Mass Migration to Scale up your Cloud Journey

Posted on August 6, 2021August 9, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

Growth in digital transformation brings with it a growing need for agility and innovation in the technology sector. As a result, by 2020, it is projected that 83 percent of the corporate workloads will be run in the cloud. When it comes to maintaining your IT burden, if you haven’t regarded cloud computing as a viable option, it’s time to rethink about your strategy.

In light of current IT trends and corporate expectations, domain experts in the industry believe that Cloud Migration is the most effective method to stay up with the Digital Transformation and fulfill the ever-changing customer demands as fast and efficiently as possible.

Idexcel is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner having more than 100 AWS certified specialists on staff. Such specialists assist with AWS migration to help you save a significant amount of time and money, by transferring your workload to the AWS cloud with Idexcel.

Three Phases of Cloud Migration Process

This process is designed to help organizations in migrating tens, hundreds, or thousands of applications. This is an iterative process, as you migrate more applications you will be able to accelerate repeatability and predictability in the AWS Migrations. Let us, deep-dive, into each of the migration processes:

Assess

At the start of the migration journey, the first thing the organization needs, is to identify all the assets in the data center that can be migrated into the cloud. The organization also needs to understand its current readiness to operate in the cloud. Most importantly, you need to identify the desired business outcomes and develop the business case for migration to the cloud.

AWS has tools to assess your on-premises resource and build a right-sized and optimized cost projection for running applications in AWS. To get started, the Migration Evaluator tool provides a total cost of ownership (TCO) projection for running the workloads on AWS based on your actual utilization of resources. This helps organizations to optimize compute, storage, database, networking, and software licenses on AWS. It also helps to estimate the cost of migrations.

This stage usually means deploying various monitoring tools such as Migration Evaluator, Migration Hub, or third-party tools like RISC Networks, which helps gather information about the applications dependency.

Once the business use case is created, migration and modernization strategies are designed based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Mobilize

As a part of mobilizing phase, we create a detailed migration plan and address gaps that were uncovered in the Assess phase, with a focus on building your baseline environment (landing zone) and drive operational readiness.

A good migration plan starts with a deeper understanding of the inter-dependencies between applications and evaluates migration strategies to drive successful migration. Based on the data collected by tools deployed in the assessment phase, we place the application into various migration paths/strategies. Here is the list of migration paths

Re-Host: It is the most straightforward path cloud migration strategy. It simply means that you lift servers, applications, virtual machines & operating systems from current data centers to Cloud. Once done, the dependencies need to be rewired to the new host in the cloud. It is typically done by a tool like CloudEndure, SMS (Server Migration Service). Amongst all the migration strategies, this is the fastest The big drawback is that cloud-native features are not efficiently utilized like CI/CD automation, self-healing, automated recovery, monitoring systems, etc.
Re-Platform: It is called a lift tinker and shift. Here you might make a few cloud and other optimizations to achieve some tangible benefit, but you aren’t otherwise changing the core architecture of the application. Example: This can be moving from the proprietary web servers to open-source Tomcat server post-migration.
Re-Purchase: Moving to a different product. Example: This can be moving a CRM application from one vendor to another vendor depending on business needs.
Re-Factoring/Re-Architecting: Re-imagining how the application is architected and developed, typically using cloud-native features. This is typically driven by a strong business need to add features, scale, or performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment. It typically entails migrating from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented/server-less architecture to boost agility or improve business continuity.
Re-Tire: Get rid of. Once all the applications are discovered, there will be few applications for which nobody takes responsibility. Since nobody takes responsibility for these servers, the server is stopped to check if that impacts any team. If there are no alarms raised by anybody, then they can be forwarded for decommissioning process.
Re-Tain: This means do nothing. There may be applications that are tied to hardware in on-premise like a Fax machine. These servers need to be hosted in data centers.

Migrate and Modernize

During the migrate and modernize phase, each application is planned, migrated, and validated. Based on the inputs from the above two phases, the migration is meticulously planned and executed. This phase can be sub-divided into 3 phases pre-migration, migration, and post-migration phase.

Pre-Migration:

It starts with setting up a meeting with stakeholders and assigning the responsibilities to the concerned person
Starting the replication/launching new instances based on the migration path
Opening the connectivity between all the dependencies
Creating the change request. The change request needs to be approved and all the pre-work, like intimation to business users regarding the downtime needs to be addressed. The changes need to be tracked as part of the change management process

Migration:

It starts with a cutover window
The On-premise server is stopped
Launching the cloud instance
Changing the hostname
Validation of the application

Post-Migration:

Enabling termination protection
Setting up backup and patching policies
Starting the decommissioning process for the on-premise server

Key Challenges to Scale Migrations

Every transformation task comes with its own set of challenges. These challenges are not faced by all the applications but on an average, it is observed that 20-25% of applications face this challenge.

