What makes a real-time enterprise?
Being a ‘real-time’ enterprise today is typically evaluated under two criteria:
the ability to capture, collect and store data as it comes in; and the ability
to respond to it at the point of consumption. Analytics solutions that allow for
this are highly sought after, as it’s considered a huge competitive
differentiator and critical capability in our fast-paced digital world. However,
while there’s much buzzword bingo about real-time data, decision-making and
insight, the readiness of the enterprise to become real-time is varied due to a
lack of understanding in how it practically aligns with their goals, resulting
in lost opportunities and wasted resources. ... We find the sudden hurried shift
among enterprises to grasp real-time analytics typically starts when
organisations examine their data and see they are not making decisions fast
enough to affect business outcomes. Many organisations potentially misconstrue
the cause of these common analytics problems as a lack of real-time analytics
capability, when there are likely several other factors at play preventing them
from making decisions efficiently and effectively, such as a long and arduous
analysis process, analysis fatigue and human bias resulting in accidental
discovery, and a lack of guidance in understanding what the insights mean.
Does Your Cyberattack Plan Include a Crisis Communications Strategy?
During a cyberattack, one of the most overlooked — and consequential — areas for
enterprises is implementing an effective crisis communications strategy. Just as
you need to shore up the technology, legal, financial, and compliance aspects of
your cybersecurity preparation plan, you must also prioritize crisis management
and communications But where should you start? Below are five crisis
communications tips to form the foundation of your strategy. ... Our media
landscape is characterized by a 24/7 news cycle, ubiquitous social media
channels, and misinformation powered by algorithmic artificial intelligence (AI)
and delivered instantly on a global scale to billions of people. This shows no
sign of abating. What does that mean? Time is not on your side. But with an
actionable plan in place, you will be much better prepared. ... With your crisis
communications framework in place, it is time for action. Picture this: your
company is the target of a ransomware attack. And while desperately trying to
address the incident, media are beginning to report the incident, citing reports
on Twitter.
How to Retain Your IT Talent
It seems easy to create an open and collaborative work culture, but in IT it can
be a special challenge. This is because the nature of IT work is factual and
introspective. It's easy to get buried in a project and forget to communicate
status to a workmate -- or to be consumed by planning or budgeting as a CIO and
forget to “walk the floor” and visit with staff members. Those heading up IT can
make a conscious effort to improve open communication and engagement by setting
an example of personal engagement with staff themselves. When staff members
understand IT’s strategic direction because the CIO has directly communicated it
to them, as well as why they are undertaking certain projects, work becomes
purposeful. Team members also benefit if they know that support is available
when they need it, and when they know that they can freely go to anyone's
office, from the CIO on down. The net result is that people are happier at work,
and less likely to leave an inclusive work culture. ... From here, training and
mentoring plans for developing employee potential should be defined and
followed. Career and skills development plans should be targeted for
up-and-coming employees and recent hires, and also for longer-term staff who
want to cross train and learn something new.
The positive levers of a digital transformation journey
It’s not just processes. People play an equally important role in the
transformation exercise. Shifting from a traditional workplace to a digital one
involves an overall change in the mindset of the people behind the business. A
company’s culture and behaviour determine how well it can adapt to being
‘digital first’. To undertake digital transformation seamlessly, many
organisations ensure transparency by communicating their expectations clearly to
their employees. This transformation also helps in highlighting skill gaps
within the organisation and sheds light on which of these gaps can be filled by
AI and automation, allowing for the repurposing of employee
intelligence. Rahul Tandon, head, digital transformation at BPCL said,
“Many initiatives and developments are bringing in a lot of automation and AI
with a clear objective to absolve our field teams of all repetitive
transactional activities and focus solely on business development and efficient
customer interactions.” This approach, he says, has infused new energy to the
field teams. “We hope it will become the preferred choice for all stakeholders
and eventually impact our bottom line positively.”
How to rethink risks with new cloud deployments
With microservices, you have hundreds of different functions running separately,
each with their own unique purpose and triggered from different events. Each one
of these functions requires its own unique authentication protocol, and that
leaves room for error. Attackers will look for things like a forgotten resource
or redundant code, or open APIs with known security gaps to gain access to the
environment. This will then allow the attacker to gain access to a website
containing sensitive content or functions, without having to authenticate
properly. While the service provider will handle much of the password management
and recovery workflows, it is up to the customers to make sure that the
resources themselves are properly configured. However, things get more
complicated when functionality is not triggered from an end-user request, but
rather during the application flow, in such a way as to bypass the
authentication schema. To address this issue, it is important to have continuous
monitoring of your application, including the application flow, so you can
identify application triggers. From there, you will want to create and
categorize alerts for when resources fail to include the appropriate
permissions, have redundant permissions, or the triggered behavior is anomalous
or non-compliant.
