Data privacy and regulatory compliance in low-code platforms

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Concerns around data privacy and regulatory compliance shouldn’t derail the adoption of low-code platforms. Here’s how to ensure low code doesn’t equal high risk.

The adoption of no-code and low-code technologies is soaring. Gartner predicts that by 2025 70% of new enterprise applications will be created in low-code development environments, up from just 25% in 2020. This growth accompanies an acute shortage of professional software developers in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, businesses and non-profit organizations alike face constant pressure to innovate rapidly.

No-code and low-code technologies present a way to close that gap, since they allow almost anyone to become a software developer. As co-founder and CEO of GitHub Chris Wanstrath famously said back in 2017, the future of coding is no coding at all.

However, while the value of low-code is undeniable, we cannot afford to lose sight of one of the biggest barriers to its adoption – data privacy and security. Low code doesn’t necessarily mean low risk. After all, allowing more people in the enterprise to get involved in development can naturally lead to creating new vulnerabilities, such as lack of oversight and visibility.

Adopting low-code software development is especially challenging for enterprises which have relied on in-house development for decades. As is the case with any transformation, the risks of something going wrong are ever-present, and adopting low-code platforms is no exception. On the other hand, the costliest words in business are ‘we’ve always done it this way’. That’s why digital transformation must always approach privacy, security, and regulatory compliance by design and default. Here’s what that means in the context of low-code development.

Read more

How low code can become a driving force in the shift to eGovernment

/0 Comments/in , /by

Government organizations face growing pressure from citizens to deliver more efficient public services. Here’s how low code can empower eGovernment initiatives.

If there’s a silver lining to the coronavirus pandemic, it’s how it led to the acceleration of digital transformation, particularly in sectors that have traditionally lagged behind when it comes to innovation. The government sector is one of those sectors, with bloated bureaucracies facing growing criticism from both the media and the general public.

Although governments might not manufacture goods or sell services, their job is to secure and protect the rights of their citizens. To that end, citizens and businesses alike rely on essential government services ranging from renewing public documents to filing tax returns to voting in elections. How governments deliver those services is falling under increasing scrutiny.

Governments face an urgent and growing demand from their constituents to provide innovative digital services that are more accessible and efficient to the general public. Enter the new era of eGovernment, in which the application of digital communications and online platforms leads to increased efficiency, transparency, and citizen participation.

However, despite the rapid advancement of eGovernment initiatives in recent years, there’s still plenty of room for improvement at regional, state, and national levels. Most governments worldwide are still struggling to modernize and replace legacy applications to integrate next-generation digital ecosystems.

The combination of low-code software development and open-source licensing is the perfect solution to the challenge. While low code is ideally tailored to governance across agencies and digital environments and public sector collaboration, open source ensures digital sovereignty in a world where the vast majority of the world’s proprietary technology is owned and operated by US-headquartered tech giants.

Read more

How open-source software can help nonprofits achieve their data equity goals

/0 Comments/in , /by

By making software development more accessible, open source and low code platforms help nonprofits achieve true data equity to further their causes.

The world’s four biggest technology companies – Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon – are all headquartered in the US and have a combined value exceeding $7 trillion. That’s far in excess of the entire GDP of Japan, the world’s third largest economy.

With the world in the midst of a digital revolution, and the future heavily orientated around data, the immense and wholly disproportionate economic gains of the largest technology companies highlight the growing global problem of data inequity.

We live in a time where, largely regardless of where we live in the world, our personal data is ultimately under the control of US technology giants and, by extension, US jurisdiction. Their business models have become strongly reliant on collecting personal data from people all over the world and exploiting it for targeted advertising. To make matters worse, and in spite of new regulations like GDPR and CCPA, they’ve often done so without informed consent as well. At the same time, the sheer volume of data these companies have has brought not only massive profit gains, but also heralded in a new era of surveillance capitalism.

For NGOs and nonprofits, data equity is emerging as an essential consideration. After all, they face constant pressure to adopt more transparent practices to earn the continued support of their volunteers and donors and to better serve their beneficiaries. To do that, they must not only practice what they preach, but also understand the implications of data inequity in an increasingly technology-focused world.

