The Official Cloud Migration Checklist

Most businesses are migrated or are in the process of migrating, critical workloads to cloud infrastructure. The competitive advantage cloud platforms give businesses makes this move an easy choice for organizations. Employees on the front lines tasked with managing these workloads know making the choice to move to the cloud is easier than performing the actual migration. Fortunately, PMsquare is here to help! I’ve created a high-level checklist to keep in mind when beginning your cloud migration. This list will help frame your thinking when planning to move on-premises applications to a cloud provider like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

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Conditional Formatting in Cognos Analytics (Advanced & Basic)

Once you have started honing your report authoring skills in Cognos Analytics, you may want to take the next step in your authoring… and customizing the output using Conditional Formatting is one of the ways you can do this. As implied by its name, Conditional Formatting allows the user to apply formatting only when a certain condition is met.

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Calculating On-Premise vs Cloud Costs

Many organizations struggle to figure out whether migrating to the cloud is the right financial decision. There are many questions that must be answered prior to making a final call. For example, what financial factors should be taken into consideration when deciding if your company should migrate to the cloud? How can you calculate the cost of running your operations in the cloud? What are the hidden costs associated with a cloud environment? How much will you be spending or saving every month by running your operations in the cloud instead of on-premise? The first step to answering any of the questions is to examine all costs associated with the current infrastructure.

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How Does Incorta Work?

Incorta is a direct data platform that delivers an end-to-end self-service data experience. Incorta consolidates data management and analytics into a single integrated platform for data acquisition, storage, analysis, visualization, and reporting without the cost and complexity of traditional solutions.

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Kai Ming’s PMsquare Children’s Center Opens Its Doors

Kai Ming, a non-profit agency providing comprehensive early care and education services for underprivileged children, and PMsquare, a data analytics technology and consulting firm, are excited to announce that the PMsquare Children’s Center has officially opened its doors on May 13th in Mission Bay, San Francisco.

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Reduce Cognos Install Times with AWS EC2 User Data and AMIs

Installing Cognos takes time. The more complex the environment, the more time it takes. The time spent running the Cognos installer is compounded by the number of environments that need to be created. Fortunately, there are options on AWS to help Cognos administrators get out of the business of waiting for the install to complete. The two options we will be exploring here are EC2 user data and custom AMIs.

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New Cube Viewer & Set Editor in Planning Analytics (2022)

IBM’s latest releases include a “new experience” cube viewer (or exploration) and a newly configured Set editor. There are several improvements and enhancements to the new viewer and set editor that represents IBM’s direction in making features easier to access. IBM is focused on improvements to the “new experience” within Workspace as it plans to deprecate the “classic experience”.

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Which To Choose: Staff Aug or SaaS Anywhere?

Just the other day, I was wrangling with a DIY challenge and spent hours trying to make a scattering of suboptimal tools I had work when a short run to the hardware store would have solved all my problems in minutes. In much the same way in analytics consulting, I see my clients sometimes struggling to find the right service for their challenges of the near and long term. In this piece, I’ll share an overview of two seemingly similar service options and discern the right time to engage for each.

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Cloud-Enable Your Legacy Applications

Many organizations have begun shifting their operations to virtual data centers, modernizing their applications to be cloud-enabled. But what exactly is “cloud-enabled,” and how can they adopt a new cloud architecture? Let’s dive into the meaning of the term and look at some examples to give a better understanding of how these applications can fit into a cloud deployment.

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Controlling Cognos UI Elements

One of the most common questions I've heard as I build my extensions is "How can I hide them from my users?". Ensuring users can only see, and interact with, only the features necessary for their job is of paramount importance. Cognos is certainly a confusing tool to the untrained with a huge range of features. Let’s figure out how to control your UI elements.

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Cognos on Cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP?)

Running workloads in the cloud is on everyone’s radar these days. Whether a company is already deployed on the cloud, actively migrating to the cloud, or just thinking about it. For many companies, taking advantage of the scale and the services that public clouds provide is becoming a critical piece of their infrastructure. However, these platforms are large and often complicated for companies looking at them for the first time.

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Kai Ming Uses Cognos Analytics to Help Kids Get Ahead

Data capture and the subsequent reporting were not easy for Kai Ming. Separate local, state, and federal agencies plus private donors and sponsors support Kai Ming. Monthly government-mandated reporting is necessary to maintain funding. Kai Ming’s Governing Board and Parent Council require different formats and content. Furthermore, Dr. Yang needed a comprehensive view of the program, from overall operations to classroom-level analytics and individual family and child records. With the help of PMsquare, Kai-Ming solved its challenges using Cognos.

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Set Up Row-Level Security in Data Modules by Using queryValue Function

I've been in several situations where a client is hesitant to use a Data Set because of the lack of row-level security. While IBM doesn't provide the same data security functionality for Data Sets and uploaded files, you can easily include row-level security using the queryValue macro function. Let's step through how to do it using an example use case.

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Be Alerted When an Amazon S3 File is Missing Using Lambda, SNS, and EventBridge

Alarms are very helpful in determining the state of certain processes such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glue workflows and jobs as part of an ETL pipeline. Ideally, there would be a team assigned to monitor the AWS Glue workflows regularly, but this is not very practical or feasible as many workflows are scheduled to run overnight or during off-hours. Setting up alarms to ensure these workflows successfully finish and don’t error out is key to troubleshooting issues early and maintaining and smooth-running pipeline.

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AI Ethics & Explainability for IBM Analytics Practitioners

With the inevitable, ever-tighter AI integration and infusion with IBM’s products, analytics practitioners need to understand the AI pillars and explainability principles that IBM espouses. These principles should be understood by CA and PA developers, administrators, and product owners, as they will inform the future direction of the AI components of each core product. Most importantly, it will be necessary for doers in our space to use the explainability toolkit in order to explain why models (and integrated, downstream components) predict/project/suggest/decide what they do to our business partners.

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Passing AWS Secrets to Microsoft PowerShell

Secret managers have become the go-to tool to avoid hard coding credentials in source code. Secret managers provide a centralized place to store sensitive data like database credentials and API keys. In Amazon Web Services (AWS) there are two services for storing secrets: AWS Secrets Manager and the Parameter Store. The key to this workflow is specific PowerShell modules that will allow you to script operations of AWS resources directly from the PowerShell command line.

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