BetaNews Staff

At least 16 million US knowledge workers have switched to remote work in the past two months and the remote workforce isn’t going away any time soon.

Large corporations like Twitter, Square and Facebook are leading the trend to allow employees to work from home indefinitely. With more companies moving to remote work for the long-term, there are common tech issues that employees should be made aware of to prevent data loss, connection problems and privacy concerns over time.

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As of last year, there were 12.1 million tech workers in the United States, according to TechRepublic. Throughout the 2010s, the tech sector workforce expanded by 23 percent with no significant dips or net job losses beyond the Great Recession early in the decade. While these numbers have declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic -- the tech sector lost a record 112,000 jobs in April -- the tech industry is still growing and will likely continue to grow as the economy reboots and the world moves toward a new normal.

Here are three of the biggest challenges and opportunities that tech professionals will encounter in the coming months and years:

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Pandemic "Work from Home Forever" journalism is taking us back to an era I thought we’d buried long ago: top-down, hierarchical management. For example, on April 18 The Wall Street Journal published "You’re Working From Home, But Your Company is Still Watching You," about the accelerating demand for various kinds of surveillance tools for bosses who don’t trust their remote employees.

The piece reported 10X order-growth for keystroke-tracking software, applications that take continuous videos or intermittent screenshots of employees’ laptops, minute-by-minute productivity analyses, and file-divers that let employers dig undetected into remote workers’ hard drives. CNBC and NPR published similar dystopian "The Boss is Watching You" reports.

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Very rarely in life is certainty guaranteed. Almost every decision we make is made imperfectly, without complete knowledge and based on a gut-checked risk assessment. When it comes to protecting your organization from phishing attacks, this still rings true. Yet, most email security providers still see through a black-and-white lens and act in terms of absolute certainty. As a result, they effectively protect against the known bad, but let unfamiliar threats slip right through.

Employees at every level of your company are making hundreds of email decisions every day -- open this, delete that, respond to this, leave that for tomorrow. With so much inbox noise, a potential phishing email can infiltrate easily -- and can impact an entire organization profoundly.

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We see the European market today as the hottest area of the global cloud in a pivotal moment. While US cloud giants battle for world domination, China is building its "Great Cloud," Russia is testing its sovereign internet, and Europe is busy creating its own digital sovereignty.

The EU recently declared a massive digital transformation for its economy in the next decade where cloud and AI technologies will play an essential role. So what exactly can we expect from the European cloud industry in the short term?

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With COVID-19 in full swing, maintaining a safe distance is everything. This pandemic has brought the global economy and trade to a standstill. However, there are still opportunities available. Those looking to start a business in this climate will need to adapt. Perhaps the most important aspect right now is to start a business that can function without human contact.

As such, here are five contactless business ideas that you can use to launch your very own venture. They cover a wide variety of niches and would still be sustainable once normal business activity resumes. 

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In the coming years, extreme weather events will become more frequent and widespread, devastating areas of the world that typically don’t experience them and amplifying the destruction in areas that do. Exposing deficiencies in technical and physical infrastructure, these events will cause major disruption and damage to IT systems and assets. Data centers will be significantly impacted, with dependent organizations losing access to services and data, and Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) will be put at risk.

Widespread droughts will force governments to divert water traditionally used to cool data centers, resulting in unplanned outages. In coastal areas and river basins, catastrophic flooding, hurricanes, typhoons or monsoons will hit key infrastructure such as the electrical grid and telecommunication systems. Wildfires will lead to prolonged power outages, stretching continuity arrangements to breaking point. The impact of extreme weather events on local staff, who may be unwilling or unable to get to their workplace, will put operational capability in jeopardy. The magnitude of extreme weather events -- and their prevalence in areas that have not previously been prone to them -- will create havoc for organizations that have not prepared for their impact.

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Business process automation has become a strategic enabler of business agility for present-day organizations, from helping to speed up business processes and reduce errors, to eliminating repetitive work. It has quickly become an essential tool that an increasing number of CIOs are utilizing across their organizations. Automation helps mid- to large-sized enterprises, dealing with various interrelated processes, to unify and streamline day-to-day work internally. The right automation tools can not only save time and money, increase productivity and enhance quality of work, but also streamline communication, improve management and retain customers.

