Improve your business resilience with disaster recovery
No organization has time for downtime in today’s ever-changing business environment. Disruptions including human error, cyberattacks, natural disaster and even business disruption related to the COVID-19 pandemic can wreak havoc on your business and bring it to a standstill. Having a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan is critical for business resilience and the survival of your organization.
So what is a DR plan? It can be defined as a set of processes and techniques used to help an organization recover from a disaster and continue or resume routine business operations. It is a comprehensive plan that combines the roles and functions of IT and the business immediately following a disaster. These plans allow your organization to adapt and recover from any type of disruption while also maintaining normal business operations.
Major app crashes are a wake-up call for organizations to improve their app stability
Organizations in virtually every industry rely on apps to provide a critical part of the customer experience. When those apps prove to be unstable, end users can be impacted in ways that cause considerable consternation. Last year, a variety of major organizations suffered significant app crashes that resulted in serious disruptions, lost revenue and hurt reputation.
For example, London’s Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest airports, experienced two simultaneous app failures that prevented departure boards from displaying accurate information and kept travelers from being able to check-in electronically, causing thousands of passengers to have their flight delayed or cancelled. Later on in 2020, bugs in Facebook’s Software Developer Kit (SDK) led iOS versions of Spotify, Pinterest, TikTok, Venmo, Tinder, Doordash and other notable apps to crash as soon as they were opened. Finally, popular eSports game Apex Legends encountered so many ongoing app crashes last Fall that a major tournament was ruined, with all matches but one having at least a single player disconnect.
A central bank digital currency: Challenges and opportunities
Digital national currencies are no longer just a concept. The Bahamian Sand Dollar was issued in October 2020, and other countries, such as Sweden and China, are currently running pilots. Within the next few years, there could be more than a dozen central banks issuing national digital currencies.
These central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are different from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ether. CBDCs are issued by national banks. The Sand Dollar, for example is backed by the Bahamian government and one-to-one with the Bahamian dollar, which is itself pegged to the U.S. dollar. They’re also not mined like many cryptocurrencies.
Make a huge saving on O&O DiskImage 16 Professional for World Backup Day
Today, March 31, is World Backup Day. It's the day of the year when those people who do remember to back up their data on a regular basis get to feel a little smug about things, and those of us who don't do so get to feel a bit guilty. But instead of feeling bad about not backing up your important files, why not make this the year that you take the World Backup Day Pledge?
The pledge reads: "I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and precious memories on March 31st". And to make it easier for you to stick to this pledge, we have an amazing special offer for you -- for a very limited period you can make a big saving on the hugely respected backup tool O&O DiskImage 16 Professional.
Need stability, scalability, high availability, and control? Here is how Atlassian Data Center can help
In February 2021, Atlassian Server officially retired and this means organizations can no longer buy new Atlassian (Core) Server licenses (such as Jira, Confluence BitBucket, JSM) as the product has now reached end-of-life (EOL). While customers can still upgrade or downgrade their Server licenses and maintenance, support will continue to be available for the next three years, and Server customers can continue to purchase additional functionality and apps via the Atlassian Marketplace. Atlassian’s ultimate goal is to move customers either to its Atlassian SaaS product or to Atlassian Data Center (allowing customers to host where they want).
Those organizations unable to move to a cloud environment (SaaS), or those who want to take a slower transition to the cloud, either because of IP issues or because they work in highly regulated industries, should seriously consider a move to Atlassian Data Center. This not only provides high levels of stability, scalability and high availability, it enables IT teams to maintain control, stay abreast of ever-increasing demands and more effectively plan ahead.
Outsourcing is a powerful business strategy -- so why is it frowned upon?
Outsourcing is the practice of contracting out certain business functions -- most commonly, customer support and software development.
When implemented effectively, it is a powerful business strategy that can help companies to reduce costs and increase efficiency. And as the proliferation of business technology continues to break down the geographical barriers to working with international partners, outsourcing has only become more widespread.
Protecting Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) from attack
The pandemic forced many employees into remote work, and cybercriminals are looking to exploit the situation by directly attacking remote desktop services as they become publicly available. Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) has become a prime target. According to a study released by the cybersecurity firm ESET, attacks against RDP have increased a stunning 768 percent over the course of 2020. Malware packages like Trickbot now include RDP scanners to search for open RDP ports, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have begun using RDP as a way to magnify their impact.
This is not to say that RDP or Windows are inherently bad. RDP is an extremely useful, complex, and functionally rich protocol for remote access. The open source project I work on, Apache Guacamole, leverages RDP internally as one of its supported protocols.
What your fraud risk service provider may not want you to know
Since the advent of B2C eCommerce in earnest about twenty years ago, an "armed conflict" has been raging between the merchants and financial services providers on one side of the equation, and the fraudsters attempting to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the ecosystem on the other side. A typical metaphor for this conflict is the reference to the "Whack-A-Mole" game. The implication is that immediately after a vulnerability is quashed by the implementation of technologies targeted to detect and block it, new technologies and tactics are introduced by fraudsters to perpetuate successful fraud. And so the battle rages on… until now.
