The Advanced Data Analytics Certificate is designed for technology professionals who are involved in data analytics, data science, or data science analysis. The Business Intelligence Certificate, whose courses are also available, is designed for business intelligence analysts, engineers and developers.

Google’s entry-level certification in data analytics is the most popular certification. The Advanced Data Analytics and Business Analytics certifications are considered the next step in the analytics professional’s journey, delving deeper into critical skills like BigQuery and SQL.

“The need to understand data to make business decisions is only growing in importance for businesses large and small, which is why we’ve made it easy and affordable for people to reskill or upskill to advance in their careers in data analytics,”

Lisa Gevelber, Founder & Head of Grow with Google, wrote in a statement.

“We’re proud that our new certificates in Advanced Data Analytics and Business Intelligence will help businesses grow their businesses and provide exciting new opportunities for data analytics professionals”,

she continued.

Google has been issuing career certifications for a long time. Since 2018, the company has launched certifications in data analytics, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, project management, user experience (UX) design, and more. In this period, around 150,000 people have received these certifications. The certifications are a good way to attract talent from groups that are not well represented in technology.

Certificates are not a prerequisite for getting hired, but they are proof that you have the necessary skills to contribute to the company’s goals.

Asking all about the trends and the future of technology, we reached out to one of the mobile operator enablers, located in Bulgaria – Effortel. Their insight on the business sheds more light on how they see the innovation in technologies and what trends might surprise us in the future.

Effortel is not afraid to innovate and dream big when it comes to inventions in that realm. The company can narrow down the huge list to 5 ones that impact telecommunications and Effortel in particular.

5G

There has not been a greater buzz in telecoms up till now than the one about 5G. It even took some ridiculous forms like being feared by the people, citizens thrashing 5G equipment in several countries, and being caricatured in thousands of memes and jokes throughout the Internet. Still, it is a natural evolution of the radio data transmission technology to address the growing demands for fast and reliable wireless voice and data transfer. It takes advantage of the most recent technologies of the internet world and allows room for integrations with protocols like HTTP and even REST right out-of-the-box for achieving optimization and seamlessness.

To address that, Effortel has started building a new generation OCS system, which is being built around a completely new, freshly patented paradigm and reduces the computational (and therefore energy consumption) footprint of the Rating Engines in the Telecom world with more than 90%. That fact also adds it to the category of the so-called Green (environment-friendly) software.

Data Science

While data science is not a new thing, we can see organizations are still inventing ways of implementing it in their businesses to achieve new goals, which are increasingly sophisticated. In their business, Effortel is using it to identify patterns of customer/system behavior, and on that basis, predict various events, which need to be avoided, or, on the contrary, facilitated. For example the Business Intelligence department in Effortel experiments with and trains models to successfully achieve customer churn prevention, predictive system scaling, etc.

Robotic Process Automation

The company took a very unorthodox approach when envisioning and developing the EMS, their flagship product – they thought of it as a living organism. Every component of the system has an ever-expanding set of virtual sensors, which emit events in an ultra-fast clustered event bus, which in turn, acts like its neuro system. This provides a firm foundation to configure native pre-programmed reactions that act like instincts of the system and ensure its adequate function to any of the internal and external events. This renders the EMS a virtual robot of sorts. Next step is connecting it with the aforementioned predictive engine from the previous section, and have it make its own decisions on which reaction to an event is most optimal and take care of its own configuration.

Another manifestation of that theme in Effortel is the development of chat bots that are connected to the EMS system and provide automated help to its human peers. One can simply write a few simple words in the chat to the bot and have it execute a complex command for them.

Full Stack Development

It’s listed on the internet as an emerging trend, but it’s more of a natural evolution path of a professional since the dawn of personal computers. Effortel is very contented that their developers choose to grow in that direction on their own.

Edge Computing

This also is an old paradigm, which recently received a new name to become trendy, and it basically means to provide the components of data capture with the rules and pieces of logic to have the data be (pre)processed at the moment of its emergence. Effortel has put that foundation at the human interaction layer of the system, mainly to optimize the processing by having it executed on the client’s CPU. Later, a broader set of capabilities was identified and taken advantage of.

