Integrated Professional Skills in Digital Age: Collaboration, Cloud Computing, Privacy and Security

This research explores the importance of collaboration, cloud computing, privacy and security in the digital age. It discusses the significance of collaboration tools in the midst of pandemic, merits and demerits of cloud storage and computing, challenges and measures to combat privacy and security, and the benefits and limitations of the internet network which Russia is trying to develop due to the Ukraine war. Subject: Integrated Professional Skills, Course Code: N/A, Course Name: N/A, College/University: N/A

INTEGRATED
PROFESSIONAL SKILLS
IN DIGITAL AGE

Table of Contents.
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
Collaboration tool and its significance in the midst of pandemic................................................1
Merit and demerit of cloud storage and computing in improving digitalisation.........................3
Challenges and measures to combat privacy and security...........................................................5
Russia and Ukraine, Russia is trying to develop their own internet, disconnecting from the
global Internet, and controlling their local network on their own. Discuss the benefits and
limitations of these networks.......................................................................................................7
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION
The pandemic has led to an immenent surge in using the digital technologies to avoid the
inefficiency in working of the businesses. Work-from-home is the new normal mode of
performing the job assigned. The current scenerio is that Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) has emmense important role in the digital businesses during the Covid-19
resulting in the upward rise in the gig economy. The research will describe the importance of
collaboration in workplace and identify how the collaboration tools have help the businesses to
survive the pandemic time while reducing the phycial among the employees. Further, the report
will critically analyse the merits and demerits of cloud storage and computing in improving the
digitalisation. The study will discuss the challenges and measures regarding the privacy and
security which has witnessed a rise during the global pandemic. In the end, the research will
evaluate the benefits and limitations of the internet network which Russia is trying to develop
due to the Ukraine war so as to disconnect from the whole world.
Collaboration tool and its significance in the midst of pandemic
Collaboration at workplace means sharing of innovative ideas, knowledge, experience,
skills, new perspectives by the group of colleagues in order to attain common objective (Castañer
and Oliveira, 2020). Working together helps to increase the productivity instead of individually
(Kulakov, 2020). It is beneficial for both the employees and the organisation. During pandemic,
collaboration has played a very significant role in running the businesses and the importance are:
 Foundation of work: An entity is formed with a group of individuals which focused to
share resources, services, ideas to meet the end goals. Collaboration binds the people in
the organisation together and is main foundation of process. The pandemic has shifted
the workforce to communicate and collaborate remotely with the help of using
technology which make the working feasible in the hard time.
 Overall work success: The success of the firm is highly dependable on how their
workforce are collaborating. For better teamwork, collaboration is crucial in achieving
the project goals (Yan, 2019). The degree of collaboration rely on the size of the team.
During Covid-19, Zoom app has given the efficient platform for the employees to
connect on a regular basis to attain overall success.
 Focus on individual responsibilities: The essential importance is to provide the
employees their duty within the team. They are provided with their role while working
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together and are accountable for that. Working together doesn't allow any individual to
run away from its responsibilities, instead they develop an employee from its core.
 Achieve common goals: The individuals role have been structured into output by the
team which aid them to accomplish their common goals. The pandemic time was
crucial for the businesses but due to work collaboration they are able to meet their
desirable outcomes.
 Growth and innovation: Innovation is an important part of the growth whether it's
business or an employee. Collaboration during pandemic through various channnels
benefitted them to exchange the thoughts and ideas while learning new skills using
online interface. Collaboration acts as a multiplier for unique and innovative ideas.
Defining collaboration tool is not easy as it is a grey area but in simple term it refers to
the interaction or conjunction tool used to connect between two or more people (Leising, Quist
and Bocken, 2018). In other words, it is an app which allows mutiple people to brainstorm ideas,
distribute tasks across teams, video conferencing to talk people virtually, collateral file sharing
within the team. This tool broaden the concept of collaboration. During the pandemic, these tools
help the organisation to survive through connecting remotely and performing the tasks. It helped
the businesses to succeed at the time when even the life of person was falling down. The tool
enabled 100% participation as WFH is the new working culture which witnessed full utilization
of the assets of the company's i.e. its members. The two collaboration tools which helped the
businesses to survive the pandemic reducing the phycial contact are:
 GoToMeeting: It is the web conferencing software with an enterprise-grade security.
