BetaNews Staff

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central holds the key to unlocking efficiency and productivity in the workplace. With improved processes at the forefront of business objectives, Dynamics 365 Business Central is the necessary solution for automating and streamlining operations.

Digitization has taken hold of our day-to-day lives and businesses. The technologies we now have access to allow us to flourish like never before -- when understood and used properly. While this may be overwhelming at times, it should be looked at in a positive light.

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The past twelve months have been tough for a lot of organizations. From inflationary pressures to fears of a global recession, many economists have made pessimistic predictions about the year ahead. As a result, controlling and reducing costs is likely to be the focus for many companies in 2023. 

Yet despite these economic stresses, IT spending has continued to rise. Gartner has estimated businesses spent around $4.5 trillion in 2022, up 3 percent year-on-year. While part of this spend is driven by digital transformation and the adoption of new technologies, a good part comes from unexpected expenses - especially when it comes to cloud where businesses can easily incur heavy costs without realizing it. Research finds that 80 percent of organizations lack awareness of how best to manage cloud computing, leading to overspending of between 20-50 percent. 

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Given we've all been told that it's inevitable that we'll get hacked, or at the least we need to assume that we will, what does this mean for businesses? It's clear that investment in cyber security measures isn't slowing down the attacks, and in 2023 it feels like there's been a significant increase in reported cyberattacks already. And we've only just hit February!

It would also appear that cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and technologically advanced. Fundamentally, you can't prevent a member of your team from clicking a phishing link, and the attack surface remains expanded due to the current hybrid working arrangements in place at most companies. So, if we are being told to expect an attack, does this shift the emphasis from prevention and defense, onto preparation and response? How would you recover your business?

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The new year began with a curveball. Normally, when economic troubles occur, high unemployment follows. That’s not the case this time around: there are plenty of jobs that still need filling. This has created a rare talent-constrained recession, leading analysts such as Forrester to encourage IT leaders to maintain employee numbers.

This is especially true of companies that have committed significant resources towards creating a positive employee experience. In doing so, they’ve been able to attract candidates and retain skilled personnel. By taking a step back, a hard-earned reputation is tarnished and a useful recruiting tool diminished. The following takes a look at talent issues in the year ahead accompanied by some tips to overcome them.

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Core banking technology moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss out…

The reduced cost of fintech, and increased functionality of cloud-based "as a service" models can reduce the number of applications a bank is running by 30 to 40 percent, and the cost of ownership by 15 to 20 percent, when compared to traditional financial services IT infrastructure.

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Another year on the calendar, another guarantee that the technology on which we are so reliant will demonstrate new and largely unanticipated consequences. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the world of cybersecurity. Let's take a brief look at three themes of cybersecurity predictions for 2023.

A is for Autonomy. The automobile industry is the very first thing we think of when we hear "autonomy," and there is no denying the promise of fully automated smart vehicles and how they can improve logistics, personal transport, and last-mile delivery. Through a darker looking glass, while we've seen proofs-of-concept in the past demonstrating unauthorized control of a moving vehicle, look for exploits relating to vehicular data: deliberate obfuscation of real-time geolocation coordinates and tampering of previously recorded data will surface as new areas of mischief for researchers and criminals alike.

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Seventy-one percent of logistics companies in the U.K. saw an increase in transportation costs in the first quarter of 2022 when compared to the same period in 2021. Forty percent of companies surveyed reported that the costs had risen by nearly 25 percent.

Enterprises are battling rising shipping costs in a hyper competitive market with an eye on providing end users with top-class consumer experiences. It’s a balancing act that leaves companies walking on a tightrope, trying to juggle between cost and consumer expectations.

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In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become an increasingly important area for businesses as more and more companies look to connect their products and services to the internet to deliver new experiences and unlock new revenue streams and capabilities. In Eseye's Annual State of IoT Adoption survey, over three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents said that IoT is a priority for their business in the next two to three years. 

However, the design of hardware, firmware, and coding connectivity management software into IoT devices are all highly specialist areas. These three core components require significant specialized knowledge and expertise. A considerable skills gap in the industry makes it difficult for businesses to successfully design, develop, and deploy IoT estates. 

