How to keep customers safe with the correct print security strategy
Today’s Wi-Fi printers possess an array of features that make printing easy, which are especially useful in a world where remote working is commonplace and employees use a range of different devices for producing documents. Despite their advantages, there remain some serious security gaps that hackers can easily exploit if an organization doesn’t have a robust print security strategy in place.
While most businesses do well when it comes to protecting core IT infrastructure including computers, servers and applications, they do often fall short when it comes to secondary assets such as multifunction printers (MFPs). With cybercriminals constantly circling and searching for different ways to infiltrate a company’s network, unsecured connected printers can be a key point of weakness leading to a major breach.
The journey to intelligent office automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been around longer than you might realize. At its core, RPA simply means the automation of any manually intensive IT or administrative task. For instance, scheduling an email is one early example of RPA. But over the last two years, RPA has become much easier to use and the tools have been democratized out to the business units so arduous daily tasks may now be automated easily. Think of it as a highly evolved Excel macro, created by someone in the business that automatically logs into and out of applications to make the enterprise more effective and efficient.
What's more, due to the lack of resources available, automating enterprise processes traditionally caused friction between business units and IT. Today, IT teams may focus on large, transformative automation (e.g., new ERP Systems, new services) and push everything else back over to other business units. Transforming an organization by allowing business units to accomplish more on their own -- while freeing up IT to focus on more complex and important tasks is a far more effective use of all resources.
Three recommendations for surviving (and thriving) in the post-pandemic IT wilderness
With COVID-19 as the backdrop, the last two years have been both scary and exhilarating for IT teams as they delivered innovation at previously unimaginable speeds.
During this time, CIOs have overseen the enablement of remote working for millions of employees and shifted numerous legacy systems to the cloud. But as we emerge from the IT battlefield of COVID-19, what does the post-pandemic landscape look like? What new challenges will the coming months pose, and how can IT departments prepare themselves for the next wave of disruption? Below are three recommendations for where to focus IT efforts in the near term while continuing to drive business value by leveraging the speed and power of modern innovations. Let’s begin by looking backwards.
Why your business success is in the hands of development and operations
One of the biggest headaches of any IT leader today is managing cross-functional teams to develop and deploy software in good time. Not only does their work have to be continuously operational to stay productive, it needs to save the business money, time and all while fixing a never-ending cycle of bugs.
This is why that without a robust DevOps process in place, which is to the benefit of the entire organization, IT management leaders often feel like they are chasing the impossible.
The 'human firewall' and the burden of securing your organization
Whether you regard your colleagues as Layer 8 "issues" in your own OSI stack, or as a human firewall which should be able to recognize and act on inbound threats, like everything else in organizations that execute well, getting your general employee population on-board with your information security goals is ultimately a matter of culture.
And the strongest security cultures are those where each and every employee fully understands that they are on the front lines. They are extended members, and the early warning system, for your core team in the security operations center (SOC).
Are health apps offering wellbeing solutions or exacerbating our health problems?
In the era of smartphones, we can now manage and even improve our health on our handheld devices. Whether you’re struggling with your mental health, want boost your physical health with your exercise regime or, you’re seeking to achieve a better night’s sleep -- there’s a wide choice of apps to turn to for support.
Apps range from guided meditation to comprehensive running plans, and they can even track your sleep and mood. But are they doing more harm than good?
To better healthcare with open data
Web scraping can be a force for good in the world. While it has been predominantly used by large corporations, more opportunities for non-profit use of web scraping have been becoming apparent.
Most of these non-profit projects focused on things such as catching corruption. However, it can be beneficial anywhere where data is public. Luckily, the global trend seems to be moving us towards the democratization of data where it becomes available to everyone.
Legacy modernization: Why observability is the way forward
Technology is critical to the survival of nearly every modern business, and it is advancing at a whirlwind pace to continue supporting these vital digital infrastructures. One such change includes a shift towards Observability. In the past year, log management, unified monitoring and event management vendors have adopted Observability to understand the internal state of their IT systems through the system’s telemetry data outputs.
Why are vendors navigating toward Observability? Telemetry data, including logs, metrics and traces, allow DevOps and SRE teams to quickly understand service-disrupting incidents in their IT systems, analyze the root cause and mitigate the issue. The visibility into these systems is increasingly more essential as IT infrastructures become more distributed, complex, interconnected and, as a result, fragile. In short, Observability helps IT teams work faster and smarter and improve service assurance in extremely complicated production environments.
