BetaNews Staff

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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Adaptability to changing conditions is a must-have trait for today’s organizations, especially during today’s uncertain world. Business leaders must prioritize adaptability as a must-have organizational trait, and as disruption accelerates, there is no guarantee that the biggest and toughest industry players will survive. 

Organizations that understand their environments and are positioned to sense change and adapt are the most likely to survive in the event of disruptions. 

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There’s a serious cloud skills gap at enterprises around the world, and it’s growing broader as time goes on. The move to the cloud has been around for a number of years, but COVID-19 accelerated it noticeably.

The pandemic forced millions of employees to work from home, requiring cloud-based tools and connections to support smooth communication and collaboration from a distance. At the same time, fears of infection drove consumer adoption of digital interactions like mobile banking, online shopping, and app-based food delivery. Without embracing the cloud, businesses can’t develop the digital services their customers demand and will struggle to support streamlined remote working, but the gap between demand and supply is enormous.

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For many organizations, knowing whether to choose a consultant or contractor, and understanding the difference, can be a puzzling task. There are many similarities between the two, however there are vast differences that enable organizations to achieve different end results.

The key is to understand how the roles differ, advantages and limitations of each, in order to make an informed decision. This will help an organization to better reach its business objectives. They need to ask themselves whether they would benefit from the high-impact expertise of a consultant or a long-term solution with a contractor? 

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Contain your excitement; 5G is coming (again). However, wasn’t it actually launched over two years ago? 

For those not familiar with the nuances of 5G technology, 5GC (core or standalone) takes 5G deployment to the next level and replaces the 4G packet core with a new, cloud-native core using containers and following 3GPP specifications (release 15). This is somewhat separate from the market-by-market launch that most operators publicize, and the activity is less visible to the casual subscriber. Below, I have predicted some of the key 5GC deployment and adoption trends for 2021. 

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It’s no secret streaming video is on the rise. Just last week, Netflix announced it surpassed 200 million subscribers after its largest ever year of growth. Peacock, part of Comcast, launched just six months ago and now boasts 33 million subscribers. The list of streaming announcements goes on and on while competition gets fiercer by the day.

There’s talk about the need to break down data silos across nearly every single industry, but the streaming video industry faces challenges and opportunities which make it uniquely ripe for data disruption. The explosion of streaming video has led to a corresponding explosion of data, and for content providers, this data has the potential to shape decision-making, improve customer experiences, introduce operational efficiencies, and much more. However, the problem is that video's uniquely complex data ecosystem and lack of data standardization have made it nearly impossible to turn all the data into actionable and business-impacting insights, at least without the right approach.

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With the UK going into its first financial recession since 2009 as a consequence of COVID-19, many businesses are struggling to stay alive in the current business climate. The economy has shrunk by 20.4 percent compared with the first three months of 2020 following months of businesses being forced to stay shut, furloughed workforces and a reduction in consumer expenditure. Additional restrictions in place at the time of writing are ratcheting up the financial pressure on multiple industries, with the prospect of a ‘double-dip’ recession an increasing prospect.

Without the right technology and continuity processes in place, many organizations were unable to adapt their models quickly enough to survive when they needed to. Now it’s a wake-up call to get the right solutions implemented to ride the waves of any future economic storms that come their way. COVID-19 has accelerated the need to work collaboratively and stay connected to protect both society and the economy. 

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Expense reporting can be a headache for both employees and businesses.

For employees, hanging onto receipts and filling out detailed paperwork is tedious and gets in the way of more productive tasks. It can be easy to lose track of important information needed to file reports correctly, especially for frequent travelers. Traditional reporting procedures put the onus on the employee to keep tabs on one more thing -- on top of doing their jobs.

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