Today’s accelerated pace of digital transformation brings significant opportunities for businesses to grow and drive value for shareholders. At the same time, the rise of connected enterprises, remote workforces, and digital payments, among other things, has increased the risk of cyber breaches, ransomware and malware attacks.

For technology companies that sit at the apex of this accelerating pace of change, cyber security is increasingly becoming a top priority. According to the 2021 KPMG CEO Outlook:

• 31% of global technology CEOs report cyber security as the greatest threat to their organization’s growth over the next three years
• 39% noted cyber security resiliency as their top operational priority
• Yet only 19% report they are very well-prepared for a future cyber-attack

Regardless of how prepared a company is to address cyber risk, it’s an area that requires ongoing investment and vigilance. Below are three ways to further increase cyber defenses.

Work together

In today’s increasingly interconnected environment, it’s clear that companies can no longer go it alone. In fact, 81% of technology CEOs surveyed believe that it will take an industry-wide approach to properly address the issue of ransomware.

Recently, this was validated when leaders from the largest U.S. technology companies joined with members of the Biden Administration to discuss ways to collectively strengthen our nation’s cybersecurity. Together, the companies pledged more than $31 billion towards the effort, including 250,000 new jobs.

Think differently about talent

Competition for talent in high demand areas like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence is fierce, but technology companies may already have a leg-up. Leaders at these organizations should look within their four walls for professionals who have the right skillset and retrain or upskill existing workers to address the changing security ecosystem.

Alternatively, technology leaders not already capitalizing on the hot M&A market in the sector should consider whether a strategic acquisition that would quickly add cyber talent to the organization is viable.

Build a cyber-first culture

It’s no longer enough to have the right security protocols in place from a technology perspective; it is more important than ever to strengthen the governance around operational resilience, enabling companies to recover from any incidents. Establishing a strong digital and cyber risk culture, championed by senior leaders, with a shared responsibility among employees, is also crucial.

With escalating cyber, ransomware and other attacks, business leaders need to take ongoing steps to defend their organizations from bad actors whose methods are constantly evolving. To continue to meet the needs of customers, employees, suppliers, and society, cyber security is clearly top of mind for CEOs of tech companies. Those who continuously remain focused on this area will build trust and create a competitive advantage.

About the Authors:

Mark Gibson, KPMG U.S. Technology, Media and Telecommunications Leader

Alex Holt, KPMG Global Head of Technology, Media and Telecommunications

The post How Tech Companies Can Boost Cyber Defenses: Building a Cyber-First Culture appeared first on eWEEK.

At the recent Zoomtopia event, the company touted its ability to power digital healthcare.

Zoom already integrates with popular electronic health record (EHR) systems, such as Epic. This allowed the company to quickly shift to telehealth at the start of COVID-19. People were comfortable using Zoom to video chat with family, friends, and co-workers, so the transition was fairly seamless when it came to delivering virtual care to patients via Zoom, Bill Shickolovich, the company’s CIO advisor of healthcare, said during a keynote address at the Zoomtopia event.

While doctors have returned to taking in-person visits, patients want to maintain some aspect of convenience with remote care. This means healthcare organizations must rethink how and why they’re offering care to patients. Some questions to consider, according to Shickolovich, is the visit needed for diagnostic purposes? Is it a follow-up? Is it a clinical assessment that can’t be virtualized? Is it a meeting with a care coordinator?

“We need to push digital transformation forward in healthcare. We need to consider the communication needs within the care continuum and determine where the opportunity is to enhance the engagement,” Heidi West, head of healthcare at Zoom, said during the keynote, which focused on Zoom’s vision for healthcare as the world adjusts to a new normal.

Virtual care is evolving to be fully digitized

One way to move forward is to view virtual care as more than just a video visit. Virtual care is about helping people manage their disease at home and providing follow-up care after a patient is dismissed from a hospital. It’s about having a mobile physician that can “see” patients anywhere in the world, at any time. It’s about closing the digital divide and providing care to people through affordable technology.

Patients have to become the center of care—from coordinating virtual appointments to engaging with family members to bringing in specialties who determine a course of treatment. That’s why Zoom is determined to break down communication silos, which exist in healthcare today, said West. Specifically, the company is focused on providing value-based care and lowering the rising costs of healthcare.

With a traditional care model, there is too much emphasis on charging fees for services. However, a value-based care model centers on collaboration and sharing results to give patients potentially better outcomes. The key is to make this model sustainable enough to convert both patients (convenience) and providers (profit).

Artificial intelligence plays a key role digital healthcare

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology that can accelerate value-based care without complicating an already complex delivery system, said Ash Damle, co-founder of Healiom, a healthcare logistics startup.

Its platform connects patients via Zoom to physicians in in less than 10 minutes by tapping into a specialist network and AI. Every patient is assessed and triaged by Healiom’s AI engine, Holmes, and two specialists without an appointment.

“We take data and apply AI, considering a patient’s past medical history, vitals, and other aspects. So, we can understand what’s going on, who they need to see, how fast. It’s an extraordinary opportunity that we have today in healthcare,” said Damle.

Looking ahead, platforms like Healiom could provide patients with instant access to healthcare using pre-visit and post-visit logistics. Pre-visit logistics involves deviceless screening through video and audio. Healthcare providers can use conversational triage AI to gather details about a patient’s symptoms, including real-time vitals (pulse rate, respiration, oxygenation). Post-visit logistics involves data-activated follow-ups to ensure patients received proper care.

This kind of innovation is likely to push organizations to become more comfortable with disrupting the traditional healthcare experience.

The post Zoomtopia: AI and Video to Power Healthcare appeared first on eWEEK.

Episode 32: Semperis’s Mickey Bresman: How to Secure Your Active Directory

Mickey Bresman, Co-founder and CEO of Semperis, provides three tips for securing your Active Directory against cyberthreats.

Episode 31: Veritas’s Simon Jelley: How to Guard Against Ransomware

Simon Jelley, GM & VP of Product at Veritas Technologies, explains why ransomware is so difficult to defend against – and outlines critical best practices to lessen the threat.

Episode 30: Hitachi Vantara’s Radhika Krishnan on Data Fabric and Data Management

Radhika Krishnan, Chief Product Officer for Hitachi Vantara, explains the role of data fabrics and discusses how data storage and data analytics are merging.

Episode 29: Extreme Networks’ Nabil Bukhari on AI in Networking, and the Democratization of Technology

Nabil Bukhari, CTO and CPO of Extreme Networks, discusses how today’s networks need AI for proper monitoring, and also dives into how the democratization of technology is changing the tech sector in profound ways.

Episode 28: Weka’s Jonathan Martin on Enterprise Data Storage: Beyond Incremental Change

Jonathan Martin, the president of Weka, discusses how today’s exponential data growth is reshaping data storage, particularly in the analytics sector.

Episode 27: BMC’s Margaret Lee on AI Service Management: Use Cases, Future Trends

Margaret Lee, GM & SVP, Digital Service and Operations Management at BMC Software, discusses how AISM pairs with technologies like AIOps, and forecasts the future of AISM.

Episode 26: IBM’s Daniel Hernandez on AI and Data Fabric

Daniel Hernandez, General Manager, Data and AI at IBM, discusses how data fabric enables a cohesive data strategy to better enable artificial intelligence.

Episode 25: Sumo Logic’s Dave Frampton on Creating a Cloud Security Strategy

Dave Frampton, VP of Security Solutions at Sumo Logic, discusses the new threat surfaces that companies need to focus on protecting.

Episode 24: The CIO/CMO Relationship: Promoting Digital Transformation

Four top industry thought leaders discuss the key issues in the CIO-CMO relationship, and whether the challenges are a tech or a human problem.

Episode 23: Riverbed’s Vincent Berk on Improving Network Security

Vincent Berk, CTO and Chief Security Architect at Riverbed, discusses network visibility and how to transform network and application data into actionable security intelligence.

Episode 22: Rubrik’s Bipul Sinha on Preventing Ransomware Attacks

Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO of Rubrik, explains Zero Trust’s role in blocking ransomware attacks, and discusses security in a multicloud world.

Episode 21: SAP’s Irfan Khan on ‘Analytics Everywhere’

Irfan Khan, president, HANA Database & Analytics at SAP, discusses the value of an end-to-end technology platform that incorporates analytics throughout.

Episode 20: Komprise Co-Founder Krishna Subramanian on Data Management-as-a-Service

Krishna Subramanian, co-founder and president, Komprise, talks about using Data Management-as-a-Service to manage data in a multi-cloud environment.

Episode 19: Tableau’s Philip Cooper on Data Analytics ‘Available to All’

Philip Cooper, VP of Product, Tableau, discusses the trend toward making data analytics tools available to employees throughout the organization, not merely the C-suite.

Episode 18: Oracle Cloud’s Ross Brown on Oracle and Multicloud Computing

Ross Brown, VP of Product Marketing for Oracle Cloud, discusses trends in multicloud, and points out key differentiators for Oracle Cloud.

Episode 17: HashiCorp’s Armon Dadgar on Zero Trust Security

Armon Dadgar, Co-Founder and CTO of HashiCorp, discusses why “castle and moat” is outdated. Plus: what’s the future of cybersecurity in a multicloud world?

Episode 16: Understanding NetDevOps: Expert Advice

Three leading experts provide a deep dive into NetDevOps, including its history, best practices and common challenges, along with a look to the technology’s future.

Episode 15: Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh: Data Backup in the Cloud

Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva, spoke about key trends and challenges facing companies in cloud-based data backup.

Episode 14: VMware’s Bernard Golden: Advice for Cloud Clients

Bernard Golden, Executive Technical Advisor at VMware, talks about cloud’s evolution, the rise in complexity in IT, and the advice he gives to his VMware cloud clients.

Episode 13: Equinix’s Karl Strohmeyer on Data Centers, Cloud, and Evolving Infrastructure

Karl Strohmeyer, Chief Customer and Revenue Officer for Equinix, provides a portrait of the rapidly evolving IT infrastructure market.