Challenges

The biggest challenge in the post-covid time and the Great Resignation is related to human resources, and at the moment, every company is having it. Lately, it is increasingly hard to find good developers, and here Effortel also took an unorthodox path – they started helping Bulgarian universities by providing time to their best professionals to teach the students all the bleeding-edge technologies of today and help them graduate with the most recent battle-tested knowledge under their belts. That way their skills are relevant to the labor market and they can integrate into their or any other technological company faster and easier.

Effortel’s Model

Effortel has never been afraid to innovate and create new frameworks, new paradigms or whatever is needed to achieve their dream goals. What they deliver as software is aimed at solving their clients’ challenges and easing their day-to-day work life, by walking in their shoes as a real end-user of their own software, because Effortel runs their own telecom operations in a number of European countries just like their clients do. It is very important to have the right culture in the company to achieve that. In the last 2 years tremendous efforts have been undertaken to (re)design and (re)build the company from within in accordance with the right target culture.

So now, internally, Effortel is like one big family, in which people trust each other, strive towards mutual growth, and help each other become the best version of themselves possible. Even when there are frictions, which is inevitable, they are all in the name of finding the optimum path for development together, because every employee’s viewpoint matters and deserves to be heard and pondered on. Employees like working and growing together, and take common pride in everyone’s individual achievements.

The new funding round, led by Riverwood Capital, brings the Redwood City, Calif. The funding round included participation from new investors Sanabil Investments and Snowflake Ventures and existing investors Costanoa Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Icon Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Union Grove Partners. Today businesses and organizations are wrestling with exploding volumes of data and struggling to identify the data they have and manage it.

Alation develops data catalogue software and tools for data governance and data search and discovery that businesses and organizations use to identify and manage their data assets for business intelligence, AI and machine learning tasks and for meeting data regulatory and governance requirements. An initial public offering for Alation is probably still two to three years off, co-founder and CEO Satyen Sangani said in an interview with CRN. Sangani also said:

“We just think we have such a massive market opportunity in building out the data intelligence category and realizing its full vision and capability. There are so many different elements of data – the complexities with data and making it really, really simple is something we could spend the next 20 years on and still have work to do. I think the market is in its infancy. What we’ve got today is a drop in the bucket relative to the market opportunity we see in front of us.”

Data governance and compliance have historically been the biggest use-cases for Alation’s software. But Sangani said demand is also being driven by the need for trusted data for AI and machine learning tasks, for data cloud migration, and for the growing use of data for self-service, data-intensive applications.

“There’s just tons of data moving from on-premises systems to the cloud, workloads and applications moving from on-premises systems to the cloud, and we see that literally every single day. Alation’s strategic alliances with data cloud service provider Snowflake and cloud application vendor Salesforce are catalysts for Alation sales for such tasks.”

Alation is focused on leveraging the new relationship with data cloud service provider Snowflake: The two companies plan “deep product integrations and joint go-to-market initiatives,” Alation said in the announcement of the new funding.

Alation will apply some of the new funding to accelerate research and development efforts for its products, including developing connections to additional data sources and extending its software to the cloud. Some of the new financial resources will be used to continue Alation’s global expansion, including expanding into new vertical markets and establishing relationships with solution providers and ISV partners in EMEA and the Asia-Pacific region.

The company launched its official channel program, the Alation Partner Network, in July 2020 to recruit reseller, systems integrator and technology partners.

Petar has been part of the company for a little over a year and is a driving force in the BI department. Staykov noted:

“I am jovial to develop my career in Bulgaria and at the same time to work on creating a product with no parallel anywhere in the world.”

Peter Staykov, Product Director at AtScale

He started his career in the company as a Senior BI Architect. After that Petar became a BI Lead, and since the beginning of March he is combining the leading of the Business Intelligence team with the duties of the Product Director. The new position gives Petar an opportunity with a team of Bulgarian IT experts and American veterans in technologies. Staykov commented:

“I am eager to take this adventure. At AtScale, we prove that the specialists here are in no way inferior to these of the leading technological countries.”

This new position will allow Peter to be a driving force in the development of the company’s product. A coincidence is what involves Staykov in the adventure called AtScale. Some of his friends told him that they are part of a company that has set an ambitious goal – to create a virtual data warehouse. The new Product Director of AtScale also added:

“At first, I thought that this was impossible. This task sounded like a utopia to me. Two days later I had a meeting with AtScale’s Vice President – Momchil Michailov. Seeing the passion in his eyes and also the motivation of my friends I could say the decision-making process was quick. I don’t mean it was easy, because leaving a team I  was developing for so many years seemed unthinkable at that time. A year later, I am convinced I made the right decision.”

