Category Archives: Data

Data, News, Sales

New global consultancy launches to help companies sell better and more.

A new global consultancy has launched to help companies operate more efficiently and sell more. The SalesFitness Group brings together established business advisory company SalesLevers and its sister data company i-snapshot.

The new group operates offices in London, Leeds, Middlesbrough and Glasgow alongside a global network of affiliates.

 

Commenting on the launch, Richard Higham, marketing and sales director of the SalesFitness Group, said: “As the economy faces a global downturn, there has never been a more critical time to manage an efficient and focused sales operation. Tough economic conditions often create market disruption and the opportunity to win market share. So we’ve launched an innovative approach to improving sales by combining leading consultancy, data insights, organisational design, team development and analytics.

“Companies of all sizes struggle to shift to a hybrid sales approach post covid and are facing economic headwinds. However, we believe that a fresh approach, enabled by technology, can help businesses grow, even in the toughest conditions.”

 

SalesFitness Group operates SalesWisdom, which helps companies with research, insights and analytical solutions. In addition, SalesLevers provides processes and tools to improve performance, including coaching and training for individual and team development.

SalesWindow works on the recording, reporting and forecasting of sales data and has recently launched a new forecasting app for complex sales called SalesCast.

The group supports companies ranging from Mizuno Golf to Chargeurs Group, an international high-technology manufacturing company and operator of the world’s largest studio dedicated to creating cultural content.

 

Martin Allison, chairman of SalesFitness Group, said: “Salespeople and the wider sales function don’t always get the respect they deserve in UK corporate culture. We believe good selling does good – good for the customer, the organisation and its stakeholders, and the individual salesperson too. In a business world that is changing rapidly and radically, the strategies, processes and skills that have served in the past need to change to deliver results in the future.”

 

Cybersecurity, Data, Data & Analytics, SaaS

Cohesity Announces DataHawk – Providing Protection, Detection, and Recovery Against Cyberattacks All From a Single SaaS Security Offering

Cohesity has announced Cohesity DataHawk, a data security software as a service (SaaS) solution that is focused on helping customers protect, detect, and recover from cyber and ransomware attacks.

DataHawk combines three critical security capabilities into one SaaS solution: threat protection via scans for attack indicators and malware; ML-based data classification that provides high accuracy in identifying and detecting sensitive or critical data; and award winning cyber vaulting via Cohesity FortKnox.

With this data-centric approach, DataHawk enables organisations to easily protect, detect, and recover from ransomware or other cyberattacks. DataHawk includes the following key capabilities:

 

  • Threat intelligence that can save the day: DataHawk incorporates a deep learning-based ransomware detection engine. It also provides intelligent threat protection with rapid scanning for anomalies, potential threats, and other indicators of a ransomware attack. DataHawk integrates a set of highly curated and managed IOC (Indicators of Compromise) threat feeds that are updated daily.
  • Data classification to quickly assess impact: When under attack, organisations want to rapidly understand any potential impact to their valuable data. DataHawk is leveraging the exceptional classification technology from BigID to accurately discover and classify large sets of data at scale to help minimise risk, improve their security posture, and understand the impact of an attack. Customers can save time chasing false positives and reach resolution faster with more than 200 built-in classifiers and ML-driven algorithms to analyse, tag, categorise, label, and classify data sets. Predefined policies for data privacy and protection regulations like the “General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR), “Payment Card Industry” (PCI), and “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act” (HIPAA) help organisations quickly identify and prioritise these sensitive data sets.
  • Cyber vaulting that provides data recovery and resiliency when it’s needed most: Organisations should always keep separate copies of their critical apps and data as part of a 3-2-1 strategy to build cyber resiliency. With Cohesity FortKnox, included in DataHawk, customers can secure an offsite copy of data in a modern cloud-based cyber vaulting service, where data is kept out of the hands of bad actors via a virtual air gap. Stored data can be recovered from this Cohesity-managed cloud vault back to the original source location or alternate targets, including the public cloud.

 

Another benefit that customers will realise with DataHawk is a growing list of integrations with today’s leading cyber security vendors that are helping IT and security build a modern automated security operations centre (SOC). Leveraging Cohesity’s API-first extensible platform, DataHawk is designed to integrate with leading SIEM vendors including, for example, select vendors joining Cohesity in the Data Security Alliance.

