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It’s that time of year when pundits are preaching what’s hot and what’s not in the new calendar year. As a fancy pants analyst sitting at his desk on Bainbridge Island typing, I resemble that. Today I want to focus on security. Recently I checked off the box on IoT here.
Security Supply Chain
For five years, I sat on the program advisory committee for
From VPNs to mesh networks, efforts to find an alternative route to internet access are gaining ground in Silicon Valley
Daniela Perdomo, goTenna’s founder, holding the $90 antenna, with engineer Raphael Abrams. PHOTO: RYAN BOBROWSKI
By Douglas MacMillan
Daniela Perdomo is concerned about the power of U.S. telecom giants that stand to gain from the repeal of “net neutrality” rules. Her company offers a way around them: A $90 antenna that lets users send messages without cellular service or Wi-Fi.
Daniel Newman , CONTRIBUTOR
Exploring all things Digital Transformation
An Amazon Echo sits on a table in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
An IHS survey estimates that there are 20 billion connected devices globally as of this year. Will 2018 be “The Year of IoT”? Not exactly, but the future looks promising and 2018 will show a promising trajectory.
Despite the huge gains in connectivity, the truth is 2018 will be more of a steady (rather than explosive) growth period for the IoT, full of fits and spasms, and everything that goes along with them. It will see lots of investment—lots of growth—and widespread adoption in a few major industries. But it will also see some growing pains—“fragmentation frustration,” potential data breaches, and security issues galore.
All mixed up
Snap today introduced a redesign of its flagship app intended to promote more intimate sharing among friend groups while pushing professionally produced content into a separate feed. The redesigned Snapchat includes a new dynamic friends page that incorporates both chat messages and ephemeral stories, and pushes items from your close friends to the top of the feed for the first time. It will begin appearing later this week for a small test group, and is expected to roll out more broadly in coming weeks.
I’ve really struggled to see the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity for MSPs. While IoT was/is a topic de jour at nearly every MSP-related conference currently, it’s still a pie in a blue sky concept. So what’s the reality of IoT as I write this in early 2018? I’d offer industrial applications that are, to be brutally honest, far afield from the traditional MSP world.
I have two data points to back up my research.
Both involve relationships I have from the Microsoft days. First, there is an employee
Let’s face it: 2017 was a terrible year for cyber security with more phishing scams, ransomware, state-sponsored attacks, and new attack vectors. Will 2018 be better?
By Michael Nadeau Senior Editor, CSO
Given what’s happened in 2017 — the Equifax breach, state-sponsored attacks, Russian manipulation of social media, Wannacry, and more phishing scams than we can count — you might not be looking forward to 2018. Breaches will be bigger, hackers will be smarter, and security teams and budgets won’t seem to keep pace.
There is reason to be optimistic, though. Yes, some things will get worse before they get better, but we expect real progress in a few areas. Here’s what we think will happen next year.
By Gregg Keizer
Senior Reporter, Computerworld
It's been more than a year since Microsoft ended the decades-old practice of letting customers choose which patches they apply, and instead instituted a cumulative update maintenance model for Windows 7 and its shadow-of-a-sibling, Window 8.1.
And yet some users still don't grasp the new scheme.