BetaNews Staff

Point solutions: The good, the bad and the ugly

Point solutions

Organizations in the digital age live and die by their ability to provide customers with 24/7 access to revenue-generating services, including -- but not limited to -- online checkout and reservation portals. If a consumer were to pull back the curtain in front of these daily activities, they would find a dedicated team of site reliability engineers (SREs) and DevOps engineers working in tandem to improve system performance and maintain availability. But why all the fuss about availability?

The answer to that question is hopefully apparent if you are an IT leader. The number of digital buyers in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the past five years. Companies without the digital infrastructure to support this influx of traffic will inevitably lose out to the tune of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Simply put: maintaining availability is mission-critical.

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Pop the champagne! GDPR is five years old!

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) turned five years old on May 25, and it has changed the way businesses think about data privacy and security. Whilst GDPR has provided plenty of benefits when it comes to improving the overall security of companies, it also brings about its own set of challenges.

As we reach the five-year anniversary of GDPR, it is the perfect time to reflect on what remains an ongoing challenge for businesses and how they can ensure protection to personal data as we see new threats arise.

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How are enterprise customers using your software?

Getting a clear understanding of how customers use your products is vitally important for software suppliers. Product managers are best equipped to deliver valuable products if they have clear knowledge about this. Data-driven insights, available from entitlement management (EM) systems, are essential for optimizing product road mapping, packaging, provisioning, and pricing decisions, all with the aim of delivering the best customer experience possible. All of these contribute to achieving strategic goals, such as facilitating shifts in monetization and deployment models, streamlining the quote-to-cash (Q2C or QTC) process, and ultimately accelerating growth and increasing recurring revenue.

Key to these efforts: aligning price (the expense for the customer) and value (the perceived utility) of your product. But this proves to be tricky without understanding of who your users are. "Lack of insights into user personas and their priorities" and "disparate systems that make it difficult to achieve single customer view" are among the top hurdles, as reported in the Revenera Monetization Monitor: Software Monetization Models and Strategies 2022. A comprehensive approach to entitlement management can help provide the insights that contribute to improved operational efficiencies.

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The key to an effective generative AI strategy: Human oversight

AI-Security-model

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems have witnessed significant advancements in recent years, offering remarkable capabilities in a variety of domains.

Generative AI is a powerful tool that can be used for both good and bad. Threat actors have been employing the latest technology to harm businesses in various ways for decades, but organizations have and must continue to find ways to use this same technology to their advantage, and ultimately outsmart these digital thieves as AI is becoming more accessible and accepted.

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Why improving the developer experience holds the key to doing more with less

home working

For some time now, there has been a trend pressing developers to take on more and more responsibilities outside of coding. They are expected to become experts in every domain – even security and cloud spend. Combine developers’ growing scope of work with a skills shortage and continued economic uncertainty, and it’s clear that they are reaching their limits. The result is developer burnout and churn. In fact, it is now thought that up to 83 percent of software developers feel burnout from their work. Developer job dissatisfaction is so high that only 48 percent of developers are confident they will be with the same company a year from now.

As the pressure mounts, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for developers to work effectively and keep up with the demands on their shoulders. To lighten the load, it is more important than ever that organizations focus on optimizing and improving the developer experience. Companies need to focus on how they can ease the pressure and allow developers to do what they do best: building innovative new software. To that end, there are three ways for organizations to create a better developer experience (DX).

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Cryptojacking: The high cost of free money

Cryptojacking

If I offered you free money, what would your first response be? For those of us in the security industry, the first thought is probably what the catch is. In the case of cryptojacking, the catch is that all the costs are covered by someone else.

Cloud infrastructure deployments are the bedrock below many companies today. However, that same infrastructure is getting targeted by threat actors that can spot opportunities to earn cash for themselves. Based on the activities of one threat actor, Team TNT, we can now estimate just how much that free money really costs.

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ESG risk management: More than just a 'nice to have'

ESG

Today it seems that the issue of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) is being talked about everywhere and has become a key focus for enterprise management teams, especially those responsible for risk management. But is this something new, or should it be viewed as part and parcel of a mature enterprise risk management infrastructure?

One thing is for sure. ESG has important implications for a wide range of stakeholders that includes directors, investors, employees, suppliers, and employees for whom performance against ESG objectives counts.

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Onboarding remote employees: Lessons learned and seven tips for success

Onboarding

With the arrival of COVID-19, the evolution of remote and hybrid work environments hit hyper drive, advancing to a point that many imagined would take decades to reach. For a distributed company with many offices, the chance to virtually "work where you live" had been a very attractive message. Today, what entices candidates and retains talent is being able to "work anywhere," virtually.

