BetaNews Staff

The essential ingredient to manage the complexity of energy models: AI

In just a few years, energy management has become a real headache. Not only must the growth in electricity consumption be taken into account, but also the reduction in fossil fuels, and the increase in the production of renewable energies, knowing that they operate intermittently -- a complexity that cannot be resolved without massive data collection, high computing capacity and AI algorithms.

While global warming should force us to reduce our energy consumption, on July 15, 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced an increase in global electricity demand of five percent in 2021 and four percent in 2022. This is a trend that is not ready to be reversed, driven by the increasingly abundant and electricity-intensive technology era, by a global population that should reach 10 billion in 2050 or even by the development of metropolises and megacities that are still energy intensive.

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Game developers shouldn't overlook Python's potential

Python is an object-oriented, general-purpose, and high-level programming language that was developed in 1991 by Guido van Rossum. Since its development, Python is one of the most popular programming languages worldwide. It often ranks high in surveys -- for instance, it claimed the first spot in the Popularity of Programming Language index and came second in the TIOBE index.

Python has gained its acclaim as a widely used tool with multiple purposes for various projects, from data analytics and visualization to artificial intelligence, language development, design, and web development. Python isn’t renowned for its use in video game development. But should this mean game developers should just disregard Python completely?

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Critical steps to ransomware protection in the cloud

The ransomware threat is very real with attacks growing in size and frequency, in part, because of the acceleration of digital transformation initiatives and the move to embrace digital services as well as the rapid implementation of hybrid ways of working.

As new digital systems required multiple access points for customers, partners, and employees, this has created a vastly expanded attack surface. This has hastened the rise in ransomware attacks, as attackers quickly took advantage of the increased number of possible attack vectors. 

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Lessons learned from 633 destructive ransomware events

The threat landscape continues to see rapid evolution, especially as the digital world grows increasingly connected and more organizations outsource business services. Adversaries are getting smarter, and their techniques are getting more advanced by the day. This has put a spotlight on the security of our global supply chain and how unstable and unprotected it is.

In fact, software supply chain attacks have tripled in 2021. The potential ripple effects of risks and disruptions within an organization’s supply chain that could ultimately impact their business are immense. Research shows that a data breach affecting multiple parties causes 26X the financial damage of the worst single-party breach.

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Pay up or play different? Five tips for beating ransomware with backups

When it comes to ransomware, sometimes the cost of downtime can exceed the cost of paying up. Companies with frozen data and systems face loss of revenue, productivity, customer departures, damaged reputations, never mind the cost of the ransom itself. Take an organization like Colonial Pipeline, which should have had healthy backups in place to quickly recover from their attack and most likely did. However, they opted to shell out $4.4 million in ransom because they didn’t know how long it would take to get up and running again. 

And according to ITIC's 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey, one hour of a server being inoperable costs $300,000 or more for 91 percent percent of mid-sized and large enterprises. 

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Fighting cybercrime: What's next for Microsoft 365

It has been over a decade since we were first introduced to the Microsoft 365 brand -- and now it is one of the most used lines of subscription services in the world. Last year marked the 10th anniversary, and if we take a look back since its early days, the service has only expanded its scope and capabilities especially when it comes to the Security & Compliance Center.

The swift ascension of Microsoft 365 hardly comes as no surprise, given the hybrid world we now find ourselves in. However, as the number of M365 users continues to increase at a rapid pace, the security risks for both users and admins will only grow as well. To break it down,  between January and December 2021 alone, Microsoft Azure Active Directory blocked more than 25.6 billion malicious attempts to hijack enterprise customer accounts by brute-forcing stolen passwords.

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Breaking away from tech giants: Why businesses should consider Filecoin storage

When it comes to storing data, businesses can often feel inundated with options from a whole host of different providers all promising to offer competitive rates and the security of your businesses’ assets. Add blockchain solutions into the mix as well, and decision-makers have a lot to be weighing up when choosing the best solution for their business.

With cloud-based technologies and blockchain in particular, jargon can be a problem when it comes to fully understanding the principles and mechanics at play. For this reason, many business leaders may dismiss these technologies, without considering the benefits they could offer. So, what exactly is Filecoin?

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How systems integrators scale IOT to enable global deployments for customers

IoT grid

Today, the promise of IoT is in little doubt. Use cases range from connected products to connected assets and we are seeing IoT deployed across a multitude of industries from telehealth and electric vehicle (EV) connectivity to smart vending, payment systems and more. Accelerated in part by the pandemic and remote working, IoT deployments are now becoming mainstream.

That said, deploying one IoT device or a prototype and ensuring it is functional, versus deploying at scale across multiple sites and geographies is when IoT starts to become more challenging.