Read more

How nonprofits can use low code to drive innovation

/0 Comments/in , /by

Nonprofits face a growing demand for digital solutions that help them expand their missions. Here’s how low-code platforms can help them do just that.

Low-code software development is often praised for facilitating the rapid delivery of enterprise apps at a time when digital transformation must be agile and continuous. However, although nonprofits share these same challenges when it comes to digital innovation, they also face some unique challenges of their own.

Chief among the challenges is the fact that NGOs and nonprofits rarely have the same degree of financial backing that major enterprises have. Hiring talented software developers to build applications from scratch, in a way that incorporates privacy, security, and data sovereignty by design, is often far beyond what their budgets allow.

At the same time, the philanthropic space is entirely built on trust. Donors and regulators alike expect complete transparency into how and where their budgets are spent. What they do with donor information is another key area, especially in the case of nonprofits that operate across borders, where concerns about digital sovereignty factor in. These factors are much harder to address if digital innovation results in heavy overspending, lengthy delays, or vendor lock-in.

Low-code promises to make software development more equitable, but the truth is that most low-code development platforms (LCDPs) are tailored for business use. These platforms tend to serve specific target markets, such as sales and marketing teams in traditional enterprises – areas that have very different needs and priorities when it comes to nonprofit organizations.

Fortunately, open source is a natural fit for low code, as well as a natural fit for nonprofits. By empowering data equity and sovereignty, open-source low-code platforms give nonprofits the opportunity to leverage the inherent benefits of low code, albeit without the risks of sovereignty and vendor lock-in concerns.

Read more

5 essentials to consider when choosing a low-code platform

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Low-code software development has become a vital enabler of digital transformation, but with many vendors to choose from, navigating the marketplace isn’t easy.

Picking the right low-code platform can be difficult, and not just because there are hundreds of vendors to choose from. Selecting the right platform is also a significant responsibility, not least because the solution you choose will likely come to play an integral role in your ongoing digital transformation journey. In this article, we’ll explore some of the key considerations when evaluating potential low-code vendors.

Read more

3 ways open-source software helps nonprofits keep up with data protection demands

/0 Comments/in , /by

As the driving force behind the future of data sovereignty, open-source software is the natural fit for nonprofits seeking to adopt modern digital solutions.

NGOs and nonprofits face many of the same threats to their data and digital assets as large enterprises. The fundamental difference is that they rarely have the budgets to implement the latest enterprise-grade data-protection measures and hire top expertise in the space. In fact, according to the CyberPeace Institute, 86% of NGOs lack cybersecurity plans.

As a result, many philanthropic ventures are highly vulnerable to threats like cyberattacks and data leaks, with half of NGOs reporting being targeted in recent years. At the same time, they face the same pressures from industry regulators as the business world to protect personally identifiable data.

Perhaps the most sobering fact about cyberthreats facing nonprofits is how philanthropic work itself makes them a target. Many cybercriminals make a point of exploiting peoples’ goodwill by launching targeted social engineering scams with a view to stealing donations away from good causes. For example, charities in the UK lost £8.6 million to fraud between April 2020 and March 2021. Naturally, when this happens, donors start losing confidence, with potentially crippling impacts on legitimate nonprofits and their beneficiaries.

Of course, data protection isn’t just about protecting against malicious threats, but also about protecting data from threats like accidental leaks or compliance failures. In a sector that relies immensely on trust, reputation, and accountability, these challenges must be tackled together as one. At the same time, however, NGOs and nonprofits must address the challenges in a way that doesn’t end up interfering with their long-term policy goals.

Read more

Which privacy and security features does your CRM need to be compliant?

/1 Comment/in , /by

CRM systems store a trove of sensitive customer information, hence the need for compliance, security, and privacy to be incorporated by design.

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms hold a wealth of sensitive and valuable customer information. Should that information end up in the wrong hands due to a data breach or leak, it could spell disaster for the organization, not to mention hefty fines in cases involving compliance failures.

In today’s digital world, every organization needs to take a proactive stance when it comes to privacy, security, and compliance. These factors should be hard-baked into any software your business uses, particularly mission-critical solutions like CRM. With regulations like Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA now in force, it’s more important than ever to ensure that the correct information governance routines are in place to safeguard customer data.

