Google is in the mood for a cull at the moment. Having announced the end of support for Chrome Apps, the company has now announced that Google App Maker will be closing down in less than a year.

While the ultimate shutdown date isn't until January 2021, App Maker is now no longer being actively developed. Additionally, Google says that as of mid-April it will no longer be possible to create new apps.

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Increasingly the boundaries between operational technology and business networks are breaking down as businesses seek access to the real time data that industrial IoT devices hold.

But that leads to increased risk to critical infrastructure as devices become more exposed. To combat these threats, Cisco is introducing an IoT security architecture that provides enhanced visibility across both IT and OT environments, and helps protect industrial processes.

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Data privacy is very much in people's minds at the moment with the introduction of CCPA and other legislation around the world.

Businesses can sometimes see privacy regulations as a necessary evil that they have to comply with, but new data from Cisco reveals growing, tangible benefits for businesses that adopt strong privacy practices.

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With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) having come into force at the beginning of the year, and Data Privacy Day coming up next week, privacy is very much in the news at the moment.

But how much of an impact will the new legislation have? And what do organizations need to do to make sure they don't lose consumer trust? We spoke to Chad McDonald, VP of customer experience at Arxan to find out more.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are no longer enough for the digital era, according to more than 200 software companies.

In a declaration published as an open letter in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, the Platform of Independents set out its belief that companies should never be locked into CRM suites, and that building better products, respecting customer privacy, and making smarter business decisions requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach to their technology stacks.

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Organizations are becoming more comfortable and familiar with cloud technology while recognizing its increasing benefits. 85 percent of respondents to a new survey say they expect to have the majority of their workloads on the cloud by the end of this year, and 24 percent plan to be cloud-only.

The study from cloud services provider AllCloud also shows more than 56 percent of respondents say that at least half of all their cloud workloads are using containers or microservices.

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Companies are increasingly leveraging digital solutions to their advantage. 44 percent of businesses have already adopted a digital-first strategy in their operations. As part of this widespread digital transformation, organizations have to reskill and upskill their employees and ensure that their staff are capable of maximizing their technology investments.

Companies are already spending significant sums on the necessary employee training. In 2018, large enterprises spent an average of $19.7 million for learning and development which included instructor-led classroom training, online training, and training-outsourcing.

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One of the most notable trends of the 2010s was an increase in data breaches. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse maintains a chronological database of data breaches that stretches back to 2005. Hacks and cybersecurity threats were an issue for companies and organizations even in the 1980s and the 1990s, but a simple scroll through that database will show how much more frequent data breaches have become within the past ten years. Since 2009 or 2010, notable data breaches have occurred virtually every day.

Why are these threats on the rise? One factor is that people are living more of their lives online. Between social media, online shopping, and the growing segment of the workforce that conducts most or all of its business on the internet, there are more targets for hackers and cybercriminals than ever before. This infographic shows how dramatically the production of global data has grown even in the past five years. With so much data out there, it stands to reason that cybercrime is becoming a more significant enterprise. It’s easy to imagine the culprits behind data breaches as keyboard warriors sitting alone in dark rooms, wreaking havoc from afar. What many people don’t recognize: the threat could be coming from the cubicle next door.

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Protecting against cyberattacks and guarding against technology failures is something that most businesses now do as a matter of course. But insuring against the risks is less common and could be leaving companies open to major losses.

We spoke to Jack Kudale, CEO of cyber insurance specialist  Cowbell Cyber to find out more about cyber risk insurance and why it's increasingly being seen as an essential safeguard.

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Increasingly IT security is seen as an issue for the entire organization. This means it's often included in business targets, but setting these in a meaningful way -- and being able to meet them -- is a major challenge .

We spoke to Joseph Carson, Chief Security Scientist and Advisory CISO at Thycotic, to find out more about the difficulties of setting and measuring the success of targets for security.

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In the IT industry, software vendors naturally focus their efforts on developing easier ways to onboard new customers and provide unique functionality on their platforms, but they rarely devote development cycles to making it easy to export workloads. As a result, it can be difficult to extract workloads and move between competing platforms. This is commonly referred to as 'vendor lock-in' and is especially concerning with databases and enterprise applications.

But, according to Chris Patterson, senior director of product management at Navisite, an RDX company, cloud computing offers an unusual opportunity for companies to break free from vendor lock-in. He believes cloud migration could alter the status quo, because when organizations decide to migrate their databases to the cloud, it also creates an opportunity to change to new alternatives, such as Amazon Aurora and Azure SQL.

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As we enter the new year, the criticality of securing sensitive data will continue to mold and transform the structure of security strategies across enterprises, resulting in a heightened focus on access control and data-centric investments. With numerous data privacy regulations on the horizon, the cost of data breaches will be more catastrophic for businesses. In 2020, enterprises must invest in proactive strategies that combat the dynamic threats targeting an organization’s most sensitive data.

Enterprises can expect the trend of increased data breaches in ERP (Enterprise resource planning) systems to continue to rise in 2020

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Security segmentation limits the ability for attacks to move laterally inside an organization by breaking data center and campus networks or clouds into smaller segments. But a new study reveals that only 19 percent currently implement segmentation solutions today.

The study of 300 IT professionals carried out by Virtual Intelligence Briefing for Illumio also shows that while approximately 25 percent are actively planning a project, more than half are not protecting with segmentation at all or planning to in the next six months.

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A new survey of almost 300 IT security professionals in large enterprises finds 53 percent of respondents say most or all cybersecurity vendors rely on unclear, opaque, and ambiguous data to promote their products.

In addition the study from Valimail, a provider of identity-based anti-phishing solutions, finds 42 percent of respondents say cybersecurity products deliver value 'sometimes,' but it is difficult or impossible to prove that value.

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Machine learning development is still in its early stages in many enterprises but investment in the technology is on the increase according to a new report.

The report from Algorithmia shows 22 percent of respondents say their companies have been in production with machine learning for a year. However, 50 percent say they spend between eight and 90 days deploying a single machine learning model.

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