CMDB is not very accurate. Even if we find all the data in the CMDB tool, many times we see that this data is not accurate and underlying assets in these applications are changed. In this case, we need to redo the planning based on current/correct assets.
If the organization doesn’t have CMDB tool. The application team is supposed to fill in the discovery data. It is found that many times the Application team takes a lot of time to fill this data as they have to source the data from multiple places.
Production systems have a limitation of when we can migrate. If the migration is not executed in that specific time frame, sometimes the migration gets delayed by months.
Migration road maps run parallel to the product feature roadmap. As a result, migration gets lower priority and gets pushed back.
The technical depth of the Application team. Many times, the applications are used by support teams and the people who developed the application are long gone. Hence there is a challenge in migrating and validating such applications.

Migration Acceleration with Idexcel

Based on the above challenge we encountered with the migrations we have developed processes and tools to migrate the application effectively.

Inventa Discovery Tool: This tool is built to speed up the discovery process. Many of the fields are auto-populated so that the Application team focuses on the data that is most important for migration. It also gives full visibility of the applications being discovered. This tool provides a self-service dashboard where stakeholders can view the status of their application discovery. It provides information about all the applications that are running in the organization. With Inventa, we get an idea about the number of applications being in progress and those being blockers. It also provides a drill-down where the user can navigate through each application to view the blockers and see why they are blocked and when it is likely to be resolved or any action needs to be taken to unblock the issues.
2/2 Migration Execution Model: The migrations are typically done at a time when the load on the servers is minimum, usually on weekends or Friday evenings. It is often the case that there is more than 1 migration happening at the same time. If both the application migration is handled by the same migration engineer, then one of the migrations may need to be pushed back.
AWS Migration Hub: One of the key reasons for the success of migration is identifying the application dependencies. It is often found that the application team is not fully aware of all the dependencies. We leverage AWS Migration Hub to identify these dependencies and proactively addressing them.
Idexcel Configuration management tool: This tool is built on top of AWS Migration Factory and CloudEndure which automates the migration execution process. This tool is developed to speed up re-host migrations. Using this tool, tasks like installing the CloudEndure Agent on the source system or removing any software post cutover of servers can be done with a single click of a button. This brings down the application downtime considerably. It provides a dashboard for all the applications in scope for migration cutover. Stakeholders can view how many application migrations are completed and how many migrations are in progress. It shows a wave-wise breakdown of all applications being migrations.

Schedule for your Free Migration Readiness Assessment Program

How can Idexcel AIDE solve Data Extraction Challenges for Public Sector Organizations?

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

Data Extraction from documents has evolved significantly since the OCR days of the 1990’s. Several template-based approaches have been replaced with Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing guided systems, offering intelligent data extraction from complex unstructured documents. Typically, Intelligent Data Extraction is a component of an overall Intelligent Automation strategy that combines various processes to give the organization a complete, automated end-to-end solution.

Idexcel’s new revolutionary framework, AIDE (Automated Intelligent Data Extractor) is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Data Extraction solution that enables rapid processing/extraction of unstructured data from scanned documents, PDFs, handwritten forms, and images for financial operations, application processes, and any procedures requiring the intake of data in an unstructured format. With our AIDE solution framework, an enormous number of paper-based documents in different formats, varying layouts, and multiple languages are digitized into various formats that can be stored and analyzed more easily.

Our intelligent framework can identify data like a human would: quickly, accurately, and within unstructured documents. Whether extracting data from unstructured financial records, purchase orders, or government documents, our platform gets the job done quickly and accurately. Not only can we automatically extract information, but we can also output the data into a final destination of your organization’s choosing, enabling easier search capabilities. The AIDE framework is seamless and scalable, simple to operate, and easy to manage.

Idexcel’s AIDE Framework can extract data from the following unstructured documents especially for Public Sector Organizations (but not limited to):

Tax Forms
Grant Requests
Court Documents
FOI Request
Handwritten Text
Standard Forms (Census, Employment) and
Many more

Although the aforementioned documents are easily interpretable and differentiable by humans however, they are difficult for simple data extraction solutions to understand. Traditional OCR which works on a rules-based extraction approach is not a practical solution owing to the complex nature of its disparities and the features. This complexity in extraction increases further when the input has handwritten and multilingual text and content. As we are aware, automating a data extraction process is quite simple when all the documents have similar layouts. A simplified template-based approach can help in this case. In other cases, though these documents have similar layouts, the information within them may vary vastly. Idexcel’s AIDE helps process all these different documents at a much more precise and quicker rate.