“Over-stretched IT and security teams are constantly trying to manage a sea of infrastructure while working night and day to stay ahead of bad actors,” said Mohit Aron, founder and chief technology and product officer, Cohesity. “The key to keeping businesses running is minimising the impact of a potential breach, bringing data security directly into the operational workflow, securing data at the source, and restoring critical workloads rapidly — while enabling IT and security teams to spend time on other business-critical tasks. This is what DataHawk is all about.”

“Minimising the impact of cyberattacks and ransomware is essential for keeping business operations running optimally. This requires classifying the data that matters most to the organisation, as well as quickly identifying attack indicators and rapidly restoring workloads,” said Jennifer Glenn, Research Director for Information and Data Security at IDC. “Integrating data classification and recovery capabilities via a SaaS platform, such as DataHawk from Cohesity, can help reduce the workload on IT and security teams and help them stay ahead of cyber attackers.”

“Cybercrime is an ever-increasing threat to businesses, and we need the best solutions and technologies to protect our client base,” said Chris Konrad, Area Vice President Cyber, Global Accounts at World Wide Technology/WWT. “The breadth and depth of Cohesity’s security ecosystem is impressive and helps solve some of the biggest challenges our customers face. Combined with rich threat protection, detection, and recovery capabilities provided by DataHawk we are more confident than ever that we have a solution that helps secure and extract more value from our customers’ data.”

 

Availability: 

DataHawk adds to the company’s portfolio of SaaS offerings that are managed by Cohesity and hosted on AWS. It is currently available for early access preview from the Cohesity Data Cloud platform with general availability planned in the coming months.

For more information: 

  • Read more about Cohesity DataHawk 
  • To learn about Cohesity’s new Data Security Alliance, click here
  • To learn more about the appointment of Kelly Bissell, EVP of Microsoft Security Services, to the Cohesity Security Advisory Council, click here 
  • To learn more about Cohesity’s new regional CISOs click here

 

Data, Healthcare News, Healthcare Tech, News

Award-winning GP demands to be urgently reinstated in long-running patient data dispute

Doctor says High Court ruling has major implications for other GPs, as his patients call for MPs to investigate 

 

  • NHS England urged by patients to reinstate ‘unlawfully dismissed’ GP
  • MPs urged to raise issue in parliament
  • BMA applying to intervene as ‘interested party’ in GP’s legal appeal

 

An award-winning GP and his patients have today urged NHS England to urgently reinstate him in a long-running saga over patient data which has placed two popular practices under a cloud. 

 

Local patients’ groups are due to meet Labour MP John McDonnell today (Nov 14th) to request that the issues are raised urgently in parliament. They are also seeking an urgent meeting with constituency MP – former prime minister Boris Johnson.

 

A High Court judge stated last month that Dr Sashi Shashikanth’s contracts were unlawfully terminated – for a GP, the equivalent of being sacked – in a complex dispute which now raises major concerns for other GPs across England.

The popular GP, who operates two practices with more than 8,000 patients in West London, is now seeking permission to appeal the court judgment, because despite being unlawfully dismissed, the judge also ruled the case was not applicable for Judicial Review.

 

The court ruling raises major concerns for other GPs who seek to dispute decisions made by NHS England in future.

 

The long and bitter saga was sparked by Dr Shashikanth’s refusal, supported by legal advice and the wishes of his patients, to give full access to confidential patients’ data to the local Primary Care Network (PCN), part of a larger private enterprise. The GP’s practices were the only local surgeries which chose not to join the PCN but offered to deliver services themselves.

 

As a result, his contracts were terminated by Hillingdon’s now defunct Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) which also lodged a series of unfounded complaints about the GP to a range of key bodies including the General Medical Council (GMC), NHS England’s GP performance management department, and the Care Quality Commission (CQC), each of which rejected the complaints. Both Dr Shashikanth’s teaching and training practices have ‘Good’ CQC ratings.

 

 

Dr Shashikanth said: “This whole saga is totally unnecessary. At a time when GP workload is on the increase, our time, energy and resources are being diverted into fighting an unnecessary legal battle and unfounded complaints, where we should be concentrating on delivering services to our patients. 

