Today's Tech Digest - Feb 05, 2020

G Suite vs. Office 365: What's the best office suite for business?

Both suites work well with a range of devices. Because it’s web-based, G Suite works in most browsers on any operating system, and Google also offers apps for Android and iOS. Microsoft provides Office client apps for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, and its web-based apps work across browsers. The suites also offer the same basic core applications. Each has word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, email, calendar and contacts programs, along with videoconferencing, messaging and note-taking software. Each has cloud storage associated with it. But those individual applications are quite different from one suite to the other, as are the management tools for taking care of them in a business environment. And both suites offer scads of additional tools as well. So it can be exceedingly difficult to decide which suite is better for your business. That’s where this piece comes in. We offer a detailed look at every aspect of the office suites, from an application-by-application comparison to how well each suite handles collaboration, how well their apps integrate, their pricing and support and more. Our focus here is on how the suites work for businesses, rather than individual use.

How remote work rose by 400% in the past decade

The report found that the rise of remote work popularity is thanks to the evolution of supporting technologies including powerful mobile devices, ultra-fast internet connections, and proliferation of cloud-based storage and SaaS solutions. "The rise of cloud-based SaaS software has been instrumental to the growth of remote work," de Lataillade said. "Employees can now instantly connect and collaborate with colleagues around the world at any time." Employees definitely took advantage: The majority (78%) of employees said they work remotely some of the time; more than half (58%) said they work remotely at least once a month; and, 36% of respondents said they work remotely at least once a week, the report found. While 36% might not seem like a huge percentage, it's a significant jump from 10 years ago. In 2010, the US Census Bureau found that only 9.5% of employees worked remotely at least once a week, indicating that the number of people working remotely on a weekly basis has grown by nearly 400% in the last decade, according to the report.

Social media targeting algorithms need regulation, says CDEI

“Platforms should be required to maintain online advertising archives, to provide transparency for types of personalised advertising that pose particular societal risks. These categories include politics, so that political claims can be seen and contested and to ensure that elections are not only fair but are seen to be fair; employment and other ‘opportunities’, where scrutiny is needed to ensure that online targeting does not lead to unlawful discrimination; and age-restricted products.” The report acknowledged, however, that personalisation of users’ online experiences increased the usability of many aspects of the internet. “It makes it easier for people to navigate an online world that otherwise contains an overwhelming volume of information. Without automated online targeting systems, many of the online services people have come to rely on would become harder to use,” it said.

NIST Drafts Guidelines for Coping With Ransomware

The proposed guidance offers a "how to" guide to implementing best practices. For example, it includes tips on vulnerability management and using backups to protect data. The second draft, "Data Integrity: Detecting and Responding to Ransomware and Other Destructive Events," offers advice on improving the detection and mitigation of ransomware and other security issues within their infrastructure. It also delves into how integrity monitoring, event detection, vulnerability management, reporting capabilities and mitigation and containment can be implemented to improve network defenses. Much like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, these guidelines offers best practices that organizations can pick and choose based on their own network architectures, says Jennifer Cawthra, the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence lead for data security and healthcare. "We put together a reference architecture to demonstrate that you can solve a cybersecurity challenge," Cawthra tells ISMG. "Now this is not the only way to solve a problem; it's just an example. ..."

From Legacy to Hybrid Data Platforms: Managing Disparate Data in the Cloud

Specifically, as part of an overall adaptive analytics fabric (the virtualized data and associated tools to aid analytics speed, accuracy, and ease of use), virtualization empowers companies to treat all their disparate data repositories as a single, unified data source that's extensible to support future technologies. A fabric provides a bridge across data warehouses, data marts, and data lakes, delivering a single view of an organization's data without having to physically integrate, engineer, or re-architect it. This abstraction enables enterprises to instantly surface usable data, no matter where it's actually stored, to produce fast, timely insights. The ability to merge data from different sources reveals another advantage. Rather than combining data into a single system that necessitates formatting data for the lowest common denominator of capability, adaptive analytics fabrics enable enterprises to store data in the data structures that best fit its use.

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