Fact: A strong password is certainly important, but it is not enough to protect your organization entirely. Multi-factor authentication will help protect your account a step further, along with many other necessary security measures. #CybersceurityAwarenessMonth
Fact: You don’t need to be connected to the internet to experience a data breach. For example, your organization’s entire IT system could become infected just by one employee using an infected USB drive. Threats come in many forms. #CybersecurityAwarenessMonth
Fact: Paying for proper security and training is much cheaper than trying to recover from a single breach. In fact, many organizations that suffer a data breach don’t recover at all. Preventative breach measures will go a long way to help protect you. #CybersecurityAwarenessMonth
Fact: Every organization and employee that has access to, or could come into contact with sensitive data, should receive cybersecurity training. Threats are continuously evolving, making ongoing training critical for all. #CybersecurityAwarenessMonth
Starting a business is fun, although it can be tempting to go for broke because you are confident that your product will be a huge success. However, according to CBInsights, of the top 20 reasons why startups fail, cash shortages come second on the list (29%), right after the lack of market demand (42%). How do you make sure your tech startup can save money and survive? Here are six tips for startups to reduce their software product development costs.
Building software that works on a tight budget is the biggest challenge most innovative startups are facing today. On average, every sixth project runs over budget by a whopping 200%.
Speaking about the main reasons for budget overruns, high costs of local tech talent, poor planning, lack of communication within the team, technical incompetence or unrealistic requirements top the list.
Here are some tips for managing product development expenses on a shoestring budget that I’d like to share with you.
People are the most important part of any software development project. When you have experienced and motivated people with excellent technical and communication skills, you are halfway to deliver a successful product.
It takes time and money to build a development team that will deliver above your expectations. You need to find talented people, pay for onboarding, adaptation, and training, as well as equipment, workstations, software licenses, etc.
Also, if you are building a new team from scratch, it will take a while for people to get to know your business, technology, and the product they are developing.
If you work remotely, hire wisely. If you run a distributed software development team, you need to make sure you are hiring the right people for team roles, and you’re paying a fair price for them.
The larger the team, the more difficult it is to manage it and bring it up to speed. The rule of thumb, according to Jeff Bezos, is – if you can’t feed your team with two large pizzas in a meeting, you’re in trouble.
Having too many people on your team means more disagreement, more communication gaps and issues, higher resistance to change, and ultimately lower productivity.
It is best if you build your core team before starting the project. If you constantly shuffle people in your team throughout the development process, you will most likely reduce the productivity and delay the progress of the project.
In the world of globalization, it makes no sense to be bound by any physical boundaries. You need to stay cost-conscious and eliminate any spending unless it’s really crucial for your project success.
If you can’t attract or afford to hire a mature solutions architect within your home country, hire one overseas and integrate them into your in-house team smoothly with the help of video conferencing, project management tools, messengers, shared dashboards and team-building activities.
One of the leading fintech startups in the UK couldn’t find and hire the right skill sets locally (due to talent shortage and high rates) and it risked delaying product delivery and losing traction.
To solve this issue, the company hired a local tech consultancy with an R&D Center in Ukraine, Europe’s leading hub for outsourced software development, and the largest tech talent pool.
The consultancy helped them build a distributed software team across three locations: the UK, Spain, and Ukraine. DevOps, business analysis, and security functions stayed in the UK, while most developer roles (.Net, AngularJS), QA, solutions architect, and scrum master were hired in Ukraine and Spain.
Because Ukrainian and Spanish resources were way cheaper than those in the UK, the startup could save significant costs and build their MVP fast enough to attract £1 million from VC funds and private investors.
Many startups begin as a “one-man show” or as a team of two or three people. But as you elaborate on your MVP and build more features, you’ll need to scale your product and, thus, hire more employees to join your team.
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that we no longer need to rent an office space to build and deliver great products. In fact, more and more organizations all over the world are choosing to work entirely remotely.
By using remote teams and collaboration tools like Skype, Slack, and Trello, you can save tons of money by ditching the brick-and-mortar office space.
One study found that if a company allowed an employee to work from home half the time, it could save an average of $11,000 per employee per month.
Going remote also allows you to move to a less expensive part of the country to save costs or even to migrate to lower-cost yet resource-rich countries like Ukraine or Portugal.
More and more startups are abandoning the hustle and bustle of metropolitan areas in favor of cheaper cities with populations between 20,000 and 100,000. As technology advances, nothing prevents you from running a successful technology company from a home office in, say, Leicester, UK (where I live and work).
Every feature you build will cost you money.
Before you release a full-fledged product, your startup won’t know what features will be important to your users. For instance, your team might spend a lot of time and money developing a feature only to find out later that your users find it useless.
