BetaNews Staff

Cyber criminals have thrived during this pandemic. In the first quarter of 2020, DDoS attacks rose by 278 percent compared to the corresponding quarter in the previous year. UK business alone are estimated to have lost over £6.2 million to cyber scams through social engineering. Globally, taking advantage of people’s vulnerabilities and the overnight pivot to 'working from home', fraudsters tricked people into clicking on links to download malware and collect confidential corporate information. Threats of ransomware increased as well.  

It’s no surprise then that to combat this situation, many enterprises, and especially professional services firms, who have long been targeted by cyber criminals, view adopting need-to-know security measures as a priority. It presents a sound way to restrict access to corporate data to those who need it or are authorized to view the information in today’s 'work from anywhere' business environment.

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The Solarwinds case has cemented the role of enterprise security in protecting business risk and advancing resiliency. As security continues to elevate and garner a seat at the board-level, we need to rely less on articulating the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) and rely more on communicating in terms of clear operational metrics as a way of establishing a baseline and goals in language the board can understand.

In the last year, we’ve seen a step-change in adoption of Mean-time-to-Detect and Mean-time-to-Respond as the core metrics forward-thinking security leaders are adopting as the north star metrics for their organization.

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Though almost all businesses use technology to some degree, some take it to new heights by creating an entire smart industry. With the COVID-19 pandemic as a leading factor that’s forcing change, 2021 will solidify five main smart industries as norms.

Now, as tech leads these industries into the technological future, it’s likely that the smart changes will remain after the pandemic ends.

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Back in 2010 I was a freelance journalist. I took work where I could find it. One of my jobs was to write news stories for PC World’s Bizfeed and Newsdesk blogs.

The goal with the blogging was simple and primitive: Break news stories before anybody else.

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While organizations have publicly talked of the benefits of digital transformation for some time, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many to pull the trigger on those plans. The crisis accelerated the adoption of digital technologies as organizations across almost every industry underwent huge changes to their operating models. 

Indeed, a McKinsey executive survey notes that companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years. Moreover, the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by seven years.

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The working environment has changed over the past year. Social distancing restrictions mean that many people have been obligated to work from home. This has affected work across many sectors -- particularly when it comes to training.

The Office for National Statistics measured that in April 2020, 46.4 percent of people in employment did some work from home. Of these people, 86 percent did so as a consequence of the pandemic.

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You have successfully launched your startup. Great. But don't make the mistake of thinking there is nothing left for you to do. There are many things still needed to run and grow your startup.

Regardless of how good your product is, you have to create an audience and awareness about it. This is where the role of digital marketing comes into play. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creating new possibilities in the digital marketing space.

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After a year full of unknowns and new normals, knowledge is power. The spike in cyber breaches in the past year, compounded by COVID-related attacks, has only increased the importance of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) in the past year. The 2021 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence survey, sponsored by ThreatQuotient, explores the state of play in the global use of CTI and outlines why the difficulties of the past year have contributed to the continued growth and maturity of CTI. 

The 2021 survey saw the number of respondents reporting they produce or consume intelligence rise by 7 percent, more notably, this was the first time the number of respondents without plans to consume or produce intelligence was 0 percent, down from 5.5 percent in 2020. Analyzed CTI helps organizations understand the capabilities, opportunities, and intent of adversaries conducting malicious cyber activities. In turn, this paints a picture about how threat actors are targeting an organization’s systems, information, and people. It is this contextual information that helps organizations and individuals respond to threats, understand risks, design better cyber defenses, and protect their organization. 

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Ever tried explaining cybersecurity to someone who isn’t tech-savvy? Just last year, my 67-year-old mother came to me in a fluster because her laptop was hijacked by a full-screen pop-up that looked like ransomware.

Thank goodness I figured out the problem before it got worse. But when you can’t be there 24/7, how do you help those around you understand basic cybersecurity principles so they can stay safe online?

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The days of hand-coding websites are long gone, and site creation applications such as WebSite X5 have made life much easier for individuals and businesses. We may now be a couple of months into 2021, but this very title has received a major update which includes a new look for the new year.

While the new user interface -- which has been cleaned, polished and refined -- is perhaps the most immediately obvious change in the newly released WebSite X5 2021.1, there's plenty more going on as well.

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After COVID-19 forced the UK to stay at home, we have had no choice but to make some changes to our everyday lives. A lot of us have used our time wisely and come up with some quirky ways to continue life as somewhat normal -- just with a virtual take on things. Being blessed with the age of digitalisation, our digital devices do just about everything for us at the click of a button.

The pandemic has seen a digital transformation in everything from online weddings to an an e-commerce takeover. According to a recent Ofcom report, the average daily screen time for TV and online video content increased to six hours 25 minutes per day since April 2020. This is up by almost a third from the year prior. In this article, we will discuss how COVID-19 has forced the world to digital in recent months.

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The majority of CEOs and COOs view digital forensics as an afterthought to cybersecurity. In the eyes of many business leaders, it is just a clean-up process for a data breach or cyber attack. But if you establish an effective digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) program, you can begin to use digital forensics as a tool for both recovery and prevention.

While cybersecurity and digital forensics work hand-in-hand, their close relationship can often obfuscate their individual objectives. For instance, cybersecurity’s main goal is to reduce an organization’s exposure to cyber attacks while also preventing their success. Cybersecurity has become even more important over the last decade and a half as industry leaders make the transition to digital applications. This is particularly true of the healthcare and automotive industries who have been lacking in their cybersecurity and forensic preparedness.

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As companies near the one-year mark of the sudden shift to a 100 percent remote workforce, corporate leadership is forced to consider a new vision. Sure, remote work was a "thing" before the pandemic hit, but it was usually a day or two a week, generally a perk reserved for management. COVID-19 became the great equalizer -- everyone logged in from home every single workday.

Over the last 11 months, we’ve learned a lot about what works (and what doesn’t). Organizations have had to test and fortify their systems to support remote teams, practices and communication preferences have changed, and employees and management have grown increasingly confident that productivity and innovation can continue outside the confines of corporate headquarters.

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With Gartner estimating that the average cost of network downtime is $5,600 per minute or $336,000 per hour, few would argue that regular testing of a robust disaster recovery (DR) plan is essential for organizations. Even if you omit the financial implications, the lost productivity, missed opportunities, brand damage and potential data loss and SLA pay-outs associated with system downtime should be enough to keep even the most hardened IT professional up at night.

So, why are fewer organizations than you may think doing it? In recent research we conducted, which surveyed 150 technical and business decision makers from organizations drawn from a wide cross section of UK enterprises, we found that DR testing frequency is remarkably low. In fact, 57 percent are only testing annually or at less frequent intervals. Whilst 6 percent didn’t test their DR at all. Moreover, of the organizations testing less frequently, the results of their last test led 44 percent of them to believe that their DR may be inadequate, while 22 percent encountered issues that would have led to sustained downtime.

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We’ve all heard of the classic golden rule. For most of us, our parents would preach to us to "treat others the way we want to be treated," or another one of life's cliches. But the idea of a golden rule has gone a step further and is impacting modern business. There’s now the golden rules to cloud migration. As enterprises prepare for the future, many are continuing to look for​ ways to modernize their IT operations due to the cloud’s convenience, flexibility and scalability.

Migrating to the cloud from a traditional, physical infrastructure, is easier said than done as many business leaders know. This is why the seven gold rules are so critical to enterprises’ migration success. Let’s take a closer look at each rule:

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