CES 2024 is the place to see and experience the biggest changes in technology firsthand. It’s the world’s largest consumer electronics show where you can see the latest trends firsthand, learn about new innovations and opportunities for a wide range of professionals, and see a wide range of tech companies and startups in action.
With over a decade of experience attending CES and more than 30 trips to Las Vegas, including during COVID-19, we’ve put together this guide to give you a comprehensive overview of what to expect if you’re visiting CES 2024 for the first time.
We’ve put together a brief introduction to CES 2024, tips for living in Las Vegas, and a comprehensive guide to visiting the show floor, all in one post. If you want to get the full picture, this is the place to start, and then check out the details below.
Strategies for navigating the show: Learn how to effectively navigate the CES show floor, including entry procedures, order of visit, how to utilize the show map, and VIP tour options.
Las Vegas Shopping Guide: Provides information on the shopping areas and unique shopping experiences you shouldn’t miss during the show.
Foodie experiences: Discover the best places to eat, drink, and explore the foodie culture of Las Vegas.
Sightseeing in Las Vegas: How to use your non-show time to discover the city’s top attractions and hidden gems.
This guide provides all the information you need to prepare for attending CES 2024 and will help attendees have the best possible experience at the show. As you begin your adventure at CES 2024, we hope this guide will serve as a compass for your shining experience. Click on each title to learn more.
Public cloud: a key component of your digital transformation strategy. Key Technologies for Digital Transformation: From RPA to Cloud analyzes the speed, agility, cost-effectiveness, and technical advantages of the public cloud, which has emerged as a prerequisite for the fourth wave of digital transformation (DT, DX, digital transformation).
It is no exaggeration to say that cloud is the most fundamental technology for DX. The emergence of cloud services represented by Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google GCP can be said to have accelerated the actual DX. It is now a rare sight to see even domestic companies putting servers in IDCs (Internet Data Centers) and visiting them regularly. For companies that aim to provide global services, the emergence of public clouds is a key tool that solves many complex problems at once, like the sweet rain in a drought. How should public clouds be viewed from a DX perspective?
Public cloud: a key component of your digital transformation strategy
Speed and agility in the public cloud: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azrue, Google GCP
One of the biggest selling points of a public cloud environment is speed and agility. In a traditional on-premises environment, building a server starts with ordering hardware. The infrastructure operations staff, in consultation with the development team, assembles the right mix of components for the server’s availability.
This usually takes a few weeks, or even months if the order is placed with an offshore IDC. Once the hardware is received, the next step is to install the operating system and software for the server, connect it to the network, test it for stability, and install it. From there, you use your own server management software to make sure the server is working properly, and if there are any unresolved issues, you travel to the IDC’s site to deal with them. In a public cloud environment, however, this process is much simpler.
You can select the server specifications you need online, and with a few clicks, the hardware is ready to go. What’s more, when you select a server specification, you can sometimes request that the server operating system or some software be installed. In other words, the public cloud is like choosing a ready-to-wear suit, whereas the old way of doing things was like making a custom suit. Because of this immediacy, the public cloud has the advantage of being faster and more agile than traditional methods, which means you can spend less time bringing new services to market and more time testing them. You can also scale to a global service in minutes.
Cost savings and flexibility benefits
Using a public cloud environment can also save you money. Of course, this can be controversial. Recent public cloud environments utilize PaaS (Platform as a Service, a model that provides various IT infrastructures necessary for app development in the form of a platform, and companies only need to worry about app development), which may cost more than a traditional server configuration. However, from the perspective of traditional server operation, cost savings are inevitable until a certain scale is reached. In addition to the pure infrastructure costs of running a single service, there is also a significant cost for operating personnel. With the public cloud, these labor costs can be flexibly managed.
In addition, since the public cloud is not an investment in servers (hardware), you only pay for what you use (pay-as-you-go). This means that for corporate accounting purposes, it is not an “investment” but an “operation” of an asset. In addition, pay-as-you-go allows you to try different business experiments without worrying about the cost if you don’t know what your server usage will be.
In server operations, server specifications are determined based on an agreed transaction between infrastructure personnel and developers, and if the actual usage is less than this, it is an over-investment in the server. In other words, if a server with an availability of 100 is actually operated and only 20 is used, 80 server resources are over-invested.
In fact, these details are rarely reported to the company’s management, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be able to recoup the investment. However, in a public cloud environment, you have the flexibility to handle this situation. If you set up 100 server resources and only use 20, you can downsize to 25 or 30. This scalability and flexibility is also a huge advantage in the opposite situation.
If your service is so successful that you experience a temporary spike in demand for server resources, you can quickly and flexibly scale up your server specifications, and we’ve seen examples where this flexibility has actually reduced server failure rates by more than 50%. Even if you do experience a serious problem with your server resources, your server recovery time will be much shorter than before.
