BetaNews Staff

Today, many businesses are transitioning to cloud to modernize environments, improve system reliability, advance their digital business initiatives, and support the new realities compelled by the pandemic, such as working from home. According to Gartner, "cloud is the powerhouse that drives today’s digital organizations". In fact, its growth has been little short of meteoric, with a staggering $494.7 billion spend and 20.4 Percent predicted growth in 2022. 

Cloud is driving increased security, increased performance, better customer experience and better value for money in tech investment, and it continues to be widely adopted by global business. But organizations are becoming more prudent and strategic in their cloud investments, centering desired business and technical outcomes when selecting the cloud model that best fits their individual needs. 

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Today, enterprise-scale companies are more interconnected than ever. People, applications, servers, networks, and devices in different departments and even in different parts of the world are constantly exchanging information in both the public and private cloud. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, most organizations strive for this kind of silo-less interconnectivity. Desirable as it may be, however, it’s not risk-free.

There are cybercriminals ready to exploit any vulnerability in an organization’s digital defences. That much should be obvious from the 60 000-plus reports of fraud and cybercrime that came from UK businesses in 2021. It’s critical, therefore, that organizations do everything possible to understand and mitigate those risks.

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The year is 2030. Most humans have been replaced by machines in U.S. warehouses and factories. Millions of Americans are out of work and struggling to find jobs as robots pack, sort, ship, and carry out the myriad duties that just ten years ago were the purview of living, breathing workers. There are little job prospects in sight for these workers as automation has completely taken over numerous industries.

As fictitious as this sounds, it is not a scene out of a science-fiction novel, but instead a scenario that could occur in the very near future. Take, for example, Amazon’s recent launch of Proteus -- the company’s first fully autonomous mobile robot. This should signal that much of the company’s workforce faces extinction by automation in the coming years. 

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As businesses continue to produce and switch over to digital products, we see more cyberattacks and software flaws exploited for nefarious purposes. The number of small flaws in software that cause major issues can quickly get out of hand. Machine learning has produced a process known as risk-based vulnerability patching to help avoid this issue.

This article will discuss what a risk-based approach is, the patching processes, solutions to negate the risk of each issue, and a management plan for every part of the process. Sections will be broken down by the type of software and each part of the risk management process.

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As one of the most effective ways to prevent attacks on IT assets, it is universally acknowledged and known that patching vulnerabilities is a critical process. But as the volume of vulnerabilities discovered in the tools we use continues to proliferate -- and the speed at which they are being weaponized increases -- patching is becoming a complex and difficult task for security teams. During the 2021 calendar year alone, more than 20,000 individual vulnerabilities were discovered and announced, and by May 2022, more than 10,000 issues had been released. The number of vulnerabilities being discovered and disclosed is not slowing down, it is accelerating.

While the security community’s ability and attention towards discovering vulnerabilities has matured, the scale of these issues has - in tandem - become overwhelming. So what can organizations do to stay afloat in today’s "sink-or-swim" threat landscape?

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The rise in cyber incidents is set to continue on its meteoric trajectory over the next decade. Ransomware attacks on a business, consumer, or a device are anticipated to take place every two seconds by 2031 -- a worrying escalation from every 11 seconds in 2021. And by 2025, damages are projected to reach a staggering $15 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

At the same time, users demand better performance and user experience year-after-year, and the subsequently increased threat landscape poses real challenges in connectivity and data security. 'Insider threat' also poses a considerable risk, with 80 percent of breaches involving privileged credentials misuse or abuse and malicious insider activity from recent employees.

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IT infrastructure has become incredibly complicated -- intensified by the investment in digital transformations encouraged by the pandemic. One of the unintended consequences? IT teams and incident responders are stressed, and stretched farther than ever. PagerDuty’s The State of Digital Operations lays out the increased burden on these teams, the results in terms of burnout, and the impact having a more mature digital operations can have on minimizing that stress.

AIOps is an essential component to any mature digital organization, and it’s clear a new approach is needed. The sheer volume of IT events, from changes, warnings and incidents, to tickets for more routine activity are increasing 70 percent year-on-year. At a moment when increases in budgets won’t keep pace with the explosion of incidents or the complexity of IT infrastructure (if the budgets aren’t being reduced outright), leveraging AIOps to serve teams and customers is critical.

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The world is becoming more connected via the use of cloud computing services and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Over the last decade, we have watched cybercrimes skyrocket before our very eyes. Corporations today cannot afford to rely on basic firewalls and antivirus software to ensure data is protected. It is essential to create a more powerful cybersecurity ecosystem.

