BetaNews Staff

How to transform the role of a CISO for the digital-first economy

CISO

With any business venture, all organizations aim to minimize downside risks and maximize upside opportunities at some basic level. With the rapid transition to digital-first technologies, organizations are offering new products to improve customer experiences by delivering the value proposition of any time, any place. But with convenience often comes risk.

For instance, restaurants and retailers are enabling GPS data using third-party applications through API integrations to power location-based services. These applications elevate the user experience and maximize business profits through customized sales offers and personalized customer service experiences. But at what cost?

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Complying with the DoJ's Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative

Under the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) new Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative, government contractors will be under enhanced accountability for implementing cybersecurity measures and reporting breaches and incidents. The DoJ’s unveiling of the initiative comes in response to criticism of current department security protocols, which have often wavered across the board and permitted cybersecurity-related fraud through a lack of enforcement.

The Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative will both focus on standardizing cybersecurity procedures for government contractors to follow and curbing cybersecurity-related fraud where companies fail to report cyber incidents.

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Rebalancing the cybersecurity equation to mitigate ransomware risks

With the average cost of a data breach now at $4.2 million, growing cyber threats like ransomware and the hybrid workforce have organizations worldwide looking to mitigate risk at every layer of the organization. 

Securing your organization is like balancing an equation: people + skills + technology = security.  Where many security strategies fall short is having an unbalanced equation. 

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Why breach-likelihood will be a game-changer for mandating cyber insurance

According to a Cybersecurity Ventures report, 2021 was predicted to have one cyberattack every 11 seconds and the cumulative cost to repair these post cyber incidents will soar to over $6 trillion in 2022.

As the digital business ecosystem expanded and the attack surface grew in tandem, cybersecurity investments have remained products and services driven. However, this approach only allows enterprises to accept or improve their cyber risk posture. Now, as the costs to manage and mitigate cyber risks rise – the average ransom demand increased by 170 percent from 2020-2021 -- businesses are seeking to 'transfer' their cyber risks through insurance. Last year alone, cyber insurance claim frequency increased by 46 percent for IT services, 53 percent for professional services, and 263 for the industrial industry, according to a report by Coalition.

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What can the IT industry expect this year? More of the same -- change

As the age-old saying goes: Change is the only constant in life. The same is particularly true for the IT industry. New technologies birth newer technologies and the cycle of exploration, innovation, and mastery continues on repeat. In my opinion, it’s one of the many perks of working in IT. Variety is the spice of life, to quote another cliche. 

The last two years have been, let’s just say, especially spicy -- with all sorts of unexpected challenges and advancements. The year ahead is sure to bring about more of the same. While hindsight may be 20/20 when it comes to 2020 (and 2021), the trick for IT professionals, and the organizations that employ them, will be trying to stay ahead of the ever-changing curve in 2022. 

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Digital transformation: Recovering the meaning behind an overstated concept

Digital transformation

The phrase 'digital transformation,' or DX, in short, is thrown around at an alarming level in the promotional and marketing materials of large tech companies and consultancies. But what does digital transformation really mean?

Digital transformation in today’s tech world is a buzzword, fashionable jargon that’s often thrown around without seeing any real value or understanding. The term assumes that everyone who creates something new is innovative, but that simply isn’t the case. Many industries have turned to modern tech to rejuvenate or enhance their business solutions. But, that doesn’t mean they’re undergoing a digital transformation. The wording and ideologies used to describe digital transformation have caused the term to be lost in translation. How do we recover the meaning behind an often overstated concept?

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5 data warehouse myths that hold development back

Businesses now live and die by data. From managing resources and analyzing performance to hyper-targeted marketing and behavioral analytics, data has become essential to the way companies operate. The demand for data has never been higher -- and it’s only increasing.

This pressure passes directly onto the people who help meet this demand. Data warehouse (DW) and analytics professionals are having to develop new data sets and produce insights at a record pace, all whilst keeping costs down. It’s clear DW acceleration is critical and this is acknowledged across the industry: according to WhereScape and TDWI’s research published this year, 63 percent of data warehouse professionals consider DW acceleration extremely important.

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Maintaining migration success: Pre-migration tips for moving Teams data

As our world grows increasingly digital, the importance of an effective virtual workplace becomes a greater priority for businesses everywhere. With many companies relying on remote workforces, tools like Microsoft Teams have become critical to enabling collaboration and engagement among remote employees. As a result, Teams adoption has skyrocketed. In July 2021, Microsoft reported 250 million monthly active users on Teams.