During pandemic it helped the businesses to use this application due to the flexibility,
secure access, award winning rating, better support team, unbeatable uptime, high-quality
video meeting, enhanced audio, account management (Hurst, 2020). This tool was
beneficial for the teams to virtually meet and fulfill the tasks that are being alloted. Due
to high standard password protection it is also useful for the parent-teacher meetings and
educational classes during the Covid-19. Even after the post-pandemic, this web
conferencing app is crucial because many businesses are following the hybrid mode of
working which would be helpful in performing better without any hindrances.
 Google meet: Work-from-home became new norm in the midst of pandemic and online
meetings became routine through video meeting apps. The second collaboration tool
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which helped the businesses to pursue during tough time was Google Meet (García and
et.al., 2021). It was designed keeping in mind the business need with simple interface in
online meeting. Meet is integrated with all the apps of Google. For example, Google
Calendar which allow people to link the meetings date and time rather than remembering
it. Google had made temporarily available its workspace without any limit on the call
duration. The members of the team are able to record the activity which directly synced
to google drive. Due to security and privacy issues businesses have shifted to use Google
Meet rather than using Zoom app because it have encrypted security.
Merit and demerit of cloud storage and computing in improving digitalisation
Cloud storage is a model which stores the clients data on the internet and cloud
computing refers to the facility a client get to access his data from any location on any device
with the help of an connection. They seems to be the technical jargon in recent time and each
passing year businesses are using these techniques to access their data stored on a cloud. Even
though it is relatively important in today's world for an individual, organisation or even the
governement the technology has its own merits and demerits.
Merits are:
 Disaster recovery: Data plays an important role in current time and what is more
necessary is to store and protect that data. Cloud storage and computing provide the data
to be stored and backedup on a external device which may be thousand of miles away
from your's location (Namasudra, 2021). Even if accidentally one have lost its data, the
cloud service provider automatically generate a backup which is easily accessible while
saving time, money and reduce stress.
 Accessibility: This is one of the biggest advantage as when your data is stored on a
cloud, you can easily access that data from anywhere. It is useful for any company having
different time zone or travelling is there in your work. During pandemic, this helps the
employees to access their data remotely via internet.
 Scalability: It is another merit as the company is flexible regarding the storage of the
data. The organisation can increase or decrease its scale of using the data storage
according to the firm's growth. The cloud service providers offer various scalable
payment plans to the categories of the businesses.
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 Automated backups: The another benefit is the automatic backup provided by the cloud
service provider and enable clients to be free from scheduling regular data backups which
would save the time, money and offline storage of an organisation.
 Cost effective: It is most important merit of using cloud storage and computing as storing
data in hard disks and investing in server infrastructure would be very expensive but not
in the case of cloud storage and computing. It can be purchased by providing normal
bucks and is also flexible. It will also cut the cost of recovering any data stored on a hard
drives while recovery can be easily done on cloud computing.
Demerits are:
 Internet dependency: It is one of the biggest disadvantage of using cloud option as you
can only access the data by internet connection. It is completely dependable on the
internet and if the connection lost or fails then it would lead to downtime. Slow internet
connection and weak bandwidth are another possible isssues which may have to face by
an organisation due to the high dependency on cloud.
 Difficult to migrate: The another demerit would be difficulty in switching to other cloud
storage company as the process of tranferring data is complex and it won't be easy for
medium to large sized businesses.
 Security concern: Cloud option means that an individual or organisation is handling its
data to the third party. The data is being stored on a cloud including the data of others
(Kaur, Chana and Bhattacharya, 2018). So, it could be possible that other may access
your confidential information regarding your personal or professional life which may end
up into big trouble. In 2014, Dropbox deleted all the data of its clients due to security
glitch.
 Lack of control: This is an disadvantage as the data stored off-site has fully controlled
by the company and the client has no authority to customize the setup of the data storage.
It is a severe issue for large clients with complex storage needs. Customization feature is
still lacking by the cloud company providers.
