Oracle is now the third of the big technology companies that is selling business profiles. The company just announced on its website that it is selling a database containing 400 million business profiles.

"Oracle Data Cloud today launched the largest business-to-business (B2B) audience data marketplace to help make programmatic and data-driven B2B marketing easier", says Oracle. What does this actually mean? You can use the database to "reach buyers and decision makers at specific companies to align B2B marketing and sales efforts" or "build audiences based on companies that have purchased a specific enterprise solution in the past".

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The new program that replaces the Safe Harbor agreement is being picked up by US companies, but very, very slowly.

In the first two weeks since the US Department of Commerce started accepting applications for the Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer program, just 40 companies have been certified.

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Phishing is one of the major security threats that enterprises now face, but according to new research from Duo Security users are putting 31 percent of organizations at risk of a data breach due to phishing attacks.

Based on feedback from the Duo Insight phishing simulation tool, the company finds that 31 percent of users clicked the link in a phishing email and worse still 17 percent entered their username and password, giving an attacker in a real-world scenario the keys to corporate data.

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Around the globe, IT directors are experiencing a common problem. What is that problem, you ask? The fact of the matter is backup environments worldwide are becoming increasingly challenging to manage. You might be asking yourself how this assertion could possibly be accurate, especially with the sudden boost in technology. Truth be told, the increase in technology is part of the problem.

Many directors in the IT world are finding themselves with less support, but are not asked to do any less. Things can quickly get chaotic when staff is not replaced, IT budgets shrink, service-level expectations continue to rise, and ROI-based business cases are created for purchased hardware even though storages spaces are completely maxed out. Sounds like a mess, right?

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As attacks become more frequent and sophisticated, conventional security techniques and human analysis struggle to keep pace.

As a result many companies are turning to artificial intelligence methods to help them defend their systems effectively. We spoke to Peter Gyongyosi product manager of security intelligence specialist Balabit to find out more about how AI is increasingly the future of cyber security.

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Consumer grade is the new enterprise grade, a new survey by ScaleArc says. The annual survey among IT decision makers has revealed that consumer apps seem to be much better than enterprise apps, because they’re faster, and more reliable.

"It is clear that consumer grade is the new enterprise grade", says Justin Barney, president and CEO of ScaleArc. "IT decision-makers who build enterprise apps recognize that they, and the general public, have a better experience on their personal apps than their work apps. We’ve all lost patience with websites and apps that don’t offer optimal performance".

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A year on from the release of Windows 10 most businesses are still reluctant to adopt the OS, according to research by solutions and managed services company Softchoice.

Based on an evaluation of more than 400,000 Windows-based computing devices between January and May this year, across 169 organizations in the US and Canada using the TechCheck asset management solution, the study reveals less than one percent were running Windows 10.

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Business leaders everywhere now recognize information as a strategic asset. Many executives value data governance as a powerful tool that reduces risk and supports data-based decision making. But what is data governance, what does it do,  and what day-to-day support does it offer to CEOs?

A company’s digital wealth requires consistent, company-wide information management. Data governance is an umbrella term for the standards and practices that guide how information is managed and used in businesses. It provides a framework, which ensures that important data assets are used consistently throughout the organization. But wait, you say, isn’t information management the CIO’s role? Yes, but inconsistent data management can affect a company’s ability to meet its business goals. That’s when it’s time for a CEO to monitor and guide company-wide data governance policies and practices. Here are some examples of when CEO attention and guidance would be required.

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One way to access data efficiently and accelerate the development and deployment of analytics apps is to build an API. APIs are a natural way to access data, whether it be personalization scores for web content or a service to assess the risk of a part failing.

There are a number of benefits to using an API for data access. First, it restricts the user to efficient requests. Google Analytics is a prime example. A query API gives you access to the rich data in your Google Analytics instance. While the API is fairly flexible, it allows Google to more accurately describe the types of queries that can be performed efficiently.

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Shortage of skills is one of the main reasons businesses give for not achieving their objectives according to Gartner and this is especially true in the cybersecurity field.

Access control specialist SecureAuth is aiming to address this with the launch of its SecureAuth University, a continuing education program for customers, partners and employees.

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There has been a "sharp increase" in the number of lost and stolen corporate data in the past two years, according to a new report by the Ponemon Institute and Varonis Systems. But it’s not as straightforward as you’d think.

The new report, titled Closing Security Gaps to Protect Corporate Data: A Study of U.S. and European Organisations, says that 76 percent of respondents experienced either data loss, or theft, in the past 24 months.

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Shadow IT is an increasingly major concern for businesses, the use of public cloud services offers convenience for workers but risks confidential information being exposed outside the organisation.

Canadian endpoint security company Absolute is launching new functionality for its Absolute Data and Device Security (DDS) product that detects data at risk on endpoints associated with cloud storage applications.

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Seagate has announced the largest SSD in the world. The 60TB Serial Attached (SAS) SCSI drive, which is designed for data centers, provides enough space to store 400 million photos or 12,000 DVDs, and is said to have the lowest cost per GB for flash storage today.

Alongside it, Seagate also announced the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD at the Flash Memory Summit conference this week. The smaller model is also aimed at enterprises, promising four times the performance than "comparable drives" but without the downsides associated with a PCIe bridge or switch.

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Many businesses are turning to virtualization technologies and to public cloud services like AWS, but bringing these technologies together can be tricky.

Hybrid IT specialist HotLink is launching a new Cloud-Attach platform that enables customers to quickly, easily and holistically incorporate public cloud resources into their existing production data centers.

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The internet and the cloud are now a key part of the infrastructure for many enterprises. But the advantages of scale, flexibility and cost can come at a price of complexity, reliability, and vulnerability.

Network intelligence company ThousandEyes is releasing Endpoint Agent, which provides a way to measure end-user experience and network behavior for every network that employees use to access critical services.

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