Episode 12: CIOs Discuss the Post-Covid World: Will Hybrid Work Continue?

Four major thought leaders in the CIO community discuss the remarkable changes created by the pandemic. Which shifts are temporary, and which will be ongoing?

Episode 11: Precisely CEO Josh Rogers: Understanding Data Integrity

High levels of data integrity and data quality enable a data analytics process to offer truly accurate actionable insight.

Episode 10: Cisco’s Kaustubh Das: The Importance of Commonality in the Cloud

Kaustubh Das, VP and GM of Cloud and Compute at Cisco, discusses why a coherent overall approach is so essential in an enterprise cloud deployment.

Episode 9: Cognizant’s Paul Roehrig: Trends in Digital Transformation

Paul Roehrig, Head of Strategy, Cognizant Digital Business & Technology, discusses the complexities of digital transformation – and also defines this oft-used word.

Episode 8: Arkose Labs’ Kevin Gosschalk: The Fight Against Online Fraud

Kevin Gosschalk, CEO and Founder, Arkose Labs, discusses the state of online fraud, including the pandemic’s effect.

Episode 7: Alation CEO Satyen Sangani on Trends in Data Catalogs

Alation CEO Satyen Sangani talks about all things Data Catalog. We’ll look at what exactly a data catalog does, and talk about some tips and best practices for optimizing a data catalog.

Episode 6: NVIDIA’s Manuvir Das: The Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise

Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA, discusses the current state and future trends in enterprise artificial intelligence.

Episode 5: Dell Sr. VP Deepak Patil: Cloud Computing in 2021

Deepak Patil, Senior Vice President, Cloud Platforms & Solutions, at Dell, discusses the importance of hybrid cloud, and also looks at future directions in the enterprise cloud market.

Episode 4: Micron’s Raj Hazra: How Data Infrastructure is Evolving

An industry leader discusses how the explosive growth in data and AI is driving equally fast growth in memory and compute capacity.

Episode 3: OpsRamp’s Ciaran Byrne: AIOps Trends

Ciaran Byrne, VP of Product Management at OpsRamp, discusses the AIOps market, including the key challenges facing this fast-growing sector.

Episode 2: Juniper’s Bob Friday: Preparing for AI in Your Business

Bob Friday, CTO of Juniper’s AI-Driven Enterprise Business, talks about taking steps to help your business deploy AI, focusing on the need for quality data.

Episode 1: Interview with Keith White of HPE Greenlake Cloud Services

The general manager of HPE GreenLake discusses the rapid changes in the cloud market, including how cloud users are focusing on growth past-pandemic.

The post eWEEK eSPEAKS Video Podcast with James Maguire appeared first on eWEEK.

Throughout my career as an IT consultant, working with various platforms and technologies, I’ve encountered a myriad of terms pitched to me to explain how their company is approaching modern software development. Terms like Agile, DevOps, SAFe, among others.

All of them come with a passionate group of advocates ready to go to bat for the term when faced with any skepticism. I am personally neither for nor against any of these terms. If something works for an organization, great. Trying to garner that same success, many companies fall into the trap of an overhyped solution as a new template or mold that everyone must fit into if they want to be successful.

The important thing companies must realize is that DevOps is not a one size fits all solution for every company. The impression I get is that if a trendsetter like Google, Facebook, or Microsoft decides to do something, then everyone must have to do that thing.

Add to this the additional pressure of taking oneself too seriously – becoming a bit draconian – and you are like a new lure thrown into the fishing pond for people like me who are generally full of cynicism after so many IT projects behind them.

Why “DevOops?”

When I ask companies where they’re at in their maturity around DevOps, the response I usually get is along the lines of “we’re on a journey towards that.” Similar can be said of companies as it relates to continuous performance testing, which generally means that the company is doing something, but they haven’t quite figured it out yet.

This brings me to why I have now deemed most current DevOps initiatives as “DevOops” – that is to say, a misguided attempt at DevOps. Most business leaders and companies are constantly looking out for the latest development, trend, or buzzwords to accelerate innovation, save time and money, and take on competitors. In recent years, DevOps has been one of the biggest buzzwords for companies everywhere.

Ultimately, one of the biggest factors in companies implementing an Agile or DevOps model is F.O.M.O. (fear of missing out). As such, companies try to adopt DevOps practices for the sake of being relevant.

This ends up causing more issues in the software development process in comparison to their older, traditional approach. This is not to say that your traditional model is the way of the future for your company. You need to make sure you are ready for this type of model.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…or is it?

When companies imitate their competitors, they are attempting to keep up with their competition and stay relevant. Many times they do this without sitting down to determine the best way a DevOps model can be implemented for them – or if they even need DevOps practices in the first place. If your primary goal is to add speed just for the sake of speed, that’s a recipe for disaster (or in this case, product development issues).

When it comes to performance testing, choosing speed over performance does not solve the problem. Companies often ask me about putting every API test or end-to-end performance test into a CI pipeline to gather timing metrics, and they want to do this as quickly as possible.

However, by doing this, the consequences are generally that the metrics aren’t valid, they don’t help solve performance issues, and become a “checkbox activity.” Why aren’t these metrics valid, you ask? Because the metrics gathered do not provide real value to the audience (i.e developers), which leads to becoming overlooked or considered irrelevant.

Meanwhile, performance issues companies were already experiencing continue to be caught after it’s too late. Generally, there is a production outage or a customer experience issue in a support ticket to deal with. The automation didn’t solve the problem. The speed at which the tests ran through the CI pipeline didn’t solve the problem. The headaches still exist.

But wait, there’s a light!

In my experience, three things indicate to me that a company has successfully implemented a DevOps model/strategy;

1. Service Virtualization (or the equivalent) has been implemented: This enables them to test against unfinished features and services and not have to wait to test until development is finished. If they have no way of working on test automation for the functions that work while others have not been created, they will fall behind on automation and testing will always be behind.
2. They have decoupled the production release from users having access to the new features: Meaning they are releasing code silently to allow end-users access at the pace they choose, such as pilot groups. If they roll something out that messes everything up, they can quickly revert to the previous version through feature flags.
3. Repetitive task automation: They are constantly figuring out how to reduce toil in the work environment by automating repetitive tasks, while at the same time ensuring that there are manual reviews in place even if there are exceptions to the standard pass/fail criteria. Everything isn’t always so cut and dry – pass or fail. A good DevOps organization knows the balance between reducing toil and mindless pipeline speed.

Ultimately, the solution to what ails a company’s performance testing initiatives will come down to the type of outcome they are hoping to glean from their testing results. If you are looking to implement solid performance test results that will enable your company to make confident business decisions, look no further than the end-user experience.

Future forward DevOps

Right now, DevOps adoption is still in the “hype cycle” stage or the area that Gartner calls the “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” As a result, there are a lot of efforts that aren’t completely serious about their DevOps pursuit and are rejecting the core things that make DevOps work because they are hard to do.

Over the next five years, we will see the hype of DevOps subside because companies will “skill up” their employees and set expectations of new hires for the required skill sets for Site Reliability Engineers. At that point, companies will figure out how to get the right value from it, and some will learn they can get better value without it.

About the Author: 

Scott Moore, Director, Customer Engineering, Tricentis

The post DevOps or ‘DevOops’: Three Tips for Successful DevOps appeared first on eWEEK.

Digital transformation of financial services is driving an increasingly automated analytics process in which personally identifiable information (PII) about borrowers is transmitted and stored in the cloud as part of the application review and underwriting process.

Lenders need PII to make lending decisions. But, at the same time, financial institutions must protect the privacy and security of consumer information, whether in the cloud, at the edge, or stored in an on-premises data center.

The global pandemic has accelerated the growth of mobile banking, and financial institutions are embracing everything from online loan applications to digital wallets. Financial technology (fintech) is increasingly being used for on-boarding customers remotely, and for using data stored in the cloud to authenticate users and to provide access to online accounts.

A Fannie Mae Lender Sentiment Survey found that 63% of lenders say APIs that enable easier borrower qualification and verification are among the top technology solutions with the greatest potential to streamline business processes. APIs that transmit PII via the cloud are a key to streamlining mortgage and loan processing for consumers.

Managing Personally Identifiable Information

The heavily regulated financial services sector has long been a leader in safeguarding personal information. But now, with PII shared and stored in the cloud, the stakes are even higher.

In the United States, increasing protection for consumer data is on the radar of government regulators. The Data Protection Act of 2021, under consideration on Capitol Hill, would create more stringent data privacy standards that would be enforced by a new Data Protection Agency.

While the outcome of the new legislation remains to be seen, it is a harbinger of new laws to protect PII. On the state level, the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA), which replaced the previous California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), exemplifies this regulatory sea change. The CPRA creates even tougher data privacy provisions than its predecessor.

One industry group proactively addressing the need for more stringent PII protection is the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The FATF has, for example, developed guidance to help governments, financial institutions, and other regulated entities determine whether a digital ID is appropriate for use for customer due diligence.

Of course, a digital ID solution is only as good as the integrity of the system that protects the PII of its users. Financial institutions need secure software and networks that can protect the PII used to verify borrower data and authenticate user access to accounts. When it comes to “know your customer” automation, lenders want automation tools that are fast, accurate, and secure. Financial institutions need to be able to parse PII in real-time as they classify, capture, detect, and analyze massive amounts of transactional data.

Using PII for Loan Underwriting

Some of the leading fintech companies – such as PayPal and Square – use automation that can transform documents into digital data and provide analytics reports within minutes, with over 99% accuracy. Moreover, lenders like Plaid and Sprout Mortgage use automation to secure and protect PII as part of the digital mortgage process. This saves time and money for financial institutions and enables mortgage professionals to focus on underwriting, compliance, and approval.