Major Data Extraction Challenges posed by both manual and primitive Automation Tools in Public Sector Organizations solved by Idexcel’s AIDE:

Minimizes manual errors that compromise data integrity and improves accuracy rates to up to 95%
As the processing of data becomes easier, faster, and more accurate it eliminates the time and complexity of processing unstructured data
Eliminates both external/internal application compatibility issues that lead to more costs by integrating commonly used applications which helps develop a tailored integration process with unique applications.
With automation and powerful continuous learning, the processing time is reduced from days to minutes thereby eliminating manual workforce costs and resource management challenges.
AIDE framework scales easily to accommodate larger workloads at minimal or no additional costs helping get rid of the inability to scale during seasonal/event-driven influxes.
With AIDE, human worker burnout and exhaustion with manual and redundant tasks are overcome, as only minimal employee oversight is required to manage ongoing tasks.

Potential Benefits derived from using AIDE for Data Extraction:

Potential of Language Agnostic Data Extraction: By leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence, AIDE can excerpt information from various physical documents across multiple languages. This is in turn very helpful for supporting, optimizing, and elevating processes in large multi-national corporations having multilingual workforce.

Considerable Time Savings: AIDE performs large volumes of data extraction at a faster rate with no compromise on efficiency and accuracy. This in turn allows Public Sector Organizations to focus their manual resources more into building meaningful services, innovation, and creative thinking.

Enhanced Data Quality: Idexcel’s AIDE captures the right data, reducing data errors and improving the overall quality of the data.

Easy Access to Data: Do away with the inconvenience of paper documentation and embrace the simplicity of organized digital data.

Improved Speed & Accuracy: With AIDE, there’s no need for error-prone manual data entry. Public Sector organizations can vastly improve the speed and accuracy of their digitization process using Idexcel AIDE, our intelligent and automated data extraction solutions.

Greater Security: Powered by AWS Cloud solutions, our framework adheres to strict security guidelines and the industry best practices.

Why Idexcel AIDE?

Every day, at every organization, at every level of management and operations, employees need to extract details from contracts, leases, tax forms, surveys, and other documents. The good news is that Artificial intelligence offers ways to perform these complex, integrated tasks far more efficiently. What we are talking about here is a decidedly less flashy and, at face value, more pedestrian use of Artificial Intelligence aimed at reducing costs and optimizing operations. Idexcel’s AIDE is a smart and intelligent data extraction framework that can process unstructured documents rapidly and digitize data from handwritten forms and papers. Besides, it can also perform unstructured data extraction from structured data such as financial statements information, extract information in Excel format, texts from image files, and extract tables from PDF documents.

The AIDE solution framework can execute data extraction from various paper-based documents in different formats, layouts, features, and languages. These documents are processed and digitized into various formats that can be analyzed and stored very efficiently. Built on top of Amazon Textract, a powerful machine learning tool, this smart solution’s storage, and security protocols are one of the best in the industry. In this way, previously inaccessible data are made available to anyone within a few mouse clicks.

Most organizations want to grow. It’s no big stretch to assume yours does, too. More satisfied customers, more revenue, more innovative ideas springing from the minds of employees. But growth for growths’ sake – as appealing is it may sound – is neither scalable nor sustainable. Without an intelligent automation strategy and the tools to back it up, there will come a tipping point at which your organization’s well-intended growth begins working against itself.

To know more about Idexcel’s AIDE, Schedule a Free DEMO

Digital Transformation Starts with Data Extraction

Posted on July 5, 2021July 5, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

An Allied Market Research report published in March 2021 showed that digital transformation in the BFSI industry globally generated USD 52.44 billion in 2019. Between 2020 to 2027, it is expected to register a CAGR of 15.4 percent, reaching USD 164.08 billion by 2027.

The outbreak of Covid-19 has accelerated the adoption of digital transformation in the BFSI sector. For example, borrowers are now more inclined to upload the requisite documents onto an online application to apply for loans rather than visit the lenders in person.

An example of how Digital Transformation is changing the BFSI landscape

According to a report published by forrester.com in 2020, banking would be purposeful, insights-driven, connected, and invisible by 2030. Soon, trust between the financial institutions and their customers would be indispensable for business success.

Unfortunately, an error-prone and time-consuming onboarding experience erodes this trust. According to Thomson Reuters, 89 percent of the surveyed corporate customers reported a poor KYC experience. As a consequence, 13 percent of them changed financial institutions.

