O&O DiskImage Professional 14 adds a flexible restore option and VHDX support
We’re constantly reminding users to backup their data. It’s not until you hear of a severe malware attack, where a business is being ransomed over their important documents, do you realize you wish you’d stored securely them in another location.
And that’s the important point of backing up your data. It offers an additional safeguard. In the case of ransomware, the easiest solution is to simply wipe your drive and restore a cloned version of your system and you’d be back up and running within minutes.
How automation is changing data science and machine learning
Almost any article you read about how automation will affect our future can be classified into one of two narratives. The first one is that it will definitely lead to a better future, as it always had since the industrial revolution. Of course, some people will lose their jobs, but as history shows, new jobs will be created. And not just new jobs, but better jobs. The other narrative is that this time is different. The robots are becoming more and more intelligent and capable. And the number of jobs and industries they’ll destroy will far exceed the number of jobs they create. Of course, it’s impossible to tell which of the two narratives will become a reality. What we can tell is that these narratives share similar inception: more and more parts of our jobs and lives are being automated.
Take for example the process of driving. For many years now, we have been taking small parts of the driving process and automating them. For a better driving experience, we built cruise control. For route planning, we developed the GPS. Now, we are able to tackle more complex problems like lane merging and emergency braking. In the next couple of years, we will most certainly have fully autonomous cars driving on the roads. Just last week Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving subsidiary, officially received the very first California permit to test their vehicles in the state without a human behind the wheel.
Communication and data breaches: How to get it right
"Data breaches have become the leading risk to data and privacy in the last ten years, and there’s no sign of an end." States the Avast Business Threat Landscape Report for 2018, and isn’t hard to believe. Over the course of 2017 there were more than 2.6 billion instances of records and data being compromised or stolen online, but in the first half of 2018 alone, data breaches exposed over 4.5 billion records.
Clearly, this is a very real threat. But while many businesses are increasing their preventative measures, the important step of creating an incident response plan is often overlooked. While any business can hope that their cyber security is enough to keep company and client data safe, it’s important not to simply assume that this will be the case.
In the race to win business chat, there's a big boy collision coming
Google will pay Apple $9 billion this year to remain the default search engine in the iPhone’s Safari browser, according to one Goldman Sachs analyst. That’s a hefty expense for Google, but will Apple end up paying the price when it comes to business messaging?
According to Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall, Apple charges Google based on the number of searches iPhone users perform using Safari or Siri.
What is the common stumbling block when adopting Agile methodologies?
I often speak with IT decision makers who want advice on what tool to buy to make their shop more "DevOps." My advice to them is not to buy anything.
DevOps isn’t something you triumphantly stick a flag in or acquire through tooling purchase or corporate acquisition. DevOps is the active intersection of frequent value delivery, frequent team communication, and frequent gap reduction between paying customers and the dev team.
Look out for the cyber threats hiding in your backups
Spending on security technology continues to soar. Nevertheless, data breaches and cyberattacks continue to make headlines at an incredible rate, with no relief in sight. The Online Trust Alliance reported that attacks in 2017 came from a myriad of vectors, such as phishing and ransomware, and that the number of attacks doubled to nearly 160,000 incidents per year over 2016. What’s worse, estimates for the number of unreported attacks exceed 350,000 annually.
While enterprises typically dominate the headlines, organizations of all sizes are affected by cyber incidents. A recent Ponemon study showed that two-thirds of small and mid-sized businesses reported that threats evaded their intrusion detection systems, and more than half of the companies said they were attacked by ransomware more than twice during the last year. There is no dispute that the number of vulnerable endpoints and the complexity of threats will continue to increase, and limited IT budgets and overstretched staff will remain an industry-wide problem. It’s clear that companies need to adopt new approaches to stay ahead of cyberattacks.
Parallels releases Toolbox 3 for Mac and Windows
Improving your system productivity is essential for getting work done more swiftly. With this in mind, many of us turn to all-in-one maintenance tools so we can optimise our computer, clean junk and fully remove installed applications. It’s just easier to own one tool to perform all your key tasks.
Parallels recently launched Toolbox for Mac which offered a number of system tools from a handy drop-down menu. Frankly, when the first Toolbox was released, it offered little more than what was already available in macOS. You could quickly take a screengrab, record your screen, create an archive and more.
How your digital footprint can impact both your online reputation and your real life
In the early days of the internet, it was possible to maintain an online presence that was completely separate from your real life. You could be one person on an online message board and another person at your day job or with your family. These days, that kind of distinction is a lot more difficult to achieve.
Your social media identity is inherently linked to your in-person identity, and even anonymous message boards attract users ready to share information about who they really are. The days of online anonymity are in the rearview.
