To say 2020 was a year of change is probably an understatement, and that’s no different for IT leaders. Pressure to optimize costs while simultaneously maintaining key operations to ensure survival (or even growth) has led to a lot of re-evaluation and, hopefully, reflection for the industry.

Technology now sits at the heart of almost every organization, but managing technology costs has become incredibly complex due to things like the flexibility of cloud, proliferation of the use of SaaS applications and increased investment in IT by business units outside of IT.

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One of the major challenges faced by IT and security teams is that they don't have a clear picture or understanding of all their assets -- laptops, servers, cloud, virtual, and IoT.

This leads to a lot of time and effort trying to identify what they have and decide whether it complies with security policies. Device security platform Armis is launching a new standalone asset management solution that's designed to deliver better visibility.

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The year 2020 was challenging to say the least. Between the pandemic, shutdowns, wildfires and other natural disasters, most of us will look forward to a new beginning in 2021. However, the pandemic response in 2020 will have a lasting impact on how and where consumers and businesses will use networks services, how service providers will build out their networks, and where they will invest in additional capacity.   

On that basis, here are a few predictions for 2021 for service providers: 

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As organizations continue to digitally transform business processes, they are increasingly transitioning from legacy applications to modern, cloud-native apps. These intricate modern apps feature far more APIs than their predecessors: In the past, an average app would usually include 1-2 APIs, but now they typically feature dozens. To make things more difficult, many of these new APIs are deeply embedded and hidden. Securing these APIs (and the larger app environments where they live) is proving extremely difficult.

Several other trends are also exacerbating the problem. For one, these new cloud-native apps are mostly built on microservices architectures. With microservices, apps are chopped up into smaller, disparate components. These components or services are then distributed across various clusters and locations, including potentially multiple public clouds and the edge. In addition, most organizations today employ a continuous software development cycle (including CI/CD) in which engineers are constantly churning out new versions of apps. Each new release comes with new APIs. For example, when a developer fixes a bug in an app, they deploy a new API.

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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.

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The past year and the rapid changes it has brought have placed a good deal of pressure on security analysts and made their work vitally important.

A new report from Respond Software and the Ponemon Institute takes a look at the state of security operations centers (SOCs) and how they're coping.

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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).

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How do you take an idea and turn it into a successful product? It’s easier said than done. Having a great idea is just one small step. The "productizing" of that idea requires many more steps to execute. According to the laws of market failure, most new products will fail even if they are competently executed. Good ideas typically fail because they can’t cross the barrier between innovation and production.

Bringing an idea to fruition and then getting it to market is a significant undertaking with many challenges and potential pitfalls along the way. And that’s to say nothing of the competition you will encounter, but there are some basic steps to take that will help position you for success.

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Microsoft Teams has been one of the winners of the pandemic, with usage in December 2020 estimated at 115 million daily users, growing from 32 million in early March.

But this success has also made Teams a tempting target for hackers. Cloud security specialist Avanan has released a new report, based on analysis of nearly 200 enterprise customers, looking at the risks of using teams and how to combat them.

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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.

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Late last year Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion, a deal that has caused major waves within the enterprise software market as pundits try to forecast how the chat app fits under the Salesforce umbrella and whether this is an attempt to challenge Microsoft for the enterprise.

We spoke with CoreView CEO Shawn Lankton, whose company is not only a Microsoft Gold partner but whose SaaS management platform supports enterprises that operate cloud and hybrid environments. He gave us his thoughts on Salesforce's motivation behind the sale and how it will shape the enterprise software world.

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The cost of poor software quality in the US in 2020 was approximately $2.08 trillion according to a report released today produced by the Consortium for Information and Software Quality (CISQ) and sponsored by Synopsys.

The figure includes poor software quality resulting from software failures, unsuccessful development projects, legacy system problems, technical debt and cybercrime enabled by exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities in software.

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Imagine that you’re driving your car. Everything is running normally when, out of the blue, your check engine light blinks on and off from your dashboard. At this point, the best course of action would be to stop driving and call a tow service, as a flashing check engine light signals that you have a serious problem that, if ignored, could cause serious damage.

And, despite the momentary inconvenience, you’ll likely be thinking: Good thing I had that signal. Now imagine the same scenario but without the warning light. In time, your easy fix can quickly escalate to a smoking engine and a hefty auto repair bill. Such is the case when businesses fail to implement the technology, personnel, and processes to support preventive maintenance.

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Securing enterprise networks has always been a challenge, but 2020 and the shift to remote working has made it even more so.

Fortunately secure SD-WAN technology can help businesses to deal with the new landscape as well as reducing costs and making strong security accessible to more organizations. We spoke to Mike Wood CMO of Versa Networks to find out more.

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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).

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