Data Analitics

Hiring Data Scientists

admin — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 04:24:07 +0000

Hiring Data Scientists admin Tue, 12/21/2021 - 05:24

Optimized supply chains, improved production efficiency, personalized customer experience, and boosted sales effectiveness are just some of the gains that our customers pursue when they turn to data science consulting services. Facing the growing demand for data science talent, we, at ITQSOFT , decided to cover a burning topic of how to hire data scientists. Here, we answer 3 main questions: what skills a data scientist should possess, how to assess those skills, and where to search for the right person.

What data scientist do you need?

To narrow the initial list of candidates down and make the shortlisting pipeline more efficient, we recommend that you clearly define a needed data scientist’s profile. With a vast variety of skills that a data scientist is expected to possess (including the endless list of big data technologies and machine learning algorithms), you can never find a data science unicorn who handles all these things with the same mastery.

So, you can devise an ideal data scientist’s profile on your own or find the appropriate option among the existing classifications. For example, ITQSOFT adheres to a classification that recognizes 2 data scientists types: analysts and technicians.

How to assess data scientists’ skills?

The approach to skills assessment depends on which of the 3 scenarios listed below your company favors:

Growing in-house data science capabilities (this scenario also covers team augmentation).
Resorting to data science consulting services (when you hire an external consultant for knowledge transfer to boost the development of your internal data science capabilities).
Outsourcing data science (when you don’t plan to develop in-house data science capabilities).

Approach 1. When you search to grow in-house data science capabilities.

Check the candidates’ CVs.
Challenge a candidate with a test to validate their skills.
(Optional) Organize an in-house data challenge.

Approach 2. When you search for a consulting/outsourcing partner.

Check a candidate company’s competence and experience: study their portfolio of implemented projects, check the attained partnerships and certificates.
Ask to deliver a proof of concept (for complex projects).

Where to find a data scientist?

Now, when you know whom to chase, let’s discuss where to search for. Job sites, recruitment agencies, and professional networks like LinkedIn is the triad that easily comes to mind. However, considering the shortage of data scientists, these traditional resources may turn out to be insufficient. In addition, these channels are mainly tuned to hiring data scientists for growing in-house teams. If you consider data science consulting or outsourcing rather than team augmentation, ITQSOFT recommends turning your attention to three extra sources:

Tech communities like GitHub and Stack Overflow – you’ll find the profiles of data scientists there.
Listings, like this one featuring the best data science consultancies.
Homepages of data science consulting and outsourcing companies where you can check the service and project portfolio of a certain vendor.

Let the effective search for data scientists begin!

Now, you know what these fantastic data scientists are and where to find them. We hope that our tips will help you make your hunt for data scientists efficient and fast, and your data science-powered projects a true success.

Data Analitics

Development vs. Outsourcing

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:25:07 +0000

Development vs. Outsourcing admin Mon, 12/21/2020 - 05:25

In-house development

Growing an in-house software development team brings increased control over development for you and intense project engagement within the team. You assemble trusted people who have a comprehensive understanding of your corporate culture and business specifics. However, certain conditions have to be observed to make it work:

Ample time, budget and management resources at your disposal.
Enough post-delivery work or other projects in the line to employ the team later.

In-house development pros

Full control over the project. You have visibility over the day-to-day progress, know what your employees are working on, and can react promptly if some stumbling blocks are in the way.
Smooth communication flow. The same working hours, face-to-face discussions, and the possibility of rapid feedback from the business side result in a shared software vision and faster reaction time of the development team in implementing changes.
Enhanced security. Your business data and know-how aren’t shared with third parties, and you keep all the knowledge gained during the project inside the company, which minimizes the chance of information leakage.
Unlimited post-delivery support. Your in-house team stays dedicated to your project after the delivery and is always available for further maintenance, bug fixes, and updates under your request.