How big is the threat against data? First, take a look at how much data we are talking about here. By the year 2025, we can expect there to be 175 zettabytes of data across the internet and networked computer systems. Think streaming video, dating apps, your private healthcare information, banking data, social media posts, and messages. The list can go on.

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The discipline of fraud prevention has changed dramatically over the past five years and continues to evolve rapidly. Consequently, former truths about fraud prevention are increasingly becoming outdated myths. Legacy vendors propagate these myths to maintain relevance, but industry leaders understand the distinction and are moving forward. 

In this article, the common myth we’ll tackle is that a merchant should buy fraud insurance to cover everything -- this is typically touted in the market as a 'chargeback guarantee.' On the surface, the simplicity is appealing; the vendor is claiming to solve merchants’ fraud problems by taking liability for chargebacks, returns abuse, Item Not Received abuse, and potentially more. But the statement is very much a myth for, at the very least, five important reasons:

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As organizations have adapted to the evolving digital landscape, there has been a meteoric rise in popularity of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a business model. This is best illustrated by Gartner’s predicted increase in worldwide SaaS end-user spending value to reach $176.6 billion in 2022. The analyst firm further predicts worldwide public cloud spending to reach almost $500 billion by the end of 2022.

Affordability and flexibility are the principal drivers for businesses to move their data environment and applications from their own infrastructure to centrally located services on a remote cloud network. However, trusting arguably their most important asset -- their data -- with an outside entity often raises some concerns around data governance, compliance, costs, and beyond. Before making an investment, it’s sensible to carry out a self-assessment process on the basis of ten most commonly asked questions:

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Industrial robots are taking over. Well, they’re becoming much more common in the workplace. In fact, according to a report by the International Federation of Robotics, the number of robots in factories has almost doubled in recent years.

The 2021 World Robot Report shows that the global number of robots per 10,000 employees has risen from 66 to 126 between 2015–2020. So which sectors are reaping the rewards?  Here, we’ll explore just this, shining a light on industries benefiting the most from robotics.

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Phishing has become a matter of grave concern for banks and financial institutions, as attacks on the industry have increased in recent years. Finance is the most impersonated industry in phishing campaigns. Some 35 percent of fake websites and emails claim to be from financial institutions, according to the American Bankers Association.

This should come as no surprise, considering the industry's role in the global economy. Given that financial organizations facilitate the flow of money it makes sense that their networks, employees, and customers are prime targets for digital fraud and theft. In response, central banks and regulators have been directing financial institutions to improve their security.

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Despite the hype during the past year, the demise of third-party cookies has not arrived. It is, however, on the horizon and unquestionably inevitable. Therefore, marketers are showing concern over what will replace those cookies or what can replace them.

It’s okay to feel uneasy about these massive changes. But it’s more productive to act on proven marketing instruments that reliably fill their void. By dissecting marketing attribution and knowing what’s working with existing customers, marketers can forgo broad approaches to reaching segments of prospective customers and, instead, refocus energies and resources to put powerful first-party data to use.

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Data breaches, cyberattacks and security concerns are growing exponentially in the digital climate, as new development practices, extra languages, and structural frameworks appear -- compounded by geopolitical tensions giving rise to state sponsored attacks. In 2022 to date, 39 percent of UK businesses have already experienced the disruption and costly consequences of cyberattacks. Some of the largest enterprises, such as Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Vodafone, have experienced attacks by highly organized groups, such as Lapsus$.

With the scale, type of attacks and target industries constantly evolving, the healthcare sector has joined financial services and the public sector in becoming a lucrative target. Healthcare data breaches reached an all-time high in 2021, impacting 45 million people -- personal health information (PHI) became worth more than credit card information on the dark web. Attack approaches are constantly evolving, with hackers searching for any weak links in growing infrastructure.

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Supply chain attacks have been on the threat radar of many organizations and their security teams for several years. However, since the infamous SolarWinds attack in 2020 -- which led to widespread and damaging compromises of data, networks and systems -- the supply chain attack vector has taken on a new level of focus. Indeed, supply chain attacks, which have become an effective way for hackers to gain access to IT networks at scale, and as such, are among the most worrying cybersecurity risks currently facing organizations today.

Supply chain risks come in many forms -- from complex to relatively simplistic. The UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey, which explores organizations’ policies, processes, and approaches to cybersecurity and is used to inform government cybersecurity policy, looked at this in its latest report. The 2022 survey reveals that just 13 percent of businesses review the risks posed by their immediate suppliers, with that number dropping to 7 percent for their wider supply chain. Possibly even more concerning, many organizations commonly perceive 'big tech' companies to be "invulnerable to cyber attacks".

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