How Containers Simplify DevOps Workflows and CI/CD Pipelines
DevOps has created a way to automate processes to build, test and code faster
and more reliably. Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) isn’t a
novel concept, but tools like Jenkins have done much to define what a CI/CD
pipeline should look like. While DevOps represents a cultural change in the
organization, CI/CD is the core engine that drives the success of DevOps. With
CI, teams must implement smaller changes more often, but they check the code
with the version control repositories. Therefore, there is a lot more
consistency in the building, packing and testing of apps, leading to better
collaboration and software quality. CD begins where CI ends. Since teams work
on several environments (prod, dev, test, etc.), the role of CD is to automate
code deployment to these environments and execute service calls to databases
and servers. The CI/CD concept isn’t entirely new, but it’s only now that we
have the right tools to fully reap the benefits of CI/CD. Containers make it
extremely easy to implement a CI/CD pipeline and enable a much more
collaborative culture.
Automation Is a Game Changer, Not a Job Killer
While many businesses embrace the positives of digitization, employees
approach these changes with far less enthusiasm. Words like “automation” and
“digitization” are loaded with baggage, invoking negative associations of job
loss. Employees are quick to assume the worst, fearing they’ll be left behind
or eliminated. But is that fear warranted? Not so, according to BDO’s recent
survey of middle market executives. The majority of companies are adding new
digital enablement projects, with 34% planning to increase headcount and 42%
comprehensively re-imagining job roles. Only 22% expect the use of automation
to have a negative impact on headcount. In most cases, jobs are changing and
evolving, requiring employees to work alongside new technologies, develop new
skill sets and integrate automation into their daily work lives. But for these
digital initiatives to succeed, organizations need to secure employee buy-in.
Otherwise, initiatives will fall well short of reaching maximum ROI. So, how
can CIOs and IT leaders change resistance into adoption and dispel unwarranted
fears among the workforce?
Bugs in NVIDIA’s Jetson Chipset Opens Door to DoS Attacks, Data Theft
The most severe bug, tracked as CVE‑2021‑34372, opens the Jetson framework to
a buffer-overflow attack by an adversary. According to the NVIDIA security
bulletin, the attacker would need network access to a system to carry out an
attack, but the company warned the vulnerability is not complex to exploit and
that an adversary with little to low access rights could launch it. It added
that an attack could give an adversary persistent access to components – other
than the NVIDIA chipset targeted – and allow a hacker to manipulate and or
sabotage a targeted system. “[The Jetson] driver contains a vulnerability in
the NVIDIA OTE protocol message parsing code where an integer overflow in a
malloc() size calculation leads to a buffer overflow on the heap, which might
result in information disclosure, escalation of privileges and denial of
service (DoS),” according to the security bulletin, posted on Friday.
Oblivious transfer extensions (OTE) are low-level cryptographic algorithms
used by Jetson chipsets to process private-set-intersection protocols used to
secure data as the chip processes data.
How can technology design be made more inclusive?
With an increasing reliance on screens to communicate, organisations should
also look to ensure that product design addresses how the software facilitates
this, and make adjustments where necessary. “Brands must consider all forms of
disabilities, such as vision and hearing impairments, as well as conditions
like autism, at the very beginning of the design process,” said Paul Clark,
senior vice-president and EMEA managing director at Poly. “At Poly, we’ve
spent a lot of time making our solutions more accessible. For example, one of
our customer’s employees is highly motivated to contribute but has Duchenne
Muscular Dystrophy and was self-conscious about the loud, high-pitched noises
that his ventilator made during calls. Poly’s NoiseBlock AI technology has
been built into all of our headsets and video bars to minimise non-human
sounds. Our personal video bar was able to tell that the ventilator noises
were not speech and blocked them out. “Simple solutions like raised volume
buttons enable the user to recognise controls by touch instead of sight.
Brands should also consider ease of use and comfort for people who wear
headdress, for example.
Driving network transformation with unified communications
As with most digital processes, cybersecurity remains a primary concern for
businesses. With the increased use of UC platforms, such as Microsoft Teams,
new security challenges are emerging. And quite often these vulnerabilities
come from actions that we do not think twice about. Video recordings, for
example, often contain sensitive and confidential information that could prove
detrimental if discovered outside of the company. Yet, these recordings are
typically stored in a server, or downloaded onto a desktop without much
consideration. In addition to threats against sensitive content and data, real
time collaboration can cause security weaknesses. With the right tools,
criminals could acquire the necessary link to access private conferences and
documents on a UC platform. Whether to simply eavesdrop or cause disruption,
this breach could result in a number of consequences, both in the short and
long term. Again, these calls and documents may contain confidential details
which could be exploited by criminals if leaked. Disruptions to conferences
will not only cause frustrations at the time, but also potentially damage the
reputation of organizations.
Quote for the day:
"Keep your fears to yourself, but
share your courage with others." -- Robert Louis Stevenson
No comments:
Post a Comment