December 7, 2023 in Data, Insights

Our Top 10 Insights from a Year of GenAI Implementation: A Technical Guide

By Katinka Gereb, Arvin Lim, Jim Hortle, James Dunwoody, Alex Essebier and Agnes Abramczyk Introduction Artificial intelligence has evolved significantly in the past year since the introduction of ChatGPT. In…
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December 6, 2023 in Data, Insights

The power of AI in your own hands. Is self-hosting your LLM a good idea?

By Stefan Fernandes “In a world where machines are becoming artists, composers, and storytellers, generative AI holds the key to unlocking unparalleled creativity. But as we dive deeper into this…
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December 4, 2023 in Data, Insights

Walk before you run: How to get Gen AI working for your business

Brendan Willkinolls - Head of Machine Learning at Mantel Group The power of Generative AI is real. I know, you’re tired of hearing about it. But the fact is, the…
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December 4, 2023 in Data, Insights

The Essence of Modern Data Management – Unravelling the Tapestry of Good Data

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and business, the importance of data management has reached unprecedented heights. The accelerating value and capabilities that can be extracted from good data are…
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November 3, 2023 in Data, Insights

Unlocking the Potential: A Guide to Maximising Impact, Realising Value, and Empowering Your Data Science Team

Written by Alex Essebier, Kathryn Collier, Stefan Fernandes, Agnes Abramczyk and Katinka Gereb Data Science Value Data science has become a buzzword in recent years, and with good reason. The…
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April 28, 2023 in Data, Insights

Unpacking AI’s Next Moves: Web Directions AI 2023

A Front-Row Seat to AI's Evolution Last month, I had the unique opportunity to attend the Web Directions AI 2023 conference. Stepping into the venue, I was immediately enveloped by an electric…
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June 16, 2024 in Cloud, Data, Digital, Insights, Security

What Apple’s OpenAI deal means for your enterprise security

Apple’s announcement that ChatGPT will, it appears, be free on certain iPhones, iPads and Macs has sparked concerns in some quarters about the threat of an “unacceptable security violation”. The…
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May 24, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Detox or Appium – Which Test Tool is Top?

Author: Mitchell Davis Published: April 4, 2023 Introduction to Mobile Test Automation It would be a huge understatement to say that mobile devices are popular. As of the end of…
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May 20, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Understanding Continuous Integration: Exploring the Process in Detail

Written by Neil Khatri In the fast moving world of software development, mastering continuous integration (CI) has become a hugely important part of a developers day to day. CI arms…
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April 22, 2024 in Digital, Insights

React Native: Thoughts from a web developer

What prompted me to start looking in to React Native? As a web application developer, my first attempt of mobile application development was about a year ago, when I decided…
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April 22, 2024 in Digital, Insights

A Mantel Group approach to tech vitality

Written by Brett Henderson Introduction One of the great benefits of working in a software consultancy is the diversity of problems we are exposed to. The creativity applied by our…
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March 27, 2024 in Digital, Insights

How to start your UX/UI Design Career in 2024 – Part 3

Skills you’ll need, and finding your first job Welcome back to our three-part series about beginning your career in UX/UI Design in 2024. Previously, we touched on different learning journeys,…
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March 27, 2024 in Digital, Insights

How to start your UX/UI Design Career in 2024 – Part 2

Starting your learning journey in UX/UI Design Welcome back to our three-part series about beginning your career in UX/UI Design in 2024. Now that you’ve potentially decided that a career…
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March 27, 2024 in Digital, Insights

How to start your UX/UI Design Career in 2024 – Part 1

Foreword: It’s 9pm on a Sunday as I sit here, struggling to think of a convincing way to start this foreword. Nothing’s coming to the surface - instead, everything’s just…
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March 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

State of On-Device Machine Learning in Android

Written by Bhumil Soni Helly: "Hey, machine learning is changing everything!" Reeaen: "Really? So my coffee machine will finally understand 'extra foam'?" Helly: "Uh, not exactly, but your phone might!"…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

How do I incorporate Design Thinking in Business Strategy?

We are in the midst of a customer-first revolution. When accessing services, people want to run their life with their phones. When purchasing products, they can (and do) leave reviews…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

How to master product adoption using discovery

When thinking about building great products to hit critical mass, the product adoption curve is a popular conceptual tool. However, just because we read left to right, doesn’t mean we…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Building Live Activities

Today, James Warren presents a tutorial on building Live Activities for iOS 16. Live Activities are a way to display rich and persistent information outside of an app, on the…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Understanding resource conflicts in Android

During Android development we often have to manage many different resources. At compilation time these resources are all gathered up and merged together into a single package. As per the…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Replacing legacy code in mobile apps

Our world is always changing. What worked in the past might not work now, or in future situations. Over time our needs will change, and we will need to adapt…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Scoping out Design Agencies? You deserve better

The most common pitfall with design agencies is the business focus on sales operations over the design process. Before exploring the various drawbacks from this pitfall, it’s worth understanding the…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