The smarter choice is to build a solid MVP first with the most in-demand features only. Once your MVP is released, you can collect valuable feedback from users to find out exactly what features they like and want to see in your app. Then, as you attract more funds, you can build features that will further enhance your product.
Your goal should be to build and market a product with minimum features that can help you onboard the first paying customers and start making money or attracting new funds.
To avoid delivering a glitchy product to the market, you should start testing it early in the software development process. By doing regular tests throughout the development lifecycle, you will discover and fix issues before moving on to other parts of the project.
If bugs pile up and you get to the end of the development process, you will need to go back and rework it. Making changes takes time and money. It will also push the release date back. You will be left with a low-quality product, wasted money, and psychological stress.
That is why bug tracking is really an important step towards reducing your product development costs.
The worst thing you can do is build your software in such a way that your users cannot use it. If you want to change something after the release, brace yourself for overheads and additional payments. Poor project planning typically results in overblown budgets.
Early user acceptance testing (UAT) can be used to minimize development costs down the road. UAT should be done after unit testing and functional testing, but it can also be done during the prototyping phase. All you need to do is create test scenarios based on your user journey or personas and have an industry or customer experience expert run the tests.
This approach will also help you reduce turnaround time and identify defects that can be fixed promptly to avoid overheads.
The same refers to security: penetration testing should be embedded in your entire product development lifecycle as early as possible to avoid overheads at a post-release stage and unhappy clients.
One study found out that developers spent up to 50% of their time fixing bugs that could have been avoided earlier in the process. At the same time, the cost of fixing errors after development was up to 100 times higher.
Choosing a tech stack for your project development is similar to choosing a car to buy. As a future owner, you need to take into account the cost of your car maintenance after the purchase, as high maintenance costs will add up to your total cost of car ownership.
According to Colette Wyatt, CEO of a UK-based software house Evolve, the cost of technology you are going to use for your project will directly affect the cost of your product development. What tools will you use? What framework will you work with? How large is the available pool of developers skilled in this or that stack? These are questions you need to answer in the first place.
Choosing the wrong technology stack can be costly, and it may bring you the following problems:
If you’re a startup specialized in data analytics or data science, ignoring Cloud migration equals shooting in your own leg. Even if data isn’t your core business, you still should consider taking advantage of Cloud opportunities and streamline all of your data-intensive processes by migrating your eCommerce or customer analytics to Cloud.
Cloud computing can be extremely cost-effective for startups due to the increased productivity they gain. Deploying cloud-based software is significantly faster than a conventional setup.
While a typical company-wide installation takes weeks or months to complete, cloud software deployments can happen in hours. It means your employees will spend less time waiting and more time working.
Cloud solutions are available on a pay-as-you-go basis. This format provides savings and flexibility in several ways. First of all, your startup doesn’t have to pay for software that isn’t in use. Unlike upfront licenses, in cloud computing, you typically pay per user. Plus, pay-as-you-go software can be canceled at any time, reducing the financial risk associated with any software that doesn’t work.
Finally, the initial cost of the Cloud is lower than on-prem solutions. For companies that need top-tier products but don’t have a lot of budgets, cloud solutions offer fantastic flexibility.
For high-growth companies, new equipment can be cumbersome, expensive, and inconvenient. Cloud computing solves these issues thanks to resources that can be obtained quickly and easily. Moreover, you eliminate the cost of repairing or replacing equipment.
In addition to the purchase cost, external equipment reduces internal power costs and saves space. Large data centers can take up valuable office space and generate a lot of heat. Moving to cloud-based applications or storage can help maximize space and significantly reduce energy costs and utility bills.
One company boasts being able to reduce its AWS costs from $55k to $20k per month and accomplish more than $500k yearly savings.
To replicate their success, here’re some tips:
Wrapping up, to reduce your software product development costs, you need to do the following:
A mix of the right people on the team, proper communication, the right tech stack, Cloud-native architecture, and a reliable tech partner is a significant prerequisite of successful product development.
Image Credit: Scott Graham
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In recent years, the fundamental insecurity of the internet has driven many to seek ways of protecting themselves and their data online. Businesses have pushed many of them in an attempt to help customers stay secure. There have been browser plugins to help force users to take advantage of SSL encryption on websites where it’s available.
The latest IoT devices are turning to short-range Z-Wave encrypted radio technology to keep attackers out. And email providers have increasingly adopted TLS encryption to protect email while it transits the internet.
For individual users, though, the latest internet security method of choice uses a virtual private network (VPN). Subscriptions for them are now available from countless commercial providers all around the world.
A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel that protects internet traffic between a user’s device and an endpoint server located elsewhere, where it exits onto the public internet. That grants the user a measure of security and privacy and some valuable extra benefits, such as the ability to watch any country’s Netflix library.
