Will new CISA guidelines help bolster cyber defenses?
Do you know what IT devices are in your business or on your network right now? If not, it’s not just cybercriminals that might be knocking on your door very soon, but the White House.
Binding Operational Directive 23-01, or BOD 23-01, is a new directive from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA has issued a Binding Operational Directive (BOD) that orders federal agencies in the country to keep track of their IT assets and any vulnerabilities on their networks.
Top security advice on keeping cyber-scares at bay this Halloween
As suggested by historical data, October has, over the last few years, shown an 'exponential growth' in cyber-attacks, ironically it is also Cyber Security Awareness month, and Halloween. As we approach the end of this year's security awareness month, and head to Halloween, it’s important that close attention is paid to proactive insights and advice offered by industry leaders.
Here is some critical advice in terms of how organizations can maintain a resilient security infrastructure in today’s target-rich environment and potentially avoid a cyber horror.
Visualization of process, testing and orchestration data: Seeing helps with understanding
In the world of business process management and automation, you can cross business intelligence with process mining and you get something we can call process analytics. What does that mean?
Business managers have been clamoring for better ways to understand what is happening inside their critical business processes. Well, inside all business processes really -- because if you can mine process data you should be able to see patterns and find weak spots. And once you find them, you can fix them -- optimize processes, find better ways to avoid blockages, and so on. One way to help business managers is to give them a way to visualize process data - to see not just the workflows, but to see what is happening inside them.
Is the IT industry's skills gap problem solvable?
The tech sector, in common with many industries, is suffering from a pronounced and lengthy skills shortfall. There’s not just a lack of qualified candidates, but training new hires is costly and time-consuming, which leads to a squeeze on the available talent. To make things worse, we have also witnessed the phenomenon of the 'Great Resignation', when the Covid-19 pandemic prompted significant numbers of people to rethink their career path.
Whether people are seeking a new challenge, starting their own business, taking early retirement or simply looking to minimize burnout and stress, the consequences of tens of thousands of skilled, experienced workers moving on can be severe. When combined with the existing dearth of suitable candidates, it becomes particularly ominous.
Your personal data has become an AI training manual and you're not getting it back
Art imitates life, that we all know. But what if art imitates your personal life, your personal likeness and does it so well that the line between what is real and surreal blurs?
Unbeknownst to us, we are becoming models for state-of-the-art AI technology that trains on terabytes of poorly filtered data scraped from all over the web. This data can include our personal photos, medical images, and even copyrighted content -- basically, anything ever posted online.
Calling all CISOs: Budgeting season is upon us
Global businesses are hyper-aware of current economic conditions. With a looming recession, company leaders are now more cost-conscious than ever and have started to re-evaluate their spending and inventory. This means taking a closer look at technology expenditures like cybersecurity.
Over the next 6-12 months, decisions will be made about the future of many vendor relationships. Business leaders will group these relationships into two categories: the ones that deliver critical value to an organization and the ones that cost more than they are worth.
Accessible hiring practices: How businesses can cultivate a more diverse workforce
Never before has society been so acutely aware of inclusivity and, even more specifically, the efforts we must take to eliminate exclusion and discrimination against people and groups. This is especially true in the workplace, and not just within the framework established once an employee is onboarded. To bolster the hiring and retention of your workforce, businesses must not engage in hiring practices that exclude people with disabilities -- 26 percent of the U.S. adult population -- from finding its listing, applying, qualifying for the role, and sustaining employment.
It has been conclusively proven that artificial intelligence algorithms used in corporate employment processes are highly biased against individuals with disabilities. To weed out anomalies in the hiring process, AI systems "necessarily produce and reflect a normative vision of the world," as the AI Now Institute at NYU puts it. Nevertheless, AI's understanding of the "normal" invariably excludes those with disabilities.
Why remote care and connected devices are becoming more commonplace in healthcare
Today the healthcare industry faces significant challenges with long patient backlogs, a shortage of staff and resources, all of which has been exacerbated in recent years by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, there are literally millions of people in the queue awaiting treatment and many more that simply haven’t come forward for care or referrals, as patients put off engaging with healthcare systems.
