And if your well-being and your loved ones depend on you? Thoughts in March were different, including alarming, the unknown scares people, these are the ones that evolution has selected.
Now it seems that everything has passed, and, more likely, with small losses. But let's try to find out - have we bounced off the bottom of the next cyclical L-shaped crisis, or are we on the first "shelf" and all the fun is yet to come? Spoiler alert: no one can give an exact answer to this question, even those whose profile is such collective high-paying research.
The purpose of this article is not the attempts of IT specialists in macroeconomic forecasts, but only a subjective view of what is happening, and an attempt to answer the question "What to do?" and a little materiel, where is it without it, because this is habr, without specifics it is impossible :)
Well, the introductory part is over, let's go!
The fact of a deep crisis in the world economy has long been recognized, but how deep it will be very useful to know in order to know what to prepare for. One of the indices most often used for forecasting by economic analysts is the PMI index. If it is above 50 - orders for products grow, if below - they fall, indicators in the Russian Federation: ru.investing.com/economic-calendar/russian-markit-manufacturing-pmi-1630 in September exceeded 50, but in the summer there was horror-horror ...
We, like all citizens, are affected by the situation with the budget of the Russian Federation. And the RF budget has a deficit. There are three ways to deal with the budget deficit:
- Sequestration of the budget
- Devaluation
- Borrowing in the foreign market.
And we already see all three tools in action.
- The Ministry of Finance has already proposed (and we know very well what the word “proposed” means in Russia) a sequestration of the budget. For our economy, the sequestration does not bode well, and the cut in the defense budget suggests that this is not an ordinary crisis, for anyone interested, we suggest reading the "positive" link https://www.rbc.ru/economics/21/07/2020 / 5f15ab829a7947382f5ec57e
An attempt was made to borrow and place Treasury bonds.
The ruble is falling against the dollar, as are most emerging currencies.
There are also facts like stopping one of the threads with pomp of the opening Turkish Stream, https://www.rbc.ru/society/10/07/2020/5f08c3ff9a7947c8483647fd because it is cheaper for Turkey to buy gas not from Russia, even Belarus has started buying oil from the USA and Norway, it is clear that this is a policy, but the facts of purchases are facts. And you shouldn't rejoice at the grown oil prices, you need to look at the volumes of supplies, and the volumes of sales from Russia have fallen dramatically, we all remember the spiritually uplifting news of May about the collapse of Gazprom's exports by 52%, by 32% of crude oil and 43% of coal. This cannot but affect the economy of our country in the medium term.
In the next 2-3 years, the money will become noticeably less, the rate of inflation will rise, work in a budgetary organization or a state corporation will no longer be such a “quiet and stable haven” as before.
The number of job seekers on job search sites is increasing, but vacancies are not becoming more. Considering that the crisis was triggered by a pandemic and, as a result, the IT infrastructure for organizations has become a lifesaver, competition for jobs among administrators and their leaders will increase.
Let's try to analyze what kind of expertise an IT professional needs in the early 20s to compete successfully for jobs, in addition to the standard technical competencies to fit the position.
What trends in IT did the 2020 pandemic have the most stimulating effect in Russia? Let's highlight three:
- tools for remote work and communication
- automation / digitalization
- import substitution
Disclaimer: The examples of programs below do not cover all known / popular / current products, these are just examples.
1. Remote work
Remote desktop - in the broadest sense. Classics, for example: RDP, RemoteApp, VDI, not forgetting about VPN, etc. There are also third-party services such as VNC: AnyDesk, TeamViewer, etc. - they, of course, carry certain security threats, but people continue to use them. This also includes any proprietary software for remote work: for example, a mobile application for top management for working with budgets, like a "client bank".
Tools for “remote” communication via the Internet - the widest possible range is meant: e-mail; portal; forums; social network; messengers, etc. The latter have entered our life especially tightly (you quickly get used to good things); it’s a habit that answers to “current” and “simple” questions are much faster to get online (or how it will take a minute to answer), and also to see whether it has been read or not, etc .: Telegram, Whatsapp, etc.
We will also include services and for video conferencing with screen sharing: Zoom, Skype for Business, Slack, Google Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet), etc.
Other tools for “remote” and collaboration (teamwork without being tied to the location of the participants). Office suites: Google Sheets, Google Docs and Google Slides, Office 365, Quip, Apple iWork.
Task Managers: There are tons of CRMs, as well as task trackers like Jiro, LeaderTask, Redmine, Todoist, GitHub and even pachca.com.
Project managers: Microsoft Project, Advanta, Asana, Bitrix24, Basecamp, ProofHub, Podio.