Financial services companies need to implement cloud-based solutions that are scalable, easy to implement, and secure. It is also important to find a fintech partner that facilitates more than just data transfer and storage. Financial institutions need intelligent document processing and automation that provides underwriting analytics related to a borrower’s income, assets, cash flow, and other PII.

Automation enables the use of PII in the decision-making process – expediting the underwriting process and reducing consumer friction. Lenders depend on robust and secure fintech to ensure user authentication, deter fraud, facilitate redaction of personal data, and create an audit trail for compliance.

Digital technologies enable lenders to efficiently deliver personalized borrower solutions that are enabled by accurate and secure data validation. Automation is here to stay. For financial institutions, the challenge is to partner with vendors that can analyze, manage, and protect PII, from the edge to the cloud.

About the Author:

By David Snitkof, Vice President of Analytics, Ocrolus

The post Using Personal Data for Analytics Requires Balancing Accessibility and Security appeared first on eWEEK.

Remote work existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, now it is part of every organization, in many cases, permanently.

This fundamental change in the way we work has had a highly disruptive impact on organizations. The more distributed the workplace becomes, the more difficult the challenge of managing content becomes. Organizations continue to use file shares and other clunky content sharing systems. Remote workers are emailing sensitive documents from home offices and cafes using unsecured devices. How we communicate and collaborate is evolving, which means content management must also evolve.

I recently spoke to Mark Wayland, chief revenue officer at Box, who explained how the platform is enabling enterprise users to secure, share, and easily access content in a hybrid work environment. Highlights of my ZKast interview with Wayland, done in conjunction with eWEEK eSPEAKS, are below.

• Box repositioned its platform around the Content Cloud—a central place to collaborate, communicate, and store content both internally and externally.
• Box is a 15-year-old company that went public about six years ago.
• The initial platform centered on collaborating and storing content on the internet.
• Box evolved with the proliferation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Governance, security, and compliance became paramount.
• Everything accelerated due to the changing nature of work during COVID-19.
• Evolution of the company/platform took place when Box introduced the Content Cloud.
• Box Content Cloud is different from platforms like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive.
• The platforms are good for personal storage, but not collaborating around content or sharing content externally.
• In fact, many enterprises turn off external sharing in those platforms.
• Content Cloud comes with best-in-class security and governance, and it’s built around the lifecycle of content.
• Content Cloud coexists alongside personal content storage tools.

Most Significant Benefits of Content Cloud

The biggest benefits organizations get when transitioning to the Content Cloud are:

• Enhanced security. Those that have struggles with breaches, malware, and ransomware infecting documents, turn to Box Shield. It scans all documents stored in the Content Cloud for malware/ransomware.
• Changing nature of work. A typical office worker uses many apps and has difficulty collaborating around content inside the enterprise. Having a single content cloud across the organization improves the way people work.
• Managing content across apps. SaaS apps produce lots of content but aren’t designed to manage the content since it’s not their core function. Content Cloud has pre-built integrations with more than 1,500 SaaS apps. Content is centrally stored, secured, and accessible in all those apps.
• Organizations that have information scattered across multiple systems face various challenges. They have issues with security and document chain of custody.
• In the entertainment industry, files that move around between different systems and home/office computers, can get leaked and result in revenue loss.
• If an apparel company is designing a new sneaker, the information is proprietary and must also be secured as content moves around.
• A wealth management or a financial services firm cannot risk highly sensitive documents being forwarded by an employee using a mobile phone in a public place.
• Every industry needs to have a way of securely communicating and collaborating around content.
• Box has been making major investments in its platform over the last five years, focusing specifically on workflow, governance, and security.
• Box released an enhanced security offering called Shield, which is one of its most successful product launches.
• Prior to that, Box introduced a tool called Governance for content lifecycle management.
• In 2021, Box launched Sign, which allows unlimited electronic signatures (e-signatures) on files stored in the Box platform. This tool offers additional security through e-signatures, an important step in the document lifecycle.
• Box also improved the signature workflow with a tool called Relay. Workflow—everything that happens before and after the signature—is now built into the Content Cloud.
• Whether employees are working from home, in the office, or a combination of the two, Box runs seamlessly in hybrid environments.
• Box continues to improve its user interface (UI), including search capabilities. A new feature called Collections allows users to capture data outside of the typical folder structure.
• Box is using artificial intelligence (AI) to make its platform smarter by building AI capabilities—such as security and metadata—into the platform.
• Box is working on enhancing integrations with key platforms like Microsoft Office 365, Google, Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow, among others.
• Box will make additional product announcements at the BoxWorks Digital 2021 conference in October.

The post Box’s Mark Wayland on the Importance of the Content Cloud appeared first on eWEEK.

Lenovo has long been one of the tech industry’s canniest vendors in terms of building and extending strategic partnerships. So it is no surprise that both new and existing partners shared the spotlight and rallying cries during last week’s Lenovo Tech World 2021 event.

Building on Lenovo’s existing suite of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Device-as-a-Service offerings, the company also used the Tech World event to unveil a host of new as-a-Service and edge computing solutions. Many of those are delivered through its Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and Solutions and Services Group (SSG).

However, while most every systems vendor is delivering or developing its own brand of EaaS and edge offerings, few are focused as intently as Lenovo is on the practical value partners can add to those efforts. As a result, Lenovo’s new offerings will arrive at market well ahead of and better formed than many others. Let’s consider this in greater detail.

The case for EaaS and edge

First, why are vendors focusing so intently on EaaS and edge computing?

In essence, they are following the money and the market but for somewhat different reasons. The case for EaaS—acquiring, deploying, maintaining and managing a vendor’s products through a single contract, support and payment agreement with no upfront costs—has strengthened significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Businesses facing unexpected challenges in everything from staffing to facilities maintenance to customer demand to supply chain management are looking for ways to survive and succeed. Those drivers, along with simplified monthly or quarterly payment terms, have made EaaS solutions increasingly valuable for and attractive to business customers.

According to Lenovo, the market for aaS offerings is growing at more than 4X the overall IT services TAM. On the product side, the company noted that aaS represents 12 percent of x86 server spend and over half of new enterprise storage spend, growing at 40 percent CAGR. In commercial PCs, one of the earliest markets for EaaS, solutions represent 17 percent of overall spend (up from 1 percent two years ago) and is growing at 50 percent CAGR.

In other words, it is no wonder that IT vendors are pursuing EaaS.

What about edge computing? The narrative there has also been impacted by Covid-19. For years, the case for edge computing revolved around the need to process, analyze and enhance the value of data being generated and collected at the remote ends of corporate networks, in locations such as factory floors and retail outlets. Those value propositions still exist but added to the mix are new use cases, such as businesses supporting remote workers and schools enabling distance learning.

As a result, private and public sector customers are seeking solutions that enhance the performance of network functions and services while also easing or automating complex management tasks. Given the growing interest in and potential size of these markets, numerous IT vendors are actively developing and delivering edge-focused solutions and services.

Lenovo’s new enterprise offerings and partners’ value-add

So what exactly did Lenovo announce at Tech World 2021? Perhaps the most important takeaway is that the company will begin offering its entire portfolio of products as a service under the expanded TruScale brand. Lenovo believes it is fully able to differentiate TruScale from competitors’ offerings through its global reach, its portfolio of end-to-end — “from the pocket to the cloud” — technology solutions, and its centralized management platform.

That said, what are Lenovo’s new enterprise data center and cloud EaaS and edge offerings all about, and what roles do Lenovo’s strategic partners play? In the former case, the new EaaS solutions significantly expand on the company’s TruScale Infrastructure Services which allow customers to use hardware and services without purchasing the equipment and pay for what they use with no minimum capacity requirements.

Lenovo’s metering solution remains outside of the customer’s data plane, combining the simplicity of cloud-like access and economics with the security of hardware deployed on-premises. Capacity can scale-up or down to meet a customer’s business needs. Agreements include all related services (maintenance, support, remote monitoring and management) paid in one monthly bill.

Partners play key roles in existing Lenovo TruScale-enabled offerings, such as the SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition, a fully managed SAP S/4HANA cloud service based on Lenovo TruScale and purchased through SAP, and the Nutanix- and Citrix-based hosted desktop solution announced in April.

At Tech World 2021, the company announced new partner-enabled offerings including:

• Edge-to-cloud solutions utilizing Lenovo’s ThinkAgile VX HCI platform and VMware Cloud Foundation or Lenovo’s ThinkAgile MX HCI platform and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI (both will be available in December 2021)
• VMware-based infrastructure solutions (Lenovo + VMware Cloud Foundation) as-a-service managed by Lenovo through the VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) (available worldwide in December 2021)
• Deloitte Cloud Managed Services powered by Lenovo TruScale IaaS which leverage Deloitte’s Open Cloud management platform and can be purchased through Deloitte or Lenovo (available in December 2021)
• In partnership with Intel, Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Solutions with Silicon-as-a-Service capabilities will enable customers to scale compute resources on-demand and only pay for activated processor cores. Proof-of-Concepts are currently in progress with availability slated for 1Q 2022
• Lenovo TruScale Infinite Storage enables perpetual non-disruptive storage infrastructure data services, including guaranteed upgrades to the most current Lenovo ThinkSystem DM series for the life of the contract. Enables customers to non-disruptively grow their storage environments up to 260PB to meet performance and/or capacity requirements (available in 1Q 2022)

Along with customers purchasing the new EaaS solutions directly through Lenovo and its strategic partners (where noted), members of Lenovo’s TruScale Channel Program can directly contract and deliver TruScale as-a-service solutions to customers (available in September 2021 for T1 partners and in Q1 2022 through Distribution).

Three separate announcements underscored Lenovo’s focus on edge computing. First, the company said it will be the first vendor to market with a solution that leverages VMware’s edge computing platform. The offering consists of two Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 Edge Servers integrated with pre-loaded VMware software and can reduce the footprint of edge hardware by up to 50 percent.

