Four best practices for leveraging Office 365 Groups
It’s no secret that cloud-based collaboration tools are transforming the way we work, and Microsoft, with Office 365, is playing a major role in shifting workplace communication. Last year, Microsoft continued to enhance and develop Office 365 Groups as a powerful hub for team productivity. When armed with Office 365 Groups, employees have the opportunity to collaborate within a dedicated space with popular Office 365 features like mail, persistent chat, and collaboration powered by familiar technologies like Exchange, SharePoint, OneNote, Skype for Business, and Planner.
Before organizations can embrace this new way of working, however, IT teams need to combat the challenges of natively managing Office 365 Groups. Why? First, there are several ways for users in an organization to create a Group within an Office 365 tenant -- meaning IT admins must determine the most effective way to implement administrative controls to prevent unnecessary sprawl. Once users have the ability to create new Office 365 Groups, IT is also tasked with controlling group membership, placing safeguards around content within groups, and overseeing the lifecycle of Groups, including the eventual decision to delete or archive a Group and its content.
Security professionals still struggle with the cloud and IoT
Organizations are using multiple cloud services and security staff are worried about the visibility problems this presents as well as the risks presented by IoT devices.
These are the findings of a survey of RSA attendees, carried out by security management and threat intelligence specialist AlienVault. A third of respondents to the survey describe the state of security monitoring within their organization as 'complex and chaotic'.
Amazon unveils Connect contact center solution
Amazon has announced a new contact center solution aimed to "power millions of customer conversations." The solution, named Amazon Connect, is a cloud-based offering, with customers paying by the minute of usage.
It all starts with the "Virtual Contact Center" solution, integrated deep within AWS. According to Amazon, it only takes a couple of minutes to set the feature up and it requires no special training to use. Payment by the minute goes on top of telephony costs, a pricing model AWS uses in its cloud services, too.
IBM announces price-competitive cold storage solutions
IBM is jumping on the cold storage bandwagon, offering a service and trying to take Amazon, Microsoft, and Google a piece of their pie. The company recently announced the launch of IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault, which basically stores data that only needs to be accessed every once in a while.
There will also be a cold storage service with "pay as you use" model, called IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex, coming later this year.
Amazon makes it cheaper to build and host Alexa skills
Thousands of Alexa developers can now build and host most Alexa skills for free using Amazon Web Services (AWS), thanks to a newly released Amazon program.
Previously, developers have had at their disposal the AWS Free Tier, offering a million AWS Lambda requests and a total of 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) -- monthly, for free. However, exceeding these limits also meant monthly fees.
UK cloud adoption rises five percent
The overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 88 percent, according to a new report by the Cloud Industry Forum. The report also states that there has been a five percent increase year-on-year, and an 83 percent increase since 2010, when the first stats were taken.
What’s also interesting in this report is that two thirds (67 percent) of users expect to increase their cloud service adoption over the coming year. A "vast majority," the report claims, will maintain a hybrid IT estate for some time.
Businesses deploy sensitive data to new environments without adequate security
According to a new report, 93 percent of enterprises will use sensitive data in advanced technology environments (such as cloud, SaaS, big data, IoT and container) this year.
But 63 percent of those respondents also believe their organizations are deploying these technologies ahead of having appropriate data security solutions in place. These are the findings of the latest Data Threat Report from Thales e-Security and 451 Research.
Lessons that founders must learn from the CloudPets breach
As a founder and innovator, you can't help but love the cloud. It's easy to use, it lets you get projects started quicker, and helps deploy them faster, too. But, as quickly as you can innovate and go to market with the cloud, you can also fail -- particularly if you don't pay attention to the small details and implement security from the get go.
I can only imagine what happened to the team at CloudPets, who recently suffered a major breach. This breach now has CEOs questioning what would happen if they were in the same boat.
The buzzwords that will take 2017 by storm
The technology industry is full of jargon and buzzwords, which, if you’re not in the club, can often feel like a foreign language. When it comes to communicating new technologies and processes to other parts of the business, IT professionals need to be careful when translating these buzzwords into human-speak if they want to avoid a confused, blank look. It’s this confusion that results in a data breach, shadow IT activity, or missing out on investment in new IT equipment.
Whether it’s to educate yourself or others, we’ve de-coded the buzzwords. Now the next time someone asks you "what the blockchain you’re on about," rather than giving them SaaS, you can breakdown the meaning, benefit, and importance.
Plex Cloud lets you access your media when your server is switched off
Plex has introduced a new feature that makes it possible to store media files in the cloud.
Plex Cloud has been in beta for some time, but it's now available to anyone with a Plex Pass subscription, and it works with Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.
Check Point adds advanced security to the Google Cloud Platform
Businesses often have security concerns surrounding moving their data to the cloud. For users of the popular Google Cloud Platform, Check Point is offering additional security with the launch of a new product.
The release of vSEC for Google Cloud Platform delivers advanced security that is built for agile and scalable cloud environments.
Microsoft Azure Blueprint helps public organizations move faster to the cloud
Microsoft is looking to help public sector organizations cut on the time needed to get Microsoft Azure up and running. According to a new announcement it has made, it will now take organizations hours, instead of weeks, to get things rolling.
The company has revealed a blueprint that "reinforces its cloud security principles," and a UK official template for creating workloads in Azure and Service Bus Premium Messaging.
Should enterprises dump legacy software?
It may be hard to believe, but many companies still rely on spreadsheets to manage their business. In fact, according to a survey, one in five businesses use them to communicate and track data internally. With big data, cloud and SaaS technologies at our fingertips (literally), why are companies still using them to get important work done?
A new TrackVia survey sheds some light on this phenomenon. It reveals that business and IT executives feel that current enterprise software is too expensive and inflexible, overly time-consuming, or excessively complicated to adopt. Due to this reality, employees have no other choice than to resort to emailing spreadsheets around to get their work done.
Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview 3 is now available
Microsoft has announced an extension of Azure technologies on-premises, as well as a couple of Azure Stack updates. According to a blog post announcing the new features, the updates will enable organizations with hybrid cloud environments to have the same flexibility and innovation capability to match their business objectives and app design.
Organizations looking to create new apps, or re-work their current ones, on both cloud and on-premises environments, now have three unique hybrid cloud scenarios on offer.
Digital transformation must be a priority in a cloud-first world
As the UK enters an uncertain economic future, the issue of falling productivity is once again center stage. Since the 2008 financial crisis, studies measuring how much output is produced per hour or worker have been constant disappointments when compared to the country’s global counterparts. According to the latest reports from the Office of National Statistics, UK productivity rose by 0.4 percent between July and September 2016. However, this figure is still far below the 2.1 percent average being achieved before 2008.
In response, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has announced plans to launch a national industrial strategy aimed at creating a prosperous post-Brexit Britain through the development of STEM skills investments in science and innovation, and infrastructure upgrades across every sector and in every corner of the country. With this plan the UK government has sent a clear signal: organizations of every size and within every industry must prioritize digital transformation if they are to succeed in a cloud-first world.
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