Cloud storages: Google Drive, Yandex.Disk, Dropbox, OneDrive.
Note services: OneNote, Evernote, Notion. Kanban boards: Trello, MeisterTask, Blossom; interactive online whiteboards: for example, miro.com.
Mind map editors (A mind map is a schematic representation of processes or ideas that simplifies the perception of information): MindMeister, Mindomo, MindMup, X-mind.
Time-trackers (Time-trackers help to keep track of how much time is spent on certain tasks, often automatically): Timely, Toggl, RescueTime, Harvest. Automation Services: Zapier, Power Automate, IFTTT.
Platforms for mass communication: Google forms or mailings using the same Mailchimp.
The vast majority of these services have one thing in common - our information is not stored on our own servers / storages, but somewhere else. But it is cheap, sometimes at the level of "free", and free cheese must also somehow be monetized, it is hard to believe in commercial philanthropists. Despite the declared availability of 24 * 7, there is still a dependence on external service providers (after all, this summer even “Git was not available for a couple of hours”), well, access to it from their side. Which is a strong stopping factor. Those. It's one thing to conduct a one-time, harmless survey through Google forms, and it's another to store really important information in an unknown data center. Issues of information security and data safety will always be relevant.
2. Automation / Digitalization
If you remember about the first part of this article, about sequestration and the like, then the main thing to remember here is that workers will be laid off. Accordingly, they will immediately remember about automation, because this thing allows you to free a lot of white (and sometimes blue) collars from work (or, as HR say, to free up their time for other tasks), this process has been going on for more than a decade (or rather, even more than one century), the last For 20-30 years, the automation process was smoother than the introduction of steam mechanisms in England, due to which the Luddites in 1812 had to be pacified by fire to defeat from the military (then crop failures were also imposed by the continental blockade arranged by Napoleon - all European markets were lost, people had to be fired en masse).
However, current automation technologies are developing, being tested and becoming more and more effective, and let's not forget who became the prime minister in our country and that the ghost of digitalization has been haunting the country for several years.
In this segment, of course, the most relevant topic is document flow, or even ECM platforms (something is described well here https://habr.com/ru/company/alee/blog/137407/ ).
EDO is also relevant almost everywhere. Despite all the hopes, we will go away completely from paper everywhere very, very long time ago, so in large organizations it is worth paying attention to solutions for digitizing and processing paper documents (OCR: Optical Character Recognition), and then / in parallel there is usually robotization of business processes ( RPA).
The pandemic has also spurred the adoption of corporate end-to-end mobile device management platforms designed to work with any endpoint device, on all platforms, for all use cases. AirWatch solutions or domestic OPTIMUM.
We will not talk about SAP, 1C here, since this is a separate Galaxy for specialized firms and specialists.
It is very useful to follow the development of artificial intelligence systems, to the level of understanding where the neuron can be screwed, and where it is impossible or makes no sense. Especially if the company is manufacturing, especially if there is a contact center. The following areas can be distinguished: speech technologies (voice robots) + chat bots nearby, computer vision, industrial systems, and if you succeed in doing one of the above, you can think about predictive analytics.
3. Import substitution
Before the pandemic of all three, this trend was perhaps the most pronounced, and after that it disappeared into the shadow of the “remote place”. However, economic problems that are gaining momentum around the world are leading to increased protectionism and trade wars. You can, of course, look for flaws in domestic IT solutions, but the issue of having a national IT industry is too important a question, to say the least, the importance of the IT industry is smoothly approaching the importance of having its own strong army. And it should be noted that in some areas, for the most part it concerns software in its pure form, and firmware, in particular, where private initiatives are possible, quite tangible achievements have appeared over the past 5 years.
What happens to the most popular hardware - servers (and, next, storage), let's make an August snapshot for memory:
Even in spite of the fact that already 5 years as Comrade Snowden gave up all his affairs, and personally came to us in Russia with his girlfriend (in Russia. With his girlfriend. Well, in fact, he is a unique person) to tell how everything is actually arranged, we said thank you to him, issued a residence permit, and ... continued to buy our beloved, familiar hardware. Intel (as well as AMD), for example, makes good processors, everyone knows about vulnerabilities / backdoors and their potential / real danger. Of course, to operate most of them, you need to already be inside the perimeter, but there is still a threat of information security. Those. while Meltdown and Specter are “somehow” treated with patches (and updated processor microcode), many others are not treated in any way, there are still undetected vulnerabilities. In order not to seem unfounded, we give information from the official sites:https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/55449_1.16.pdf and https://www.intel.ru/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/ xeon-scalable-spec-update.pdf , - the status of the search / implementation of methods for treating a considerable number of old and new vulnerabilities, that Epyc has “no fix planned”, that Xeon Scalable has “No Fix” (you can also read for example, article https://habr.com/ru/post/427757/ ).
