World Backup Day founder, Ismail Jadun, has said that March 31 will “will make everyone think about their situation, learn about the various options and get their files backed up”. 

World Backup Day 

World Backup Day, first celebrated in 2011, is an annual event (taking place on March 31) that’s dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of data backups and encouraging individuals and businesses to back up their important data regularly.

The purpose of World Backup Day is to remind people about the importance of their critical data in case of data loss, theft, or damage to their devices. It has become a global movement with individuals, businesses and organisations participating in the event by promoting backup awareness, sharing backup tips, and encouraging others to take backups of their data.

Why?

Data is now a critical asset of businesses and organisations and over 1.8 zettabytes of data is being generated per year (according to IDC Digital Universe), which is a lot to backup!

If businesses don’t backup their data, they can be at risk of losing critical information that could have severe consequences, including:

– Data loss. If a business experiences a data loss event (such as a system crash, hardware failure, cyber-attack, or natural disaster) and they don’t have a backup in place, they can lose all their critical data.

– Downtime. If a business’s data is lost, it can take considerable time to restore systems and data. This can cause extended periods of downtime, which can negatively impact the business’s continuity, productivity, customer service, and revenue.

– No disaster recovery option. Many businesses now have disaster recovery plans in place with data backups as a central feature of them. Having no recent data backup available could seriously affect a business’s chances of recovering at all from a serious cyber-attack or fire, for example.

– Reputational damage. Losing critical data can also damage a business’s reputation. For example, if a business’s customer data is compromised due to a data breach and they don’t have a backup, they can lose the trust of their customers, leading to a loss of existing and future business.

– Legal and regulatory compliance issues. Many businesses are required by law to keep certain types of data for a specified period. Failure to do so can result in legal and regulatory compliance issues.

That said, according to a Backblaze survey, nearly 30 per cent of people say they have never even backed up their data.

How Can Data Be Lost? 

There are many ways that critical business can be lost such as theft (theft of hardware and cyber-attacks), hardware failure or loss a device, natural disaster, fire/flood/damage to premises and equipment, and obsolete file formats.

Backup What? 

According to World Backup Day sources, items to backup data from should include your computer, laptop, phone, iPod, tablet, other wireless devices, photos and even videos on social networks.

Options 

One of the goals of World Backup Day is to make people aware of the different backup options. There are two main types of backup solutions:

– Local backup. An external hard drive that can be easily retrieved at home.

– Cloud/offsite backup. An online backup service or hard drive securely placed in a different location.

Having both local and offsite backups can give businesses peace of mind, knowing files are safe and secure should anything happen.

Regular, Reliable, And Secure 

When backing up data, it is important to make sure that the chosen backup option is safe and reliable, has been set up correctly and has been tested, and that it happens automatically and regularly.

In general, businesses should backup their data regularly to minimise the risk of data loss and ensure that they can quickly recover from any data loss event.

A good rule of thumb for businesses is to perform daily backups of critical data, including customer data, financial data, and other mission-critical information. For less critical data, such as email or other non-essential files, weekly or monthly backups may be sufficient.

However, it’s important to note that businesses should also consider the type of backup solution they use. Some backup solutions allow for continuous backup, which means that data is backed up in real-time as changes are made. This can provide an extra layer of protection against data loss and ensure that the most recent version of the data is always available.

Cloud Is The Popular Option 

Most businesses now opt for cloud backups. 95 per cent of small businesses and 85 percent of all businesses store data or backups in the cloud..

Using the cloud for backups offers several benefits, including:

– Scalability. Cloud backup solutions are highly scalable, allowing businesses to easily increase or decrease the amount of storage space they need as their data needs change. This can help businesses save money by only paying for the storage they use.

– Cost-effectiveness. Cloud backup solutions can be more cost-effective than traditional backup methods, as businesses don’t need to invest in expensive hardware or hire additional IT staff to manage backups.

– Accessibility. Cloud backup solutions allow businesses to access their data from anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection. This can be particularly useful for remote teams or businesses with multiple locations.

– Security. Cloud backup solutions typically offer robust security measures, including data encryption, access controls and backup redundancy. This can help businesses protect their data from cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and other threats.

– Automated backups. Many cloud backup solutions offer automated backups, which means that data is backed up on a regular schedule without requiring manual intervention. This can help businesses ensure that their data is always up-to-date and reduce the risk of data loss due to human error.

