BetaNews Staff

Most IT architectures are complicated. If you’re considering migrating to the cloud, you’re right to be concerned about the many changes that will be required of your architecture and your organization as you make your transition. Cloud migration challenges continue to give organizations anxiety, even though the cloud has been around for nearly 20 years.

Of course, nobody embarks upon a cloud migration expecting to fail. The basic problem is that few people understand the hidden challenges of such a complex project, particularly as it relates to ongoing processes and operations. Unexpected challenges are the curse of any major undertaking, and cloud migrations are truly full of unexpected challenges.

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COVID-19 forced businesses across the globe to rapidly adopt remote work in order to adhere to social distancing and stay-at-home orders. For some companies, this transition was seamless, especially those that already implemented cloud and the necessary supporting tools within their organizations. Others struggled to adapt their workforces to this highly remote, cloud-first environment. In fact, 41 percent of enterprises have not taken any steps to secure access for their remote workers despite the fact that 65 percent enable personal devices to access managed applications.

To quickly support remote work, organizations were spurred to adopt cloud and allow employees to access the corporate network from unmanaged devices. However, cloud and BYOD environments call for specific security solutions, and organizations that failed to simultaneously implement the necessary controls also expose themselves to more risks, including insider threats. Even once stay-at-home orders are lifted and some businesses choose to return to the workplace, COVID-19 had such an impact on the way we work, making it likely that the following post-pandemic predictions may occur.

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Microsoft's cloud storage and Google Drive rival, OneDrive, is in line to receive a number of new features, the company has revealed. Personal and business customers are due to gain access to features that will make life easier, including a new Add to OneDrive option for easy file and folder sharing.

Add to OneDrive is a business-centric feature that will be a big help for collaborative work, but home users have a lot to look forward to as well. Key new features include the ability upload files of up to 100 GB in size, and the arrival of a dark mode option for the web-based version of OneDrive, bringing it in line with the mobile apps.

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The future of work is happening now: despite skeptics prophesying growing unemployment rates, AI not only creates new job roles but also changes the employee experience for the better. Assisted with AI tools and analytics, workers no longer have to spend hours (and, consequently, years) on meaningless routines, since they can focus on job aspects that truly bring value.

So how will artificial intelligence transform employee experience and enhance employee engagement? Read on to learn how AI contributes to digital workplace transformation.

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In the past six months, COVID-19 has evolved from a speck on the world radar to a full-blown pandemic. While it has claimed the lives of many and shed a massive spotlight on some of the major issues in healthcare, it has also served as a catalyst for innovation.

As with nearly every element of the healthcare system, applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have also been transformed by the pandemic. Although the power of machine learning and AI was being put to significant use prior to the Coronavirus outbreak, there is now increased pressure to understand the underlying patterns to help us prepare for any epidemic that might hit the world in the future.

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Your computer almost certainly contains a large amount of sensitive data, whether it is data related to work, or personal information. Computer security is often thought of in terms of keeping hackers and viruses at bay, but you also need to think about the fact that other people could gain physical access to your machine.

It could be that your computer is stolen; it might be that someone finds your computer unattended and decides to access your data; or you might sell your computer and forget to wipe the hard drive. None of these scenarios present a security risk if you use the BitLocker feature of Windows 10 Professional to encrypt your entire system -- there's also BitLocker To Go which can be used to encrypt removable media such as USB drives.

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With the release of eM Client 8, the desktop email client for macOS and Windows gets a visual overhaul in addition to a batch of new features. But em Client is about more than just email; there's also a calendar component, chat and notes.

Just about every aspect of the user interface has been redesigned to improve not only aesthetics, but also ease of use. A key enhancement to the software that will be welcomed by many is the ability to run multiple instances of the program simultaneously. This means it is now easier than ever to move between different sections of the app, as you're able to have, for instance, your emails open in one window, and your calendar in another.

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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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