AtScale’s General Manager for Europe – Momchil Michailov commented:

“Petar is an exceptionally professional and proves it every day in the last 12 months. I highly value his desire to improve himself and learn new things. Ever since our first meeting, I knew he was the ideal candidate for AtScale. Time proved that this is right.:

Petar graduates with a bachelor’s degree in “Telecommunications technologies” from the Technical University of Sofia. After that, he got a master’s degree in “E-business and e-governance” from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. He started his professional development in his student years as a software engineer. Before joining the AtScale team, Petar was part of the international giant Coca-Cola for over 12 years. There he started his career in Business Intelligence (BI). In the last few years, he was leading a team of 40 professionals.

Petar Staykov’s new role is another example of the success of the AtScale Bulgarian dream team. In the last 18 months, the experts working in Sofia are an integral part of every update of the company’s product.

In fact, more than 90% of AtScale’s software engineering is being done in Bulgaria. Just recently, Silicon Valley-based organization announced, a Bulgarian expert will develop the company project to boost machine learning.

Nuspire, a leading managed security services provider (MSSP), announced the release of its 2020 Q4 and Year in Review Threat Landscape Report. Sourced from its 90 billion traffic logs, the report outlines new cybercriminal activity and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) with additional insight from its threat intelligence partner, Recorded Future. Craig Robinson, a Program Director, Security Services at IDC said:

“The volume of sophisticated attacks seen throughout 2020 highlight the criticality of business intelligence and cybersecurity detection and response to improving organizational cyber readiness. Nuspire’s latest report puts into perspective the changing nature of cyberattacks. Security leaders must be ready for unexpected situations, consistently revisiting and revamping their cybersecurity strategies.”

2020 was a chaotic year that shifted the threat landscape and changed the way many organizations manage their business operations. In addition to increasingly sophisticated and frequent attacks, Nuspire security experts observed a massive spike in malware with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) agent activity, which overshadowed all other malware variants identified throughout the year. John Ayers, Nuspire Chief Strategy Product Officer added:

“The SolarWinds attack shook the cybersecurity community to its core and should serve as a reminder to organizations small or large that security must be a priority within every aspect of the business. As attack techniques continue to evolve and the frequency of attacks increases, it’s critical for business success to understand the changing threat landscape and how to protect themselves from cyberthreats.”

During Q4 security experts uncovered a 10,000% increase in ransomware activity—the largest spike in activity Nuspire has observed to date. Ransomware operators targeted some of the most vulnerable moments in time, including the U.S. Presidential Election, the holidays, and continued to leverage year-long themes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, exploit attacks saw a whopping 68% increment this quarter as a result of numerous SMB brute force login attempts.

Additional notable findings from Nuspire’s 2020 Q4 and Year in Review Threat Landscape Report include:

Although malware activity was on a slow decline at the beginning of 2020, activity sharply increased in Q4, reaching its highest point through the year in September. VBA Trojans were the most commonly observed malware at 95%, suggesting either numerous malspam campaigns were launched or a large-scale one was instigated by unknown operators. Nuspire expects that VBA agent activity will continue to overshadow other variants as VBA is the first stage of infection.

• Throughout 2020, Nuspire observed a consistent increase of exploitation events with DoublePulsar reigning as the top utilized technique. However, Q4 saw the largest volume of activity in December with SMB Login Brute Force attempts, closely followed by HTTP Server Authorization Buffer Overflow attacks.
• Botnet and Exploit activity remained fairly consistent throughout the year with the largest contenders being ZeroAccess Botnet, which made a significant appearance in May, and DoublePulsar staying at the top of the exploit activity list in 2020.
• In Q4, attackers increased attempts to exploit new vulnerabilities as they were disclosed. This escalation was driven by the release of a known vulnerability in over 49,000 Fortinet devices on the dark web and APT groups – which also targeted the SSL-VPN vulnerability (CVE-2018-13379). Shortly after this list was released, activity attempting to exploit this vulnerability increased by 4,176%.