Articles about Cloud

It is now several months since Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. As such, the developers of numerous apps and services are following suit -- Google included.

The company has revealed that it will end support for Google Drive for desktop on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 later this summer. No 32-bit version of Windows will be supported either, meaning that Drive users will have to upgrade their operating system, or stick with the web-based version of Google's cloud storage service.

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Modern enterprises hold huge volumes of data and increasingly it's stored in the cloud. This means that protecting the information is a significant challenge and it can even be easy to lose track of where data is.

We spoke to Dan Benjamin, co-founder and CEO of Dig Security, to discuss the risks around cloud data storage and how to address them.

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Cloud incident response company Mitiga has released research on a significant forensic security deficiency in Google Workspace that enables threat actors to exfiltrate data in Google Drive without any trace.

Data theft is one of the most common motives for attack, and with more than six million businesses using Google Workspace -- including Google Drive -- the cloud-based repository has been a prime target for data exfiltration.

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In the last 12 months, 90 percent of organizations have suffered an identity-related incident, an increase of six percent over the previous year.

A new report, based on an online survey of over 500 identity and security professionals, from The Identity Defined Security Alliance, shows that only 49 percent of respondents say that their leadership teams understand identity and security risks and proactively invest in protection before suffering an incident, while 29 percent only engage and support after an incident.

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Moving to the cloud has always presented something of a challenge, but the pandemic made things even more difficult because of the need to manage more applications across a distributed workforce.

Add in the issue of shadow IT, and enterprises are increasingly struggling with SaaS sprawl. We spoke to BetterCloud CTO, Jamie Tischart to learn more about the problem and how to deal with it.

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New analysis by Orca Security of scan results from its Cloud Security Platform reveals the top risks facing organizations this year.

The analysis of workload, configuration and identity data from real-world production cloud assets on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes and more identifies five of the most common, yet severe, cloud security risks which are found in many cloud environments.

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Google has announced an update to its inactive account policies that means some user accounts will be deleted before the end of the year.

The company says that accounts that have not been accessed for two years will be deleted starting in December. While the deletion of inactive accounts might seem fairly innocuous, there are serious implications for many people, such as those who have used Google cloud storage, or Gmail, as a means of backing up data and have had no reason to access their account since.

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Microsoft has been spotted scanning for malware within password protected zip files stored on its cloud services.

Security researcher Andrew Brandt was among those to notice that Microsoft appears to be bypassing passwords added to zip archives in order to check for malware. While the intentions of the company may be good, the practice raises serious questions about privacy and security.

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Despite the fact that insecure password practices are regularly exploited in cyberattacks worldwide, 83 percent of cloud professionals surveyed at the recent Cloud Expo Europe event say they are confident about passwords' security effectiveness, with 34 percent 'very confident'.

But the study, of over 150 people, carried out by Beyond Identity also reveals frustrations. 60 percent find it frustrating to remember multiple passwords, 52 percent are frustrated by having to regularly change their passwords, and 52 percent by the requirement to choose long passwords containing numbers and symbols.

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Businesses of all sizes have had to accelerate digitization across the entire business in recent years, as the adoption of hybrid working practices forces them to make changes to ensure operational continuity. By digitizing processes and embracing the cloud, businesses have delivered faster, more flexible, and more resilient services for employees and customers.

The rate of cloud adoption shows no signs of relenting. Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud end-user spending to reach nearly $600 billion in 2023. This growth presents a multitude of opportunities, but the compounded cyber risk that comes with a widening digital footprint presents IT and security teams with an immense challenge.

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Google used yesterday's Google I/O to announce new services and capabilities across Google Cloud and Workspace.

Among these is Duet AI, an AI-powered collaborator, to enable more users and developers to start seeing the impact AI can have on their organization and help solve day-to-day work challenges.

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The introduction of advanced technologies has opened a world of possibilities for global corporate growth. The problem is that IT department budgets continue to be constrained, limiting the scope of technology investments at large.

This means that business leaders need to innovate to be prepared for changing business conditions. Advancing their digital transformation roadmaps should take priority as this will likely provide the greatest return on IT investment since the technology choices they make today will have a major impact on future success.

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In the dash to move systems to the cloud it's easy to become dependent on the services of a specific vendor, making it time-consuming or costly to move to an alternative at a later date.

We spoke to Cooper Lutz, chief architect, digital solutions at AHEAD, to get his advice for IT teams making their way to the cloud on the best practices to mitigate vendor lock-in.

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A new study from Vega Cloud on the use of cloud software and services by enterprise IT executives shows 48 percent expect to reduce their IT spending a little or a lot in 2023.

In addition, 65 percent say that reducing their cloud spending will be a goal for this year, while three-quarters of IT execs surveyed say they plan to cut cloud costs by between 10 and 50 percent in 2023.

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Digital and cloud transformation has unlocked new business opportunities and operational efficiencies for organizations. But migration to the cloud also means our approach to deploying applications and services has radically changed, as enterprises move away from traditional data centers. Likewise, flexible working means users have also moved away from traditional offices and branches.

As a result, organizations that were once heavily dependent on MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) have either moved, or are moving, away and it has lost its dominance. Today, many organizations have either deployed, or are looking to deploy, SD-WAN over the internet. However, the move away from MPLS to an internet-based SD-WAN solution means that some global organizations are now struggling with the performance of their inter-region connectivity. Using the internet between regions – across longer distances and where applications are not locally hosted – can present issues.

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