Ubiquitous in the workplace, mobile devices vastly increase employee productivity, connectivity and their ability to collaborate. Employees can easily access corporate networks and sensitive enterprise data with a mere swipe -- whether they are bringing their own device (BYOD) or via a corporate-issued device. At the same time, mobile devices present significant privacy and security challenges for organizations.

Employees commonly install personal apps on devices they also use for work. Often, employees don’t think twice about whether an app they’re using could potentially expose their corporate network to risk. In fact, an alarming percentage of mobile apps used within the enterprise are able to access sensitive device functions, or otherwise exhibit behavior that may pose security risks to the organization and violate its BYOD policies. Without understanding what these apps do, organizations are playing Russian roulette with their security.

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I've been at CloudSec 2016 in London, listening to various security professionals from the likes of Trend Micro and Microsoft talk about the challenges businesses face in securing their data in the cloud.

As you could probably have guessed, talks have centered around the ever-expanding threat landscape, the continued industrialization of cybercrime through various underground marketplaces around the world and general cyber security trends.

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The question many businesses are asking themselves is, 'should we be moving to the cloud?' The public cloud is clearly a success, as shown by the significant adoption of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Companies are benefiting from the pay-as-go nature of the cloud, as well as from the ability to turn up services as needed without the traditional hardware spend. Gartner recently reported that cloud computing will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020.

But even with this growing popularity, corporate IT departments are still struggling with how to integrate public clouds into their data center initiatives. One of the main reasons for this hesitation is the uncertainty around maintaining workload performance once the data gets to the cloud. This is a valid concern, but one that can be overcome. We spoke to Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer for infrastructure performance specialist Virtual Instruments, to discuss how workload analysis and modeling is the first step for any cloud migration initiative.

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It is often the illusive H Factor -- the human element -- that ends up being the weakest link that makes cyber-attacks and data breaches possible, sometimes even more so than hackers exploiting zero-day system vulnerabilities or employing new malware.

According to the 2016 Verizon DBIR, human errors are a major factor in most data breaches. This human touch is especially true with the growing mobility of employees and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies that are becoming more widespread. Therefore, while technological cybersecurity solutions take center stage in many businesses' cybersecurity plans, addressing the human element is as important as the technological one.

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Cloud computing seems to be a feature of successful businesses, but still a lot of workloads remain on premises, a new study by IBM suggests. More than 1,000 C-suite executives from 18 industries were interviewed, face-to-face, to come to this conclusion.

In 78 percent of cases, cloud initiatives are either "coordinated" or "fully integrated", which is a significant jump, compared to 34 percent we had in 2012. More successful the company is the higher the percentage too. On the other hand, 45 percent of workloads remain, and are expected to remain, on premises.

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Contracts are among the most sensitive documents that many enterprises handle. When storing them in the cloud therefore firms need to be sure that they’re secure and properly managed.

Contract lifecycle specialist Icertis is partnering with cloud storage supplier Box to integrate with the latter's enterprise content management platform, empowering users to collaborate with internal stakeholders and seamlessly share documents and contract drafts during negotiation.

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Microsoft is now the overall leader in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, beating Salesforce by a tiny margin. However, not everything is as straightforward as it seems.

According to Synergy Research Group, Microsoft, even though late to the party as usual, now holds 15 percent of the SaaS market, while Salesforce, the leader so far, has 14 percent share.

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More than four out of ten (41 percent) of all enterprise workloads all over the world are either on a private or public cloud. By the time we reach 2018, the number will have risen to 60 percent, according to a new report by 451 Research. The cloud-first approach is already common, the report says.

More than a third (38 per ent) of all enterprises polled for the report say they already have such a policy. Europe is leading the way, with 42 percent of organizations having such a policy. On-premise private clouds as well as software-as-a-service models are most common among enterprises, each accounting for 14 percent of all apps, 451 Research says.

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IT professionals are most likely, out of all working people, not to use their entire annual leave, according to a new Robert Walters Career Lifestyle Survey. This is mostly because they are under pressure to deliver new projects on tight deadlines, and to keep their projects safe from cyber-attacks.

Almost half (44 percent) of IT pros polled during research said they had not used their entire annual leave, compared to the average of 36 percent.

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It's not that there are less data breaches lately -- it's that they're not being disclosed. That's basically what Huntsman Security is saying, after it requested data about error and breaches in security through the Freedom of Information Act. Between April 2015, and March 2016, a total of 2,048 incidents were reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

This represents a jump of 88 percent, as the year before, there were a total of 1,089 reported incidents.

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There's a reason why cyber attacks use social engineering techniques, it's because the person sitting in front of the screen is usually the weakest link in the security chain.

This is confirmed by the findings of a new report from Wombat Security Technologies which shows that in the last year, the number of organizations that reported being a victim of phishing has increased 13 percent, and 60 percent of enterprises say the rate of phishing attacks has increased overall.

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Data and analytics are some of the most important new skills you, as an employee, can have today. This is according to Alteryx, whose new report dives into the most important skills and competencies in the workforce today. That being said, data and analytics have surpassed some interesting skills, like multilingualism.

Knowing a second language isn’t really that important any more, even though a 2014 report suggested otherwise. The Alteryx report, entitled The Business Grammar Report, also says data is no longer "confined to the IT department or technical specialists". Just 15 percent of UK businesses are still doing it the old fashioned way while almost a third (31 percent) are empowering their employees with self-service analytics tools.

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Cisco wants to transform into a software company and to further move towards that goal it announced the acquisition of CointainerX, a small start-up formed by engineers from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware.

The container-as-a-service business creates virtual containers for data centres, for Windows and Linux.  The financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. ContainerX didn’t try to hide the excitement.

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Tech-stress may be a relatively new phenomenon in the corporate world, however it is also the latest in a long line of issues which have a significant impact on the performance of today’s employees. Largely a symptom of the "always on" culture that stems from the nation’s growing reliance on digital devices, tech-stress is reported to be placing additional pressure on the corporate world as many workers struggle to switch off and relax.

According to the 2016 Quality of Working Life study carried out by the Chartered Management Institute, employees are now working 29 days extra a year and are suffering rising levels of stress. Citing an apparent "tech-addiction", the study found that this obsession with checking emails outside of work hours is making workers more stressed and less productive.

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HP has launched three new products to help businesses move their workloads into the cloud computing environment easier. The trio includes the t630 Thin Client, ThinPro 6, and VMware Blast.

The t630 Thin Client allows for the streamlining of current cloud-based deployments, comes with next generation, x86 quad-core systems-on-a-chip developed by AMD, and offers AMD Radeon graphics.

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