In 2013, a survey from cloud portfolio management provider Innotas revealed that 50 percent of businesses surveyed had experienced an IT project failure within the previous 12 months. Now, three years later, not much has changed. According to the most recent Innotas annual Project and Portfolio Management Survey, in fact, the numbers have increased: 55 percent of the 126 IT professionals surveyed between January and March 2015 reported they had a project fail, up from 32 percent in 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft released patches for 51 vulnerabilities Tuesday, including one affecting Internet Explorer that hackers have exploited in targeted attacks against organizations in South Korea.The Microsoft patches were covered in 16 security bulletins, eight rated critical and eight important. The affected products include Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Office and Microsoft .NET Framework.The patches included in the IE and Edge security bulletins, MS16-051 and MS16-052, are among the most important ones and should be prioritized because they can be exploited to compromise computers when users visit specially crafted Web pages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
WhatsApp is taking its popular messaging service to the desktop with a new Mac and Windows app released Tuesday. It's a pretty straightforward app: the millions of WhatsApp users can now continue conversations from their phone on a computer, and vice versa. That's a boon for people who want to chat with friends on WhatsApp without having to use their phones. The move should help WhatsApp better compete with other messaging services like Line, WeChat and Telegram, which already have desktop applications available for at least one platform. In order to set the app up, users have to scan a QR code inside the application with the Android or iPhone versions of WhatsApp, which will then allow them to log into the application and use it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Slack is offering its users a new way to sign into other applications. The company announced Tuesday that it has launched a new "Sign in with Slack" feature that lets people use their login for the chat app to sign in to participating applications. Developers of applications like Quip can now enable their users to sign in with Slack credentials, which can make it easier for people to get started with applications -- and therefore more likely to try them out. The new feature makes it possible for independent developers and startups focused on workplace productivity to get an easier foothold with new users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eric Schmidt was called to the witness stand Tuesday in Oracle’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, and he gave little ground during some tense exchanges with Oracle’s attorney.The chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was the first witness called in the trial, in which Oracle accuses Google of infringing its Java copyrights in Android.Schmidt was initially questioned by Google's own attorney, and he testified that Google did not believe it needed a license to use 37 Java application programming interfaces for which Oracle owns the copyright.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A controversial new wireless technology is closer to widespread use, after Qualcomm and T-Mobile got an official green light from the FCC to test LTE-U in four U.S. locations late last week.Qualcomm has had limited testing underway with Verizon since January, but the new authorization from the FCC means that the T-Mobile implementations will be of greater scope. T-Mobile will trial LTE-U (see explainer on LTE-U here) infrastructure in Richardson, Texas; Bellevue, Wash.; Simi Valley, Calif.; and the city of Las Vegas. Verizon’s testing is taking place in Raleigh and Oklahoma City.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier we delved into disaster recovery and network security. Now it’s time to take a look at Critical Security Controls 13, 14 and 15, which cover data protection and access control. The Critical Security Controls are best practices devised by the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit dedicated to improving cybersecurity in the public and private sectors.A company’s data is its crown jewels, and because it’s valuable, there will always be people looking to get their hands on it. Threats include corporate espionage, cybercriminals, disgruntled employees and plain old human error. Fortunately it’s relatively easy to reduce your potential exposure. It calls for protecting your data, using encryption and authentication, and carefully restricting access.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Are you happy with your on-device biometric fingerprint scanner? I’m not. The scanner on my most recent tablet has failed to unlock the device. The cause then was probably dirty hands coming in from the garage. I disabled that biometric experiment—likely never to be used again.I'm not the only one who sometimes disregards security in favor of ease of use. Half of passwords are more than 5 years old, a report found last year. And three-fourths of those surveyed then said they use duplicate passwords. Clearly not secure. The more complicated and consequently secure one makes the password, though, the harder it is to remember.