An Apple a day: How iOS16’s medication features open the door to better prescription management experiences

‍With the recent announcement of iOS 16’s new Medication features, a world of possibility is opening up that could enable simpler and more streamlined experiences in an area that has…
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February 26, 2024 in Digital, Insights

What is Design Thinking? How to use Design Thinking – inform creativity and innovation in solving problems

First up, what is Design Thinking? Unfortunately, there are multiple ways to define design thinking, which can cause a bit of a headache! For many designers it is a creative…
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February 25, 2024 in Digital, Insights

The key ingredients to building my confidence

I saw a quote on linkedin the other day that said “Be the leader you never had”. This really resonated with me as I am becoming a leader at Pretzel…
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February 25, 2024 in Digital, Insights

3 key skills of a human centred designer

"Human centred design is defined as a creative problem-solving approach that focuses on generating solutions that are based on meeting the needs of the people we’re designing for" - (IDEO).…
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February 23, 2024 in Digital, Insights

What is Human centred design? An easy to understand explanation, finally!

What is human-centred design? Human-centred design starts with the people involved, their goals, their needs and what makes them happy, and not so happy. Human-centred design is an approach to…
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February 23, 2024 in Digital, Insights

My Journey from Chemical Engineering to Design

“Design and Chemical Engineering”, when you say those two things together it sounds like you are comparing the sun and the moon, chicken soup and raspberry slushies, Pepsi and Coke…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Thinking with Leaders – Resilient Leadership

I was recently invited to sit on a panel to talk about Resilient Leadership hosted by Google. It was a great panel with Aireen Omar (Air Asia) and Ruma Balasubramanian…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

How I got a new career in Design Thinking and Technology during COVID

Being new to the human centred design industry, I started working on a few voluntary projects, did some freelance work and then finally landed a full time role in a…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Reveal, reveals a whole new look

Melbourne AU, 2 June 2021 Mobile app developer Itty Bitty Apps, the brains behind the leading app debugging tool Reveal, today released v29 of the professional iOS developer’s best friend.…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Someone should build that

As developers, most of us are sensitive to aspects of our day-to-day that could be improved. Most of the time, there turns out to be an easy way to satisfy…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Conditional Navigation with Navigation Compose

In this post, I’m going to describe some of the pitfalls of Jetpack Navigation in Compose, and how to avoid them. Understanding these problems and finding solutions has been quite…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

The power of SDKs to drive growth

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. - Metcalfe's Law Metcalfe’s law of network effects is what drives the exponetial growth…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

iOS for the uninitiated – how to get started

After having completed most of a computer science degree I did what any reasonable person would do. I dropped out and tried to figure out how to be an iOS…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Smooth Integration: SDKs for the BNPL revolution

The market for buy now, pay later (BNPL) is booming. The digital shift of 2020 combined with a surge in consumer interest in better understanding and controlling spending, has pushed…
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February 21, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Build Better Apps

Smartphones and tablets are an integral part of our everyday lives. They help us to connect, to capture and relive precious moments with our loved ones, and to carry out…
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February 20, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Introducing our iOS UI kit

We built an iOS 16 UI kit for Figma🎉  But why build this kit, and what makes it stand out from the other iOS 16 UI kits in the community?…
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February 20, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Continuous Delivery at ANZ Plus

Today, I will show how we do continuous delivery with the new ANZ Plus app, and how we go from developers opening a pull request to having the app out…
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January 15, 2024 in Digital, Insights

Unlocking new realities: What businesses need to know about visionOS and Vision Pro

Apple has a knack for keeping us on our toes and changing the face of consumer technology. We've seen it time and time again, from the iPod to the Apple…
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December 11, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Unveiling the Future: GitHub Universe 2023 Announcements

Introduction GitHub Universe 2023 marked a thrilling culmination of groundbreaking innovations that will reshape the coding landscape, elevating developers' capabilities to new heights. Amidst an array of exciting updates, one…
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August 11, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Jetpack Compose Android Testing – Beyond the Basics

Author Gary ChangCreating Android UI instrumented tests has traditionally been more involved than creating unit tests principally because of all the set up required to provide enough of a stubbed…
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June 27, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Emerging API Technology Trends – Tech Radar 2023

Written by Ashish Tripathi Mantel Group prides itself on being a learning organisation, striving to promote technology vitality and prepare our clients so they can evolve and be successful. Each…
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April 27, 2023 in Digital, Insights

GraphQL Part 1: Comparing Monolithic and Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) Architectures for Implementing GraphQL

Written by Mirjam Uher Background GraphQL is a powerful query language for APIs that was released in 2015. It has since gained a lot of attention for its schema-driven approach…
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April 27, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Emerging web technology trends – Tech Radar 2023

At Mantel Group, we bring value to clients by building cost effective, efficient and innovative solutions that keep them ahead in the market. To do that in the web tech…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Discover emerging mobile tech trends – Tech Radar

Mantel Group prides itself on being a learning organisation, striving to promote technology vitality and prepare our clients so they can evolve and be successful. Each year we run a…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Orchestrating Microservices in Real Life. A Blog Series. Part 1: Should we be orchestrating our microservices?

