Articles about 2020

Yesterday, I predicted the demise of conventional IT caused by the wide adoption of SD-WAN and SASE, accelerated by the emergency demands of everyone working from home. Now that Congress has passed a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 bail-out, let’s throw-in the implications of that legislation to see what effect it is all likely to have on what used to be IT. The short version is to expect an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever. Please understand that some version of this bloodbath was going to happen anyway. What matters right now is how we respond to it.

While my previous column was generally about turning lower-level IT nerds into Uber drivers, this one goes a little further up the food chain to include IT contractors and consultants. Yes, I’ll be using IBM as an example, not because Big Blue is anything like a bellwether anymore, but because I just know it so well.

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IT -- Information Technology -- grew out of something we called MIS -- Management Information Systems -- but both meant a kid in a white shirt who brought you a new keyboard when yours broke. Well, the kid is now gone, sent home with everyone else, and that kid isn’t coming back… ever. IT is near death, fading by the day. But don’t blame COVID-19 because the death of IT was inevitable. This novel coronavirus just made it happen a little quicker.

I mentioned the switch from MIS to IT because that name change presaged the events I am describing here. Management Information Systems was an artifact of big business, where corporate life was managed rather than lived. Information Technology happened when MIS escaped into the wild. MIS meant office buildings and Local Area Networks while IT includes home workers in their pajamas which, frankly, describes me at this precise moment.

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For 20+ years I’ve been writing predictions every January and I guess I’m doing another set now. But this time will be different for several reasons. For one, January is over, so it has sloughed over into February. For another, I always start by going back to the year before and grading my previous year’s predictions. I’m the only guy in this business who does that. But this year I am going to bury the score a bit because I need to start with a prediction simply because it's immediate and really can’t wait. So I’ll do the scoring later, but today I have my first 2020 prediction to get out of the way.

And, finally, there is one more difference between this year and every other: this year I’ll not just say what I think is going to happen, I’ll also say what I think should happen. I’m old and cranky and there are only a couple of these so just bear with me.

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Individuals, brands, marketers and creatives looking to make a splash this year need to make sure their content -- be it images or videos -- is fresh and relevant.

Shutterstock has analyzed data gathered over a 12-month period from billions of customer searches for photos, illustrations, footage, and music, and produced a report predicting the styles that are set to dominate this year.

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Internet of Things devices are now an accepted part of our home and business lives. They've led to increased focus on edge computing too thanks to the large volumes of data they generate, but what do industry experts think is going to happen in this sector in 2020?

Karl Sigler, threat intelligence manager at Trustwave SpiderLabs thinks the dev-security lifecycle will become the Achilles heel for IoT devices. "IoT devices are not getting any safer. With the huge influx of IoT devices in homes and organizations, the attack surface targeted by criminals is just getting larger and more diverse. Manufacturers and developers need to take the security reins. But today's IoT solutions are often missing security quality assurance during their product development lifecycle. High bandwidth, direct connections to the internet via 5G will increase the threat of Mirai-like botnets. These direct connections will also provide attackers the ability to bypass perimeter protections that are normally in place in homes and organizations. All manufacturers should add security vetting to their product development lifecycle, especially with the cloud and 5G in mind, to get IoT device security in check before the number of vulnerable devices in the market becomes overwhelming."

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With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) set to come into force in January, privacy and how companies use data is set to be one of the big themes of 2020. What do some of the industry’s leading figures think this will mean?

Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Segment believes, "Though the GDPR roll-out should have given American companies a good taste of what was to come, it's still likely that most will do the bare minimum to comply with the CCPA until the US government starts enforcing it in 2020.

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Not too long ago, information security was a human scale issue. Because the number of assets to compromise was contained, and because there were only a few attack vectors in the adversarial arsenal, enterprises were able to train security analysts to identify and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities.

Managed endpoints, internal applications, routers, switches, DNS servers and domain controllers compromised the majority of an enterprise’s network presence. In today’s world, mobile devices, cloud applications, IoT, and third party connections to vendors have dramatically grown the enterprise digital footprint. Additionally, adversaries were not nearly as sophisticated as they are today, leveraging only a small fraction of modern day attack vectors. Today’s threat actors have a much larger arsenal of attack vectors to use, including newly discovered vulnerabilities, misconfigured cloud services, and more services and applications exposed to the internet.

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Artificial intelligence is making its way into more and more areas of our lives. But what can we expect to see happen in this area in 2020? Some industry experts share their views on the latest AI trends.

Synthetic data specialist ARM Insight believes, "There will be a huge investment return gap between those using basic analytics or simplistic machine learning on data from those that are using true artificial intelligence. Machine learning simply won’t cut it any more. Artificial intelligence will be the only path to maximum data value."

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It's the time of year again where the great and good of the tech sector like to consult the tea leaves, gaze into the crystal ball, read the runes -- and of course draw on their industry knowledge -- to give their predictions for the year ahead.

So, what do they think is in store for cybersecurity in 2020?

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It's hard to believe that artificial intelligence is in its earliest stages. But for however many Alexas and self-driving cars we have now, experts say we have only scratched the surface of what AI can achieve.

In 2020, we'll see even more new applications of it -- here's what to expect.

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New data published by INAP at Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas this week reveals the top challenges IT professionals expect to face in 2020.

Migrating applications to the cloud tops the list for 37 percent (up from 34 percent last year) while protecting against cyber attacks is in second place chosen by 31 percent (down from 36 percent).

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Every year, threat actors will continue to evolve their current tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that they use in order to exfiltrate customer, company and partner data, interrupt business operations, implant ransomware, and more. In fact, cybercrime damage costs are predicted to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021, according to research from Cybersecurity Ventures. In 2020, as cybercriminals refine their methods, we will continue to see a plethora of breaches occur due to a common vulnerability: misconfigurations.

Despite organizations running an average of 40 percent of their workloads in the public cloud, most companies fail to be able to accurately identify the risk of misconfiguration in public cloud as higher than the risk in traditional IT environments. In the new year we will also see a greater focus placed on identity in cloud security -- a challenge that’s easier said than done, since approaches that worked in traditional data center environments do not translate to the cloud.

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Adobe has released major new versions of its entry level image and video-editing suites with the joint release of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 and Adobe Premiere Elements 2020 for Windows and Mac.

Both new products add a smattering of new features to add to their already rich capabilities. Photoshop Elements includes the ability to automatically colorize photos and select subjects in a photo with a single click, while Premiere Elements adds a feature to reduce grain from noisy videos.

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Being a Windows Insider can be very confusing these days. It used to be there was only one Windows 10 preview version to test -- the next feature update of the OS -- but now there are Skip Ahead flights rolling out which let users test versions of Windows 10 that won’t see the light of day for another year. Crazy.

On Tuesday Microsoft released Windows 10 19H1 Build 18346 to the Fast ring, and today we get Windows 10 20H1 Build 18845 for Skip Ahead Insiders. To access this build you will need to have opted in to Skip Ahead. That branch is now closed, but it's still possible to get access should you wish to. Follow the instructions here.

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