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from Hitachi is that the company is forming a new, standalone Silicon Valley-based unit to explore and execute upon opportunities within the Internet of Things.This is interesting, since the parent group, Hitachi Limited, has a dizzying variety of business units, many (if not most) of which have their own IoT opportunities. Indeed, when attending a Hitachi Data Systems conference last year, I was amazed at the variety of businesses that fall under the Hitachi moniker. Many of those businesses were demonstrating in the expo hall, and a huge number had an IoT bent to what they were doing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT departments eager to meet their goals for digital transformation should evaluate whether their traditional IT vendors are adapting to new technologies fast enough or whether to enlist a new crop of more innovative vendors, says research and advisory firm IDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Vendor management once meant squeezing service providers for the lowest costs. That approach won't fly today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Whenever creating a budget, there is always the rainy day fund or the contingency account in case of unexpected circumstances. But what if those circumstances are a data breach that is bigger than you could have ever imagined? And you don’t have cyberinsurance?Look to open sourceTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Over the past week security researchers have seen increasing attempts by hackers to find servers vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities recently found in the ImageMagick Web server library.The flaws were publicly disclosed last Tuesday by researchers who had reason to believe that malicious attackers already had knowledge about them after an initial fix from the ImageMagick developers proved to be incomplete. The flaws were collectively dubbed ImageTragick and a website with more information was set up to attract attention to them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has found evidence that at least one employee of Bangladesh’s central bank was involved in the theft of US$81 million from the bank through a complex hack, according to a newspaper report.The number of employees involved could be higher, with people familiar with the matter suggesting that a handful of others may also have assisted hackers to negotiate Bangladesh Bank’s computer system, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.Bangladesh Bank officials could not be reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, or the kind that's not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible.Towards that end, IBM Security on Tuesday announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial-intelligence system to tackle cybercrime.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing can be a difficult technology to wrap your head around so many users turn to consultants to help them. Who’s the best cloud consultant?IDC says its Accenture.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Commercial drones gaining altitude with top IT vendors +Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Accenture landed at the top of the list: The company is one of the top IT consultants in general and has aggressively pivoted toward helping customers embrace cloud technology. IDC
The size of each bubble represents market shareTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Way back in the old days—say, five minutes ago—if you wanted to take advantage of what a country had to offer, you had to actually go there. But in the age of “Everything as a Service,” physically locating yourself in the country you want to “reside” seems so old school.
At least, that seems to be the rationale behind Estonia’s efforts to offer something called “e-residency.” As Taavi Kotka, Estonia's CIO, explained in Business Insider last week, "It’s called CaaS. There’s SaaS. We’re Country as a Service.”Estonia is cooler than you think
Here’s the deal. If you didn’t know—and there’s really no big reason you should have—the Republic of Estonia is a tiny but technically advanced Baltic country of just 1.3 million people. According to Wikipedia, “Estonia is often described as one of the most internet-focused countries in Europe,” and it “boasts “an advanced, high-income economy and high living standards. Unfortunately, the population has been shrinking for decades.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As a freelancer who has worked for a large range of big companies over the years, I'm all too aware of how important contracts are to an enterprise's working.I've long been amazed that coming to a decision about a body of work tends to be a relatively quick process, but actually negotiating and formalizing the contract becomes an incredibly drawn out process. I've often laughed when I've been sent a 40-page contract by a vendor for a tiny piece of work. I have neither the legal skills nor the legal budget to pore through the document. I tend to just let things slide—at the end of the day, I'm just keen to get the job happening.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As of 2015, more than 40 million Americans had some kind of student loan debt. According to a survey from education finance portal iontuition of the 1,000 student-loan-debt-holders surveyed in July 2015, 80 percent say they'd appreciate it if their employers helped with repayment of their debt through a matching opportunity, much like a 401k. As businesses struggle to attract and retain talent, is student loan repayment assistance becoming a must-have benefit?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just as the dust has settled on the Superfish controversy, another piece of software installed on Lenovo PCs is causing problems. This time it's due to a major malware exploit.The problem is with Lenovo Solution Center (LSC) software, which the company describes as "a central hub for monitoring system health and security." LSC is supposed to monitor your system's virus and firewall status, update your software, perform backups, check battery health, and get registration and warranty information.Unfortunately, it also has a vulnerability that allows a malicious attacker to start the LSC service and trick it in to executing arbitrary code in the local system context, according to researchers at Trustwave SpiderLabs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here