The company also announced enhancements to Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A), which is designed to automate data center and cloud infrastructure deployment tasks. According to Lenovo, LOC-A can now support up to 10,000 edge computing sites and speed time to deployment by up to 81% while reduce labor requirements by 10X+ (vs. manual methods). The ThinkSystem SE350 Edge Servers and LOC-A enhancements will be available in September 2021.

Finally, the company introduced the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE70, a flexible artificial intelligence (AI) edge platform for enterprises that is designed to support intelligent transformation efforts in areas from logistics, transportation and smart cities to retail, healthcare and manufacturing. The ThinkEdge SE70 was created in cooperation with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leverages the AWS Panorama Device SDK which can be used to transform commonplace IP cameras into ‘smart’ cameras. The new solution is powered by NVIDIA’s Jetson Xavier NX platform for supporting AI and machine learning models at the edge. Availability for the ThinkEdge SE70 is slated for 1H 2022.

Final analysis

Successfully working with strategic partners is a vital issue for vendors of every stripe. Doing so can substantially reduce the time, effort and risks involved in developing and delivering new solutions and services. Plus, well-known partners add their own imprimatur or “seal of approval” to new solutions, a crucial issue for enterprises and other organizations that tend to value reliability as much as they do innovation.

Those points and value propositions are clear in the new EaaS and edge computing solutions Lenovo announced at Tech World 2021. With the help of strategic partners, the company has significantly expanded its TruScale portfolio with IT and cloud infrastructure offerings that should appeal to a wide range of business customers. Lenovo has also followed a similar partner-amplified path in its new edge offerings, resulting in solutions that will resonate with businesses’ current needs and emerging areas of interest.

As I noted earlier, Lenovo has proactively leveraged strategic partnerships for many years, from well-established efforts with IT industry mainstays, including Intel, Microsoft, VMware, SAP, Nutanix, Citrix and NVIDIA to newer relationships with Deloitte, Kyndryl and AWS. While the Everything-as-a-Service and edge computing offerings announced at Tech World 2021 may be new, the partner-driven ethos behind them has been a key part of Lenovo’s longstanding success and the benefits it consistently delivers to business customers and the channel.

The post Lenovo Taps Strategic Partners for New Everything-as-a-Service and Edge Solutions appeared first on eWEEK.

Mickey Bresman, Co-founder and CEO of Semperis, provides three tips for securing your Active Directory against cyberthreats.

Among the topics we discussed:

• What does “identity-driven cyber resilience” mean?
• Why is Active Directory (AD) security getting so much attention now, in particular?
• Share your top three tips for organizations looking to quickly beef up AD security and recovery.
• What future trends in cybersecurity do you see as highly important?

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According to Daniël Pairon at KPMG, “resilience is the ability to deliver critical operations in the face of disruption. It allows organizations to absorb internal and external shocks, ensuring the continuity of critical operations by protecting key processes and resources such as systems, data, people, and property.”

However, after COVID-19, I think that many business leaders would all agree that resiliency is about more than service availability and optimization of system performance through prediction of future performance and capacity requirements. Today, resiliency is about people, then processes, and then systems.

So how have things changed because of the crisis? The following comments were part of a recent CIO Chat about this key business topic.

Has Defining IT Resiliency Changed as a Result of COVID-19?

CIO David Seidl starts this discussion by saying that “even though we knew better, we mostly thought about our systems, and perhaps do I have enough staff to cover things. Now we think about how our staff is doing mentally, emotionally, and physically in a way that we should have before.

“We also think about how to support multimodal access methods for almost everything. Hybrid meetings have become a default. For this reason, we adjust far more fluidly to changing circumstances. Meanwhile, our leadership team has leveraged IT more than before the crisis and has learned to use more of the tools that we provide. We operate a pair of video conferencing tools because we need the ability to operate even if one is down. Before, most folks didn’t know how to use one conference tool very well. COVID has been an all-hands-on-deck experience.”

CIO Martin Davis agrees with Seidl and says he has rethought “IT Resiliency as well as mental resiliency. It must also include resiliency over a longer term then we were expecting. It’s no longer about can we survive a short period of pain.”

Adding on, CIO Melissa Woo says, “the last 18 months have been grueling for IT professionals. And let’s add we are now seeing a resurgence in infections at a time we were all breathing a sigh of relief that the end of the pandemic was in sight. This second round really tested resiliency. There’s a recurring theme here – resiliency of our teams is a concern.”

CIO Sharon Pitt adds, “it turns out our systems could have been a bit more secure and robust. Also, our procedures and processes could have be tighter. The biggest concern, as time marches on, is the well-being of our teams. For my part, I think it’s a cross-university concern. Maybe even it is an across the nation concern. People are still suffering and many of our teams remain very, very lean.”

CIO Deb Gildersleeve agrees and says, “in the past we often thought about resiliency around a location, work, and data center, COVID-19 made us look at it from an employee perspective. As important, you can’t look at resiliency in a silo. You must consider resiliency alongside adaptability. So, organizations need to stay as resilient as possible and agile enough to adapt when disruption occurs.”

Does IT Resiliency Have a People Component?

Former CIO Ken LeBlanc started this conversation by saying it is “so important for CIOs to have strong partnerships with the HR function and 3rd party sources.”

But, Seidl says, “I think it always did. We had group 1, 2, and 3 picked out for emergencies. But COVID changed how we view preparing for an emergency. I think we’re better for it, but I’m also worried about the long-term impact on folks who have carried the resiliency burden for so long.

“If I asked folks the question how would you prepare for a multi-month, or yearlong emergency now, I wonder what our plans would look like. Our old plans were for an outage, or major event  that would be days, maybe weeks.”

Woo adds an important note: “none of the stuff matters without people to run it.” Davis agreed and said, “most things are people at their core. Even before you always relied upon the people working 24×7 to resolve a critical outage. That’s true even more so now.”

For CIO Jim Russell, the people component today “has received at least greater awareness. The flex in our organizations comes first in the people and if they are working from a trauma position, they often lose resiliency. So being and keeping folks fresh should always have been part of putting in place a healthy IT department.”

IT Strategy Officer Katie Rose, adds “we have to ensure that people can bring their best, and if they’re burnout, that won’t happen.”

Rob O’Donohue, Gartner CIO Analyst, said, “I look at this through many domains in IT. Culture, leadership, strategy, workforce models, and relationships all as important as technology. Interested to see if others are thinking the same. I have results coming out soon on this topic and the shift in technology resilience to more of the human jumps out. More needs to be done. Cultural resilience is key.”

Reconsidering Endpoint Devices and How They Connect

CIOs shared with me over the last couple months that many workers were issued laptops for the first time as they left their offices. So how should strategy work going forward?

Seidl said, “in many cases, we sent desktops home that were never expected to move. We benefitted, fortunately, from a purposeful effort to make services available wherever people are over the past few years. Our administrative assistants were surprised when the leadership team took over mail duties during the pandemic. I think we learned some good lessons about leveraging location too.”

For Russell, “COVID-19 accelerated the work from anywhere movement. This change has meant rethinking security and training but just sped up one aspect of digital transformation. And some of the resiliency of IT occurs in the clients or customers.”

Adding on, Davis says that “this time has changed the thinking of many. It’s no longer about locations for resiliency or security it’s more about individual objects, e.g. a device, or a database, or an app.”

Given this, Gildersleeve says the question that every CIO is asking is “what can we do as a company to make sure everyone can do their best work from wherever they are located in a secure way.”

Part of this starts by doing what Pitt suggests, “redefining technology standards, allowing teams to work from anywhere. In our cases, significantly change was required to our HR policies. Fortunately, we did not need to redefine how our teams connected to our systems…although we expanded and tightened that capability. But certainly the availability of broadband was a significant concern for some.”

CTO Anthony McMahon added an international perspective by saying, “in New Zealand, our issue was a return to normal too quickly. Leaders didn’t have time to note the impact of security in home networks before everyone moved back to the office. Endpoints have been tightened, but risks remain. Especially as we are now back working from home.”

CIO Carrie Shumaker adds, “her organization will now have laptops for most if not all and a soft phone-first strategy. Many departments had been deploying laptops for years, but this pushed the stragglers forward.”

Where Systems Needed Help

Seidl says that his organization’s “infrastructure is a decent-sized small city, which means our approach has to include stuff that just plain won’t flex that way now, or even easily in the future. I look at this through many domains in IT. Culture, leadership, strategy, workforce models, and relationships all as important as technology.”

Gildersleeve similarly argues for considering the people and process stuff first. She says, “getting tech to new hires became a whole new process. Previously, we were able to bring people into an office and walk them through their setup and then they were good to work from anywhere…

“Now, we have to get ahead of ordering and building out new systems because we have to factor in shipping time and getting folks what they need before they start”. She adds that “as we continue to work in a hybrid-remote workforce where people are working all over… Resiliency is as much equipment and systems as it is making sure employees are safely accessing data and information in a way that keeps the company secure but doesn’t compromise productivity.”

To make this happen, Russell says several technology decisions needed to be made. This includes the following: “Communications, Video Collaboration, Files Storage, and a host of exploration and training just on better use of resilient aspects of existing tools.” CIO Carrie Shumaker notes, “we need soft phones by default and for business texting.”

Parting Words

Without question, CIOs think about resiliency through a whole new lens because of COVID-19. As well, the crisis is going to force the ripping off of “human band-aids” to systems.

CIOs need to make employees resilient wherever they work. Shumaker puts it this way. “For me, I grew up in IT running payroll, which required all-nighters on a regular basis, and we staffed; accordingly, tired people make poor decisions. Those were typically marathons of greater than 48 hours. COVID-19 has added a whole new dimension.”

Businesses today without question need to be concerned first about resiliency from the people dimension.

The post Understanding IT Resilience: The Human Component appeared first on eWEEK.