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Four keys to successful product lifecycle management

As companies begin their yearly evaluation of goals and objectives there may be some new discussions brewing. The need for companies to adapt their product development processes to support new types of supplier collaboration, flexible sourcing strategies, and digital transformation efforts has caused a paradigm shift toward more flexible, sustainable platform technologies that enable them to rapidly adapt to disruptions and opportunities in the market.

These new demands on businesses have stretched the limits of their legacy PLM software. Overly customized PLM software with a history of creating unresolved technical debt is driving many companies to a point of reflection -- questioning where do we go from here? Do we spend millions redeploying or trying to painfully upgrade our traditional PLM software? Will those efforts make our business more resilient and more agile? Here are four questions every company must answer:

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Why the pandemic's effect on cloud is more than a technology change

energy

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a technology leapfrog beyond anything we’ve seen in decades. But now that we’ve made this leap is there any going back? And do we have the right technology for enterprises to keep up with new demands?

According to Pew Research, as of around two years into the pandemic, roughly 60 percent of U.S. workers who say their jobs can mainly be done from home (59 percent) are working from home. Our research found that digital experiences like online gaming, streaming and telehealth increased dramatically during the early days pandemic. And now, technologies and experiences like cloud gaming caught on during the pandemic are exploding. 

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Which technology trends can help organizations achieve their digital ambitions?

digital transformation

In the era of fast business, organizations face increased pressure to continually improve and rapidly iterate on their digital transformation strategies. Nearly 70 percent of companies cite digital transformation as their top IT priority, while McKinsey estimates that COVID-19 has sped up digital adoption by seven years.

While the urgency to transform increases, 90 percent of businesses report that they face at least one barrier in their efforts to drive digital change. But what does this really mean and how can an organization achieve their digital ambitions in the era of fast business?

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AI's evolution from oddity to ubiquity

Artificial intelligence

There was a time when the notion of machines "thinking" was the stuff of fantasy. We had the tin man in the Wizard of Oz but that was fiction, a nice story created in Hollywood. The idea that a computer could think, solve problems, and learn from experience like a human was just too far-fetched in the early 20th century. But, science happens, and in the mid-1950’s, the first program, Logic Theorist designed to mimic human-like skill solving was created and the rest, as they say, is history.

Over the next twenty years, the concept of artificial intelligence evolved. Many thought that the attention artificial intelligence received after the Logic Theorist program was created would propel this new discipline into practical, real-world applications. But there was a problem; computer storage and speed requirements to process the amount of data used for running machine learning algorithms were just not up to snuff. To fully realize the potential of AI, computers needed to get faster with more storage. Lucky for us, computers did get faster, much faster, and as we learned from Moore’s Law, storage increased too, at a rate that eventually caught up to the requirements of AI.

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Securing remote work isn't a perk of the job: 4 tips for the future of flexibility

Remote working

In workplaces around the country, business leaders are struggling to settle on a long-term policy for their return to the office. The issue isn’t just the pandemic, although sudden changes have caused companies like Ford and Google to delay their return-to-office strategies. The more pressing challenge as enterprises grapple with the choice of remote or in-person work is employee retention and recruitment. The fact of the matter is some workers would rather quit than go back to commuting and working in an office.

But while corporate leaders are considering the impact of remote, hybrid, and in-person work policies as part of their retention strategies, they must also bear in mind the cybersecurity implications of these flexible approaches. For your CISOs and security team leads, securing remote workers isn’t a perk of the job.

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Moving to the cloud is the basis of a good Business Continuity Plan

A Business Continuity Plan is, broadly speaking, a set of processes and principles to improve resilience and ensure a business can continue functioning. Due to the importance of IT to productivity for almost every organization in the 21st century -- downtime, when IT systems are offline, is its antithesis.

Thanks to the rapid adoption of digital tools spurred on by the pandemic and the general move to online we have seen throughout the world, there is a tremendous amount of risk out there for businesses with online assets, from cyberattacks and ransomware to natural disasters and power outages. However, using cloud-based IT assets such as remote desktops, SaaS applications, and cloud storage of data can be a shortcut to protecting their continuity -- and therefore the continuity of your business.

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How can growing MSPs navigate today's staffing challenges?

Over the last two years, the rise of remote working and increased digitalization across private and public sectors has increased demand across the MSP ecosystem, giving many businesses the opportunity to grow.

However, these opportunities can also bring significant challenges. For instance, it’s crucial to balance the needs of existing clients with the time and resources required to successfully onboard new ones. Some organizations find they are so focused on meeting and exceeding the expectations of their current customers, that it can limit their ability to expand -- with an inevitable knock-on effect on growth. And when teams are already at capacity, the idea of adding to their workload can seem like an impossibility.

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