Yet, many CIOs, IT and engineering leaders are still sorting through lessons learned in recent years in order to adjust to this new normal -- and critical areas like onboarding technical staffers remains challenging. For me, being a year into the pandemic and noticing that not feeling that new remote engineers had a true connection to the product was a sign our processes needed updating. So, my team and I surveyed recent hires on common issues they faced when getting up to speed and how these were handled.

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AI-driven SEO techniques for website optimization

In today's digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential component of any online marketing strategy. It involves optimizing your website to improve its search engine rankings and attract more potential customers. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), businesses can now use AI-powered tools to improve their SEO efforts. In this article, we will discuss how to use AI SEO to improve your website and attract more potential customers.

Before we dive into the details of using AI for SEO, it's important to note that hiring an SEO consultant can also help you improve your website's rankings. An SEO consultant can provide you with valuable insights into your website's performance and help you develop a customized SEO strategy that meets your specific needs. When hiring an SEO consultant, look for someone with a strong track record of success, experience in your industry, and a deep understanding of SEO best practices.

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Cybersecurity in the utility space isn't just about keeping the lights on, it's about saving lives.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 signaled many things to the Western world, but perhaps one of the biggest warnings was how precarious energy security really was as oil and gas prices skyrocketed following the start of the war.

As Europe entered winter and the demand for energy increased, it highlighted just how vicious the cycle can be as cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and operation technology increased.

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Exposed: Understanding the threat of digital spying & stalkerware

Stalker

The global market for commercial spyware is currently estimated at around $12 billion, which over the last 10 years has seen 80 countries purchase the technology. Spyware is used for a range of purposes, allowing operators to gain remote access to devices from across the world. Once a device becomes infected, the perpetrator gains complete control of the device, which can mean unfettered access to messages, audio calls, photos, and remote access to cameras and microphones.

What’s worrying is spyware is becoming accessible even to users lacking advanced tech skills. Cheaper, more rudimentary forms of spyware like stalkerware exist. Stalkerware can be particularly intrusive and abusive as it must be physically installed, meaning attackers need direct access to which ever device they try to infiltrate. In this article, we will expose the threat from digital spying and stalking, and how to maximize protection.

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The biggest impediments to user adoption of enterprise technology

Workplace

An investment in enterprise technology can’t truly be deemed a success unless the organization achieves successful user adoption. While there are key best practices that can steer organizations towards successful adoption, there are also several impediments along the way. Here we’ll explore the impediments and how to overcome them.

The #1 impediment to successful user adoption is having a tech-focused mindset. Oftentimes, a customer will think to themselves: "OK, all the various bits of the tech are working. The project is on time and on budget. Let's roll this stuff out organization-wide, offer a bit of training, and people should love it and adopt it to solve their problems."

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Transforming talent acquisition: An introduction to predictive analytics in recruitment

Recruitment

In the age of data, recruitment is undergoing a seismic shift. Predictive analytics is at the forefront of this revolution, supporting talent acquisition with data-driven insights while facilitating more precise decision-making than ever before. But what is predictive analytics and how exactly can it enhance your recruitment processes?

Predictive analytics (PA), simply put, uses historical data to forecast future outcomes. In recruitment, predictive analytics is like having a crystal ball that provides insights into hiring lead times, future employment needs, potential employee performance, and retention rates.

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Digital accessibility: Supporting a culture of continuous improvement

Online Shopping

In spite of all the attention and welcomed awareness digital accessibility has received in recent years, lawsuits filed against companies who are not attentive to this issue show no signs of abating. In fact, the number of suits brought to federal court citing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) reached a new record in 2022 (and this is just the number of cases that were involved in litigation -- the actual number of ADA demand letters was likely much higher).

Throughout 2022, several high-profile household brand names were the target of legal actions, including the Gap, Zola, Barnes & Noble and Goop. In fact, e-commerce companies remain the biggest risk for digital accessibility lawsuits, amounting to 77 percent of cases according to UsableNet. Almost 20 percent of the top 500 e-commerce websites received accessibility complaints in 2022; however, there is an interesting trend of accessibility lawsuits against smaller e-commerce companies (less than $50 million per year) which is on the rise

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Understand how Cyber Threat Intelligence can best leverage the capabilities of network detection and response

Intelligence is now considered essential to the process of identifying, understanding and acting upon threats. According to the "Global Perspectives on Threat Intelligence" study conducted by Mandiant, 96 percent of decision-makers interviewed for the research believe that it is important to understand which cyber threat actors could be targeting their organization. Consequently, threat Intelligence should be fully integrated into the internal mechanisms linked to threat detection and response. 

Before detailing how intelligence can be integrated into defense tools, it is necessary to talk about the nature of intelligence, the complexity of collecting it, and how to curate, qualify and act on it in the most efficient way. Intelligence effectiveness depends on the contextualization of the elements collected in relation to a business’s specific environment. Once the qualified information is available and translated into specific formats and languages, it can then be used appropriately in detection tools, such as network detection probes, SIEMs, EDRs, etc. 

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