In-house development cons

Slow launch. Hiring one developer takes, on average, 30-35 days, and the task is complicated by high demand for them. You have to compete with other companies and offer better working conditions to attract top talent. And you not only have to think about getting qualified specialists, but also ensure they match each other by skills and personality to be efficient as a team. What’s more, they’ll require time to get familiar with each other’s working styles before reaching high productivity levels.
Expenses on keeping an in-house team and the risk of turnover. Payroll, taxes, insurance, training, and maintaining the IT infrastructure are tough on the budget. With that, you don’t have guarantees your employees won’t leave mid-project.
Limited expertise. Naturally, you can’t gather all the skills and roles in your team. Still, you may need additional competencies as the project unfolds, for example, to solve arising problems or complex tech tasks. It’ll take longer to get a handle on them with existing resources (and, possibly, investments into additional training) and decrease the speed of development.

In-house or outsourced? Get data to support your decision

ITQSOFT can conduct a feasibility analysis of in-house vs. outsourced development with TCO calculation of both options for your particular case.

Outsourced development

Today, the primary driver for outsourcing software development is not just cutting costs. Judging by the requests ITQSOFT gets as an outsourced development provider, more and more companies are looking to cover complex development needs with outsourcing. This is all about optimization: instead of spending vast resources on growing required competencies in-house, they can get them right away and at a better cost.

Outsourcing is a good fit for startups without established development and for non-IT enterprises going in for digital transformation, where time and budget don’t favor expanding the IT department with a full-scale development team. Also, outsourcing helps product companies to speed up time-to-market and scale business by increasing development output.

Outsourcing pros

Access to top talents. You’re not restrained by your geographical location and can tap into the world’s talent pool to find any skills you need, including those in emerging technologies and narrow domains. Moreover, you can select destinations that offer a better price/quality ratio than others.
Reduced costs. No expenses inherent to in-house development related to recruitment, salaries, retention, and more.
Fast project launch. You get an assembled team whose members are likely to already know how to work with each other from past projects, so you don’t risk getting inner collaboration difficulties and don’t have to spend time hand-picking each employee.
Reduced management efforts. You get a self-managed team, which frees up your resources to focus on high-level business activities.
Flexibility. It’s easier to scale an outsourced team up and down depending on your needs. A vendor will take care of adding the right specialists to the team when the project grows and requires more hands to handle.
Streamlined development and effective problem-solving. You plug into established processes, with many of them already automated and refined according to best practices (e.g., DevOps, CI/CD). Generally, a vendor’s teams have a rich experience in handling development challenges due to a variety of projects they’ve had a chance to participate in. They also have access to the knowledge accumulated inside of their company, which is a great support in case of any problems or non-standard tasks arising.

Outsourcing cons

Less control over the project. The development process isn’t as transparent as with in-house development, which can put a vendor’s performance in question.
Possibility of communication gaps. Varying time zones, cultural differences and insufficient English skills may become a barrier to effective collaboration.
Possibility of a confidentiality breach. Sharing business information may possess some risks stemming from the human factor as well as insecure communication channels.

The presence or absence of outsourcing-related risks depends on a vendor you choose. I recommend avoiding vendors with the lowest prices – this is a very short-term saving that’s likely to bring undesired consequences discussed above. It’s better to focus on getting value-for-money: by choosing a more established vendor, you may pay more (still much less than for an in-house team) but get long-term savings from good quality of their work.

To know how to find a reliable vendor, you can explore another article written by ITQSOFT.

So, what to choose?

The main factors to consider while deciding on in-house vs. outsourced development are the time and budget you have and the complexity of software to be developed.

However, if you want to combine the advantages of both approaches, you can try one of the hybrid strategies:

Develop an MVP with an outsourced team and then gradually grow your in-house team for further evolution and maintenance.
In case you already have a development team or an IT department, you can try other models than full outsourcing – a dedicated team or staff augmentation. With these models, you can keep core development activities in-house, while benefiting from outsourcing routine or, on the contrary, narrow areas of development.

If you decide to leverage outsourcing benefits either with full outsourcing or a hybrid strategy, our team at ITQSOFT is ready to help, just let us know.

Data Analitics

Cloud Software Design

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:25:05 +0000

Cloud Software Design admin Mon, 12/21/2020 - 05:25

Data security issues due to poor tenant isolation

If you’re a software product company, you may face data security issues with your cloud application in case of insufficient tenant isolation in the multi-tenancy cloud architecture. Bad tenant isolation can lead to data leakage between tenants, fines from clients in case of data security breaches and delays in app response.