– Disaster recovery. Cloud backup solutions can help businesses quickly recover from data loss events, such as cyber-attacks, natural disasters, or hardware failures. With cloud backups, businesses can restore their data quickly and easily, minimising downtime and ensuring business continuity.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Having an annual World Backup Day acts as a reminder of the importance of having an effective, regular, and automatic backup solution in place for one of the most critical assets of a business. With so many risks and threats to business data (e.g. cyber-attacks), backing up data is crucial for business continuity and disaster recovery and, therefore, for the survival of a business. The many benefits of the cloud (as outlined above) now make it a sensible and cost-effective option for the majority of today’s businesses and organisations and using the cloud for communications, storage and backups has become normal practice for many businesses, particularly since the collaborative online working in the pandemic, and with today’s cloud-based SaaS apps like Microsoft 365.

Hopefully, World Backup Day will motivate the 30 per cent of people who say they have never backed up their data to understand the reasons for doing so, how easy it can be to set up, and to decide to start doing so as soon as possible.

Equinix, the largest global data centre and colocation provider for enterprise network and cloud computing, has installed a rooftop farm at one of its sites that uses waste data centre power to grow fruit and veg.

Paris Rooftop Greenhouse 

As part of its Corporate Sustainability programme, Equinix has already covered several of its data centre rooftop sites with covered with plants and vegetation to keep the buildings cool, lowers cooling costs and reduces storm water runoff. Now, the company’s new ‘rooftop farm’ at its Saint Denis, Paris PA10 data centre has 430 m2 greenhouse and a further 570 m2 of green space. The greenhouse is powered by a heat recovery system with heat exchangers linked to the data centre’s water-cooling system. It also features humidity monitoring, temperatures sensors, sunshades, automated irrigation, and ventilation systems, all of which can provide climate, year-round growing facility for fruit and vegetables and relaxing garden space.

Growing Fruit & Veg

RBA Architects, who completed the ground-breaking urban farm project for Equinix have highlighted how the seasonal fruit and vegetables are cultivated inside the greenhouse using a hydroponic system to maximise space efficiency and minimise water usage. Also, the gardens are planted with species known to maximise the amount of rainwater consumption and support insects and wildlife, and have been enhanced with the installation of ‘insect hotels’.

Sharing 

The rooftop garden has also been designed to be wheelchair accessible, and provide natural shade, cooling, and relaxation spaces. Visitors and staff to the site can share the foods that the project has created and use the dedicated seating and catering areas.

John Hutchinson, Director at RBA, said of the project “It is of increasing importance that we increase our actions and mitigate the environmental impact of an increasingly digital world” and that it “heralds the start of an exciting new era.” 

Tenth Data Centre In Paris 

The PA10 Paris data centre the tenth opened by Equinix in Paris over the last 20 years and the rooftop garden is one way that enables it to be built in line with global environmental standards and designed with the aim to be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certified.

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation? 

Projects that use heat transfer from data centres or from servers installed in homes (on the side of water tanks) or in businesses (to heat swimming pool sites) are becoming popular ways to save energy and energy costs, deal with data centre/server heat removal, help the environment, and help data centre companies meet their environmental targets and improve their green credentials. This urban rooftop garden project shows how modern heat exchange technology, the use of sensors and hydroponics can be combined in an innovative way make productive use of what would have been waste heat and wasted space in a way that benefits many stakeholders and the environment.

Further to the news that Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, died last week, it’s a reminder that also last-week-in-history (22 March 1993), Intel announced it would be shipping its Pentium microprocessor. This was the successor to the Intel 486, and it was a massive undertaking that involved thousands of engineers and scientists, and it took several years to complete. These first Pentium chips had a clock speed of 60 MHz, which was considered very fast at the time (despite modern clock speeds being several GigaHertz).

This perfectly illustrates Moore’s Law (i.e. the doubling of chip/components every year), which was observed by Gordon Moore himself back in 1965. For example, here’s one way they’ve grown in power, from 1971 (when Intel introduced the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004) to 2021.

Year / FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second)

1971 700,000
1981 5,000,000
1991 1,900,000,000
2001 7,200,000,000,000
2011 8,200,000,000,000,000
2021 442,000,000,000,000,000

According to this, the fastest computer in the world in 2021 was 631,428,571,429 times more powerful than that in 1971. To be clear, FLOPS don’t show true processing power and Moore’s Law has been slowing down and many other factors apply; this exercise is purely for a sense of comparison and awe.

Humans brains aren’t great at scale (i.e. very small or large numbers) so for perspective, if one were to imagine that a single sheet of A4 paper (80 GSM standard office paper) represents a supercomputer in 1971. On that piece of paper, you coiuld write on it, draw on it, do sums on it, whatever you like.

In 2021, the computer would be represented by 631,428,571,429 sheets of A4. That’s 39 billion square metres or enough office paper to wrap over all of Wales TWICE over.