During the recent Tesla AI Day event, Elon Musk said he discourages “machine learning, because it is really difficult. Unless you have to use machine learning, don’t do it.”

Well, Musk may be right in his assessment, because machine learning is quite difficult to implement. Most companies desire the benefits of what artificial intelligence can achieve for their business, but most don’t have what it takes to get it up and running. Therefore, as much as 85% of ML projects currently fail.

The takeaway from Musk’s startling statement is that organizations can’t treat AI, of which machine learning is a subset, like a part-time project. Many businesses are making some important mistakes when trying to do AI. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Below are five data points from Bin Zhao, Ph.D., Lead Data Scientist at Datatron, showing some common mistakes of AI implementation.

1. Careful: this isn’t traditional software development

Don’t treat AI/ML development like traditional software development. Developing AI/ML models is a much different process than software development, but many organizations try to apply the traditional software development lifecycle to manage AI/ML models.

Machine Learning development lifecycle (MLLC) takes much more time because of additional factors including translating AI algorithms to compatible software codes, unique infrastructure requirements, the need for frequent model iterations, and more. Compared to traditional programming languages, it can take more than five times as long. This means today’s typical application release processes are simply not applicable.

2. Using or standardizing the wrong tools can hamper data scientists’ productivity

This type of tools mistake introduces unnecessary delays and inefficiencies. In most IT situations, organizations can control the types of servers they buy, the software tools they use, the dependencies they build with and so on.

Not so with AI/ML; organizations must allow their data scientists to use their preferred tools based on what they think will get the job done in the best way. Otherwise, they’re likely to see all their data scientists leave.

3. IT/DevOps staff can lack ML expertise

DevOps is the union of software development and operations with the goals of reducing solution delivery time and sustaining a good user experience through automation (e.g. CI/CD and monitoring). But DevOps experts don’t know the nuances of working with ML models.

MLOps is a new term that expresses how to apply DevOps rules to automate the building, testing and deployment of ML systems. The goal of MLOps is to unite ML application development and the operation of ML applications, making it easier for groups to deploy finer models more often.

4. Beware of the misalignment of the skill sets of data scientists

Data scientists need the right raw data for modeling, and they excel in uncovering data to build the best models to solve business challenges. However, that does not mean they are experts in all the intricacies of deploying models to work with existing applications and infrastructure. This causes friction between them and the engineering team and business leaders, resulting in low job satisfaction for data scientists.

Though highly skilled and trained, they must rely on others for deployment and production, which also means that they can’t iterate rapidly. And since the projects shift to the engineering team, who don’t have the ML skill set, it’s easy for them to miss details – especially if the model is not making accurate predictions.

5. Don’t get too caught up in the romance of academic AI research vs. business reality

Academic AI research has historically focused on developing models and algorithms. Limited efforts have been devoted towards iterating and improving data sets for a specific business problem, operationalizing a machine learning model or monitoring models in production.

Building and deploying a machine learning model for solving a real world problem is much more than developing the algorithm itself.

A sound plan for ML success

Operationalizing ML models is hard but not impossible. Using a new model development life cycle will streamline the process of model development and model production. It does this by helping data scientists, engineering and other involved teams make effective decisions in a timely manner. It will also help teams to reduce production risks. A successful model governance tool can also help by standardizing processes, simplifying governance and significantly reducing risks.

About the Author:

Bin Zhao, Ph.D., Lead Data Scientist at Datatron

The post Elon is Right, AI is Hard: Five Pitfalls to Avoid in Artificial Intelligence appeared first on eWEEK.

I spoke with Simon Jelley, GM & VP of Product at Veritas Technologies, about why ransomware is so difficult to defend against, and his suggestions for critical best practices to lessen the threat.

Among the topics we discussed:

• What’s the current state of ransomware?
• Why does security software alone keep falling short?
• Why is paying the ransom never the right thing to do?
• How do organizations prepare for a ransomware attack in such a way that they can avoid paying the ransom?

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It’s a quandary many organizations face regarding cloud IT services. They can go the do-it-yourself (DIY) route, keeping most, if not everything, involving their IT environments in-house. Or, they can outsource the responsibilities to a third-party company.

Both options offer certain benefits, depending on a company’s specific business needs. The problem – one of them, anyway – is that IT operations today go far beyond applications and desktop computers. They’re now critical to meeting key business initiatives.

This creates a challenge for many organizations. Their IT staffs are already busy deploying new software, staying on top of evolving cybersecurity threats, maintaining hardware, and handling other day-to-day tasks. Few have the time or expertise to step back and create a comprehensive strategy that aligns with their organization’s overall goals.

That’s why companies must consider how outsourcing certain aspects of IT operations to a managed services provider can help them. The following are five benefits of managed services to consider when determining whether to outsource to a managed cloud service provider or go with the DIY IT approach

1. Less Load on Staff, Resources

In discussions about managed services, freeing up internal resources gets mentioned a lot, and for good reason. It’s one of the biggest benefits of IT outsourcing.

Offloading routine IT tasks, such as system monitoring and patching, enables in-house IT professionals to focus on the business, whether that entails developing products, improving operational efficiency, or other strategic endeavors. These are the kind of initiatives that are essential to enabling organizations to undergo critical digital transformation and gain and maintain a competitive edge.

But it’s not just routine tasks that can be handed off to managed services providers, particularly regarding cloud environments. Managed service providers can take on things like cloud security monitoring, reporting, and technical support, and forecasting, planning, optimizing, and allocating cloud spending effectively across various channels. This frees up internal IT staff time and enables organizations to get more value out of their cloud resources.

Rather than spending time researching best practices, trying to stay on top of trends that impact their cloud environments, and going through all the steps required to invest in the latest and greatest tools, internal IT departments can count on their managed services providers to take on those responsibilities

2. Expand with Specific Expertise

A lot of IT projects are relatively straightforward and don’t require special expertise. However, some run high on the complexity scale, tend to be time-consuming, and may require experience beyond what in-house IT professionals possess.

In many cases, these are high-profile projects with a lot riding on them. They could entail migrating regulated workloads to the cloud, or developing applications that employ advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence. If these projects aren’t executed correctly, they can result in business-disrupting downtime, product failures, or other consequences.

Midway through one of these projects is not the time to determine your staff doesn’t have the right skills to pull it off. However, it’s also not cost-effective for companies to hire full-time employees with the requisite experience and expertise just for a single project.

Using managed services solves the issue by allowing organizations to access the necessary project-specific resources. The key is to work with managed service providers that have proven success in the type of project you need delivered. In addition to benefiting from the provider’s experience and knowledge, by partnering with a managed services provider, your team can learn along the way.

3. Optimize Your Cloud Deployment

A successful IT project doesn’t end with deployment to the cloud. In-house teams often must move on to the next task. They aren’t always available to provide the ongoing enhancements that help ensure that a solution is leveraged to its full potential and the business gets a return on its technology investment.

For a managed services provider, this responsibility is often part of the project scope. It’s in their interest to not only develop an optimal solution. They also want to take the added steps after deployment to ensure the solution works as expected and delivers the anticipated value.

The best managed services providers have broad cloud expertise in ongoing optimization. That optimization encompasses both application and infrastructure performance, as well as cost control.

These companies employ tools such as user enablement frameworks, ROI reporting, cost audits, and continuous improvement to ensure the cloud solutions they develop and implement deliver long-term value.

4. Continuous Help

Many in-house IT staffs are available around the clock. However, that doesn’t mean they’re available to handle specific issues that might arise with a cloud environment or service. That often requires special expertise that might not be available within a company. Plus, internal IT staff are often already bogged down by competing priorities. Even if they have the expertise to deal with an urgent issue, there’s no guarantee that they have the availability to do so.

Among the benefits of contracting for cloud managed services is that expert support is just a phone call, text, or email away. Most managed services providers that offer 24/7 technical support also provide service level agreements (SLAs) that specify the amount of time in which they’ll address customer requests.

Some of these companies also offer support arrangements that can be customized to customers’ needs. That may include delivery of support during specified times or a block of hours that can be used at any time. This kind of flexibility helps supplement internal IT resources and provides for access to the expertise needed, when it’s needed, without a long-term investment.

5. Better Cybersecurity

This is another area where going with a managed services provider can make a huge difference. Managed services providers that specialize in IT security for cloud operations maintain highly experienced teams of security experts. They are at the forefront of their fields and stay on top of emerging cyber threats.

These organizations invest in leading-edge defensive tactics and tools as well as mitigation strategies. The best among them take a multi-layered approach to IT security, employing a variety of resources to defend against both external and internal breaches across endpoints, at the edge, and throughout the network.

Among the resources they can employ are security and vulnerability assessments to identify issues and fix them before they become problems. They can also take over the responsibility of monitoring your organization’s network and cloud infrastructure, maintaining the security integrity of your endpoints, and incorporating practices like application vulnerability monitoring, firewall management, and configuration management.

Some managed IT security service providers also have expertise in compliance with various regulatory requirements and industry standards. They can help integrate the necessary controls to meet HIPAA/HITECH, PCI-DSS, and a variety of other regulatory compliance needs.

More Reasons to Outsource Cloud Operations

We’ve covered just a handful of issues to assess when determining if managed services are right for your company. There are many others, and the list of considerations grows once you opt to go with managed services. That includes the qualifications of the managed services provider itself.

This is an area of research you should conduct to make sure you find a great managed service partner that is also aligned to your current or desired cloud environment.

About the author:

Denis Volkov is the Director of Managed Services at ClearScale.

The post Managing Your Cloud: 5 Benefits of Managed Services appeared first on eWEEK.

Behind the scenes, technology is becoming increasingly complex as the cloud, artificial intelligence, extended reality, edge and many other emerging technologies come into the mainstream. For technology users, however, interfaces are becoming more and more intuitive. It’s almost inversely proportional: the more complex a technology becomes, the easier it becomes to use.