 

“I’m seeking to have my termination notices urgently rescinded by NHS England. I have also taken legal advice and I’m seeking permission to appeal the judge’s decision not to allow a Judicial Review. It’s time for this affair to be resolved, quickly, particularly because we’ve been treated differently to other similar practices in England.”

 

 

Dr Kieran Sharrock, deputy chair of the BMA GP Committee England said: “When a court has found a judgment to be incorrect there has to be a legal route to challenge the judgment. If procedural process gets in the way of justice, the BMA believes this has to be corrected.”

 

The doctor has also sought the help of Rob Hurd, CEO of NWL ICS, the body which inherited the mess when it replaced all of West London’s CCGs. Mr Hurd has been asked to help resolve the saga quickly, so that attention can be focused locally on looking after patients, especially at a time of severe GP shortages.

 

John Rogers, 78, a prostate cancer patient, who leads one of the local patient groups, said: “Dr Shashikanth has been treated terribly at a time when the NHS is crying out for good doctors.

 

“Patients at both his surgeries decided they did not want confidential records shared, and our GP and his practices are being discriminated against as a result.

“It’s ludicrous – and a scandalous waste of Dr Shashikanth’s money and taxpayers’ money fighting this in court. NHS England should do the right thing and reinstate our doctor now especially since the judge said he’d been treated unlawfully.”

 

Heart transplant patient, Dennis Ball, 77, has been treated by Dr Shashikanth for nearly 20 years. He said: “I think he has been treated harshly, unfairly, and has been punished because his patients decided they did not want their data shared. I think there’s discrimination and politics at the heart of this whole sorry affair.

“Dr Shashikanth must be given his full status back and should be able to practise how he and his patients wish.”

AI, Data

How AI enables organisations to move from network monitoring to proactive observability

Written by Stephen Amstutz, Head of Strategy and Innovation, Xalient

 

In today’s world, the volume of data and network bandwidth requirements are growing relentlessly.  So much is happening in real-time as businesses adapt and advance to become more digital, which means the state of the network is constantly evolving. Meanwhile, users have high expectations around applications – quick loading times, look and feel visually advanced, with feature-rich content, video streaming, and multimedia capabilities – all of these devour network bandwidth. With millions of users accessing applications and mobile apps from multiple devices, most companies today generate seemingly unmanageable volumes of data and traffic on their networks.

 

Networks are dealing with unmanageable volumes of data

 

In this always-on environment, networks are completely overloaded, but organisations still need to deliver peak performance from their network to users with no degradation in service. But traffic volumes are growing, and this is bursting networks at peak hours, akin to the M25; no matter how many lanes are added to the motorway, there will always be congestion problems during the busiest periods.

 

As an example, we’re seeing increasing need for rail operator networks to handle video footage from body-worn cameras, in order to cut down on anti-social behaviour on trains and at stations.  However, this directly impacts the network, with daily uploads of hundreds of video files consuming bandwidth at a phenomenal rate, yet the operators still need to go about their day-to-day operations while countless hours of video footage are uploaded and processed.

 

This is a good example of where AI and ML can and is helping organisations take a proactive stance on capacity and analyse whether networks have breached certain thresholds. These technologies enable organisations to ‘learn’ seasonality and understand when there will be peak times, implementing dynamic thresholds based on the time of day, day of the week, etc., as a result.  AI helps to spot abnormal activity on the network, but now this traditional use of AI/ML is starting to advance from ‘monitoring’ to ‘observability’.

 

So, what is the difference between the two? 

 

Monitoring is more linear in approach. Monitoring informs organisations when thresholds or capacities are being hit, enabling organisations to determine whether networks need upgrading.  Whereas observability is more about the correlation of multiple aspects and context gathering and behavioural analysis.

 

For example, where an organisation might monitor 20 different aspects of an application for it to run more efficiently and effectively; observability will take those 20 different signals and analyse the data making diagnostics with various scenarios presented.  It will leverage the rich network telemetry and generate contextualised visualisations, automatically initiating predefined playbooks to minimise user disruptions and ensure quick restoration of service. This means the engineer isn’t waiting for a call from a customer reporting that an application is running slow. Likewise, the engineer doesn’t need to log in and run a host of tests, and painstakingly wade through hundreds of reports, but instead can quickly triage the problem.   It also means network engineers can proactively explore different dimensions of these anomalies rather than get bogged down in mundane, repetitive tasks.