Thankfully, digital transformation initiatives such as digital KYC can vastly improve customer experience in the banking sector. Instead of employing teams to verify and extract data, FinTechs and banks can use comprehension and data extraction tools to accelerate their paperwork. These tools can extract data and digitize documents from both structured and unstructured documents powered by machine learning and AI.

Achieve Digital Transformation Success with Idexcel AIDE

According to a report by researchandmarkets.com, 2.5 quintillion bytes of digital data are globally generated in a single day. Therefore, organizations worldwide have to ensure that such large volumes of information are efficiently and accurately processed.

Digitization of data is the first step towards Digital Transformation. This means data extraction from the non-digital medium is the first step for Digital Transformation.

Handwritten forms and text-based documents were never designed for electronic workflows. As such, extracting information and converting the same into digital data poses inherent challenges. Traditional solutions such as OCR are often niche and do not offer widespread application benefits.

If the nature of the document to be converted has complex features and variations, a rule-based extracting information approach such as OCR is not feasible. In addition, multilingual content and handwritten text can make the digitization process even more difficult.

Idexcel AIDE is an intelligent and automated data extraction framework that can process documents rapidly. It can digitize data from handwritten forms and papers. It can also perform unstructured data extraction from structured information such as data from financial statements, extract data in Excel, texts from images or extract tables from PDF documents.

Just like humans, AIDE can execute data extraction from multiple formats, features, and layouts. In addition, it can process documents across numerous languages and digitize them into machine-readable formats that can be analyzed and stored efficiently. Using Amazon Textract, a powerful machine learning tool, AIDE’s storage, and security practices are the best that the industry has to offer.

Why AIDE Is A Good Tool For Data Extraction

Save Significant Time: AIDE can perform large volumes of data extraction at a rapid rate without compromising accuracy. This allows the organization to focus its manual resources on building meaningful services, innovation, and creative thinking.
Improve Accuracy And Speed: When humans perform data extraction and entry, they become error-prone and tedious. Using intelligent and automated data extraction solutions such as AIDE, organizations can vastly improve the speed and accuracy of their digitization process.
Enhanced Data Value: With fast and more accurate data in hand, organizations can make informed decisions and not miss market opportunities. This enables them to generate higher RoI from their data extraction processes.
Language Agnostic Data Extraction Power: Leveraging AI data extraction, AIDE can efficiently extract information from physical documents across multiple languages. This is very helpful if your company is a large MNC spanning multiple geographical locations and having a multilingual workforce.
Better Security: Powered by AWS cloud solutions, AIDE comes equipped with state-of-the-art security features. Your crucial and confidential business data is safe and well protected.

Accelerate your digital transformation and make your data extraction process more accurate using our AIDE framework.

How is Cloud Computing Transforming the Financial Services Industry?

Posted on May 12, 2021May 13, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

An increasing number of financial institutions are transforming their systems and exploring how cloud computing can help. The COVID-19 pandemic has further inspired financial and banking leaders to incorporate cloud and security in financial services. According to The Next Web, cloud services have served as a saving grace throughout the unprecedentedly challenging time, making it easier for businesses to allow employees to work remotely, efficiently, effectively, and securely. While digital transformation without the cloud is not impossible, its scope will be very limited.

If you are curious about the transformational possibilities of cloud computing in financial services and need more information to determine whether it’s the best path for your bank or other financial institution, keep reading.

Improving Operational Efficiencies in Financial Institutions

Top cloud service leaders work to design and build a system that focuses on the big picture for your FI, which includes user experience to drive satisfaction and success for all.

Further, the flexibility and scalability that cloud adoption offers allow your financial business to quickly adjust to operational changes, empowering you to handle greater volume without worrying about adding more storage capabilities or staff to manage it all.

Reducing Costs

When you move your data and key business applications to the cloud, you don’t have to store them locally, continually upgrading your storage needs with quick fixes. Even better, you no longer need to worry about your physical infrastructure since your cloud service provider has it covered. With the Pay-as-you-go pricing models provided by the cloud providers, you’ll enjoy huge savings associated with no longer worrying about buying, maintaining, upgrading, and housing the necessary hardware.

Increasing Data Storage Options In the Cloud

The need for more data increases daily, making it challenging for on-site IT teams to keep up with the demand. With the right cloud service provider, you have access to virtually unlimited cloud storage without worry.