The great democratization of technology is being driven by an array of enablers including natural language processing (NLP), low-code platforms, robotic process automation (RPA) and others. These tools are not only removing the friction of using technology, but also allowing people to optimize their work or fix pain points on their own.

This trend, which is discussed in Accenture’s 2021 Technology Vision report, promises to deliver significant value to businesses while also improving the employee experience. Imagine the possibilities of a world in which people can create a custom dashboard for a group’s finances, for example, or build an app to approve and automatically fulfill purchase orders, and all without having to ask the IT team for help.

Already, 88% of executives we surveyed in conjunction with the report believe technology democratization is becoming critical in their ability to ignite innovation across their organization.

In this environment, not only are problems solved faster, and by the people who are closest to them, but the IT team’s time is spared for where it can really add value: big implementations, scaling successful programs, and injecting the most cutting-edge technology into the business, for example.

Leapfrog the skills gap

Seizing on the opportunities of technology democratization has never been more important. Companies across a wide range of sectors are facing well documented skills gaps that could stunt growth, if it isn’t already.

To-date, solutions to the skills gap have mostly focused on training. And while this will remain an important requirement, the democratization of technology offers another approach. It’s a parallel strategy that will further close the disconnect between workforces and the technologies needed to deliver the most creative solutions in today’s market.

It also unlocks the full potential of every worker. When access to powerful technology capabilities extends throughout a company, at all levels, every person can become an active and vital part of the digital transformation effort. People can pick and choose for themselves what to automate, enabling them to focus on the things they do best. That means better outcomes for workers, customers and the business.

The activation of grassroots innovation

In essence, technology democratization is the enablement of grassroots innovation. Simple-to-use technology is a necessary condition for this type of innovation, but it’s not sufficient. It is also necessary to teach your people to think like technologists.

Fundamentally, employees will need to learn what tools are at their disposal and how and when to best deploy them. But more than that, businesses also need to invest in employees’ overall technology literacy: helping them understand the logic of machines, the benefits and risks to different decisions, and how to see technology not just as a tool, but as a solution.

The aim is to ensure that the people closest to customers and internal problems have everything they need to identify new solutions and opportunities and get them operational as fast as possible.

For this to work, employees must understand issues of data governance and security and be able to innovate in low-risk manner. There are relatively simply ways to achieve this. For instance, CommScope, a fiber optic manufacturer, developed a low- and no-code program with guardrails in place to help its people avoid accidental security risks.

Reinventing innovation: 3 key questions

Over time, the democratization of technology will challenge traditional notions of who “owns” technology, how technology strategy and planning is done, and the role of IT. As this happens, leaders have the opportunity to reimagine the intersection of technology and the organization – and to reinvent how their IT and non-IT employees work together.

Google has already done just that. Its workers  can use new tools even if they’re not supported by the company – so long as the teams using them support the new stack themselves and mitigate any issues that might arise around effective collaboration.

Very soon, the pace of transformation in enterprises will no longer be limited to how quickly IT teams can roll out new solutions. Instead, empowered workers on the front lines of the business will become change makers and innovators in their own right.

If business leaders are to ensure their companies benefit from this innovation advantage in the years ahead, they need to address three core questions:

1. Does my business have the capabilities needed to democratize IT?
2. How can I train workers to think like technologists?
3. How can democratized technologies make IT groups more effective – and vice versa?

Without answering these questions and taking steps to empower your people, you’ll be holding your own digital transformation back. Industries are adapting and transforming around you – grassroots innovation will help you keep up.

The post How Democratizing Technology Adds a Crucial Element to Enterprise Innovation appeared first on eWEEK.

One of the lasting impacts of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic will likely be the accelerated migration to a truly hybrid workforce model for many businesses. Enterprises will need to support their employees with equal access to opportunities and resources, whether in the office, working from home, or on the other side of the world.

Increasingly, open collaboration and productivity tools are at the heart of this global paradigm shift and have been the lifeblood for many businesses forced into remote work models by the pandemic.

Google Meet and Cisco Webex are two of the biggest names in the video collaboration game. Given that the companies compete for the same pie, it may have caught some by surprise last week when both announced their intention to make Cisco Webex and Google Meet more interoperable. Let’s look closer at the announcement, which I believe makes sense on many levels.

Also see: Digital Transformation: Definition, Examples and Strategy

Mr. Gorbachev, tear these silos down

With more businesses operating in the digital world than ever before, everybody has their collaboration software and hardware of choice. Video conferencing platforms have been duking it out since before the pandemic began to be the preferred option for corporations headed the hybrid direction. The dust is beginning to settle and revealing a world with multiple, popular videoconferencing solutions.

One problem is that many older conference rooms are outfitted with videoconferencing equipment that will only function when paired with a specific software suite. This focused and somewhat proprietary approach brings unnecessary burdens to video call customers when communicating with end customers or suppliers that may not have that service in their rooms. Customers will commit to a video call service and, in doing so, transferring the video call service’s burden of competition.

In other words, while I may use video call service X and my client uses video call service Y, since X doesn’t work with Y, my client and I have taken on the burden that video call service X and Y should be taking. The biggest factor going into this is that businesses are using proprietary hardware to use service X and Y, so compromising on another service leaves the hardware unusable. This approach won’t fly for future video call solutions.

You see, during Covid-19, we were all trained and used any service that our customers or suppliers preferred. This was because, at home, we were all PC-based and it takes maybe 5 minutes tom add another video service that the enterprise may not fully support.

Situations will arise when your business must communicate with entities that have standardized its operations on a different platform. As it stands, it takes time and energy to figure out how to best communicate across these silos. It’s a simple equation: reduce friction, save time and improve productivity—isn’t that what these tools were made for in the first place?

Video call solutions that implement interoperability become more attractive to the enterprise. However, this is a two-way street—when Webex decides to be interoperable with Google Meet, Google Meet likewise must meet in the middle. Otherwise, it becomes a standoff where one side becomes interoperable at the cost of giving an advantage to the other. At that point, the interoperability becomes convenient only to the side that isn’t interoperable, ultimately counterintuitive.

Google + Cisco = best friends forever?

Google and Cisco, together, are hoping to usher in a new era of cooperation that enables both to retain their current customer base and reduce the headaches of platform incompatibility. Starting in Q4, both companies’ videoconferencing hardware will be able to connect to the other’s videoconferencing software platform.

Google says it has removed steps that will make it easier and more intuitive for customers to join Google Meet using Cisco Webex hardware natively. Webex devices will flash a “One Button To Push” (OBTP) prompt when a meeting is about to start, featuring the Google Meet logo. All it takes is (you guessed it) one push of the button, and you can join the Google Meet with your Webex device, bypassing the need to enter meeting IDs, passwords, or any other steps for validation.

Thanks to WebRTC technology, Google Meet’s media and signaling can travel directly from the Google Cloud to any device registered to Webex, whether that be directly or via Webex Edge.

Conversely, Google says that users of its Google Meet video hardware will now easily access Webex meetings. To join a scheduled Webex meeting, all a user must do is add the Google device, or conference room, to the Webex meeting invite and then wait for go time. When the meeting is about to begin, the invite will appear on the device’s agenda accompanied with the tag “via Webex by Cisco.”

Customers should enjoy the Webex meeting with the same seamless joining experience, Google Meet UI, and call controls that they’re accustomed to. This interoperability will come embedded on all Google Meet hardware devices, in addition to the Google Meet Series One Desk 27 and Board 65.

My thoughts

Most video call services—Zoom, Teams, Meet, Webex—all have interoperability features integrated into its services, but I have yet to see one integrated into proprietary hardware. I think this strategy will be a win-win-loss. It will be a win for both Google Meet and Cisco Webex and at the same time being a loss for competition like Zoom. It essentially puts Webex and Meet on another level of interoperability between parties.

From my experience with video calling, it is convenience and reliability that win the day. When businesses use specific hardware to do all-day video conferencing, this interoperability will be all the difference.

I also see businesses believing that they are getting their money’s worth in its hardware. Rather than using the service and hardware it paid for every other video call, the service and hardware are used all the time. I say “all the time” because I imagine other video call solutions will jump in on this hardware interoperability in the near future. The difference will be Google and Webex are the first to do this for their hardware, and it is an appealing feature for businesses obtaining new video call hardware.

The biggest kicker for this interoperability is that Cisco’s Webex will not support E2E encryption. Connecting Cisco devices to Google devices will not bring over the E2E encryption. I think it is a compromise that Cisco users should keep in mind since the E2E encryption is a big seller for Webex.

Wrapping up

The last 18 months have been a slugfest between videoconferencing platforms, all vying to be the platform of choice for corporate America during this time of workforce upheaval. That said, I believe both Google and Cisco understand fundamentally that the future is open and collaborative. Nobody currently has (nor can achieve) a total monopoly on collaboration hardware and software. Acknowledging this reality allows joint customers to spend less time troubleshooting and more time collaborating.

Google, for its part, says it intends to reduce friction with other major productivity platforms (Zoom or Teams both come to mind), and I expect we’ll see other collaboration suites following suit (forgive the wordplay). It’s time to give “playing nice” a try.

The post Cisco’s Webex And Google Meet Interoperability Makes an Interesting Pairing appeared first on eWEEK.

I spoke with Radhika Krishnan, Chief Product Officer for Hitachi Vantara, about the role of data fabrics, and how data storage and data analytics are merging.

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It’s hard to pinpoint the first use of the phrase “digital transformation,” but it has been around since at least 2012. And of course, the process of digitization, or migrating towards computerized technologies, has been going on since the 1960s.

Indeed, for nearly a decade, industry pundits have been telling enterprises to embrace digital transformation, and many of them have been heeding that call. Enterprise technologies like cloud computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence all drive the growth of digital transformation.

Today, the term “digital transformation” has become nearly ubiquitous. It’s hard to find a company that hasn’t embarked on at least one digital transformation project. In a 2021 Gartner survey, only 3 percent of the data and analytics leaders surveyed said they were not involved in a digital transformation project.