 

This delivers clear benefits to the business by reducing the time teams spend manually sifting through and analysing realms of data and alerts.  It leads to faster debugging, more uptime, better performing services, more time for innovation, and ultimately happier network engineers, end-users and customers. Observability correlation of multiple activities enables applications to operate more efficiently and identify when a site’s operations are sub-optimal with this context delivered to the right engineer at the right time. This means a high volume of alerts is transformed into a small volume of actionable insights.

 

Machines over humans

 

Automating this process, and using a machine rather than a human, is far more accurate because machines don’t care how many datasets they must correlate. Machines build hierarchies, and when something in that hierarchy impacts something else, the machine spots certain behaviours and finds these faults. The more datasets that are added, the more of a picture this starts to build for engineers who can then determine whether any further action is required.

 

Let’s touch on another real-life example. We are currently in discussions with a large management company who own and manage petrol station forecourts. They have 40,000 petrol stations, and each forecourt has roughly 10 pumps, equating to 400,000 petrol pumps across the US.  Their current pain point is a lack of visibility into the petrol pumps and EV chargers connected to the network.  As a result, when a pump or charger is not working, they might only become aware of this following a customer complaint, which is far from ideal.

 

The network telemetry that we are gathering, and that behaviour analysis, means we are developing business insights, not just network insights. We can see if a petrol pump stops creating traffic, which triggers a maintenance request to go and fix the pump. This isn’t a network problem, but the network traffic can be leveraged to look for the business problem. This is a use case for fuel pumps and EV chargers but imagine how many other network-connected devices there are in factories or production facilities worldwide that could be used in a similar way.

 

Getting actionable insight quickly

 

This is where our AIOps solution, Martina, predicts and remediates network faults and security breaches before they occur. Additionally, it helps to automate repetitive and mundane tasks while proactively taking a problem to an organisation in a contextualised and meaningful way instead of simply batting it across to the customer to solve. Martina discovers issues with recommendations around tackling the problem, ensuring that organisations always have high-performing resilient networks. In essence, it essentially makes the network invisible to users by providing customers with secure, reliable, and performant connectivity that works. It provides a single view of multiple data sources and easily configurable reporting so organisations can get insights quickly.

 

Executives and boards want their network teams to be proactive. They won’t tolerate poor network performance and want any service degradation, however slight, to be swiftly resolved.  This means that teams must act on anomalies, not thresholds, to understand behaviour to predict and act ahead of time. They need fast MTTD and MTTR because poor-performing networks and downtime impact brand reputation and ultimately cost money! This is where proactive AI/ML observability really comes into its own.

Cybersecurity, Data, GDPR, Tech, Technology

New forensic analysis of electronical devices unveils dangers of inadequate data disposal for individuals and businesses

  • Thousands of sensitive documents recovered from the laptops purchased online which their owners believed to have been ‘wiped’.
  • Personal data found across 80% of devices searched.
  • 366 files recovered contained business-related keywords.

Leading global professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) has today released findings by its Disputes & Investigations practice regarding some in-depth forensic analysis* conducted across six used devices purchased on an online marketplace. The analysis found sensitive and highly personal data on 80% of the devices.

The project’s aim was to expose the dangers of inadequate data disposal in business and private settings and demonstrate how failure to properly dispose of redundant IT equipment can lead to data breaches, which not only violate data protection laws, but can also result in financial fraud, with devastating impacts on companies’ finances and reputation.

A&M was able to recover 5,875 user-generated documents across the six devices. The majority of those items came from carved data (i.e., deleted data on the hard drives of the laptops), with a few documents still sitting on the hard drives, undeleted. The vast majority of the data recovered by the A&M team contained highly personal and sensitive information; such as scans of valid passports, as well as various appraisal forms and job application forms detailing personal identifiable details including full names, National Insurance numbers, addresses, emails, date of births and other sensitive data. In addition, 366 files analysed on the devices by the A&M team included business-related keywords.

 

Graeme Buller, Director at A&M, explained: “The rise of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and remote working are increasingly blurring the lines between personal and business use of devices, exacerbating concerns around data security and the lifecycle management of IT assets. While only 6% of the files recovered in our analysis contained business-related information, the very fact that they made their way onto these personal devices is sincerely worrying. If released into the wrong hands, even what appears to be small, harmless data can have devastating impact on a company.”