Those with minor problems and early-stage symptoms subsequently develop more serious conditions, which are harder to treat and in turn increase the cost of healthcare provision.
Modern AIOps doesn't just fix outages -- it prevents them
Is your business one accidental click away from a major outage? We saw it happen with Atlassian earlier this year. You may already have an incident management strategy and monitoring, but is it adjusted for the ever-changing IT infrastructure and application architectures? Putting appropriate protocols in place ensures that one human code push can't shut down an entire system for three weeks.
Legacy monitoring tools for IT teams were helpful with older, monolithic infrastructures. When we had static infrastructures, finding a direct correlation between the incidents and applications was much easier. Eventually, signals needed even faster processing, but legacy tools couldn’t keep up.
How inclusive is STEM and how do we diversify the relevant fields?
A lack of workforce diversity in terms of education currently plagues STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) industries. The world cannot continue to thrive without the work produced under STEM and the geniuses behind it. So why does it struggle to encompass inclusivity, and why is this a problem? Let’s explore here.
It’s difficult to argue that STEM is inclusive when statistics show that more than half of scientific, technological, engineering, and math workforces are made up of white men. With this particular gender and race taking up a staggering 65 percent, that doesn’t leave much room for men of other races, and women generally.
The business continuity emergency
2021 marked a dramatic step change in global climate conditions, with a significant increase in the incidence and severity of extreme weather events resulting in flooding, hurricanes and heatwaves across the globe. The UK and Europe experienced the hottest summers on record during the past three years. This year’s extreme, record-breaking heatwave in July took the UK climate beyond 40 degrees Celsius, and posed serious threats to UK infrastructure.
This ongoing and accelerating trend is now sadly locked into the Earth’s system for decades to come. In Western Europe, heatwaves are increasing in frequency, at about three times faster, and in intensity, roughly four times faster, than in other midlatitude regions according to a recent study. This is having a knock-on impact for business, as evidenced by July’s West London data center outages for Google and Oracle Cloud and heatwave related IT issues for NHS Trusts. The need for C-suites to consider climate-related events as a serious risk to business continuity can no longer be seen as a problem of the future.
AIOps of the future: Building confidence in your brand
Technology dominates just about every sphere of modern-day society. If you are like most, you see it in your everyday lives. We increasingly buy online, with U.S. retail e-commerce sales now totaling $768 billion. Likewise, we increasingly work online, with 58 percent of Americans, or 92 million people, now telecommuting at least once a week.
For the most part, online consumers and remote workers take the technology behind their personal and professional activities for granted. We need groceries, so we open a grocery app, fill our virtual carts, check out and -- voilà -- the order is at our door in just a few hours. We apply the same expectations to remote work tools and, well, just about every technology we encounter throughout the day. It should just… work.
Cloud security is complex -- but most vulnerabilities fall into three key categories
With most enterprises leveraging at least one type of cloud deployment today, the question arises: is the cloud more or less secure than on-premise solutions?
The reality is that for on prem or even private cloud environments, the approach to security largely relies on a barrier defense. When organizations are compromised within this barrier, it can basically become open season for malicious actors, which we’ve seen in marquee incidents such as the Target data breach, the Home Depot hack in 2014, or the recent Uber breach, which exploited an unpatched security vulnerability.
How technology investment could be the savior for businesses
It’s hard to hide from the doom and gloom messages that are encircling the world around economic uncertainty but despite this, business and technology leaders still have a job to do -- and with 2022 coming to a close, 2023 planning must be approached with a growth mindset.
As much as it may seem counterintuitive to spend in times of financial uncertainty, those businesses that make rash decisions to tighten the purse strings and reduce technology investment, may just be the ones that end up being left behind.
Resiliency through visibility: Why supply chain disruption needs to be tackled by a holistic approach
A host of 'black swan' events have hit companies’ supply chains over the past two years, straining existing processes and structures. Beyond the obvious impact of COVID-19, the Suez Canal blockage, chip shortages, and Brexit -- now organizations are trying to mitigate disruptions from the war in Ukraine and rising inflation.
The end result: a stronger need than ever before to enhance levels of communication, collaboration and joint decision making across the supply chain, to reduce risk in the face of challenges still to come.
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