Enhancing Availability and Resiliency Through Redundancy

Redundancy, creating backups and fail-safes, can help make applications resilient and more readily available. Many cloud service companies are building various redundancies to guarantee that data is always available and secure. A few redundancies include:

Availability Sets, which protect against localized disk or network hardware failures. Virtual Machines (VMs) are spread across different fault domains, defining the VM group that shares a common power source.
Availability Zones, which serve as isolated data centers within a cloud service system’s regions.

AWS has developed several strategies to improve availability, resilience, and sustainability through faster innovation and enhanced security, accelerating deep learning workloads, investing in faster processors, and much more.

Freeing IT Teams to Manage Core Organizational Projects

Investing in cloud services means that your IT team can focus on strategic planning, core organizational objectives, and on-site employee support and training. Engineering-focused IT team members can take on projects like app development to improve customer experience.

Boosting Customer-Banking Relations

Pleasing customers is high on your priority list, and cloud computing in banking offers many ways to do that. With cloud services, you can control customer data instantly and better understand their financial habits and account management preferences. Additionally, you can improve the customer experience and offer instant and accurate information, consistent accessibility, and peak performance to keep their visits brief, easy, and satisfying. Customers will enjoy a better experience with fewer disruptions and outages. Even if there is some disruption, cloud computing resources make it easier to get back online quickly, ensuring continuous availability to customers.

Tightening Up Security

Cloud service firms continue to dispel any fears that experts have expressed over cloud security over the years. With the right cloud platform partner, keeping your data in the cloud is safer than keeping it on-site with effective SSL management options, enhanced credentialing, and data encryption.

Many cloud service providers take a proactive approach to tackling DDOS attacks, avoiding data breaches, preventing data loss, strengthening access points, and sending prompt notifications and alerts.

Streamlining Compliance Standards

The digital world is brimming with risks, making compliance standards essential for everyone, particularly financial institutions. Once you move into the cloud, you’ll find that your provider must remain compliant with all relevant regulations.

The financial industry is brimming with regulations to protect multiple parties, including customers, investors, and financial institutions, and it’s imperative that all parties dealing with a financial institution’s data, including a cloud hosting service, must remain compliant.

Cloud computing helps to achieve compliance by taking the necessary steps to secure data and mitigate risk. Further, cloud providers also offer several dynamic tools and features across network security, access control, data encryption, and configuration management. All these tools and features help customers meet their security objectives and remain compliant with their information security standards.

Are You Ready for Cloud Computing Services to Transform Your Financial Industry Enterprise?

If you find any of these transformative possibilities exciting, it might be time to consider moving to the cloud. Our Idexcel team offers an array of cloud services to enjoy a bounty of benefits. With over 20 plus years of experience fine-tuning various digital technologies, we can help you take your financial business in any direction you choose.

Connect with our team to schedule your free assessment.

Digital Workers Are a Necessity in Our Post-Pandemic World

Posted on March 17, 2021March 18, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

Modern growth depends on automation. Any routine task that can be automated gives an enterprise an edge over the competition in the beginning and then becomes a necessity for survival.

Excel macros were once a boon to any data-driven enterprise. They allow data analysts to automate processes that involved a lot of error-prone copying, pasting, and time. The problem with Excel macros is that they are limited to automating Excel and other Microsoft products.

A modern enterprise will have a suite of software that will benefit from automation, software that must work together to get the job done. Robotic process automation, or RPA, can automate routine processes at the user interface level regardless of the underlying software stack and takes automation to the next level, automation of any software an enterprise uses.

But automation has evolved even further than RPA. Let’s look at what digital workers are and how they can change your business.

What Are Digital Workers?

Using robotic process automation, you can create bots. Bots automate very specific processes and usually have a narrow range of functionality. Note that digital workers are not bots. Digital workers can handle a broad range of tasks that would roughly correlate to a human job description. You can think of them as a fleet of bots that you deploy for a complete task.

Use cases for a digital worker include:

Data entry
Updating CRMs, ERPs, and billing
Employee onboarding
Client onboarding
Claims processing
Account reconciliation
Invoice processing

Digital workers are designed for specific job roles, so you don’t have to track down all the repetitive processes you use and map RPA bots to each task. Instead, you just download a digital worker, configure it, and put it to work.

The Benefits of a Post-Pandemic Digital Workforce

The pandemic brought many businesses to a halt. For others, it took a while for employees to adjust to working remotely. Business models changed forever, and digital workers have become an invaluable asset for organizations to thrive in this new world and adjust to changes quickly.

Here are some benefits of using digital workers:

Accurate Data

Many of the jobs you can replace with a digital worker involve data. Human data entry has always been susceptible to errors. It’s just the nature of being human. Digital workers take error out of the equation by cross-checking information and flagging any issues for a human to review.