 

Other insights from the document recovery included:

  • 155 documents had references to the term “invoice”.
  • 100 documents had references to the term “court”.
  • 84 files recovered contained the keyword “report”.
  • 23 files recovered mentioned the word “appraisal”.
  • Images were found that consisted of workplace building ID cards, salaries of employees, invoices, and other internal business correspondence.
  • Of the 5,875 documents which were retrieved from the PCs, 366 files included work-related keywords and 4% contained residual data that had been improperly deleted.
  • Web-related items accounted for 16% of overall data.
  • 2,111 email items were found.

 

Buller continues: “What may be shocking to many is that the data we captured was done so using software that is actually publicly available to anyone. This highlights how vulnerable our devices really are (even when we believe them to be ‘clean’) and demonstrates the risk that fraudsters and other malicious actors with moderate forensics skills pose today. The key here is making sure all devices are wiped correctly** and observe a rigorous data disposal management process.”

 

A&M share five best practice tips when it comes to data disposal management:

1.  Strongly enforce data security policies: To prevent sensitive data from being transmitted outside of secure environments at the first place, company emails and documents should ideally be kept in a secure location and never saved locally to a machine or device.

2. Establish and maintain a secure data destruction policy: There should be policies and procedures in place that relate to the secure destruction of data. There should be alignment between Legal, Risk, HR and IT departments to ensure consistent flow of information and to provide clarity around roles and responsibilities for those involved this process.

3. Adapt policies for the new business reality: Data disposal policies must be updated to reflect the current remote working environment. New considerations should include how to ensure devices are handed back when an employee leaves the firm, or how to remotely wipe IT assets if they refuse to return the device or in case of loss/theft/replacement. One alternative is to create incentivised pathways for staff to dispose responsibly.

4. Ensure all data is securely and effectively wiped: Deletion and formatting – including factory-resets – do not permanently remove the data from the devices. Data sanitisation practices including the use of specialist software should be introduced to ensure all data is properly wiped and cannot be recovered by hackers.

5. Ensure companywide training: Ensuring all employees get sufficient training around data destruction, and indeed are educated on the correct way to save data, is key. This should be training across the board and regularly updated to remind employees of the correct procedures, especially as tech continues to evolve.

 

Robert Grosvenor, Managing Director at A&M, comments:

“Whether as a company or as an individual we all have a responsibility to make sure any data we hold is securely and effectively deleted when we no longer need it. In the case of GDPR, unnecessarily holding on to personal data, runs the risk of greater fines and likelihood of enforcement in the event that that this data is in involved in a privacy breach.”

 

Buller concludes: “As our study demonstrates, failure to properly dispose of redundant IT equipment may well lead to data breaches which not only violate data protection laws, but can result in financial fraud, with devastating impacts on a company’s finances and reputation.”

 

To see the full A&M paper, please click here.

 

Data, Data & Analytics, Healthcare Tech, News

Gerimedica leverages Sisense to empower healthcare practitioners to improve care

Sisense, the leading AI-driven platform for infusing data analytics, partners with Gerimedica, a multi-disciplinary electronic medical record (EMR) company that serves the aged-care market, to transform patient care with the power of big data.

Since deploying Sisense, Gerimedica has seen an average decline of 6% (the equivalent of two days) in admission days per patient, resulting in €540 reduced cost per patient. And with beds freed up two days sooner, there’s also less wait time and more patients helped. On average, customers using Sisense see a reduction in the number of patient admission days by roughly 5.9 when compared to non-Sisense customers.

Founded in 2007 by a small group of passionate medical professionals, Gerimedica has one single driving force: to make innovative changes and improvements to patient health care and treatment delivery. The company believes that data-driven software is vital to improving health care and patient outcomes.

 

Watch the on-demand webinar here: Healthcare Analytics: How Gerimedica delivers insight-driven care

 

“The power of Sisense is not only in the dashboards or the web app but also in the notifications,” says Hamza Jap-Tjong, CEO and Co-Founder of Gerimedica Inzicht, a Gerimedica subsidiary. “Health professionals now have access to alert dashboards that highlight the patients who are struggling or not making anticipated progress. They are able to connect the dots between clinical and operational data and focus their discussions on a handful of patients, which has really improved the way they give care.”

