Expense reporting can be a headache for both employees and businesses.

For employees, hanging onto receipts and filling out detailed paperwork is tedious and gets in the way of more productive tasks. It can be easy to lose track of important information needed to file reports correctly, especially for frequent travelers. Traditional reporting procedures put the onus on the employee to keep tabs on one more thing -- on top of doing their jobs.

In 2020, companies like Tesla and Aerion (supersonic jets) flaunted 'Digital Twins' as being the cornerstones of their product design prowess.

This concept of representing physical objects in digital fashion is an extension of the general computer simulation industry that has been decades in the making. If 'software is eating the world', it seems that for the applied sciences type of domain, computer simulations have officially become the standard utensils.

Ford and Google are to create a new partnership designed to accelerate the automobile giant’s digital transformation, and reinvent the connected vehicle.

The two firms are creating a new collaborative group, called Team Upshift, to leverage the talent and assets of both companies and unlock personalized consumer experiences and data-based opportunities. These will potentially include new retail options and ownership offers based on connected vehicle data.

If you’re an avid Sling user then you likely pay the extra $5 per month for the cloud DVR Plus service. It works like any other DVR, except recordings just aren’t on your hard drive. The TV service has been providing this for a couple of years and it’s been a big frustration for many users because the limit was a bit stingy. 

No longer -- the company has upped the space in a big way and, if you haven’t already, you’ll be getting a notification the next time you sign in. 

For companies that deal in sensitive information, keeping data secure in the cloud and for remote working is a major challenge.

To help meet this TetherView is launching an innovative managed private cloud service called 'Digital Bunker' which offers a 'one-way-in and one-way-out' private cloud solution for enterprise customers.

Digital risk protection platform CybelAngel has updated its offering to include asset discovery and monitoring in order to help businesses identify hidden risks.

It can uncover hidden, rogue or obscure devices and services existing outside of the security team's awareness and control. These shadow assets include file servers, cloud databases, connected industrial systems and IoT devices.

2020 showed all the ways that data protection could go wrong. Ransomware took off on a steady incline throughout the year with record numbers of data theft, corruption, etc. Data sprawl and cloud access to data have also become threats, as many employees moved to remote work and expanded companies’ potentially vulnerable data environments. 

Organizations are paying more attention to security and data protection issues while utilizing cloud to better manage and protect their critical data. 

According to a new report from mobile security specialist Wandera 52 percent of organizations experienced a malware incident on a remote device in 2020, up from 37 percent in 2019.

The report is based on captured data from Wandera's global network of 425 million sensors across both corporate-owned and BYOD assets, making it the world’s largest and most insightful mobile data set.

After an extraordinary year, businesses around the world are anxious to embrace 2021 as a year of renewed focus and a return to normalcy. But businesses must continue to focus on best practices and investments that will enable them to navigate the path ahead.

Much uncertainty remains in the coming year as the impacts of the global pandemic linger. Many of the workplace changes we adopted in 2020 will, by necessity, continue this year.

Almost half (49 percent) of companies globally expect to increase IT spending in 2021, while 19 percent expect to keep it the same and 32 percent expect it to decrease, according to a new report from Flexera.

The pandemic has had an effect too, with 57 percent saying they increased spend to-date for SaaS due to COVID, and 49 percent saying they increased public cloud spend, while 36 percent decreased spend on on-premises software.

Over half (54 percent) of organizations that store customer data in the cloud had security incidents in 2020. As a result, as many as 62 percent plan to remove sensitive data from the cloud or have already done so to improve their data security.

These are the findings of a new report from Netwrix which shows the most common types of cloud security incidents in 2020 are phishing (reported by 40 percent of organizations), ransomware or other malware (24 percent), and accidental data leakage (17 percent).

A new survey finds that 85 percent of IT decision makers are planning to up their budgets for 2021, with 65 percent of companies indicating that cloud migration is a top priority.

The study by automated cloud migration company Next Pathway shows most companies are in the early stages of moving to the cloud and 94 percent say application migrations will be performed over multiple months or years.

We've seen a general move to the cloud over the last few years, while 2020's pandemic has forced more organizations to turn to the cloud in order to support their remote workers.

Can we expect this trend to continue into next year and what other factors might come into play?

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major influence on spending and digital transformation plans in 2020 with many businesses speeding up plans to move to the cloud.

A new study from BillingPlatform of 300 CFOs and senior finance executives shows that this trend is likely to continue into 2021. Respondents named their three top priorities as investing in cloud-based technologies (42 percent), identifying ways to drive higher revenue through new products and services (41 percent) and reducing operating costs or capital investments (36 percent).

With Salesforce purchasing Slack for $27.7 billion and Microsoft Teams reporting over 115 million daily users, the market for collaboration tools is proving that they are here to stay. With the ubiquity of remote work, companies are reliant on sharing data outside of the traditional, on-premises network to reach employees in their homes. Accordingly, for organizations to optimize their communication platforms’ utility, data policies should allow remote access to files. Consequently, lots of organizations have been forced into accelerating their cloud adoption to meet the needs of their remote workforce, leaving the question: what is to become of legacy systems?

While there is a lot of thought being given to new cloud initiatives, this narrow focus can sometimes let legacy data and systems fall by the wayside. Data regulations do not only pertain to the storage of new information, but they also mandate the proper storage of data from recent years past. Consequently, while it is critical during cloud transition to consider how to defensibly govern data remotely, consideration must also be given to how to scrub, remove, change, delete, and recall data in legacy systems as well. If you cannot access user records, personal data, corporate regulatory data, and legal requirements, then simply storing it is pointless as it fails to meet the demands of regulators. As we have recently seen from the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act, any customer may request that an organization produce their stored personal data, and not meeting these requests can cost millions.