One key consideration in preventing fraud is the use of technologies to determine whether the purchaser at the other end of an Internet session is actually the person they represent themselves to be. Some would say that the first major breakthroughs in identifying "Who is there?" on the purchaser side was the use of IP intelligence, and associated technologies like proxy piercing detection. Additional enhancements to complement the first fraud detection technologies have included the addition of more sophisticated "inference-dependent" technologies categorized as Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral Biometrics. All of the services delivered in this category use the combination of various dynamic and static inputs or "signals" to infer the probability that there is indeed a person at the other end of an Internet session, and that it is indeed the person is actually who they represent themselves to be. In other words, implying "Who is there?"
Delivering resilience for IT operations in 2021
Enterprise operations leaders today are facing a challenge: Support the rapidly growing and evolving needs of the business without losing control of the complex infrastructure that is needed to do so.
In recent years, and especially in the accelerated digital transformation spurred on by the pandemic, it’s become common practice to increase productivity by siloing development, with multiple teams working autonomously to rapidly deploy code. In simpler times, in organizations running on a handful or applications, it was possible to operate according to a linear, predictable blueprint of development. The dev team was able to identify and de-bug code to keep their applications, and therefore the business, running smoothly.
Telematics can be a valuable tool in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine
One thing authorities are learning with the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is that data matters. Since the first vials of this medical breakthrough began leaving their factories on highly specialized refrigerated trucks in December last year, there have been numerous reports of seemingly avoidable mistakes.
From a miscommunication between logistics officials and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that left 14 states with vaccine shortfalls to reports of vaccine shipments going to waste or spoiling because of poor timing or confusion over protocols, there is a general state of confusion clouding this initial phase of the distribution effort. With the CDC reporting more than 16 million cases and 300,000 deaths in the U.S. throughout 2020, the stakes could not be higher, and these mistakes could be avoided.
How technical teams can better collaborate in a crisis
The transition to remote work has been difficult for technical teams. Software professionals were already struggling to deliver everything on their plate, and shifting to a fully remote model has resulted in ever-changing patterns of communication, making it more difficult to build the human relationships that are so important for good collaboration. Just as tech workers were settling into more agile workflows, they must now also manage cross-team collaboration and alignment without being in the same space.
Software professionals have limited bandwidth to adapt and work on the soft skills required to navigate these remote interactions, and collaboration has suffered as a result. In fact, a recent study by Lucid revealed that as much as 75 percent of respondents said that collaboration has suffered the most in their work life since the start of the pandemic, even more than productivity. This lack of successful collaboration within technical teams and across companies can have a truly detrimental impact on an organization, especially during a crisis.
The top disruptive autonomous vehicle technologies in 2021
Years ago, autonomous vehicles were just a concept. Today, they’re much more attainable and already on the road in some places. The industry is developing, though, and 2021 is on track to see countless improvements.
The following five disruptive technologies will improve the autonomous vehicle landscape and bring them even closer to full realization.
The top conversational marketing trends in 2021
The global enterprise messaging industry accounts for 2 trillion messages annually. Messaging is a great medium for engagement -- it’s instant, and users tend to be much more responsive compared to other media. Also, users tend to utilize messaging apps dozens of times every day. Therefore, brands that do messaging right will see much higher frequency and intensity of engagement than with other media.
Most messages are delivered today using good old-fashioned SMS messaging. However, this sizable enterprise messaging industry is about to change in significant ways. Newer messaging channels are emerging with far greater capabilities -- namely Whatsapp, Rich Communication Service (RCS), Google Business Messages (GBM) and even a new messaging channel launched by Gupshup called Gupshup IP (GIP) Messaging. The common theme across all these channels is that they are all based on data messaging using the Internet Protocol (IP messaging).
Will Budget 2021 make or break Britain's digital future?
Every crisis presents an opportunity -- a truism never more evident than in Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s latest investment into the UK’s digital landscape.
For years, the UK economy has faced a fundamental problem; we have more need for highly skilled digital professionals and leaders than we have workers to satiate that demand. Recent research from Microsoft found that the vast majority (69 percent) of UK business leaders believe their organization currently has a skills gap, with a significant 44 percent fearing that this will have a negative impact on their success in the next year.
Audacity 3.0.0 is here with support for a brand-new project format
While Audacity has been in receipt of pretty regular updates, it is quite a while since there were any major changes to the free audio editing software. All of this changes with the release of Audacity 3.0.0, however.
To kick things off, there are bug fixes -- lots of bug fixes. In fact, there are more than 160 that have been addressed, ranging from minor problems to "really juicy high priority bugs". But Audacity 3.0.0 is about much more than just fixing bugs. There are improvements across the software as well as a completely new project format.
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