 Fixed contracts: This is the last demerit of using cloud facility as the providers trap the
clients into long term contracts in which the organisation are not able to customize their
storage needs if they plan to reduce or increase, they are stuck to the conditions of
prevailing contracts.
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Challenges and measures to combat privacy and security
Privacy is the fundamental right recognized by various international and national
regulations. The current digital age define privacy as “ independent right that is protected by
legal ducuments (De Salve, Mori and Ricci, 2018).” During global pandemic, WFH culture had
witnessed a various cyber attacks on the employee as well on organisations. With the ease in the
guidelines of the Covid-19, many companies are offering their workforce a hybrid mode of
arrangement. Even after post pandemic, the organisations are still facing the security and privacy
challenges. In this heading, the measure to control these challenges are being dicussed.
Challenges are:
 SQL injection: This is one of the common practice to steal data, access database and
perform operations. It happens due to insecure coding mechanism for accepting the
inputs. It add special character by manipulating SQL.
 Data loss in cloud: It is another challenge which is faced by the organisations as
many of them have migrated using cloud storage as a source to keep the data. The
lack of customization feature enable the risk to control the data loss as many time
users operate from their own devices and unsecured connections. It may happen that
the data could be maliciously or accidentally lost.
 Malware: It is the major risk to the data in which the user can only access the
encrypted data by using the key which could be provided in exchange of paying a
ransom to the hackers (Tawalbeh and et.al., 2020). This method is mostly used to
steal the data and sometimes even after paying the data is lost.
 Threats: Threat is the biggest security and privacy challenge which mostly includes
three types i.e. non-malicious threat is the first in which damage to the data is caused
negligently as an individual is unaware of security guidelines. The second kind is
malicious threat which intentionally causes the harm by stealing the data for personal
gain. Compromised threat is the last type in which the attackers operate as a
legitimate user by using the account.
 Engineering attacks: It is primary threat technique used by the hackers to data. User
could lost its private data by clicking malicious messages and loosing access to their
network. Phishing is one of the common practice of engineering attacks.
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 Accidental exposure: Total number of data breaches are caused due to accidental
release of the data (Otuoze, Mustafa and Larik, 2018). Due to the unawareness of
security guidelines most of the company's employees unknowingly mishandle or lose
valuable data. This is the major challenge while considering the security and privacy
of the data as this is the most easy way to access data.
Measures are:
 Big data security: It is a practice to prevent the large amount of data by following the
strategies like AWS big data, Microsoft Azure, Google cloud big data, snowflake,
elasticsearch,splunk.
 Data masking: It is another measure to protect the privacy by creating the synthetic
version of the data which is useful for various purposes (Mocrii, Chen and Musilek,
2018). In this method the value of the data has been changed retaining the type of data.
 Data encryption: This method is mostly used by the hackers by accessing the data and
encrpting it with a key. Therefore, it is best way to secure the privacy by protecting the
given data. This technique convert the data from plaintext to ciphertext which can only
to read by an decryption code.
 Data loss prevention: Redundancy is the biggest drawback of cloud option as if the data
is lost from the cloud storage then it can't be restored (Ogonji, Okeyo and Wafula, 2020).
To prevent this kind of situation, organisations use different safeguards like physical
backup of data on the hard drives or backing data at other locations.
 GRC: It is the best methodology and measure to improve data security by using
governance which enforce policies within the organisation, risk which identify potential
security threat as well as ensuring the organisation prepareness plan and compliance
which are regulatory with the industry standards while using data.
 Password hygiene and anti-malware: One of the simplest measure to prevent the
security is by enforcing strong and unique passwords and installing antivirus software to
protect the data.
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Russia and Ukraine, Russia is trying to develop their own internet, disconnecting from the global
Internet, and controlling their local network on their own. Discuss the benefits and
limitations of these networks.