 

Prior to implementing Sisense, the team at Gerimedica knew that current multidisciplinary electronic medical records (EMRs) were falling short on delivering impactful insights — Gerimedica’s included. Customers were wasting time digging for insights from exported reports, and the product’s current dashboards were proving inadequate.

In search of a solution that would empower end users and improve levels of care whilst being profitable, Gerimedica turned to its partner Sisense. It needed a BI platform that was on-premise, easy to use, secure, and could support a mountain of constantly expanding data.

With 295 tables, 2,500 columns, and nearly 1 billion records, Sisense’s solution was quickly singled out as the best option for mashing up disparate data, automating the ETL process, and simultaneously providing an intuitive, self-service user experience for healthcare professionals with minimal training.

Now, customers have access to 60 customisable dashboards that answer all of the questions it used to take 400 dashboards to answer. Health professionals can drill down and filter these dashboards to find the answers they’re looking for at a glance. Even more, these dashboards are powered only by the data that matters — actionable data that helps doctors, nurses, and other health staff improve care paths for their patients.

 

Paul Scholey, Vice President of International Sales at Sisense, says, “It’s exciting to see innovative healthcare companies like Gerimedica embracing significant data-driven transformation, especially in a sector that has traditionally been a laggard to digital adoption.

“Embedding Sisense’s innovative BI solution within Gerimedica’s EHR (electronic health record) has been key to maximising each health professional’s time. Now they can now truly prioritise providing the highest quality care – care that’s fueled by data-driven insights.”

 

About Sisense

Sisense goes beyond traditional business intelligence by providing organisations with the ability to infuse analytics everywhere, embedded in both customer and employee applications and workflows. Sisense customers are breaking through the barriers of analytics adoption by going beyond the dashboard with Sisense Fusion – the highly customisable, AI-driven analytics cloud platform, that infuses intelligence at the right place and the right time, every time. More than 2,000 global companies rely on Sisense to innovate, disrupt markets and drive meaningful change in the world. Ranked as the No. 1 Business Intelligence company in terms of customer success, Sisense has also been named one of the Forbes’ Cloud 100, The World’s Best Cloud Companies, six years in a row. Visit us at www.sisense.com and connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

 

About Gerimedica

 

Gerimedica supports healthcare professionals in delivering the best possible care. They do this by combining innovative software technology with in depth knowledge of the health care domain. Gerimedica’s EMR is known under the name “Ysis”. It is tailormade to the needs of medical practitioners in elderly care and the care for mentally disabled people. The system has been designed in order to minimize the time a professional spends at their computer screen. They have optimized the processes for finding relevant information and for reporting about care given. This enables a practitioner to spend more time on actually delivering care to patients. This is where their motto: “Focus on you profession” originates. Tens of thousands healthcare professionals working at more than 120 healthcare institutions use their software on a daily basis. Visit us at www.gerimedica.nl.

 

 

 

 

Cybersecurity, Data

Reliable Ways of Keeping Your Data Safe

Web threats and data theft can cause serious problems to a business. Without proper security procedures, a company leaves itself open to attacks. Some of these attacks can be frustrating and unfixable. However, as dangerous as hacks can be, they are avoidable. There are various ways of preventing hacks. Here are some of the most effective ones.

Have A Strategy

Instead of having a broad idea of which procedures and policies to use, businesses of all sizes should have an IT security strategy that is as exhaustive and detailed as possible. The plan should outline how to keep data safe and what to do if the measures in place do not work. The company should then implement the strategy.

Protect Your Systems Against Malware

  • Malicious malware can cause serious data damage, and keeping your PCs unprotected increases the risk of data wipeout. Here are a few things that can help you protect your PC against malware:
  • Keep your emails clean
  • Use firewall
  • Use PC protection that can protect your PC without compromising its performance.

Secure Your Wireless Network

People nowadays often use wireless networks for internet connection. Wireless networks are prone to hacking, and a hacker interested in the details of your business could use the path to get the information. Strengthen your router using the strongest encryption and ensure that the broadcasting function is turned off. If the hacker cannot see your network, they cannot hack it.