There are numerous ways to ensure better tenant isolation in your cloud app but all of them have to do with your application’s database design. Let’s focus on these two:

The database-per-tenant approach presupposes that when a new tenant is added to the platform, the app creates a new database for them (with the frontend and backend still shared among all tenants). This approach makes sure that your tenants only have access to their isolated databases and besides that allows easy data backup, recovery and migration. However, this approach does not scale that well, so you have to clearly see your app’s future scalability needs to be sure that this is the way to go.
In the shared database approach, a cloud app hosts all tenants in one database and assigns each tenant a unique ID. Each data record has a tenant ID column and thus tenants can only access data attributable to them. Easy resource management is a definite strong side of this approach since the database shares computing and storage resources across all tenants, however, this is also the reason for poor app scalability opportunities behind this approach. That is why it can be sometimes altered by sharding the database and making each shard contain the data of one tenant.

Want to Create a Cloud App That Isolates Tenants Just Fine?

ScienceSoft is ready to design and develop your cloud application with cybersecurity in mind and help you identify what particular way of tenant isolation is better for your project.

Bad application performance

With poor decisions made on the cloud software design stage, your app can further experience performance drops caused by high network latency.

This problem is only true for developing cloud apps using IaaS because you can’t influence network latency in any other cloud service model. So, in case your application is a big monolith with equal load on all virtual machines, while designing the app, you’d need to use a load balancer to route requests equally among your virtual machines avoiding their overload. And if your app is built using microservices, you’d have to analyze how the features of the app are going to load their respective virtual machines and thus deploy such a number of virtual machines for each feature that would be able to handle the load adequately. These measures normally ensure a lower network latency and better performance of cloud apps.

User overload due to neglected integration capabilities

Insufficient integration between apps can manifest in redundant manual activity for your users when they have to switch between systems. For end-user companies, that means low employee productivity and, for product companies, that means low user satisfaction with their platform and high customer attrition.

There’s much more to the topic of application integration but let’s cut it short for the sake of simplicity. Here are three ways for a cloud app to integrate with other systems:

Through an additional architectural component called the integration layer. It runs data transformation (for apps to ‘understand’ each other’s data structures), encryption and transportation. Here is an example of single sign-on app integration we did using the app’s integration layer.
Through middleware infrastructure specifically created for the sake of integrating multiple apps and platforms with each other. This is the most cost-effective integration strategy, if you already have the middleware infrastructure in place or if you’re planning to have a lot of your apps integrated in the future (written once – used multiple times).
Through a separate cloud integrator application, such as in this integration project we did for a software development company with $1-billion turnover. In this strategy, the integrator app functions as an external integration layer for all apps to be integrated.

The third is usually the more expensive option that companies resort to it if their cloud apps don’t have any internal integration capabilities and there’s no mature middleware infrastructure in place. That’s why, during the cloud software design stage, you need to understand your future app’s integration needs and plan for the integration layer or the middleware infrastructure not to spend more on the integrator app development later.

Excessive cloud expenses

Cloud apps usually offer a lot of flexibility and scalability. However, it is pretty easy to end up paying a fortune if your app wasn’t designed with reasonable resource consumption patterns in mind.

I believe that cloud resource consumption needs to be optimized at the architecture level. For example, while designing your app, you need to provide for using mechanisms that let you avoid overpaying during low periods and at the same time allow handling load surges. Scheduled resource scaling and autoscaling can be such mechanisms (note that you need to be cautious with the latter one not to wind up paying much more than you’d expect). Besides, you need to build your cloud app so that it is dynamically orchestrated and containers are actively scheduled and managed.

Benefit with a meticulously designed cloud app

Cloud software design is the foundation for making your software work smoothly. Decisions made right at this stage will make sure your app will focus on achieving your business goals instead of being an impediment with constant data leakage fines, big fat cloud resource consumption bills, low user satisfaction claims and constant app performance drops. In case you’re not sure you can handle cloud software design on your own without making wrong decisions, consider ITQSOFT cloud-native development offering as your helping hand.

Data Analitics