Massive amounts of corporate data now stored on employee USB devices

There has been a 123 percent increase in the volume of data downloaded to USB devices by employees since working from home has become widespread due to coronavirus. What's more, according to a report from SaaS data protection company Digital Guardian, 74 percent of that data is subject to organisation data governance policies. Cloud storage and USB devices have become the most preferred data egress paths after the COVID-19 emergency declaration, accounting for 89 percent of all data moved outside the enterprise. Data egress via all paths (email, cloud, USB, etc.) was 80 percent higher in the first month following… [Continue Reading]

Updated platform offers zero-trust management of multi-clouds

Multi-cloud environments tend to be harder to secure because teams and applications are much more distributed resulting in a larger attack surface. A zero-trust approach deals with these threats but can introduce overheads that make it hard to manage. Morpheus Data is integrating VMware NSX-T and Unisys Stealth technology into its cloud automation framework to enable microsegmentation and dramatically simplify the implementation of zero-trust processes. For VMware NSX-V and NSX-T, customers can manage transfer zones, distributed firewalls, edge gateways, load balancers and more directly from Morpheus plus securely share these network objects in multi-tenant environments. Unisys Stealth is a software… [Continue Reading]

You need to take action if you want to avoid being cut off from Zoom

Zoom has been one of the most used, yet most lambasted, contestants in the video conferencing arena during coronavirus-driven lockdown times, and much of the focus has been on privacy and security issues. Having acknowledged that it had work to do, the company promised to take steps to improve its service and has issued numerous updates to its app in recent months. The release of Zoom 5.0 in April was a major step, and you only have days to upgrade or risk being cut off from the service completely. See also: Zoom is gaining end-to-end encryption following acquisition of Keybase… [Continue Reading]

Turn off the security please, I'm the boss

The C-suite is the most likely group within an organization to ask for relaxed mobile security protocols (74 percent) -- despite also being highly targeted by cyberattacks according to a new study. The report from zero-trust platform MobileIron finds that executives feel frustrated by mobile security protocols and often request to bypass them. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of C-level executives say IT security compromises their personal privacy, while 62 percent say security limits the usability of their device, and 58 percent claim IT security is too complex to understand. More concerning is that 76 percent of C-level executives admit to requesting… [Continue Reading]

Three-quarters of organizations fail to complete legacy system modernizations

New research from Advanced shows that 74 percent of organizations have started a legacy system modernization project but failed to complete it. The report also suggests a disconnect between business and technical teams could be to blame. CIOs and heads of IT are more interested in the technology landscape of their organisation as a whole, whereas enterprise architects are more internally focused. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of enterprise architects cite hardware dependency and other technical influences as the primary reason to modernize whereas CIOs and heads of IT cite business competitiveness (66 percent), security (58 percent) and integration (54… [Continue Reading]

Safe working practices suffer when working remotely

Almost half of employees are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home according to a new report from email security firm Tessian. While 91 percent of IT leaders trust their staff to follow best security practices when working remotely, over half of employees (52 percent) believe they can get away with riskier behavior when working from home. Half (48 percent) cite 'not being watched by IT' as a reason for not following safe data practices, closely followed by 'being distracted' (47 percent). Additionally, staff report that security policies are a hindrance -- 51 percent say such… [Continue Reading]

NPD found a surge in mobile data usage in March

Mobile data usage has been on the rise for a while, as networks get better and faster and more people get mobile phones. Of course, with many people home right now phones are likely being used more than ever. NPD, a market research firm that monitors these things, found a surge in usage in March, which coincides with the pandemic and people being forced to work from home. Usage was up to 75 percent in March, that's year-over-year. Month over month the increase was up to 27 percent. The company points out "This increase in usage was driven primarily by… [Continue Reading]