Can businesses return to 'normal', post-pandemic?
Few businesses have been able to avoid the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic -- the necessity of strict social distancing and national lockdowns including closure of non-essential retail created a major financial strain on organizations across the country.
Recent figures paint a promising picture of businesses’ recoveries. Indeed, the ONS recorded an increase of 9.4 percent in investments made by businesses in Q3 2020. However, there is still a tremendous distance ahead on the path to recovery; the latest figures show Q1 2021 investment levels still 18.4 percent lower than Q4 2019, the last wholly pre-pandemic quarter.
3 reasons QA and monitoring must merge to support new customer expectations
Customer expectations have dramatically shortened the software development cycle. The question now for development teams is how to ensure quality assurance and innovation.
Traditionally, QA was a major step in the process. Developers would create the software. Quality assurance engineers would test it. But customers now want new versions and features more quickly, and the traditional approach to QA simply takes too much time.
Why a web hosting partner could save you a headache
When you’re getting a website off the ground, lots of factors come into consideration -- from the design and functionality, to the content that will populate the site. Hosting is one area that shouldn’t be forgotten about.
Partnering with another company to support your web capabilities can seem like a daunting task. But if you ask the right questions up front and do your research properly, you’ll avoid getting stuck with a service that doesn’t meet your needs. Before signing on the dotted line for any website hosting plan, make sure you take time to consider the following things.
How the pandemic has impacted communication service providers across different vertical markets
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a lasting impact on countries around the world and, even with the successful vaccination roll out, regions are still moving in and out of lockdowns. Containment measures have, as you would expect, caused a substantial drop in business activity across Europe, especially in contact-intensive sectors. Economic growth is expected to pick up throughout 2021 as vaccines become more widely distributed. However, communication service providers have seen a significant surge in demand because of the pandemic. Overnight they saw demand spike as organizations moved to a distributed workforce.
With many businesses now committing to a more hybrid working model, communication service providers will continue to experience high demand for the foreseeable future, which presents a unique set of challenges.
4 ways to optimize workforce productivity in 2021
As organizations become global and teams get increasingly distributed, establishing and maintaining workforce productivity becomes crucial to drive business success. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations realized that, in the absence of proper infrastructure and setup, global teams battle several challenges such as poor communication and fragmented collaboration that can deter any organization's growth.
With dispersed resources and remote onboarding of people and teams, getting the correct technology setup and helping the workforce perform optimally becomes extremely challenging.
AI isn't biased, but you might be
We've all seen the headlines suggesting that AI is racist and sexist. However, many people overlook one important fact -- that AI is simply a tool, incapable of being inherently biased. That’s not to say AI isn’t capable of producing biased outcomes -- as the headlines show, it certainly is. But it can only ever be as biased as the data upon which it relies.
So how can developers and marketers avoid deploying biased AI? Unfortunately, there is no magic one-size-fits-all solution. As with any successful technology deployment within a business, it requires a thorough understanding of the datasets you are working with, and the outcomes AI can produce with said data. The first step is knowing what to look for.
Architectural options for ensuring high availability and disaster recovery in SQL Server
Architecturally speaking, what’s the difference between configuring SQL Server for high availability (HA) and configuring it for disaster recovery (DR)? The terms HA and DR are so often paired that one might imagine them to be the same -- when in fact they are distinct approaches to mitigating different risks.
Let’s start by distinguishing the risks. Let’s say your mission critical SQL Server infrastructure resides in a datacenter in Orlando, Florida. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your own data center, a co-location facility, or a cloud data center. A category 5 hurricane causes a catastrophic failure of the data center and your critical SQL Server infrastructure goes offline.
7 reasons to make your website a progressive web app
These days progressive web applications (PWAs) are gaining their share in the web world. They have become a decent alternative to native mobile applications. There is even an opinion that progressive web apps have enough potential to become the future of the web.
In this article, we will discuss the core benefits of this advanced technology. You will find out what makes PWAs so special and why you should consider turning your website into a progressive web app.
Best practice steps for safe data sharing
Digital data is everywhere. You only have to look at how much data is transmitted over the internet on a weekly, daily, hourly, or even second-by-second basis to understand just how much data is being shared. In fact, at the start of 2020, the amount of data in the world was estimated to be 44 zettabytes. Given how much data is created every day, pundits predict that this will likely increase to 175 zettabytes by 2025.