In short, as computers are getting more powerful, crunching passwords take less and less time – exponentially so. Furthermore, computers are now connected more than ever before and platforms (and associated AI’s like ChatGPT) are getting more powerful, exponentially. Think about next year!

In summary, Moore’s Law is a form of compound growth, the eighth wonder of the world, according to Einstein.

WhatsApp can use up a lot of space and mobile data by automatically downloading some large photos, videos, and voice messages. Here’s how to limit the types of media that are automatically download and the amount of mobile data WhatsApp calls use.

– Tap on the 3 dots top right and tap on ‘Settings’.

– Tap on ‘Storage and data’.

– Switch to toggle to ‘Use less data for calls’.

– Under ‘Media auto-download’, go through the mobile data, Wi-Fi, and roaming options and untick your preferences for photos, audio, videos, and documents.

Microsoft has announced that it is to help users save time and increase productivity by embedding its AI chatbot ‘Copilot’ into popular Microsoft 365 apps.

Embedded In Popular Apps 

Microsoft says that the Copilot chatbot has been embedded in the popular Microsoft 365 apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. Like Chat GPT, Copilot is a natural language conversational chatbot that can give the same human-like responses to questions.

Business Chat 

Copilot is operated in Microsoft 365 by ‘Business chat’, which is the field (like that in ChatGTP) where you ask the chatbot questions and give it instructions using normal language, e.g. to generate a status-update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads, type in “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy”. 

How Will Copilot Help? 

Examples of how embedding Copilot into the main Microsoft365 apps can help users include:

– In Word, Microsoft says Copilot can save hours in writing, sourcing, and editing by being able to write a first draft, to edit and shorten it, rewrite it, or give feedback as required, in the same way as you might write a piece using ChatGPT.

– In Teams, Copilot can again save time and effort and make meetings more productive by summarising key discussion points of meetings, including who said what, where people are aligned and where they disagree, and suggest action items, all in real-time during a meeting. It can also recap meetings for you and send you the notes afterwards.

– In PowerPoint, it can create whole presentations for you from a simple text prompt and add any relevant content from a document you made.

– In Excel, Microsoft says Copilot can analyse trends and create summaries and graphs of data, all done in seconds from simple text prompts.

– In Outlook, Copilot can save time by clearing your inbox in minutes, not hours, e.g by drafting emails for you and analysing long email threads in seconds.

– In Power Platform, Copilot can be also used to automate repetitive tasks, even creating chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes.

Save Time, Increase Productivity and Uplevel Your Skills 

Microsoft’s announcement focuses on three main benefits of using Copilot, which are improving productivity, saving time, and upleveling skills, i.e. making you better at what you’re good at and helping you to quickly master new AI functionality.

OpenAI Launches GPT4 

Microsoft’s Copilot announcement comes just days after OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT that Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in and has been working closely with) announced the launch of GPT4, an updated version of the AI model that powers ChatGPT.

OpenAI said GPT-4 (which was trained on Microsoft Azure AI supercomputers) outperforms ChatGPT and “can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem-solving abilities.” 

Caveat – It Can Be Wrong 

Even though ChatGPT has already become a trusted and valuable tool to businesses in just a matter of months and Copilot and GTP-4 holds even greater promise, OpenAI is covering itself by highlighting one caveat – it can be wrong because it can share disinformation.

Not Yet 

Although the launch has been announced, Copilot will initially be available (as a pilot) to just a small number of enterprise customers, and there are no details of pricing and licensing as yet.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Copilot is another big step forward in what seems to be a conversational chatbot revolution that’s transforming the way we can work by saving time and boosting productivity. The power of Copilot will provide a way to get more out the most popular apps in Microsoft 365, adding significant value to the app and creating new opportunities for users. Copilot is another major selling point and competitive advantage for Microsoft and for businesses, Copilot offers an easy-to-use way to save time, boost productivity, get greater insights into their own business and operations to aid better decision making, plus learn more about aspects of Microsoft365. All in all, Copilot could be the next game-changing step in the AI chatbot revolution.

Following the news that Microsoft will soon be integrating Copilot, an AI large language model (LLM) like the one behind ChatGPT, into Microsoft 365, we look at how this will help businesses, what OpenAI’s GPT-4 will bring, and Google’s response.

Copilot 

Microsoft announced last week that it will soon be adding Copilot to Microsoft365. Copilot is an AI large language model (LLM) and natural language conversational chatbot that can give the same human-like responses to questions as OpenAI’s Chat GPT can. Once integrated, Microsoft 365 (there’s no news of when that will be yet) users will be able to type instructions into (and ask questions via) the ‘Business chat’ text field – like the text field in ChatGPT

Microsoft says that Copilot will be integrated in the most popular Microsoft 365 apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. This will mean that, with the use of normal language typed text prompts, be able to carry out tasks like:

– Writing/re-writing, sourcing, and editing documents in Word, just as you might write a piece using ChatGPT, thereby saving hours.