Firms have good reason for tackling these projects. Several studies have found that digital transformation correlates with better business outcomes. For example, a Deloitte Insights study found, “Greater digital maturity is associated with better financial performance. The higher-maturity companies in this year’s sample were about three times more likely than lower-maturity companies to report annual net revenue growth and net profit margins significantly above their industry average—a pattern that held true across industries.”

And while digital transformation was already well underway at many companies by 2019, the coronavirus seems to have accelerated the process. A 2021 BDO Digital study found that 43 percent of organizations surveyed where accelerating their existing plans in response to the pandemic, and 51 percent were adding new digital projects. Looking ahead, 90% of middle market organizations planned to maintain or increase their digital spending in 2021.

In the same vein, when Boston Consulting Group surveyed 5,000 managers and employees about how the pandemic was affecting their business, more than 80 percent said that their digital transformation efforts were helping them deal with the economic slowdown.

But what exactly is digital transformation? And what should organizations be doing if they want to experience the benefits associated with this trend?

What Is Digital Transformation?

You will get widely different definitions of digital transformation, depending on who you ask. And almost everyone shades the definition slightly so that it benefits them. For example, Salesforce, which sells customer relationship management software, will tell you, “Digital transformation begins and ends with the customer.”

Red Hat, which sells software and services that touch all areas of business, says:

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.

Analyst firm Gartner, which makes its money by selling information about broad, complex topics, makes digital transformation look broad and complex:

Digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization (for example, cloud computing), to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. The term is widely used in public-sector organizations to refer to modest initiatives such as putting services online or legacy modernization.

The eWeek definition of digital transformation is a bit more general: “Digital transformation is the adoption of digital technology that has the capability to transform the business.”

Critically, digital transformation involves more than just deploying some new technology. And it is about much more than becoming more efficient or increasing productivity.

Digital transformation is about finding new markets and new ways of doing business, about interacting with customers in new and different ways. It involves harnessing the power of emerging technology to do things that have never been done before. It often leads to new revenue streams, increased margins, greater competitiveness and meeting other business goals.

It carries a high degree of risk. But it also brings significant opportunities.

Digital Transformation Examples

Well-known companies that have publicly discussed their digital transformation efforts include GE, Nike, Home Depot, Walmart, Target, John Deere and many others. But because every organization is unique, digital transformation looks different at every single company that attempts it. And often organizations are deploying more than one kind of transformational technology at once.

Having said that, many organizations are drawn to similar types of technology. Here are some of the more popular types of digital transformation projects:

• Converting from primarily brick-and-mortar sales to ecommerce.
• Migrating from on-premise data centers to cloud computing.
• Using big data analytics to become more efficient and optimize business processes.
• Deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning into business analytics to uncover new insights.
• Creating mobile apps that allow customers to interact with the company from their phones.
• Integrating new technologies like Internet of Things sensors, digital twins, blockchain and others directly into products.
• Abandoning traditional advertising methods like direct mail, television and newspapers in favor of digital marketing and social media.
• Utilizing virtual reality and augmented reality to improve product design and service processes.
• Enabling employees to work remotely, thus improving their employee experience.

Today, most digital transformation efforts incorporate several of these types of technologies. And they also usually require a change in business strategy as well.

How to Create a Digital Transformation Strategy

The most successful digital transformations are those with well-planned and well-implemented strategies. How can you create a successful strategy? Here are some tips:

• Identify your business goals. Deciding to start a digital transformation project because everyone else is doing a digital transformation project is a surefire recipe for disaster. Before you begin, make sure everyone on your team understands why you are undertaking the effort. You need to have agreement on your current situation and a clear vision for where you want to go. Often, the most effective digital transformation goals come with key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics that allow you to track your progress toward your goal.
• Hire an expert. Chances are good that no one on your current team has ever shepherded a successful digital transformation before. If that’s your situation, you might want to think about bringing in some help. This could take the form of hiring a full-time employee with digital transformation experience, or it could entail hiring an outside consulting firm. Some companies also hire other key personnel in IT, marketing, or other areas who have experience or expertise in the kind of transformation you want to make.
• Build on your strengths. It’s tempting to throw out everything you are currently doing and start from scratch, but that is usually a mistake. Think about what you already do well. Do you have loyal customers? What does your brand stand for? As you go through your digital transformation you need to make sure you aren’t doing anything to undermine the success you already have. The digital transformation projects that meet their goals often seem like a natural extension of a company’s previous efforts into the digital arena.
• Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. A common theme among digital transformation frameworks (more on that below) is an emphasis on the customer experience. Digital transformation will change the way your customers interact with your organization. You need to make sure that this new experience is positive and reinforces the brand image you want to have.
• Establish new procedures and policies. New technology is completely unhelpful if no one uses it. Before you roll out a new tool or application, think carefully about how you want your employees to use it. If you don’t clearly define procedures and institute some enforcement mechanisms to make sure that people follow them, your staff will likely revert back to the old way of doing things. In some cases, digital transformation will require a complete cultural transformation, which is a lengthy, difficult process.
• Iterate. You can’t transform your organization in an instant. Instead, make a small change, evaluate and repeat. Digital transformation projects that evolve through a series of steps are more likely to succeed than a wholesale change that you attempt to implement all at once. If you keep your strategy somewhat agile, you can make slight modifications along the way and react to changing conditions in a timely manner.
• Consider following a digital transformation framework. Several analyst and consulting firms have laid out digital transformation frameworks that can help give form to your strategy. Remember that your actual strategy should be unique to your organization, but following a proven strategy can help you avoid missing key steps or repeating mistakes that other organizations have made before. A framework isn’t necessary, but it might be helpful, particularly if your management team doesn’t have prior experience with digital transformation.

What is a Digital Transformation Framework

According to Boston Consulting Group, less than a third of companies (30%) navigate their digital transformation successfully. In order to help businesses improve their odds, a number of consultants, vendors, and other experts have published digital transformation frameworks.

A digital transformation framework is a step-by-step plan for successfully implementing a digital transformation strategy. Usually, it comes along with a graphic representation that shows how the consultants perceive digital transformation.

Some of the most well-known digital transformation frameworks include the following:

• MIT Sloan’s Path to Digital Transformation The MIT Sloan Digital Management Review offers a host of resources related to digital transformation, including several different step-by-step guides that could be classified as digital transformation frameworks.
• Boston Consulting Group’s Six Factors of a Successful Digital Transformation include integrated strategy, leadership commitment, high-caliber talent, agile governance, effective monitoring and a modular platform. It says that 80 percent of organizations with these factors in place success in their digital transformation efforts.
• PwC’s Digital Transformation Framework has five steps: evolve your business, create new value, protect for the future, accelerate through technology and know your customers.
• Cognizant’s How to Win with Digital Playbook claims that only 30 percent of digital transformation projects succeed. It says that in order to be one of the winners you need to take a human-centered design approach, cope with emerging technologies and digitize your business strategy.
• Gartner’s IT Roadmap for Digital Business Transformation describes the key steps of digital transformation as ambition, design, scale, deliver, refine. And it notes that digital transformation continues to be a top priority for business leaders.No matter which digital transformation strategy and/or framework your organization chooses to pursue, it’s worth noting that planning and strategizing is only part of the effort. In order to succeed, you will not only need a good plan, you will need to execute it well. As more and more companies embrace digital transformation, those that rise to the top of their industries will be those that execute digital transformation well.

The post Digital Transformation Guide: Definition, Examples & Strategy appeared first on eWEEK.

I spoke with Nabil Bukhari, CTO and CPO of Extreme Networks, about how today’s networks need AI for proper monitoring. We also focused on the profound change created by democratization of technology.

Among the topics we covered:

• What’s the role of cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence in networking?
• What do you see as the next shift in the future of work?
• People often talk about the “democratization of technology” – let’s discuss the meaning and implications of this concept.
• What do you see as the future for network technology several years from now?

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Also: here’s a preview of Zoomtopia 2021.

Now that back-to-school season is upon us again, some students are back in the classroom, and some will continue to learn remotely (depending on the school district). To better understand how Zoom has evolved to support educators and the value of digital platforms, I spoke with Pat La Morte, global education solutions lead at Zoom Video Communications, in my recent ZKast interview, done in conjunction with eWEEK eSPEAKS. Highlights of the interview are below.