Faster Processing

A digital worker can work faster than a human can type. Jobs that once had to be calculated in working hours can now run unattended in a fraction of the time. Digital workers also don’t need breaks and can work all day long.

Increased Productivity

Automating tedious, manual tasks like data entry will free up employees’ time to focus on more important tasks. Employees will be motivated to work on more interesting tasks when they aren’t interrupted by menial work. Digital workers can work 24/7 and don’t take sick days.

Lower Costs

All the other benefits of digital workers add up to a lot of savings. Without human error, tasks won’t have to be done twice. Because digital workers can process tasks faster, your business can get more done each day. And employees can work on important tasks while digital workers automatically and economically take care of all the menial tasks.

Conclusion

The pandemic changed the way business is done. Businesses are undergoing digital transformation to keep up with the changes in the pandemic’s aftermath. Digital workers are an important part of this transformation. They can automate processes once done by employees with more accuracy, faster processing, and lower costs while freeing employees to do more important work.

Our team at Idexcel offers Automation and AI services for your business. With over 21 years of experience in every aspect of intelligence, automation, and AI, we can help you digitally transform your company. Get in touch with our team to schedule your free assessment.

Why Are Cloud-First AI Solutions Important?

Posted on February 24, 2021February 24, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

Nearly everywhere you look in today’s global marketplace, you’ll spot an ever-increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions combined with cloud computing technologies. You might even personally use AI in cloud solutions in the form of digital assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Home. But how far down the AI solutions rabbit hole are you ready to take your business?

If you are still on the fence about adopting AI in the cloud for your enterprise, you might benefit from exploring why cloud-first AI solutions are vital to your business’s growth now and in the future.

Keep reading to learn the most crucial benefits of investing in a cloud AI platform.

Transformative IT Infrastructure That Spurs Growth and Competition

Today’s top AI cloud platforms, like AWS, are reimagining and transforming traditional IT infrastructure to help you keep up with the competition within your industry. It comes down to your potentially falling behind the competition if you don’t adopt AI in the cloud, making it a little like high-tech peer pressure thanks to the increasing demand for AI-optimized cloud application infrastructure. Basically, everyone is doing it, so it’s best to stay ahead of the curve to minimize the need for a panicked adoption later.

The top vendors make it easy for you by introducing specialized IT platforms that feature pre-designed storage and computing resources combinations to streamline the learning curve for you and your team.

Enhanced Data Access and Data Analysis

AI and data go hand-in-hand, and to a degree, data feeds AI, allowing it to learn and become smarter. Essentially, your computing system learns more without explicit or manual programming. Add to that benefit the cloud’s nearly unlimited data storage capacity, removing delays and other obstacles, and your AI is free to gather, analyze, and interpret data. With massive tomes of data and unlimited resources to access it, your AI can make predictions regarding matters like risks and troubleshoot those issues before they boil to the surface as bona fide problems. Further, training machine learning models is much easier in the cloud. With the right solution, machine learning options don’t require in-depth and intensive AI knowledge, extensive familiarity with machine learning theory, or a group of data scientists.

Reduced Costs

Think about all the time and resources your business has invested in infrastructure upgrades and adding on-site storage, then imagine a business model that removes those concerns. The top cloud AI platforms can do that for your organization and much more. With a cloud AI solution, you can purchase only the amount of storage you need for the data you currently possess and what you anticipate ahead, knowing you can scale to your enterprise’s needs. It also frees your IT team to manage on-site matters, such as purchasing, installing, updating, and maintaining employees’ hardware devices.

AI cloud platforms also reduce or eliminate the need for your executive and IT teams to perform continuous tech research in a field where everyone struggles to keep up with the latest trends and innovations. Your AI cloud service provider stays up-to-date on these concerns as a matter of course, therefore able to pass the benefits of their work along to your business, further allowing your team to attend to core business functions.

Are You Ready to Adopt Cloud-First Solutions for Your Enterprise?

Adopting a cloud-first solution puts you on track for keeping up with the competition at a minimum, and along with your own strategies, it will help you move far ahead.

Our team at Idexcel can help you determine and launch the best strategy for seamless AI cloud adoption. For more than 21 years, we have delivered professional services and technology solutions with specializations in cloud services, cloud-native services, data platforms, and intelligence to satisfied, loyal clients. Get in touch with our team to schedule your free assessment.

