March 11, 2023

4 Reasons to Outsource Large IT Projects During Economic Headwinds

Great professional services teams accumulate best practices over time and will bring complementary skill sets into the business they’re partnering with. Shared knowledge helps grow the skillset of your internal team, and enables them to contribute more meaningfully to the success of your business. Your employee satisfaction can even increase from personal and professional progress felt when learning new technology, frameworks, or languages throughout major IT projects developed in partnership with external experts. This aspect cannot be overlooked, given that 91% of employees report being frustrated with inadequate workplace technology and 71% consider looking for a new employer as a consequence. Expert teams have the depth of knowledge on a breadth of tools that help save tremendous time and many headaches by creating efficient, automated workflows. Ensure that your team gets the opportunity to work directly with your outsourced development team to facilitate knowledge sharing.

Migrating to the Cloud: Is It as Intimidating as It Appears?

Being Cloud Native is often considered crucial for business success in the current business landscape. However, the perception of becoming “Cloud Native” as a drastic change for a business might not necessarily be accurate. In this article, we will delve into the concept of Cloud Migration and its effects on the IT support infrastructure of your business. ... “Cloud Native Services” are those services and infrastructure specifically designed to run on cloud platforms, hosted and maintained by Cloud Providers. These services can include a variety of offerings, such as virtual machines (VMs), application servers, VPNs, load balancers, routers, databases, and disk storage. They can be divided into three main categories: compute services, network services, and storage services. ... Throughout the entire project, it is essential to continuously monitor and manage the cloud environment to ensure that it remains secure, cost-effective, and aligned with the business objectives.?

DevOps as a Graph for Real-Time Troubleshooting

A lot of data for observability is interrelated, but our current tools don’t allow us to view metrics, logs and distributed traces as connected sources of information. These data types are often collected in siloes, and correlation of the data is done manually. For example, to know if a spike in a metric on one service might have something to do with a spike on another service, we often search through the metric charts to find the correlation. You need a solution that connects operational data from the start. ... Digital Enterprise Journal’s recent State of IT Performance Report found that change is the largest source of production issues. 75% of all performance problems can eventually be traced back to changes in the environment. When simple configuration errors can cause a domino effect, there’s a broader lesson to be learned. If you’re not capturing code or configuration changes as part of your observability strategy, it’s time to close that gap.

New variant of the IceFire ransomware targets Linux enterprise systems

Known up to now to target only Windows systems, the IceFire malware detected by SentinelLabs uses an iFire extension, consistent with a February report from MalwareHunterTeam — a group of independent cybersecurity researchers analyzing and tracking threats — that IceFire is shifting focus to Linux enterprise systems. Contrary to past behavior targeting technology companies, the Linux variant of IceFire was observed attacking media and entertainment companies. The attackers’ tactics are consistent with those of the "big-game hunting" (BGH) ransomware families, which involve double extortion, attacks against large enterprises, the use of numerous persistence mechanisms, and evasion tactics such as deleting log files, according to the SentinelLabs report. Double extortion occurs when attackers steal data as well encrypting it, and usually ask for ransom that's double the usual payment.

We chat with ChatGPT itself about the future of AI

AI has already been quite transformative, particularly in the digital marketing industry. How do you think this is going to evolve? One area where AI is likely to have a significant impact is in personalized marketing. By analysing vast amounts of data on individual consumers, AI algorithms can help marketers tailor their messages and campaigns to specific demographics, interests, and behaviours. This can lead to more effective marketing strategies and higher engagement rates. Another area where AI is likely to make a big impact in digital marketing is in automation. By automating routine tasks such as social media posting and email marketing, AI can free up marketers to focus on more strategic activities, such as campaign planning and content creation. Additionally, AI can help improve the accuracy of targeting and reduce wasted ad spend by predicting which users are most likely to convert. Finally, AI-powered chatbots are likely to become increasingly prevalent in the digital marketing space.

What Does the National Cybersecurity Strategy Mean for Public and Private Stakeholders?

Making that shift a reality is going to mean creating incentives. “We must shift incentives so that when entities across the public and private sectors are faced with the trade-offs between easy but temporary fixes and durable, long-term solutions, they have the resources, capabilities, and incentives to consistently choose the latter,” an Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) spokesperson said in a statement to InformationWeek. Regulation will be a necessary element in incentivizing this fundamental shift in responsibility. “Our strategy reflects the reality that voluntary measures will not be enough to deliver the cybersecurity posture we need to enable our digital society,” according to the ONCD spokesperson. While new regulation certainly has a role to play, so do other forms of incentive. “Simply adding mandates and regulation could have detrimental economic impacts, promote a ‘bare minimum’ approach to compliance and pass costs downstream.?

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