Thankfully, implementing the right CRM software can help you on your compliance journey by introducing security and privacy by design and default. An enterprise-grade CRM platform will provide the technical controls needed to satisfy the requirements of laws like GDPR and CCPA and, in doing so, simplify and, to a large extent, automate compliance routines. A fully modular, low-code, and open-source solution goes even further by giving you unprecedented freedom over how you govern your data.

In this blog, we’ll look at some of the functions and features a CRM should have to make that possible:

Read more

What is data federation, and why is it important to your organization?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Data federation is the process of using virtualization to have multiple databases function as a unified system to reduce costs and support agility.

One of the biggest technical challenges facing enterprises today is that they have to deal with a constantly growing multitude of applications and data sources. Further complicating matters is the fact that all of these sources have their own data models, constraints, dependencies, and other requirements.

This challenge has resulted in the increasing complexity of data integration workflows. As a result, many enterprises find themselves struggling to overcome operational siloes born of the fact that different departments use different systems that don’t work well together. In the end, sharing information becomes such a burden that each department operates in a bubble.

The rapid migration from on-premises legacy systems to cloud architectures has resulted in yet further complexity. With many businesses having adopted a multi-cloud approach to keep costs low and efficiency high, the sheer disparity of data sources has increased too. Evidently, it’s time to get things back under control.

Managing this complexity requires enterprise technology leaders to rethink the way they work with their data. To become data-driven, they need to consolidate and integrate their various data sources and govern their entire digital infrastructure as a single unit – even if their data remains physically isolated in different systems.

Read more

How to manage risk with open-source software

/0 Comments/in , /by

Open-source software might be free to use, but that doesn’t mean it’s free of obligations. With threats becoming more complex, security must be a top priority.

As the adoption of open-source software continues to grow rapidly, software development teams must go to ever greater lengths to manage risk. Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) have further added to that risk surface by bringing development outside the IT department, potentially resulting in a rise of shadow IT.

Despite this, the use of open-source libraries can deliver tremendous benefits to businesses by delivering specific functionalities without developers having to build them from scratch. Open source is also a natural fit for low code, especially at a time when at least 82% of firms consider custom app development outside IT important for driving growth. Moreover, Gartner predicts that two thirds of all business apps will be created using low-code platforms by 2024.

These developments are among the defining characteristics of modern digital transformation strategies. This is also why open source accounts for as much as 90% of all code in today’s web and cloud apps, with the average software application relying on at least 500 open-source dependencies. As such, the sheer size and proliferation of open source has made it a key target for threat actors, with inevitable vulnerabilities leading to a significant increase in open-source risk. The grouping of open source and low code can, potentially, further expand that risk surface by letting it grow far beyond the auspices of the IT department.

Of course, that’s not to say businesses should scale back their adoption of open-source and low-code – not at all. Together, these innovations are vital for helping businesses adapt and scale rapidly in an era of constant change. But as is always the case with any innovation, new risks arise that need to be managed from the outset. Thus any digital transformation must be secure by design as such that security becomes a driver of innovation rather than a barrier. Here’s what that means for open-source low-code software development:

Read more

How the combination of open-source and low-code enable total data portability

/0 Comments/in , , /by

With a combination of open source software and low code development, organizations can be freed from vendor lock-in and maintain full control over their data.

With the low code revolution now well underway, business leaders are starting to consider its impact on regulatory compliance, privacy, and security. However, vendor lock-in and a general lack of control over where their data resides remain key concerns, especially given that most low code development platforms (LCDPs) are either partially or fully closed source.

Addressing these challenges is a top priority as organizations store ever-greater quantities of sensitive data in the cloud in increasingly disparate environments. That’s why there must be a standardized and universal way for organizations to locate, access, and control their data, without being beholden to their technology vendors.

On the other hand, low code presents the promise of reduced costs and faster development cycles. At the same time, in a closed source environment, the vendor has the final say in how your data is stored, accessed, and transmitted, making it impossible to achieve true digital sovereignty.

This conundrum is exactly what makes low code development a natural fit for the open-source model. Organizations can enjoy the benefits of low code while preserving digital sovereignty and, in doing so, maintain complete control over its availability and the application of universal privacy, security, and compliance policies.

Read more