Intro: Microservices, orchestration, an assessment Microservices have become a popular architectural paradigm when building large complex systems. The appeal of building microservices comes from the idea that dividing functionality into…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Tech radar – Discover emerging tech trends

Written by Sangeeta Vishwanath What is our Technology Strategy? Which Technology areas are we investing in? These are questions we explore regularly within the Mantel Group team, and the Mantel…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

A Tour of OAuth Standards

Written by Brett Henderson The previous blog Entitlements In Context provided some context around how IAM (Identity and Access Management) fits into typical DigIO solutions. It made some mention of the OAuth…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

LambdaTest vs BrowserStack vs SauceLabs: Testing Tools Analysis

The Need For Cross-Browser Testing Tools Imagine navigating the digital world without the worry of web and mobile application compatibility issues. Sounds blissful, right? Thanks to cloud-based, cross-browser testing tools…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Pros and Cons of Flutter – From an App Engineer

Overview Cross Platform vs Native development is not always a straightforward consideration. I’ve been involved in my fair share of heated debates over what is best. As a passionate iOS…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Discover emerging QA technology trends – Tech Radar

Mantel Group prides itself on being a learning organisation, striving to promote technology vitality and prepare our clients so they can evolve and be successful. Each year we run a…
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April 24, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Using Kafka with Go: A Tech Assessment

Written by Song Xue There’s an increasing demand for Kafka across the Mantel Group brands in client projects. Java, Kotlin, and Scala are the default languages for writing applications that interact…
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March 1, 2023 in Digital, Insights

Party-Based Authorisation

In the previous blog, A Tour of IAM Standards, I walked through a history of standards relating to IAM (Identity and Access Management). OAuth 2.0 provides a great building block…
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December 5, 2022 in Digital, Insights

Lightweight Java Part II — Quarkus

Author Jason Feng, DigIOIf you haven’t read Part I, which includes a brief introduction to GraalVM and Spring Native, please have a read here Introducing Quarkus Quarkus, from Red Hat,…
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November 3, 2022 in Digital, Insights

Entitlements in Context

Written by Brett Henderson Introduction I often quip that “All non-trivial projects begin as an identity project”. I used to say it in jest but it now feels more like…
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October 30, 2024 in Insights, Security

CPS 230 – What do I need to know and do?

Nick Ellsmore, October 2024 As the new APRA CPS 230 standard takes effect, executives must act now to ensure their organisations are equipped to manage operational risks—especially in areas like…
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July 23, 2024 in Insights, Security

CrowdStrike outage: Implications for business continuity plans

Nick Ellsmore, 22 July, 2024 The CrowdStrike issue is not a case of ‘security company breaks the world’. Instead, it is a more nuanced discussion around business resilience. At its…
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June 16, 2024 in Cloud, Data, Digital, Insights, Security

What Apple’s OpenAI deal means for your enterprise security

Apple’s announcement that ChatGPT will, it appears, be free on certain iPhones, iPads and Macs has sparked concerns in some quarters about the threat of an “unacceptable security violation”. The…
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August 31, 2023 in Insights, Security

What is Continuous Assurance?

By Phil Massyn One of the major challenges organisations are facing today is providing transparency into their current security posture which is able to provide both granular detail in addition…
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June 27, 2023 in Insights, Security

Unravelling Adversarial AI: A New Frontier in Cybersecurity

By Brendan Wilkinolls The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought about revolutionary changes in virtually every sector of society. AI offers innovative solutions and uncovers new possibilities, leading to…
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May 19, 2023 in Insights, Security

Cyber security with a purpose (why compliance /= security)

Where it all began In the 1980s a new age of technology was dawning, as personal computers started to move from laboratories and specialist engineering uses to something that was…
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May 19, 2023 in Insights, Security

An Introduction to Amazon Security Lake  

In today's fast-paced digital world, cyber threats are on the rise exponentially and are a constant stress point for organisations. Remediating any security incidents require logs from different resources and…
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May 19, 2023 in Insights, Security

Integrating Crowdstrike Falcon logs with Amazon Security Lake 

Organisations can gain access to a wealth of information, including system detections, vulnerabilities, and configurations, by integrating third-party services such as CrowdStrike's Falcon Query API with security lakes, which have…
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May 19, 2023 in Insights, Security

The difference between Cybersecurity & Information Security

Information Security vs Cybersecurity The terms Information Security and Cybersecurity are often used in the media on a daily basis and when words such as attack, threat and breach are…
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May 19, 2023 in Insights, Security

Security metrics, an executive level view

The business opportunities provided by technology related innovation are immense but these opportunities are also accompanied by an ever increasing level of risk. How does the executive team obtain clarity…
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May 17, 2023 in Insights, Security

Integrating Okta logs with Amazon Security Lake 

In this post we’ll take you through the logical steps to configure Okta System logs conversion into parquet files in OCSF (Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework) format and storing them with…
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