Zoom has evolved to keep pace with online learning

• Many schools, educators, students and parents struggled with virtual learning. This has less to do with the technology and more to do with preparedness and experience with products like Zoom.
• Most schools were forced into remote learning with no notices causing ad hoc deployments that lead to inconsistent experiences. Now that schools have had time to take a step back and assess the past year, expectations should be higher.
• Although Zoom was initially designed as an enterprise solution, its adaptability made it a valuable resource for schools during COVID-19. Zoom recently made enhancements specifically for the education sector.
• Zoom’s Focus mode allows teachers to engage with students without distractions and improves classroom management. Students in a meeting cannot see each other, while the teacher can see all the participants.
• With new pinning and spotlighting enhancements, teachers can spotlight and pin up to seven participants. If a school uses a sign language interpreter, that person is prominently pinned on the screen the entire duration of the meeting.
• Another new feature sends students to a waiting room if a teacher loses internet connectivity for more than 20 seconds. Students get a pop-up message that alerts them not to leave the meeting.
• Zoom already has several features that weren’t designed specifically for schools but are used by educators, such as:
• Livestreaming for graduations, sports/games, and other events that have attendance limits due to COVID-19.
• Breakout rooms, where teachers can split a class into groups of students to work on projects or assignments.
• Polling, which allows educators to create multiple choice polls and gather student responses live during meetings.
• Zoom will soon launch advanced polling, a feature that will let moderators create up to 20 polls, making the experience even more interactive for students. The feature will expand to include true/false, fill-in-the-blanks, and other questions to help teachers quiz students.
• As an online video communications platform, Zoom is committed to improving security, which is a major concern for educators.
• At the start of the pandemic, Zoom made several security enhancements like adding end-to-end encryption for an additional layer of protection.
• Zoom formed a CISO Council and advisory board, which includes security leaders from different industries.
• Alex Stamos joined Zoom as an outside advisor to perform a comprehensive security review of its platform.
• There are some best practices teachers/educators, students, and teachers should follow to maximize learning in the digital environment this year.
• Teachers/educators should make sure they understand Zoom to help students navigate the platform if they experience issues.
• Zoom should complement not change the way an educator teaches. It should be managed as a classroom space.
• Teachers should provide a consistent workflow for all students. If some students are in the classroom and some are learning remotely, they all need to know where to find the material.
• Students should follow the teacher’s protocols and pay attention to the lessons teachers are presenting via Zoom.
• Schools have to protect future competitiveness, school identity, and their legacy in a virtual world.
• Schools that were most successful during the pandemic reimagined instead of recreated the learning environment.
• Education has never been so accessible to so many people and it will be difficult to go back to “normal.” Yet there are still socioeconomic issues that need to be addressed.
• Low income communities in the U.S. don’t have adequate broadband for distance learning.
• Availability/affordability of equipment and connectivity are required to bring accessibility to these communities.
• E-Rate, which provides discounts on telecommunications services and internet access to schools and libraries, is one example of a government-funded program.
• Schools are also working with local cable and broadband companies to bring Wi-Fi hotspots to students’ homes.
• Platforms like Zoom are equalizing what is unfair in the education system.
• In the future, some districts will be building schools with no classrooms and using Zoom to deliver material. Students who are on campus/building could be working with a teacher in more of a mentorship role while engaging in hands-on learning at home.
• Education will be a key track at the upcoming 2021 Zoomtopia event. There will be a total of 10 sessions ranging from a visionary keynote to best practices to safety. More information can be found on the Zoomtopia site.

There is still a wide range of inconsistency between states and countries with the respect to the pandemic. This means the uncertainty and rapid changes to safety protocols will continue to change, sometimes very quickly.

Schools, parents and students must accept the reality that virtual learning will be in place, likely indefinitely. Educators need to rethink how learning is done and leverage the unique capabilities of products like Zoom to change the way students learn and collaborate.

The post Zoom’s Pat La Morte on the Evolution of Online Education appeared first on eWEEK.

On Tuesday, September 14, at 11 AM PST, @eWEEKNews will host its monthly #eWEEKChat. The topic will be “Trends in Data Storage, Protection and Privacy,” and it will be moderated by James Maguire, eWEEK’s Editor-in-Chief.

We’ll discuss – using Twitter – important Trends in Data Storage, Protection and Privacy concepts, including market trends, key advantages, best practices, overcoming challenges, and data storage’s critical role in today’s IT sector. Data storage, it seems, never stops expanding.

How to Participate: On Twitter, use the hashtag #eWEEKChat to follow/participate in the discussion. But it’s easier and more efficient to use the real-time chat room link at CrowdChat.

Instructions are on the Data Storage Crowdchat page: log in at the top right, use your Twitter handle to register. The chat begins promptly at 11 AM PT. The page will come alive at that time with the real-time discussion. You can join in or simply watch the discussion as it is created.

Special Guests, Trends in Data Storage, Protection and Privacy

The list of data storage experts in this month’s Tweetchat currently includes the following – please check back for additional expert guests:

• Paul Speciale, Chief Product Officer, Scality
• Curtis Anderson, Software Architect, Panasas
• Chris Preimesberger, Contributing Writer, ZDNet. Editor emeritus, eWeek

Chat room real-time link: Go to the Crowdchat page. Sign in with your Twitter handle and use #eweekchat for the identifier.

The questions we’ll tweet about will include – check back for more questions:

1. What is the biggest current challenge in data storage?
2. Are companies struggling with siloed and fragmented data storage as much as they always have? Or is this getting better?
3. For data privacy, what’s the current state of compliance and data storage? Are companies struggling with compliance issues?
4. For data protection, clearly ransomware has become a huge problem. Key best practices to protect against ransomware?
5. What do you expect for the future of data storage, protection and privacy, say 3-5 years out?

Go here for CrowdChat information.

#eWEEKchat Tentative Schedule for 2021*

Jan. 12: What’s Up in Next-Gen Data Security
Feb. 9: Why Data Orchestration is Fast Replacing Batch Processing
March 9: What’s Next-Gen in Health-Care IT?|
April 13: The Home as Enterprise Branch
May 11: Next-Gen Networking Products & Services
June 8: Challenges in AI
July 15: VDI and Enabling Hybrid Work
Aug. 17: DevOps & Agile Development
Sept. 14: Trends in Data Storage, Protection and Privacy
Oct. 12: DataOps: The Data Management Platform of the Future?
Nov. 9: New Tech to Expect for 2022
Dec. 14: Predixions and Wild Guesses for IT in 2022

*all topics subjects to change

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Aside from the pandemic, ransomware has become one of the gravest threats to the global economy.  It is no longer a matter of “if” an organization is going to be attacked but “when,” according to Gartner.

The research firm predicts that 75% of organizations will face one or more attacks by 2025. National Security Institute found the average ransomware payout was $200,000 in 2020, up from just $5,000 two years ago as ransomware gangs resort to more aggressive tactics to get what they want.

Large-scale attacks on enterprises—the latest being one against Accenture—are creating regular headlines. The U.S. is the largest region for such attacks, and ransomware accounted for 30% of all U.S.-based cyberattacks in 2020, more than double the rate globally.

Why is ransomware worse now?

The word among security experts is that the Covid-19 pandemic, with its resulting lockdowns and work-from-home mandates, created an enticing new opportunity for hackers.

Employees sometimes use insecure personal devices and networks, accessing desktops over the easily-compromised Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) software and connected by VPNs which aren’t always configured or secured properly. This has led to a perfect storm of vulnerability at even the largest corporations with massive IT budgets and large teams in place. Ransomware attacks are also becoming more sophisticated.

Ransomware software is now attacking in multiple stages, from penetrating the network, to stealing credentials, to attacking the backup systems. Over this entire time period, which can take weeks to months, companies typically don’t know they are under attack until finally someone suddenly notices files becoming encrypted and unusable.

How does this affect data storage?

Ransomware players are attacking all IT infrastructure, not just servers and applications. In 2021, the network attached storage (NAS) appliance maker QNAP alerted its customers that eCh0raix ransomware was attacking its NAS devices, especially those with weak passwords, as reported in this ransomware paper by ESET.

This is a disastrous prospect, since data growth is exploding and 80% of the data in organizations is now unstructured file data sitting either in NAS storage or in the cloud.

The ransomware challenge of unstructured file data

Protecting file data is tricky because of its sheer volume, variety and fast pace of growth. IT organizations must create a layered strategy – meaning that in addition to keeping local backup copies, they must also keep an extra copy isolated in a different place such as the cloud that cannot be infected.

But now we’re talking major sticker shock. Many organizations have petabytes of file data and a petabyte can easily be a few billion files. Companies are already struggling to backup all this data. Adding another copy can give the CFO a serious migraine.

The good news is that it’s possible to create a cost-effective layered strategy. Here’s how:

1. Prioritize visibility and audits

Early detection of ransomware by monitoring activity and identifying threats and unusual activity across networks and infrastructure is a great goal. Analytics on data usage by unstructured data management tools can show suspicious activity on files, such as an abnormal amount of reads and writes.  While early detection is the ideal line of defense, it is not foolproof as ransomware attacks are constantly evolving. Storage managers should have analytics dashboards showing key metrics on all data usage across on-premises and cloud locations. Most (80%) of file data is typically cold and has not been used in a year or more. Knowing what data is hot and actively used, and what is not is key to creating a cost-efficient multi-layered defense.

2. Create a multi-layered data management defense

• Snapshots and Backups for Hot Data. Snapshots and backups keep track of changes to data as they get updated. They are needed on hot, active data to protect from user or system failures.  But they can get attacked by ransomware, and if it is undetected for days, they may “protect” corrupted data.  Ransomware protection needs an additional copy of this data in storage that is immutable (meaning it cannot be rewritten), in a separate physical location such as the cloud.  This can all get expensive, which is why you want to use backups on hot, active data, which is typically 20% of the footprint.
• Cloud Tiering and Immutable Storage for Cold Data. A mantra of modern data management is that all data should not be treated the same. It’s not a democracy. By tiering cold data off top-grade NAS to an object-lock storage in the cloud, you get an immutable copy of cold file data at a fraction of the cost. Ransomware software cannot rewrite it.  Moving cold data to object storage also reduces your backup footprint—which serves as another defense against ransomware while reducing backup license costs. Yes, you can also create a DR copy of data on tape, but recovery times will be significantly longer and physical backup solutions have become less appealing in the cloud age.

3. Have a plan – and validate it

With these components in place your team should have actionable plans in place to respond to attack scenarios. The time to realize if your plans can be executed is not when the hackers have succeeded and are chuckling behind their screens. Plans must be documented and tested to ensure data is protected with rapid restoration and alternative methods of data access so you can keep the business running without disruption—or large ransom payments.

Beyond Security Teams

The fight against ransomware is extending beyond the security team into all aspects of enterprise IT, including data storage. With unstructured data management, storage professionals can complement the efforts of their security colleagues by adopting a multilayered defense strategy that begins with real-time visibility across all storage, and incorporates snapshots, backups, and object-locked cloud storage. Your cybersecurity team will thank you.

As cybercriminals get more creative and aggressive, data management professionals will need to up their game with a more nuanced approach to the disaster recovery plan.

About the author:

Kumar Goswami is CEO and Co-Founder of  Komprise.

The post The File Data Factor in Ransomware Defense: 3 Best Practices appeared first on eWEEK.