Building an agile IT budget

budget keyboard

As the number of people working remotely increases, organizations are relying more heavily on IT to manage day-to-day activities. This new demand placed on IT infrastructure, especially cloud technologies, brings with it a change. Instead of building a budget in the background, IT professionals need to evaluate how information is going to be consumed by the organization going forward.

In light of the current climate, business priorities are changing. To build a budget that’s agile and can react to changes in service consumption, it’s up to IT professionals to work with the wider organization to really understand what’s important going forward. Many organizations are starting to look to cloud-based technologies as a way to mobilize their workforce in the long term. This means as users continue to work remotely, they will consume more bandwidth and data at an increasingly exponential rate. This increase in consumption has a direct impact on the IT department and subsequently the budget.  

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Enterprises ramp up AI/ML spending despite deployment challenges

Artificial intelligence

In response to the economic impact of COVID-19 companies are turning to their investments in AI to deliver both short-term cost-cutting and long-term technology innovation to drive revenue and efficiency.

A report from ML operations and management software specialist Algorithmia finds that 83 percent of organizations have increased their budgets for AI/ML and that the average number of data scientists employed has increased 76 percent year-on-year.

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New platform helps protect IoT devices

Internet of things

There are likely to be around 31 billion IoT devices by the end of this year and we already know that they can be vulnerable to attacks.

Israeli company Karamba Security is launching its XGuard Monitor platform aimed at managing the security of large numbers of IoT devices.

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Pandemic speeds up migration of infrastructure to the cloud

Storage

A new report from hybrid infrastructure solutions provider INAP shows that 54 percent of tech leaders say the pandemic has motivated their organization to move applications and workloads off-premise.

The survey of 500 IT infrastructure managers and senior technology leaders reveals that 53 percent say that their organizations are migrating to colocation and hyperscale public cloud environments, with 50 percent also turning to hosted private cloud solutions.

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Spammers get better at pretending to be banks

password theft

As always, spammers and cybercriminals seek to take advantage of the peak online shopping season covering Black Friday and the Christmas holidays.

The Bitdefender Antispam Lab has identified a series of campaigns impersonating online banking and financial organizations. In October six in 10 emails (58.84 percent) relating to the banking industry were fraudulent.

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DNS threats expected to surge over the holidays

DNS

With more people shopping online than ever before, 78 percent of cybersecurity professionals say they expect to see an increase in DNS-related security threats over the next month.

This is according to a new report from information services and technology company Neustar's International Security Council which also finds that 59 percent have altered their DNS security methods in the run up to the holiday season.

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Microsoft releases an off-schedule update to PowerToys

PowerToys

Having released the experimental PowerToys v0.28 earlier this week complete with the video conference mute feature, Microsoft has now released an update to the stable version of its Windows 10 utility collection.

We were not expecting to see an update to PowerToys v0.27 just yet, but Microsoft has produced one out of the blue. The company says it deemed the release "important" as it addresses a number of issues.

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PNY launches 1TB PRO Elite SDXC flash memory card

EBB7DF0F-5067-4202-8A4D-21E0D940D8A4

Having 1TB of storage in a tiny memory card may not be so incredible to consumers these days, but to me, it is still quite amazing. Hell, many computers -- including the newest Apple MacBook Air and Mac mini -- have just 256GB of storage by default. So yeah, having 1TB of storage in an SD card is impressive.

Now, PNY launches its 1TB PRO Elite SDXC flash memory card, and photographers should be very excited. Not only does it offer a lot of storage capacity, but it is very fast too.

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ADATA XPG DEFENDER PRO is a mid-tower PC case for both NVIDIA and AMD gamers

XPG-DEFENDER-PRO

We recently told you about the ADATA XPG STARKER -- a beautiful compact ATX mid-tower gaming PC chassis. That case was notable for being small while also accommodating a full-ATX motherboard.

And now, ADATA has another elegant chassis that goes in the other direction. Called "XPG DEFENDER PRO," it is instead quite deep, allowing it to support up to E-ATX boards. It should also be able to fit the latest NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards without issue. The front of the case is a beautiful mesh, which will allow optimal air-pull.

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Happy 10th Birthday, Google Play Books!

10th-birthday

Reading books is for nerds, right? Well, that depends on your definition of "nerd," I suppose. While I must confess to not being a regular reader, I greatly admire those that are. Reading is surely a better way to spend time than mindlessly watching sports on TV -- something I am quite guilty of doing.

So no, reading is not for nerds, nor is it nerdy -- it is quite the respected hobby, actually. And thanks to technology, many folks now read eBooks -- paper books are so last century. While Amazon is likely the most popular company for selling digital books via Kindle, it should not be forgotten that Google does this as well. In fact, Google Play Books (the search giant's book store), is celebrating a 10th Birthday this week. Time really flies, eh?

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92 percent of SMBs turn to new technology during the pandemic

Small business owner laptop

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a dramatic evolution in the ways that smaller businesses interact with their customers.

In fact, 92 percent of all small business personnel surveyed in a new study from Moxtra say their organizations have adopted new technologies during the pandemic.

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Number of 2020 vulnerabilities set to overtake last year

Software testing

The latest report from Risk Based Security reveals that the number of vulnerability disclosures this year is back on track to reach or surpass 2019 after a decline in the first quarter.

Earlier in the year there had been a sharp decline of 19.2 percent in the number of vulnerabilities disclosed. But on the latest figures Risk Based Security's VulnDB team aggregated 17,129 vulnerabilities disclosed during the first three quarters of 2020, marking a mere 4.6 percent gap when compared to last year.

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Insider threats now more common than external ones

Insider threat

A new report from Netwrix shows that cybersecurity risks related to insiders are now more common than external threat actors.

In fact, since organizations have increased remote working, four of the top six types of cybersecurity incidents they experienced have been caused by internal users. These are: accidental mistakes by admins (27 percent), accidental improper sharing of data by employees (26 percent), misconfiguration of cloud services (16 percent) and data theft by employees (14 percent).

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Brand new Kodi 19 'Matrix' available -- download it NOW!

Kodi-Matrix-Beta2

The Kodi Foundation has been hard at work finishing up the next iteration of its hugely popular home theater software. Kodi 19 'Matrix' offers a number of big changes, including a switch to Python 3 for add-ons, improved music handling, an interface makeover, and PVR reminders.

Today, the team rolls out a new update and you won’t want to miss it.

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Apple is offering free screen replacements for iPhones with touch issues

Black iPhone

If you have an iPhone with a screen which has become unresponsive to touch, you might be in line for a free replacement.

Apple has launched a new display module replacement program for iPhone 11 handsets. The company says that it is only this model of iPhone that is affected, and in order to qualify for a free replacement, the handset needs to have been produced between November 2019 and May 2020.

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