Business Impacts of Data Extraction Solutions

Posted on January 25, 2021March 9, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

The Current Digital Automation Climate

Digital disruption in the form of automation has caused a massive change across the globe that has affected all industries in various ways. AI-powered automation solutions reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and offer massive benefits to stakeholders. Currently, the manual extraction of data from hundreds of documents, creation of spreadsheets for record-keeping from that data, and analysis to confirm a business outcome happens on a massive scale every day. It can be so time-consuming and frustrating, especially with the possibility of errors and duplications. If left undetected and uncorrected, these discrepancies can magnify into much larger issues downstream.

If these manual tasks could be accomplished in a fraction of this time by a digital resource, imagine how much time can be freed up for the most critical aspect to business success: human intelligence. More and more organizations are shifting from manual processes to solutions that leverage AI-powered data extraction tools that become more intelligent over time using ML (Machine Learning). Business executives are turning to AI to cut out repetitive tasks such as paperwork (82%), scheduling (79%), and timesheets (78%) (Source: PWC). By harnessing the power automation and ML, Idexcel data extraction solutions can identify, extract, and analyze data from all types of sources at phenomenal speed with tremendous accuracy.

How does AI fit in with Data Extraction?

It is extremely important for companies to have a strong, data-driven strategy in place as the foundation to build AI solutions on. Statistics reveal that businesses engaging in data-driven decision-making experience almost 6% growth in productivity. This reinforces the importance of understanding how smart data extraction can improve business operations. The challenge is that the actual process of mining and analyzing the essential data has become extremely arduous due to unstructured data. In fact, IDC projects that 80% of the total data will be unstructured by 2025, which will pose a challenge for organizations that are not properly prepared with a data strategy in place.

Data extraction using AI works in a self-sustaining way by training itself on billions of relevant data pieces, understanding formats, and evolving to optimize performance over time. Using NLP (Natural Language Processing), Deep Learning, OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and our customized proprietary framework, this solution delivers ready to use data for analysis to drive valuable business-critical insights.

Impact of AI-Powered Data Extraction in Banking and Financial Services

Banking and Financial services operations include processing millions of documents that are filled with both unstructured and structured data every day. These organizations must hire a huge and expensive workforce to complete the necessary data extraction, data processing, retrieval, and storage procedures. ML-powered solutions reduce this need to drive greater efficiency and productivity across multiple operational areas in the financial services and banking sector:

Speeding up the extraction of relevant information from mortgage documentation, contracts, financial reports, and other sources.
Accounting operations including AP & AR Statement Data Extraction
Payroll processing of timesheet reconciliation for Invoice creation and submission
Financial reporting to ensure compliance with regulations on contracts, applications, and other requisite documents.

The possibilities for applying this solution are endless. Supply chain management, retail, ‘marketing, insurance, and real estate are also key industries in which an Invisible Automation solution can be used to elevate operations.

Key Advantages of Data Extraction Solution

Earn More Customer Loyalty: Loyal customers are the most significant assets for any organization. Taking considerate, data-driven steps to make the experience better for them fosters a positive and long-lasting bond based on trust.
Accelerates Information Processing: Automation of manual and repetitive tasks like extracting data points from invoices and forms significantly accelerates the information processing procedures, resulting in faster information to be analyzed for stakeholders to make critical business decisions.
Saves Significant Time: Time is one the most indispensable resources for any organization. In a world that is constantly bombarded with billions of data at a rapid rate, relying on the speed and accuracy of manual labor introduces operational vulnerability. Automation gives back time and energy to team members to focus on creative thinking, innovation, and building meaningful services.
Cost optimization: With consumer demands, habits, and buying behavior shifting while the market competition increases, it has become exceedingly difficult to reduce costs. Manual extraction of data and unnecessary staffing will pose an even bigger challenge. Try a data extraction solution and you can get the same job done accurately, economically, and promptly.
High Accuracy: Data extraction and data entry are highly error-prone tasks. Even if done with much diligence and precision, small mistakes are bound to happen. These small mistakes in thousands of documents might amplify into issues and future regret for the company. Also, you will end up jeopardizing the much-needed time and money to no avail. But by just using a data extraction solution, you can be assured of zero errors and prompt execution.
Focus on Primary Objectives: Optimal productivity of employees is of paramount importance for any corporation’s prosperity. Forcing employees to perform monotonous and exhausting tasks, which provide no real value to the company, lowers their productivity and enthusiasm drastically. This also reduces job satisfaction and will slowly but surely, negatively impact the company. Incorporating automation will remove this unnecessary burden from the employees’ shoulders while enhancing productivity. This will spare the much-needed time for employees to focus on more meaningful tasks. This will transform into a win-win situation for the employees and employers.
Improve Data Accessibility: An intelligent and automated data extraction tool enhances the visibility of the incoming data, its storage, and retrieval, making it readily accessible whenever necessary. A survey by Forrester suggests a 10% increase in data accessibility can augment the net revenue by a whopping $65 million for a typical Fortune 1000 company.