As corporations continue to leverage cloud-based solutions to enable remote work, the need to keep their digital environments secure and organized remains vital.

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In 2022, security is imperative in the overall company strategy

Laptop security

Over the last 18 months, the world has changed which has impacted everyone personally and in the workplace.  Businesses now have to adopt more flexible, work-from-anywhere strategies. This has increased the potential for security attacks that IT and Operations Teams need to defend against with the majority of employees remotely connecting to critical business systems.

With more companies embracing cloud communications and enabling employees to connect from a myriad of devices using a plethora of business applications, the opportunity for bad actors to compromise critical systems has expanded and security can no longer be an afterthought. It has to be included in the overall company strategy. Here’s what we foresee on the horizon for infrastructure security in 2022.

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Exploring the use of the Python programming language for data engineering

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.

The chief focus of Python was never web development. However, a few years ago, software engineers realized the potential Python held for this particular purpose and the language experienced a massive surge in popularity.

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Developer experience in 2022 -- why will it be so important?

Developer team

In the past, companies have all had a solid focus on customer experience. They built a better, more efficient experience for those they sell to. With this in mind companies saw a rise in sales and loyalty. They realized keeping the customer happy was the key to being competitive in the market.

In parallel companies were also working with their employees to better improve and invest in their experience. They quickly realized that without happy employees they could not keep their customers happy. It looks like developer experience will be going through a similar shift in priority. They are now more and more becoming the focus of cloud providers and technology companies. These companies are investing and building tools to help developers work better, faster, and more efficiently.

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How AI-as-a-Service is perfectly poised to meet next-era production's ramp-up & capacity challenges

Manufacturing and the science of materials are evolving quickly, so the rate of new products and product variations industrials put into the world is increasing. This evolution also means process parameters, which circumscribe the making of things, are proliferating. Meanwhile, the quality metrics of products and components have become more refined than ever before.

As a by-product, industrial equipment sensors generate an abundance and complexity of data far beyond the reach of statistical process control -- let alone human capacity. Semiconductor engineers, for example, must contend with petabytes of data daily. And they do so from wafers with chip architectures fabricated to accommodate hundreds of millions of transistors per square millimeter.

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Washington cannot let Amazon water-down consumer protection legislation

The holiday season is a reminder that with more Americans than ever heading online to do their shopping, lawmakers must continue taking action to prevent consumers from falling prey to internet scammers. That’s why it was welcome news when Amazon recently reversed course on its longstanding opposition to bipartisan consumer protection legislation in Congress that would require third-party online marketplaces to verify independent sellers, with the goal of reducing counterfeits and stolen goods from these platforms.

But while Amazon’s public change of heart seemingly paves the way for the eventual passage of the bill, known as the INFORM Consumers Act, lawmakers must ensure that the retail giant and other tech companies do not work behind the scenes to water down the legislation and render it toothless. Counterfeits pose great harm to consumers and small third-party sellers, and Congress must pass strong, comprehensive enforcement mechanisms to adequately protect both groups.

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2022 will be the year of broadened supply chain security -- here's why

Even a year after the SolarWinds infiltration in late 2020, software supply chain risk continues to dominate the security conversation. Take the Log4Shell vulnerability that recently came to light and caught everyone off guard. Not only is this flaw insanely easy to exploit but the impacted Log4j library is used in nearly every enterprise Java installation -- and the vulnerability gives attackers ultimate power to download, delete, install, and server-hop as they please. As even massive companies like Google, PayPal, Apple, and Netflix are impacted by this flaw via the software supply chain, it’s another one that makes organizations wonder: are we using that too?

In 2022, IT leaders will intensify their supply chain focus to answer this very question, expanding their scrutiny from their own applications to the components they buy and integrate. Widening the scope of the supply chain is crucial; outside software and components need their checks and balances just as code created internally does. This deepened understanding of supply chain risk will increase demands to test and secure everything, from the most seemingly insignificant open source package to the most extensive APIs and third-party components.

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PowerToys alternative ThisIsWin11 gets a huge visual revamp

For anyone making the switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11, there is quite a lot to learn, as well as a reasonable amount of stuff to unlearn. And for anyone venturing out into computing for the first time, or people making the switch from macoS or Linux to Windows, there even more to consider!

ThisIsWin11 is a free portable app that serves several purposes, one of which is introducing some of the key features of Windows 11. The app started life as a simple project to help people to become familiar with the latest version of Windows, but it has expanded to be a tweaking tool as well. And the latest incarnation introduces a completely new look.

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