"Russian" servers, current list: https://gisp.gov.ru/pp719/p/pub/products/in the field (product) name, enter “Server” (similarly, you can see “storage” / ”data storage”). For today (09/09/2020) we see 23 registry numbers of servers (and 12 storage systems), and there is also information about some more on the way to being added to this list. We wrote about Elbrus back in 2015.
Review and comparative testing of PC "Elbrus 401 PC". Part Four - Benchmarks
Review and comparative testing of the Elbrus 401 PC. Supplement - questions and answers
Now on the way (we expect serially in 2021) Elbrus-16C with 16 cores, a frequency of 2.0 GHz and support for DDR4 memory, many domestic manufacturers are already in full swing preparing to offer suitable servers and storage systems on them.
Cisco and Juniper have not gone anywhere, and Huawei has done well, caught the moment, and by sending its partners to printing houses to print thousands of stickers with a beautiful name in Cyrillic, it received an explosive growth in sales. Although even without the support provided by the native state of Huawei, there are a number of fairly large customers who have almost the entire network infrastructure already built and are successfully working on domestic https://www.qtech.ru/ and https://eltex-co.ru/ (we are well aware of these, but this is not a complete list of domestic manufacturers of network equipment).
Let's also look at the results of the five-year plan for the development of domestic computing systems from people in beautiful Italian suits who often sleep at work (employees of the Ministry of Industry and Trade).
There will be a separate article about domestic hardware and software, and who is interested now - for a start, here is an informative link https://reestr-minsvyaz.ru/reestr/reestr-po-klassu-operacionnye-sistemy/ (try to answer the question: why are they all registered in 2016?).
We ran at a gallop in various disciplines, including humanitarian, what should an IT specialist now pay attention to in order to
- and Russian,
- and about automation,
- and so that the next possible autumn domestication by remote users will come in handy?
I remembered one of the tasks being solved by our customer (one of the largest construction companies in the Russian Federation):
Customer problems:
1. During the design, construction and maintenance of facilities, several thousand employees of this organization communicate more and more with each other and hundreds of contractors through messengers such as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. These communications include not only the exchange of messages, but also negotiations, and more and more - the exchange of documents (the last point was considered by the company's management to be completely unacceptable).
2. Even before this project, the customer was aware that with the help of chat bots, it is possible to greatly simplify routine processes within the company, starting with obtaining a personal income tax certificate and ordering a pass for contractors' trucks, ending with the negotiation of contracts.
3. Security officers, as always, want to control everything, their work is like that, and immediately after the FSTEC certificate they recall the register of domestic software. Plus the problem of quit employees, who have access to confidential correspondence for months (and in some cases, years) - neither the information nor the members of general groups in the conditional WhatsApp are available to the customer services, and the information is stored on a private smartphone forever.
4. Further, the IT specialists spoke, remembering that the remote location is not as far away as it seems, about the same place as the imminent cold weather + at least the usual seasonal flu, which means that it is necessary that not only ios / android be installed, but that and there was a desktop version and a web version, well, not worse than WhatsApp. Well, of course, if we are talking about corporate communications, then the system in question should integrate without problems with AD, exchange, etc.
Based on these criteria, we have chosen one amusing domestic tool for corporate communications. By the way, at the moment, the solution that covers all of the above requirements is the only one. We made inquiries, it turned out that the product has been sawing for a decent amount of time and there are implementations from the most serious customers.
What attracted this corporate messenger initially:
- it is deployed on its (corporate) server
- clients both for mobile (IOS or Android) and for PC (Application or Web).
- integration with corporate IS (out of the box only AD, and for the rest there is BotX documentation, see the next paragraph)
- built-in chatbot (or rather a platform for developing corporate bots)
- "task manager" (tasks per person, broken down into subtasks, deadline, etc.).
- product development - 100% in the Russian Federation
- FSTEC certificate
- the default trailer in this messenger is video conferencing (now on PC or Web versions) and voice calls.
Let's talk a little about the installation, the installation process required:
0) Select a scheme (one server or two (Front and Back)).
Networking schemes were taken from the administrator's instructions.
Option one server (Single CTS):
Option two servers (Front and End):
1) Create a VM with parameters based on the estimated number of corporate users and the selected scheme of one or two servers (see Table 1).
Table 1. Requirements for “one server” with data storage for 1 year:
2) Install a choice of guest OS: RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu; and on the OS install: Docker
3) Provide the FQDN of the created server to the developer, in response to receive the settings file.