In a time where consumers are changing the way they interact with companies’ digital infrastructures, it’s imperative to consistently transform your organization to equip it with the latest technology. Processes will continue to become automated, more intelligent, and enable human resources to focus on elevating product/service delivery and driving business success. By leveraging ML-powered AI with automation tactics, data extraction solutions can skyrocket productivity and churn explosive revenue at a fraction of the original time and costs incurred. Ready to get started building an elegant operational infrastructure to optimize resource allocation, reduce overhead costs, and establish a competitive edge? Get connected with an Idexcel expert today.

AWS re:Invent Recap: Werner Vogels Keynote

Posted on December 18, 2020January 13, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

Major Service Announcements:

NEW: AWS CloudShell is a browser-based, pre-authenticated shell that can be launched directly from the AWS Management Console to run AWS CLI commands against AWS services using a preferred shell of Bash, PowerShell, or Z shell. This can all be completed without downloading or installing command line tools. AWS CloudShell is generally available in us-east-1 (N. Virginia), us-east-2 (Ohio), us-west-2 (Oregon), ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo), and eu-west-1 (Ireland) at launch.
PREVIEW: Chaos Engineering with AWS Fault Injection Simulator is a fully managed chaos engineering service that makes it easier for teams to discover an application’s weaknesses at scale in order to improve performance, observability, and resiliency. Developers can now specify conditions to create real-world scenarios that allow hidden issues to be revealed, monitoring potential unforeseen issues, and identify bottlenecks that might affect performance that are usually very tough to find.
PREVIEW: Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) enables developers to ingest, store, and query millions of time series metrics, increasing scaling capabilities. This Prometheus-compatible monitoring service makes it easier to keep track of containerized applications at a larger scale.
PREVIEW: Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG) is a secure data visualization service that allows users to query, correlate, and visualize various operational metrics, logs, and traces across multiple data sources to increase observability.

Why it Matters:

There were some major themes we noticed throughout the presentation that really resonated on how to help meet customer needs, wherever they are in their digital transformation journeys:

1. Architecture Sustainability: One of the biggest focuses for many organizations is analyzing the sustainability of their architectures and the impact it has on operations. Once COVID-19 forced companies to adapt how they work, looking at technical architecture strategies is no longer about working from home. It’s about working anywhere, with the right tools available to complete the work necessary that drives business success. AWS tools and new services launched enable development teams to build better solutions, but also to help our clients bring more sophisticated solutions to market faster.

2. Dependability: Another critical theme discussed was the need for solutions to be dependable and not bound by latency. Availability, reliability, safety, security are all properties of dependability that must be considered when building solutions. This is why we’re excited about the new fault removal, forecasting, and Chaos Engineering tool announced, AWS Fault Injection Simulator. This enables weaknesses to be identified quickly to be fixed, addressing the common challenge IT teams have adequately stress-testing cloud applications and. With the integration of the AWS Fault Injection Simulator, we will be able to stress-test applications at a much faster clip to ensure greater dependability in solutions we deliver to our customers.

3. Observability: Many organizations that have various systems generating and storing terabytes of data would benefit from an end-to-end observability that displays optimized analytics and valuable insights to IT and leadership teams. The sheer amount of data could be massive and near impossible to integrate into one core dashboard without the right tools and approach. That is why we are excited about the logging, monitoring, and tracing capabilities that will be available in the latest of two core service previews announced:

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) is a tool that automatically scales the intake, storage, and analytics queries when workloads sizes change and are integrated with AWS security services to. The service works with Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, enabling fast and secure access to required data sources.

Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG) is a fully managed service that can be leveraged to create on-demand, scalable, and secure Grafana workspaces that create visualization elements and perform data analyzation from multiple sources.

4. Customer-Centricity: Every organization has a unique digital transformation journey with very specific needs that requires a tailored approach to build a solution that has an impact. Werner reiterated his message of building with customer needs in mind on Twitter by saying, “Think about what you can do to meet your customers where they are.” He reminded us to be conscious of important issues up front while designing products – services, interfaces, and user experience features that could help address their concerns during an uncertain time for many. It is critical that the services we build to address operational problems should consider the experiences we’re creating for people.

Are you ready to construct your Digital Transformation Roadmap or need to know a little more about how we can help? Get connected with an Idexcel expert to schedule your assessment today!