As employees and businesses, we are constantly sharing information. Likewise, the number and variety of entities and individuals we share that information with has grown exponentially. No longer is this simply restricted to the perimeter of our own businesses, but it now extends to partners, suppliers, customers, prospects, and influencers around the globe. Consequently, the challenge for most organizations now is: how do we share data easily, quickly, yet also securely?
Leveraging MISP and TheHive when you create your cyber threat intelligence practice
Many CISOs I speak with across Europe tell me their cybersecurity teams rely on two, primary open-source platforms within their security operations (SecOps). The first is Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP), that allows the storing and sharing of indicators of compromise (IoCs) with other MISP users. The second is TheHive, designed for security incident response (IR). The two solutions are tightly integrated so that SOCs, CERTs and any security practitioner can act more quickly when incidents happen.
For organizations with limited resources or just beginning to build a SecOps practice, MISP and TheHive are easy-to-use tools to help your teams react to malicious threats. The next step to proactively mitigate risk from the full breadth of threats your organization is facing, is to leverage MISP and TheHive to create a cyber threat intelligence (CTI) practice. To do this, you need to consider a third platform that integrates with these two solutions and provides five essential capabilities for a CTI practice so your teams can get ahead of threats.
Why digital transformation is an ongoing process for enterprises
It’s already well known that COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation. McKinsey estimates that it shot forward by about 7 years of progress within just a few months, and CNBC reports that 85 percent of companies sped up their digital transformation plans, but the real question is what happens now?
You could say that there are 3 main pillars to digital transformation, and they don’t necessarily take place one after another. These pillars include:
Finding the formula to combat back-to-work anxiety in STEM
Mental health is a popular topic at the moment, while the majority of us were trying to maintain a healthy routine and lifestyle while stuck indoors, it begged the question, what about after lockdown? Back to work anxiety was bad enough for some of us after months of leisure time and lie ins. But entering the next stage of eased lockdown regulation is a cause of mental health disruption for some of us, bringing a sense of unease, worry, and anxiety.
At first, the thought of losing our freedom and summer plans caused anxiety in itself, but once we got used to our new life it subsided. While some are eagerly anticipating a return to work and normality, others are genuinely distressed by it -- whether this is facilitated by concerns of the virus or facing our colleagues, there’s a real issue that needs addressing.
Digital transformation: 5 steps your company must take to succeed instead of survive
COVID-19 has changed the way companies think about digital transformation because it has accelerated the need to increase business connectivity while operating from decentralized settings.
Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) have been tasked with keeping their places of business at the forefront of the latest tech innovations. In a recent Gartner survey, 47 percent of respondents said their CTO is dedicated to modernizing core technology infrastructure in order to spur innovation.
Why IT needs smarter cloud security
For IT and security professionals, the job of keeping the enterprise secure is becoming an ever more complex proposition. In addition to the fact that distributed working looks set to become a permanent feature, keeping up with a raft of emerging new technologies while dealing with the rising tide of cyber threats means there is a growing number of tasks to keep on top of.
With time and resources in short supply, gaining full visibility of data from across the entire security stack will be key to achieving better and more comprehensive threat detection. But maintaining robust policies and controls also depends on adopting technology that is able to adapt quickly and self-learn from user behaviors.
Edward Snowden: The untold story of how one patriotic American exposed NSA surveillance
Edward Snowden might not yet be a historical figure, but he certainly is a hero. He is the whistleblower of all whistleblowers, the American who blew the lid off of Washington's spying on private citizens. But Snowden’s leak revealed that it’s not just the U.S. government that is spying on virtually every American -- big American telecommunications companies are also helping them to spy as well.
Snowden’s upbringing is largely uneventful. His maternal grandfather was a Coast Guard rear admiral and his father was also an officer in the Coast Guard. His mother was a U.S. District Court clerk. His parents divorced around the time that he would have graduated high school in 2001, but Snowden is a high school dropout. After a nine-month absence due to mononucleosis, he simply took the GED exam and then began taking community college classes. Despite a lack of a bachelor’s degree, he worked at a master’s online from the University of Liverpool.
© 1998-2024 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.