DX Core Technologies and the Public Cloud
There’s another important factor in utilizing the public cloud from a DX perspective. This is that most of the latest technologies for DX, such as artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things, are implemented in public cloud environments. As we mentioned earlier, it’s important to utilize external resources to build well-crafted technologies instead of trying to build them from scratch. In this context, we also talked about the importance of open innovation. If you want to take advantage of this scalability and fast-moving technology at the right time, you can only do so if your company’s systems are in a public cloud environment.
Whether you’re creating a minimalist product to bring to market or experimenting, the public cloud can give you the most bang for your buck. In the old way, it was difficult to start a new business because you had to acquire a lot of assets, starting with hardware, and the sunk costs were quite high if the business failed, but now you don’t have to worry about that. Of course, how well you utilize the public cloud environment is another matter, and it’s also an internal capability. Nevertheless, the public cloud has become an integral part of the DX landscape.
Digital Transformation Security: The need for new security policies centered on user experience. Key Technologies for Digital Transformation: Explores the importance of new security regulations for the third era of digital transformation (DT, DX, Digital Transformation), from RPA to cloud. Comparative analysis of global trends and changes in security policies centered on user experience.
Changes in public certificates and the user experience
When it comes to security in Korea’s IT environment, the first thing that comes to mind is authorization certificates. For quite a long time, they have been used without choice due to various regulations, and many users complained that they were forced to install unnecessary programs on their personal PCs. It was quite a hassle to use public certificates to do online banking or use public web pages, installing certificates and various security programs, rebooting, etc. Until recently, some regulations have changed, and public certificates can be used instead of traditional certificates, which are much more usable.
If you’ve ever used internet services in a foreign country when only traditional certificates were available, you’ll be amazed at the ease with which you can use financial and payment services. It’s the same internet banking, but in some places you have to install several programs, and in other places it’s as easy as using a portal with just a few clicks. What’s the difference? It’s the difference between user experience and technology, whether you see users as something that can cause problems and prevent them from happening, or whether you make them feel comfortable until they do, and then compensate them for it.
Digital Transformation Security: The need for new security policies centered on user experience
Domestic and international security policy differences and their impact
Security issues also show a similar difference in perception between domestic and international companies. Companies with more than a certain number of employees, especially affiliates of large domestic companies, already have internal security programs in place and are not allowed to capture or freely release documents for security reasons. This is understandable, as the goal is to prevent the leakage of sensitive company information. But do these security policies keep up with the changing landscape, and the answer is no. The core of corporate document security is not the circulation of documents within the organization, but the prevention of external viewing of documents through DRM, etc. when they leave the organization.
However, the security system of Korean companies has been in the direction of blocking and viewing unconditionally. This is also true for email. Many companies even delete emails automatically. However, it is questionable whether these deleted emails are kept separately. If you mechanically delete an email and then have a major lawsuit and need to recover it, do you even have an alternative? As you can see, employees are experiencing a significant loss of productivity for security reasons.
The Evolution of Security: A User-Centric Approach
In recent years, organizations’ security efforts have changed. This is due to the adoption of SaaS services, represented by the various digital tools described above. SaaS services are utilized by renting servers from service providers rather than owning them. One of the first problems large organizations face when adopting SaaS services is the confusion caused by the different security levels. The beauty of SaaS is that you can access the document you’re working on or the file you’re collaborating on from anywhere, anytime, with authentication.
However, if you translate this into a traditional security policy, you may find yourself storing documents for a period of time before deleting them, or accessing them from anywhere other than your company’s designated PC.
This is the same as how employees are viewed from a public service perspective. In our case, we view them as potential security risks and apply security in a way that restricts their ability to use many functions. So we have a policy of deleting materials or restricting access after a certain period of time. For a global organization, however, the approach is to leave things as open as possible for individuals, but to make them aware through training that there can be significant damages if something goes wrong.
With so much work being done from home, it’s easy for companies to see which PCs each employee is using and where they’re accessing from. They already know your work and home addresses, and they can tell if your access is legitimate or not just by looking at the IP address.
Then, when access is monitored from a completely different location than home or work, the security solution alerts you to the anomaly, and it’s up to your security team to track it down or immediately revoke the privileges. Rather than preventing access in the first place, the security solution can take action when an anomaly is detected, ensuring that employees can work uninterrupted from their favorite locations. This small difference makes a huge productivity difference in the real world.
Digital transformation security regulations and the need for them
In the DX journey, it’s sometimes the details that make the difference between starting a program to improve the digital capabilities of your employees and having it fall flat on its face and failing to produce real results. We’ve talked about document security before, but how many organizations in Korea are actually doing it right? Let’s say you have a confidential document that was created by Team A, and access to it is limited to Team A members and the company’s CEO and executives.
If a member of Team A moves internally to Team B, does that member immediately lose access to the confidential document they previously created? Most likely, they will have separate files on their personal PCs. Don’t assume you’re doing a good job with corporate security programs like public certificates if you don’t address this basic situation. If you’re looking to change your organization’s work culture with DX, you’ll also need to look at your existing security policies from the ground up. You’re bound to find something that needs to change.