What for? The answer is simple: the messenger is available not only to corporate users, it can also be used by ordinary users (like WhatsApp), but they are already served by the developer's servers. And it is also possible to communicate between different users. But ordinary users (who downloaded the free-distribution version) will not have access to corporate functionality at all without our permission.
4) Install container images from the developer's repository (here again it was necessary to contact the developer).
5) Configure networking according to the selected scheme.
6) Configure a voice server.
7) Configure integration with AD. (of course, you can add corporate users by e-mail, but this is ... a choice for small organizations).
8) Install the messenger client on the phone (android or iOS) and check if everything works as intended (starting with test users). Then, registering live users (the integration is already there, the process is extremely simple), test it again.
9) With bots out of the box, it turned out to be a little more complicated: on the one hand, there is a supplemented “catalog of bots”, and on the other, there are no 100% ready-made corporate bots. One of the reasons: everyone has their own IS (information systems) and integration with them requires the participation of a programmer, which, by the way, is available from the same developer. Although you can “write down” a simple bot yourself, you need to have minimum qualifications (the corresponding documentation for “BotX” is provided by the developer upon request).
Let's check how domestic the corporate messenger Express is officially:
https://reestr.minsvyaz.ru/reestr/?sort_by=date&sort=asc&sort_by=date&sort=asc&name=Express&owner_status=&owner_name=&show_count=100&name=Express&owner_status=&owner_name=&set_filter=Y
matching number: System 57
What else is interesting about the architecture of the Express messenger:
Federated structure. The created federation allows for secure and secure communication between servers and employees of different companies.
Chips: The mutual visibility of contacts can be configured not only in both directions, but also only in one direction;
What data is visible is also flexibly configurable (in fact, which fields from AD are visible);
This is also why top management usually has its own CTS server with its own settings (not only the supervisor mode is turned off, but another list of AD fields is visible, for example, the phone number is not exactly visible);
After setting up a trusted connection between two CTS servers of friendly organizations, in fact, traffic between users of these friendly corporate servers will not go through the public (RTS).
Moreover, the developers have made a beautiful feature with a visual and interactive representation of the composition of group members with interserver connections (example screen below).
Let's highlight the advantages of the corporate messenger Express:
• Reduced risks of information leaks (key, bold plus) at a rather low cost (small requirements) and greater control ;
• Reducing the risk of information loss (with properly adjusted fault tolerance / disaster recovery);
• Protection of personal data (triple encryption, at the same time the impossibility of recovering data in case of loss of passwords from encryption keys);
• Also taken care of and privacy, for example there is a so-called. Stealth mode for delicate negotiations. By timer, all messages are burned (by time, after sending, or after reading).
• Consolidated contact list: phone contacts, colleagues (search in the corporate directory) and business partners (search on trusted servers).
• Minimum time for adaptation. A standard set for the messenger, namely: messages, files, calls, conferences.
• Corporate chats and channels instead of mailings (you can turn on the visibility of messages published before the user joins the channel).
• Defined content and user management; Audit of information security events, including, if necessary: ​​statistics on user activities and supervisor mode (control of correspondence). And for the management, you can raise another server without control (i.e. for all other employees with control, well, or also without, decide for yourself). When the supervisor mode is turned off, even after it is turned on (mode), there is no way to “control” the earlier correspondence.
• The cost of the corporate messenger Express, in our opinion, is quite humane, and with the rise in the value of the dollar and euro it will become more and more humane and humane, and it is always better to pay a Russian manufacturer for a working product, because in the end it is the salary of your fellow student, neighbor in the district or country.
• Complete exclusion of country-specific and significant reduction of political risks
(the epic with the telegram has already begun to be forgotten, but it is better to keep it in mind).
And cons:
• Hardware requirements: they are; including there are network requirements.
• Time for implementation. Deploying and debugging the system will take, albeit minimal time, but time, usually several days. The adaptation of users also requires a minimum, but time (after all, the user experience has already been acquired on other messengers). But for the same chatbot, it will take more time (calculated in weeks) and more resources.
• Self-elimination of accidents. When the service crashed for some reason (with proper configuration, you have to try, but is it difficult skillfully), no one for the admin will do its job (support, of course, can support, but your server, your own network, your firewall, etc.) etc.). And full-fledged communication through this messenger will be interrupted during the accident (but no one cancels other communication methods). Those. if the business has saved on failover / disaster resilience, there will be one more possible small fire more.
• A new icon on a smartphone instead of the usual one can cause resistance from users, the meaning of which is much more serious than it might seem at first glance.
Who will be interested - follow the link on our site you can find seven notes about the Express messenger from the series “to make others less rake-less”.