– Use Copilot to make meetings in Teams more productive e.g., by asking Copilot to summarise the key discussion points e.g., who said what, where people are aligned and where they disagree and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. Copilot will also be able to recap meetings and send you the notes afterwards.

– Creating whole PowerPoint presentations from a simple text prompt and adding any relevant content from other documents.

– Analysing trends and create summaries and graphs of data in Excel.

– Making it much faster for users to clear their inbox in Outlook, e.g. by drafting emails  and analysing long email threads in seconds.

– In short, Microsoft sees Copilot as major value-adding USP for its Office suite and is highlighting the time-saving, productivity-potential for users.

ChatGPT4 

Just days prior to Microsoft’s announcement about Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGTP’s creators and a close working partner of Microsoft announced the introduction of GTP-4, an improved and upgraded version of ChatGPT. Open AI says that GTP-4 is “OpenAI’s most advanced system, producing safer and more useful responses” and it can “solve difficult problems with greater accuracy, thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem solving abilities”. 

Images As Inputs Too 

As well as text inputs, GTP-4 can accept images as inputs and can generate captions, classifications, and analysis. For example, on the OpenAI website it gives the example of a GTP-4 user uploading a photo of some cooking ingredients accompanied by the question “What can I make with these ingredients?”.  The example reply for GTP-4 is a list of dishes that can be made with the ingredients featured in the image.

OpenAI also says that GTP-4, which was trained on Microsoft Azure AI supercomputers surpasses the earlier version of ChatGPT in its advanced reasoning capabilities and outperforms the earlier version by scoring in higher approximate percentiles among test-takers (90th compared to ChatGPT’s 10th on the Uniform Bar Exam).

Safer 

OpenAI also says that it has spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. For example, OpenAI says that, in its own evaluations, GPT-4 is 82 per cent less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40 per cent more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5.

Already Included In Other Products 

GTP-4, which is already incorporated in Microsoft’s Bing search engine, is also already being used in new products in collaboration with other companies and organisations, e.g. Stripe, Duolingo, and even the Government of Iceland (to help preserve its language).

Limitations 

Although ChatGPT has been extremely popular, and GTP-4 looks like being even more so, OpenAI itself and other tech commentators have warned of some important limitations and potential problems that businesses need to bear in mind about these AI models. For example:

– They can produce wrong and/or inaccurate answers and can potentially spread disinformation.

– The free version of ChatGTP is sometimes busy, i.e. it’s not available to all users in periods of high demand.

– GPT-4 can display social biases, hallucinations, and create adversarial prompts.

– Microsoft may not have server hardware needed to run the AI for Copilot across Office 365 and for GTP-4 in Bing (a shortage of GPU power). This could impact smaller businesses as Microsoft may prioritise capacity to bigger customers.

Google’s Answer?

Following OpenAI’s recent announcement of the general release of API access to ChatGPT and ‘Whisper’, its automatic speech recognition (ASR) AI model, Google has now announced that it’s giving API-level access to its LLM model PaLM to enable developers to build it into their apps and workflows. Google says that developers and businesses can now try its APIs and products to start building Google’s AI models through Google Cloud and a new prototyping environment called MakerSuite. Also, Google says that it’s introducing new AI features through Workspace. Google has also said that it may add PaLM’s AI capabilities to Google Docs, Gmail, and other parts of its suite.

No More Heard About Bard 

There have been no new announcements, however, about when Google’s direct conversational chatbot competitor to ChatGPT ‘Bard’ will actually be released. The original announcement of its impending release in just a few weeks, as an answer to the announcemnet of ChatGPT’s release, was reportedly met with criticism by Google employees for being “rushed” and “botched.”

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Although there were already chatbots out there, the release of ChatGTP and its game-changing success was really just the opening of the AI chatbot revolution which looks likely to be the next big leap in computing and business. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella puts it (with reference to Copilot) “we are at the start of a new era of computing” and as Microsoft’s Jared Spataro says, “Copilot marks a new era of computing that will fundamentally transform the way we work.” AI language models are now being released thick and fast, both through APIs so developers can make new, much more powerful apps, embedded in search engines and across productivity suites (Google and Microsoft), and as online chatbots for all end users. ChatGPT is already onto its next big chatbot upgrade with GPT-4. For businesses, all this will mean increased leverage and productivity, time and cost savings, better business insights, and being able to harness new value adding powers that can transform work and outcomes. We are still at the beginning of an AI revolution that holds a lot of promise for businesses going forward.