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A 'work device' isn’t what it used to be. Employees are no longer restricted to a single, company-issued device. Instead, they move between devices based on task, time of day, and location. One minute, they might be working at a desk on a Mac, while the next they are on the move, staying productive from an iPhone.

Research has shown that employees highly value the ability to choose which device(s) they use. In fact, 87 percent of respondents in an independent global survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne in 2021 said choosing their work device was important to them, and 89 percent said they’d even be willing to sacrifice part of their salary to be empowered to choose their own technology.

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As security professionals assess the cloud security challenges that lie ahead for the coming year, one thing is certain. Threat actors will continue to double down on their efforts, utilizing new techniques and refining pre-existing methods as they extend their ever-growing toolbox.

To help enterprises stay ahead of the game, our security research team has highlighted some of the top trends and attack vectors cloud security teams can expect to encounter in 2023.

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With cyber criminals deploying increasingly sophisticated methods of attack organizations must go the extra mile to protect their data and avoid costly financial and reputational damage. With new threats emerging each day, these risks cannot be taken lightly. This is particularly true for corporate legal teams and law firms who are prime targets for cyber attackers given the amount of sensitive client information that they hold.

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2022, the average consolidated total cost of a data breach in the UK is £3.36 million, up from £2.37 million in 2015. Given the financial and reputational damage a data breach can cause, legal teams and law firms cannot treat cyber security as a tick box exercise. However, there is a tendency to fall into a key myth of cyber security: "We are doing fine as long as we pass our annual security audit."

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As the world seems to innovate just about every experience in our lives, from online banking to ordering lunch or submitting an expense report, digital transformation continues to enable new possibilities. Research shows the average enterprise invests $48 million annually on digital transformation projects. These projects include improving the experience of enterprise apps for customers, enabling smoother hybrid work experiences for employees, or providing new and improved technology for staff to to increase their productivity, efficiency, and sense of accomplishment.

Taking the broadest possible perspective, the overall spend on IT by enterprises worldwide in 2022 was $4.4 trillion, per Gartner. This spending is forecast to continue increasing in 2023.

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As many CISOs are discovering, protecting cloud native environments requires a fundamental shift in thinking when it comes to keeping threats at bay. The huge change in the technology stack, the rapid delivery of software updates, and the unfettered use of open source, all present new challenges that old-style security tools cannot resolve.

Rather than using different point solutions that only solve specific security issues and need to be manually stitched together, Gartner recommends adopting a unified and end-to-end full lifecycle solution that starts in development and extends to deliver comprehensive runtime protection. In other words, a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP).

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During "romance week" and Valentine's Day, your heart can be stolen in the blink of an eye, and so can your money. The FBI has warned of "romance" scams, centering the bulletin around the celebration of love, which demonstrates that it’s not just a box of chocolates that’s seducing people, it’s scammers and cyber criminals. Staggering new data from the FTC shows that last year, nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam, and reported losses hit $1.3 billion. The median reported loss was $4,400.

Romance scams are a variation of what’s called "pig butchering," a type of social engineering attack that alludes to the practice of fattening up a hog before slaughtering it. The approach combines some time-tested elements of fraud -- such as gaining trust. It relies on the effectiveness of relationships nurtured on social media and the ease with which currencies can be moved electronically. In simpler terms, scammers are posing as lovers, gaining the trust of their fake beau, and then asking them for money for gifts, procedures, plane tickets, you name it.

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Security failures happen. Unfortunately, in today’s always-on, highly digitized world, it is inevitable and a question of not if but when. We only need look at the news during the first few of weeks of 2023 to see several high-profile breaches reported, including T-Mobile and Mailchimp. The companies, its customers and its employees must remain on high alert in the coming months for increased phishing attempts from threat actors using credentials from the attack.

So many of these breaches get blamed on employees being socially engineered, highlighting the importance for employees to be more aware of their role in cybersecurity and for companies to have effective, thoughtful security training and intuitive security systems in place. Users are an organization’s biggest vulnerability; a well-known attack vector for data exfiltration that unfortunately cannot be completely closed. Today, organizations have a wide variety of users and any one employee, partner or supplier from any level within the company can present a vector through which a hacker can infiltrate the organization.

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