That doesn’t mean, however, that commercial VPNs are the only option. It’s becoming increasingly common for internet users (who are tech-savvy or have an adventurous spirit) to set up and operate their own VPN servers for private use. Doing so gives them greater control over where their data goes, who might have access to it, and exactly how it’s secured en route to its destination.
For those interested in setting up their own VPN server, here’s a basic rundown on the steps involved to make the process as user-friendly as possible.
Before deciding to set up a personal VPN server, it’s essential to consider how you plan to use it and what you need it to do. If the primary purpose is to enhance your online security and keep your ISP (or another local network operator) from spying on you, a personal VPN is a good fit.
If you are looking for a VPN to anonymize your traffic or allow you to use services like BitTorrent without anyone tracing the activity back to you, a commercial VPN provider is a better option. With that out of the way — here’s what you need to do to get a VPN server up and running:
To operate a VPN server, you’ll need a machine to run it on that’s available from anywhere you might travel, and that has sufficient bandwidth to handle whatever traffic you send its way. For most people, that means choosing one of the many major cloud providers like Google GCP, Amazon AWS, or Microsoft Azure.
Any of those would make a good fit for a VPN server, but it’s important to look at the pricing details to see how much the traffic you expect to generate will cost you each month. If you’re planning to use your VPN to protect all of your web traffic, it might be worth looking into an unmetered VPS solution instead.
With a cloud provider lined up, the next decision to make is which VPN server type to deploy. Today, most commercial VPN providers rely on software called OpenVPN, which is freely available and open-source. Besides, many major cloud providers have ready-built OpenVPN server instances available, which make deploying one a snap.
It’s also among the fastest VPN protocols available so that it won’t slow down the internet connections of anyone using it. For all-around use, OpenVPN makes a good choice.
There are other options available, too. One is called SoftEther, another open-source project that acts as something of a Swiss Army knife for VPN provisioning. It supports connections using any major current VPN protocols, including OpenVPN, IPsec, MS-SSTP, and L2TPv3.
That means it’s capable of supporting connections from almost every internet-connected device imaginable, which makes it ideal if you need to protect a house full of devices.
By far, though, the best current solution for anyone deploying their own VPN server is Algo. It’s an easy-to-set-up VPN system that supports every cloud provider imaginable and has a step-by-step install process that makes getting it up and running easy enough for a novice to handle.
Better still, it supports connections using the WireGuard protocol, which is a highly-secure and blazing fast protocol that most people expect to be the eventual successor to the widely-used OpenVPN.
The great thing about WireGuard works very well with mobile devices, negotiating unstable wireless signals with ease. That’s something that other VPN systems like OpenVPN struggle with. In many cases, a mobile device with a weak signal can be a nightmare to use with a VPN, with frequent disconnections and pauses for re-authentication.
WireGuard, by contrast, takes less than a second to reconnect when there’s a signal issue, providing a stable and seamless VPN experience no matter where you use it.
With the VPN server up and running, the next step is to collect the information needed to connect devices to it. In the case of OpenVPN, the server installation process will have also created a client configuration file that may be used on any device with a native OpenVPN client available.
In those cases, all that’s required is to copy that file to the device and tell the client software where to find it. Then simply provide the username and password selected during the server installation, and the connection should complete with no issues.
For a SoftEther server, connecting a client can be a little more complicated. The server can generate configuration files for OpenVPN and IPsec clients, so if those are in use, the generated files should be all that’s needed on the client (besides the username and password you’ve set).
If the server is configured to use the native SoftEther protocol, nothing more than the server’s external IP address and the login information is necessary to get up and running.
If the server’s running Algo, the installer will have created configuration files for any device capable of running either the WireGuard client or an IPsec-compatible client. The server’s installer will specify where the files reside, and they’re all that’s needed to connect. Best of all, Algo will even generate a QR code with the required configuration information that makes connecting mobile devices as easy as snapping a picture.
Once the necessary clients are connected, the last step is to check to ensure that all of the device traffic is being appropriately routed through the new VPN server.
The simplest way to do this is to visit a testing site that can scan your connection information. If the results reveal the device’s actual IP address or geographic location, something’s not working correctly. If everything’s right, the test should show the VPN server’s IP address and location and the DNS server information used during the server setup process.
In the case of an issue, retrace the setup steps on the server and client to ensure nothing’s been missed. Chances are; however, everything will work on the first try.
If all went well, the result should be a fast, secure personal VPN server that is capable of protecting as many devices as you need (as long as you’re willing to pay for sufficient bandwidth).
Best of all, the setup is entirely disposable, which means it can be terminated or moved to a new hosting provider at any time. After getting through the setup once, it should be easy for just about anyone to repeat the process as many times as they need or want to.
The best part of all is that everything about the setup is under the direct control of its owner – meaning there’s no third-party to trust. And for the security-minded, there can be no more significant asset.
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