The difference between no-code versus low-code solutions is that the latter requires technical "know-how" of the product and is extremely difficult for regular business employees to use. No-code solutions provide your average business employees the ability and independence to build solutions based on their own needs, without dependency on the IT staff. Below are three ways to automate business processes with no-code solutions:

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With stay at home orders and the sudden need to securely share sensitive documents from employee’s homes, there has been a significant demand for a surprising technology: the digital fax. Despite industry-wide efforts to digitally transform, the physical fax is still a very common and necessary piece of technology for many organizations.

In fact, 89 percent of small to medium-sized businesses still use faxes in one form or the other, and faxing still dominates communication in several fields. For example, faxing accounts for 79 percent of all communication in the medical industry. These same organizations have been scrambling to support the abrupt shift to remote work and have had numerous roadblocks in the process.

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When progressive technologies start to deliver on their potential, we can expect a wholesale shift of vendors looking to get on the bandwagon. First the technology enthusiasts and early adopters will come to validate the promises of the newest technology and hone its potential into something viable for the mainstream. Once that is done, the early majority, late adopters and finally, even the skeptics jump in as well.

Finally the time is here for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML) in cyber. There is a widespread move out of the early adopter stage and into the early majority stage of adoption. We need to get onboard if we are going to thwart cybercriminals. The good news is that the industry is recognizing the power and the value of AIML and is finally making investments in this space.

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We hear a lot about what artificial intelligence means for business and research, how it can speed up and streamline tedious processes and so on.

But if machine intelligence is going to be our new normal how does that affect what it means to be human? Emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University, John C. Lennox has written a new book exploring these questions. In this exclusive extract he looks at how our brains compare to computers.

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We may only be halfway through 2020, but SoftMaker Office 2021 is already here. After a period of beta testing, the office suite is ready for a full release on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Available either as a one-off purchase or on a subscription, SoftMaker Office 2021 is pitched squarely as an alternative to Microsoft Office. The office suite makes bold claims about competing with Microsoft's famous suite of tools, but the claims that more than stand up to scrutiny. This is an impressive selection of programs that has much to offer.

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Increasing numbers of internet users are becoming aware of the privacy and security implications of being online, and it is for this reason that secure browsers such as Tor are growing in popularity. Now, with the release of Tor Browser 9.5, the browser features an option that can automatically switch to the secure .onion version of a site if one is available.

In short this means that sites are able to actively promote the fact that they have a secure .onion site available. Publishers now can advertise their onion service to Tor users by adding an HTTP header, so if someone visits the regular version of a website, a notification will appear informing them of the more secure option.

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There are certain moments throughout a businesses’ lifecycle where security leaders need to have a clear view into their cloud infrastructure. One example is during mergers and acquisitions processes, when it’s crucial teams not only understand their own organization’s security posture but also that of the company being acquired. Still, a recent Forescout survey of IT and business decision-makers found that 65 percent of respondents regretted an acquisition their company made because of an overlooked cybersecurity issue.

Marriott International’s 2016 acquisition of Starwood Hotels set the company up to become the world’s largest hotel chain. However, it later emerged that Starwood’s reservation system had allowed unauthorized access to cybercriminals since 2014, leading to a large-scale (and very expensive) data breach in 2018 -- a clear example of why transparency is key during M&A. If Marriott had known that Starwood’s IT infrastructure had been compromised, they could have sought ways to remediate or otherwise address the issue and revised the proposed transaction accordingly. Instead, they were penalized heavily by regulators and were hit with lawsuits from customers.

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The recent reminder of the importance of basic hygiene has been glaring not only within the physical world, but also the cybersecurity one. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) understand this more than most, given the sudden surge in remote work and additional threats this has brought to their organizations. Because so many people have started working from home, corporate perimeters have expanded in a way that many security professionals were not prepared to manage but must now understand in order to effectively safeguard their organizations.

With pundits anticipating a lasting impact on the way we work brought on by the pandemic, CISOs must consider all of the necessary steps to manage cyber risk in what could be the "new normal." And, like nearly anyone following social distancing guidelines right now, a good CISO understands that good security is built on a foundation of good, basic hygiene.

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