Bridging the IT skills gap: How to start today
By the numbers, the IT skills gap seems easy to understand. According to Gartner, two-thirds of organizations aren’t addressing the IT skills gap how they should be. It is estimated that by 2019, IT tech specialists will fall by more than 5 percent, and by 2021, 40 percent of IT employees will be more involved with a business role than purely IT. These are major numbers.
But it’s not just about a lack of people. Companies and individual employees alike are being constantly bombarded by the ever-increasing pace of technological development, making the task of playing catch-up a constant challenge for IT professionals at any level. In a 2017 survey by CompTIA, there was near consensus among respondents about the IT skills gap, with two top concerns: 1) Too many workers lack advanced skills, and 2) segments of workers are falling behind.
That's classified: Government can continue its data protection leadership
We are living in the data age. Organizations are grappling with a seemingly unending barrage of data and are challenged by how best to use it, store it and secure it. Yet data breaches and leaks continue to happen, despite security regulations becoming stricter in an attempt to help control it.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why data protection remains a top concern for all organizations. This is especially true for government agencies, which handle some of the most sensitive information in the country. Take the Census Bureau, for example -- public concerns about the security of census data is one of the Bureau’s top issues as it prepares for the 2020 census. Lawmakers have warned that if there were a breach of census data, it could permanently damage public trust and affect the capability of this country to gather essential data in the future.
Four steps to make your business intelligence teams more relevant
The world of analytics is changing. Self-Service Analytical tools like Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are enabling business users to perform reporting and analytics on their own with little to no support from the IT organization. This trend has evolved due to several factors including:
1) Organizations are flooded with data and IT organizations are not able to keep up
2) Easier to use Business Intelligence tools make it more efficient for business users to directly create their reports rather than go through IT for a project
3) IT organizations analytical projects can take several months when a business needs this information in weeks
Are APIs becoming the keys to customer experience?
In recent years, APIs have encouraged the emergence of new services by facilitating collaboration between applications and databases of one or more companies. Beyond catalyzing innovation, APIs have also revolutionized the customer-company relationship, allowing it to provide an accurate and detailed picture of the consumer at a time when a quality customer experience now counts as much as the price or capabilities of the product.
Over the years, customer relationship channels have multiplied with consumers who can interact with their brands through stores, voice, email, mobile applications, the web or chatbots. The multiple points of interaction used by customers have made its journey more complex, forcing companies to consider data from these many channels to deliver the most seamless customer experience possible. To do this, they must synchronize data from one channel to another and cross-reference data related to its history with the brand. This is where APIs come into play. These interfaces allow data processing to refine customer knowledge and deliver a personalized experience.
Why endpoint management is critical to your enterprise security strategy
Endpoints make the enterprise run, whether they are laptops or desktops running macOS, Windows or Linux; smartphones or tablets running iOS or Android; virtual machines or IoT devices. They’re found driving business on local networks, in remote offices and in the hands of traveling users.
However, endpoints also make the enterprise vulnerable. They are a favorite target of criminals who launch cyberattacks via ransomware, spyware, phishing and other malicious software. Over the past year alone, critical endpoint vulnerabilities have been discovered in popular OSs and applications and then exploited by WannaCry, Meltdown, Spectre, Petya, Fireball, Bad Rabbit and other harmful code. The challenge facing enterprises, then, is how to minimize the vulnerability of their endpoints and simultaneously maximize their value. While endpoint management is already a widely adopted IT practice, now is the time for IT teams to expand their efforts to include endpoint security. As we’ll see below, combining endpoint management and security can solve some of your most pressing issues.
How automation will impact education
There has been a lot of hype around how new technologies like automation will impact our way of life. Some live in fear that their jobs will be lost to humanoid robots, while others excitedly welcome bots like Amazon Alexa into their home. The impact of 'robots' -- itself an ill-defined category -- is widely discussed and hotly contested.
In the business world, most industries have much to gain from automation and robotics, but what this looks like in practice is a far cry from the wider speculation.
IT and the rise of connected cars
Volkswagen recently revealed that it is exploring using an innovative form of distributed-ledger (i.e., blockchain) technology called the IOTA "Tangle" to deliver software updates to its autonomous cars. The technology may be available to customers as early as Spring 2019. It’s just the latest in a seemingly unending stream of news about connected cars, a broad term that encompasses everything from cars with built-in GPS systems to fully autonomous, AI-driven semi trucks in the emergent IoT space.
While the topics of conversation are spanning everything from legislation to programming ethics, not enough air-time has been devoted to discussing exactly how the arrival of this new technology will change the charter for the IT teams who will be tasked with supporting the future of transportation.
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