During the war that has taken place between Russia and Ukraine, Russia is trying to
develop their own network of internet. Russia is getting isolated with various tech companies
and breaking its operation from various applications which includes Twitter, Facebook Netflix
etc. The country is moving towards using local operators and is planning to completely
disconnect from the global internet. It has been observed that by March all the server and
domains will be transferred to the Russian Zone(Kumari, and Sambhav, 2020). The document
was released by the Russian Ministry Of Digital development which showed the limit attempts in
the use of internet services. Russia is one of the developed nations with the population of 140
million so the plan to expand its own network can have immense impact(Budnitsky, and Jia,
2018). The ongoing war between the nations is resulting into ripping the global unity and in
such difficulty and the motive of Russian government to develop its own internet network with
the motive to have a control over the communication and information band. From the above
analysis various benefits and issues/ challenges that can be faced by the country with regards to
develop its own private network are:
Advantages of developing private network:
1. The main purpose behind development of the private network is to prevent the citizens
from accessing to the global network.
2. With the implementation of such plan the country or state can have full control over the
various information and communication networks which can also contribute in the
overcoming the issues that is faced by the user of the internet.
3. Furthermore it also helps in more protection of the data and security of the information of
the users as the state has full control over the private network established by the nation.
4. On the other hand with the establishment of the private network will help in prevention of
the malicious power to interfere and control the network system of the country as there
will be full control of the Russian government(Claessen, 2020).
5. Developing the private network will help to reduce various issues which also helps in
reducing the cyber attacks and provides full security of the personal information of the
users.
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Limitation of developing private network:
 Developing the private internet network is not easy as various restriction are imposed as
there will be full control of the Russian government and it is observed that with the era
of the globalisation developing private network can be an issues and restrict the user for
accessing various information which can be an issue.
 The other limitation faced by the nation is the negative effects of the global
communication and lack of communication for gaining useful information will be
restricted as the control, will be in the hands of the government.
 In the era of digitalisation, the country can face the issue and problems relevant to the
supply chain as it requires efficiency in the supply chain.
 In today's world , it is necessary for the citizens to have the information and should be
aware of the trends that is prevailing in the market(Ram Jagannath, and et.al., 2019). But
if the Russia is developing its private network will restrict the citizens to be aware about
the current trends which is generally spread through digital networking.
 On the other hand they have to monitor the laws effectively and make modification
accordingly and maintain more strict provisions in order to maintain strict control over
the laws of the state.
CONCLUSION
From the above report it can be concluded that in today's world the role of technology
has increased rapidly and with this it has helped to get relevant information and data in less
time. With the emergence of the covid-19 has resulted into increase in the scope of technology .
The project is based on the importance of Information and communication technology which is
considered as important factor which has led to the growth of the business. It has also helps in
the collaboration at the workplace has been gained importance which is required that was
necessary for the business to grow and balance their loss during the pandemic. The present report
summarize the the meaning of collaboration at workplace and tools that has helped the business
to sustain in the market during the pandemic.
Furthermore, the importance of cloud computing , cloud storage and role E-commerce
has also summarize in the study. The project also discuss the increase in the cyber attacks and
security challenges faced by the company and apart from this various benefits and limitation that
Russia can face in context of developing the separate internet network.
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REFERENCES
Books and journals
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organizations: Establishing the distinctive meanings of these terms through a systematic
literature review. Journal of Management. 46(6). pp.965-1001.
Claessen, E., 2020. Reshaping the internet–the impact of the securitisation of internet
infrastructure on approaches to internet governance: the case of Russia and the
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De Salve, A., Mori, P. and Ricci, L., 2018. A survey on privacy in decentralized online social
networks. Computer Science Review. 27. pp.154-176.
García, N.O. and et.al., 2021. Remote academic platforms in times of a pandemic. International
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Hurst, E. J., 2020. Web conferencing and collaboration tools and trends. Journal of Hospital
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Kaur, R., Chana, I. and Bhattacharya, J., 2018. Data deduplication techniques for efficient cloud
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architecture, software, communications, privacy and security. Internet of Things. 1.
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Namasudra, S., 2021. Data access control in the cloud computing environment for
bioinformatics. International Journal of Applied Research in Bioinformatics
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Ogonji, M. M., Okeyo, G. and Wafula, J. M., 2020. A survey on privacy and security of Internet
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Otuoze, A. O., Mustafa, M. W. and Larik, R. M., 2018. Smart grids security challenges:
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Ram Jagannath, and et.al., 2019. Applications of the Internet of Things with the cloud
computing technologies: a review. Edge Computing. pp.71-89.
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