BetaNews Staff

When you’re on a vacation, you want to make sure you can get the best possible photos from your environment. This meant (and still does for many) dragging around a huge DSLR camera with telephoto lens all day.

Problem is, apart from the weight, dragging a DSLR can attract all the wrong attention. You look like a semi-professional commercial photographer on an unauthorized shoot and, travel to places such as Miami and Los Angeles, and there are lots of locations where you can’t take your sizeable camera.

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How many people backup their data? A decreasing number. The new standard is to upload our data to the cloud, storing our most important files and documents in a remote location and then synchronizing those files across our various devices.

Backing up our data is old-school, right?  There’s certainly an element of truth to this. These days, along with the cloud, if you have a password manager, retrieving your important data now takes minutes, not hours. Gone are the days when your system would crash and you’d have to start recovering your entire drive to get access to your system.

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An IDC survey of mid-market enterprises found that that enterprises are  embracing SD-WAN-based infrastructure services. The survey identified that drivers include better automation, bandwidth optimization, consistent application security and self-provisioning.

IDC Network Infrastructure vice president Rohit Mehra noted that the enterprise WAN is rapidly being "re-architected to cost-effectively deliver new, secure capabilities" and that adapting SD-WAN is a "key ingredient for success." Good advice, no doubt, but let’s dig a little deeper. Here are the reasons why SD-WAN is the right way to meet your digital business needs today -- and tomorrow.

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How do you store your passwords? You’ll be surprised. Some people use the same memorable pass for most websites, but if this is compromised it offers the fraudster access to every site where you used the single login.

Other people simply write down their passwords. To be fair, if you can trust the people in your household, there’s no problem with this, but how do you access your website logins on the road? Do you take your notepad with you, containing every single login and, no doubt, your bank password?

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In 2016, American businesses suffered half a billion dollars a year in losses from phishing attacks with the average cost at $1.6 million each. These numbers are alarming evidence that just one click can cause significant financial and reputational damage to your brand. And since studies show that a staggering 30 percent of phishing emails get opened, it’s no wonder that they consistently rank as the top cyberattack vector.

Despite being one of the oldest cyberattacks in the book, phishing remains so popular because it’s a highly effective means of exploiting the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain: humans. To make matters worse, hackers have become much more sophisticated in their techniques: no more poorly written, typo-ridden Viagra spam emails and unclaimed heritage scams. Phishing attacks are now highly targeted, dynamic and "hypermorphic," making them increasingly difficult for both humans and machines to detect.

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Technology progresses quickly. In large part, that’s due to semiconductors, which power everything from computers to toasters.

As semiconducting components become more advanced, they get smaller and more powerful. This, in turn, enables electronic products to become smaller, more powerful and more cost-effective. One company, which has long been a leader in the semiconductor business, recently introduced a unique machine that takes microprocessor production to the next level.

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While the success of Apple Watch has attracted the most attention when it comes to enterprise wearables in the workplace, the market is beginning to split into battles for the wrist (and borrowing from Neil Cybart), the eyes (e.g. Google Glass) and the ears (e.g. AirPods). Not to mention wearables for the body -- smart garments and (God forbid) implantables (Now, apparently, a word. Though if someone in my company tells me I need to implant something for my job, they will have my resignation before they finish the request).

But the adoption of such technology comes with a practical limitation -- we each have only so many wrists and assorted body parts. And let’s not discount the fact people will naturally resist adorning themselves with devices throughout the workday. Nobody wants to walk around the office looking like they’ve just been assimilated by the borg.

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First, let’s clarify the difference between Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Virtual Reality (VR) blocks out the real world and immerses the user in a digital experience. Augmented Reality (AR) adds a layer of interactive digital elements on top of the real world. Or in simpler terms, AR can be defined as a technology which overlays a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world. The question is: when will we begin to see more Enterprise adoption of AR?

Companies are eager to jump on the AR bandwagon but are still unclear how to best use AR to drive sales around their product, improve efficiencies for their operations. Additional unknowns include how much it will cost to enhance the B2C/B2B experience and when companies could expect to see a return on their investment.

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Enforcement of the GDPR Regulation will begin this May 25. Are you ready? If not, Microsoft offers some information-protection solutions to help your organization identify, classify, and protect your data. The tools track your adherence to the regulations, ensure you’re able to identify sensitive data, and can prevent that data from escaping your organization via email, etc.

While this article focuses on GDPR policy management, the info also applies to other regulations (e.g. HIPAA).

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The Internet of Things has taken the global tech industry by storm in recent years. The idea, in its simplest form, is the mass interconnectivity of billions of devices. All of this is in the hope that it creates a massive network of devices in constant communication with each other.

Why would this network be important? Because it has the potential to completely revolutionize how we interact with tech and with the world around us. When all of the devices in the world are interlinked then we have the possibility of extracting mountains of data and synthesizing it so that we may make improvements across the board.

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Making an app is hard, but getting it noticed on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store can be an even more difficult task. Optimizing your metadata is the biggest hurdle to getting noticed and finding users.

There are many "tips and tricks" articles out there that promise to help, but very few talk about what to avoid. Fortunately, with a strong App Store Optimization (ASO) strategy, you can stand out from the crowd while keeping an eye out for ASO pitfalls. By maneuvering around these pitfalls, you’ll be one step closer to improving your app’s visibility.

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No matter the industry, ensuring the security of all our digital transactions is everyone’s biggest concern. Aside from bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, enterprise blockchain technology has the potential to overcome many current (and potentially future) hurdles digital transactions must face.

So how do organizations determine if blockchain is right for their business? How do companies know when is the best time to implement and start using blockchain? Before we answer these questions, let’s first provide some background on what blockchain is and how it works.

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In April, Lastline launched the first of our Malscape Monitor reports, for the fourth quarter of 2017. The report analyzes data from our Global Threat Intelligence Network to provide several insights and benchmarks on encounter rates with malware that CISOs can use to measure their own cyber risk and security performance.

There are three findings that I want to elaborate on in this blog post that I think will illustrate why many of today’s threat detection technologies are ineffective resulting in increased risk of a malware infection.

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Conducting a web search on mobile -- unless you’re incredibly specific -- is hit or miss. Want to test it out, just use your device’s voice assistant to conduct a search.

Siri or Google Assistant will commonly return an unrelated series of results, more than they should anyway. Then, you have to sort through lengthy search listings to find what you’re looking for, hopping from website to website until you find what you need. Even then, a single website might not contain the full amount of information you’re looking for. Sorting through the results manually isn’t any more accurate, however. And the smaller the display, the fewer results you’ll be able to sort through, making the process that much more tedious.

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When traveling, we like to take as little as possible. We don’t want to be dragging a huge 15" laptop on the road, but we still need access to our files, data and even our favorite apps.

With this in mind, often we carry around a small USB stick with our most important data. Simply plug the USB stick into any computer and you have full and secure access to your files, without having to worry about copying them to the temporary PC.

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