The rise of the analytics engineer
The rise of the analytics engineer pays homage to the evolving complexity of modern data analytics. The role encompasses many fields, and is closer to software engineering than traditional analytics, as it involves writing programing scripts and maintaining data as a set of software-producing artifacts.
It’s within the context of a rising awareness of the data ecosystem that the demand gap between data scientists and analytics engineers is closing. Once heralded as the 'sexiest job of the 21st Century', analytics engineers are set to soon steal this accolade away from their antecedents.
Certificate outages are an entirely preventable disaster
These days, I wince anytime a major digital service outage makes headlines. Outages happen, of course -- and sometimes they are unavoidable. Servers crash. Cybercriminals get lucky. People make mistakes.
That’s not why I wince, though. I wince because anytime an email exchange goes down, a music service crashes, or a mobile provider loses service, I know there are good odds that the culprit is none of those things. All too often, major service outages come down to two simple words: "expired certificate."
Why organizations need to increase their focus on zero-day threats
Zero-day exploits are some of the most critical cybersecurity threats facing businesses today, but also one of the most difficult to address. Cybercriminals that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities take advantage of flaws within an organization's software and security systems before the victim itself discovers it. This can lead to potentially devastating consequences when bad actors are successful in accessing critical data and networks undetected.
It is also much harder to defend against these attacks when the victim is fighting in the dark - how can an organization fix a vulnerability when they don’t know it is there? For this reason, there are thousands of organizations across the world operating with unknown gaps in their cybersecurity defenses that are vulnerable to zero-day threats
Winter is here
Gary Kasparov, the famous Russian chess player wrote a book in 2015 titled "Winter is Coming" which chronicled the collapse of the Soviet Union, charted the rise of Putin, and painfully captured the many missed opportunities of the West to contain Putin. The book also laid out historical reasons that Putin invaded Ukraine in a chilling fashion. Now that "Winter is Here," Putin initiated a ground war that might evolve to other geographies and realms, including information operations and cyber.
The prospect of a full-blown Cyber war -- once remote -- seems more likely if the Russian invasion of the Ukraine escalates and spills out of Eastern Europe and enters the highly-connected world in which we live. How bad can it be? No one fully knows, but cybersecurity professionals are no strangers to Russian cyber-attacks.
Using voice biometrics to stop fraud and deliver a better customer experience
Cybersecurity pros have an unenviable task: helping businesses mitigate risk and keep consumer data safe, all in the midst of a continually evolving threat landscape. Yet even in the face of daily news stories of data breaches, they manage to spot some silver linings. When it comes to digital security, each year brings a bit of good along with the bad, and cybersecurity professionals celebrate the former while reminding us we need to be constantly improving if we want to protect our customers and our companies.
A look back in the rearview shows 2021 was no different. The bad: by the end of September, the U.S. had already seen more data breaches than all of 2020. Even more concerning, a 2021 Forrester survey of individuals responsible for implementing enterprise passwordless authentication, a proven cybersecurity measure that helps defend against these breaches, showed adoption is lagging with half of the respondents less than three months into the process.
The rise of application modernization and how to approach it
If recent times have taught us anything, it is that technology and digitization capabilities continue to advance at a rapid rate. Organizations, rightly, are fearing being left behind with legacy systems, and there are many reasons why application modernization strategies make business sense.
One of the most obvious and essential drivers is cost. Maintaining and operating legacy applications will become increasingly expensive as time passes. At the same time, new software engineers will also be eager to master new technology instead of being trained on old systems. For instance, a survey conducted by UK Cloud found 83 percent of organizations saw skills and capabilities as an impediment in adopting cloud. As engineers proficient in the dated technologies leave, new training requirements will eat into budgets.
What we can learn from famous data quality disasters in pop culture
Bad data can lead to disasters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars or -- believe it or not -- even the loss of a spacecraft.
Without processes that guard the integrity of your data every step of the way, your organization might suffer catastrophic mistakes that erode trust and lose a fortune. As a reminder to make sure that high-quality data is an end-to-end priority for all types of industries, let’s look at some of the biggest data quality incidents in recent pop culture history.
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