Safeguard Your Passwords

Most people use passwords for things they can remember or use one password across all the platforms. While this is easier, it is not recommended. You should use complex passwords. These passwords should include characters, capital letters, and numbers, making them difficult for hackers to guess. Also, change your passwords occasionally to keep them even more secure.

Set Up Automatic Software Updates

Hackers scan networks to identify the version of software a business is running with. If you are using an older version, vulnerability increases, and hackers can use the vulnerability to access your data. The easiest way to ensure your software is always up to date is by setting up automatic software updates. Updating your software to the latest version decreases vulnerability which helps keep your data safe.

Conduct Background Checks

When hiring new employees, it is advisable to ensure that you understand their motives for the business. Employees must be honest and committed to seeing the company prosper. The best way to know about your employees is by conducting a background check.

Dispose of Data Securely.

Before disposing of hard drives that contain business data, every sensitive data about the business should be removed. That way, confidential data about the company cannot fall into the wrong hands.

Use Cloud

Cloud is more secure and effective. It also makes it easier for employees to retrieve data from anywhere as long as they have the passwords. You can use the cloud to keep your data even more secure.

Does a Computer Need Antivirus Software?

Yes, a computer needs antivirus software. Antivirus protects the computer from malware and improves its functionality. It can also block spam, act as a line of defense against hackers, and limit access to websites that can put your business at risk.

Is It Possible to Hack Any Software, And How Dangerous Can It Be for Your Business and Employees?

Yes, it is possible to hack any software. If this happens, it is dangerous to a business because it increases the risk of losing data, puts a company at risk, and puts employees and customers at risk if the hackers obtain sensitive personal data.

Is It Possible to Spy Through Any Camera?

Yes, hackers can use cameras on your devices to spy on you. They mostly use webcams but can also use the camera on their phone and other devices.

Which Software Is the Safest?

There are many antivirus software. Each can protect your PCs, but the safest depends on the individual’s needs. Some antivirus software is premium, but you can always use a Free Antivirus from Avira that will still keep your data safe.

 

Data, News

Cyber attacks are now the #1 cause of data loss, Databarracks research reveals

2022 marks the first year cyber attacks overtake human error as the top cause of data loss

New research by Databarracks has shown that 38% of organisations reported cyber attack and internal breaches as a cause of data loss in 2022.

The findings come from the annual Data Health Check, a survey of 400 IT decision makers. This year’s survey focused on themes of Ransomware, Cyber, Backup, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.

Barnaby Mote, Managing Director of Databarracks commented: “For many of us, these results should come as no surprise. Data loss caused by cyber attacks has been increasing year on year since we began the Data Health Check in 2008. In a relatively short space of time, we’ve watched cyber attacks go from minor threat, to where we are today as the leading cause of data loss for organisations.”

Mote continued: “The seriousness of the situation cannot be overstated. The other causes of data loss have not gone away. IT teams are still dealing with similar numbers of incidents caused by human error and hardware or software failure. The growth is in addition to these causes. It is a significant burden because recovery from cyber-related data loss is typically far more difficult and time consuming.

“Of those surveyed, over half have experienced a cyber attack. We also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, ransomware is the most common form of cyber attack this year.”

Mote provided suggestions on how organisations can protect themselves.

“There are two key areas organisations can focus on to protect themselves against cyber related data loss. Firstly, improve your defences to prevent the attack occurring and secondly, improve your ability to respond and recover if you do suffer data loss.

“Your first line of defence is your staff. It’s essential that employees are trained and practice good cyber hygiene. We found that almost a quarter of organisations have not carried out cyber security training in the last year.

“Review your Disaster Recovery plans to make sure they are up to date and equipped to deal with the task at hand. Cyber incidents are very different from traditional causes of data loss. Look specifically at the frequency of your backups and the number of versions of data you keep to minimise both downtime and data loss.

“Growth in cyber-related data loss will only continue so it is critical organisations are able to respond effectively.”

View the online report here:

https://datahealthcheck.databarracks.com/2022/

Download the full report here:

https://www.databarracks.com/resources/data-health-check-2022

Data, News

Catalogic Software Introduces Newest Version of DPX with Proactive Ransomware Protection

DPX 4.8.1 includes GuardMode for greater cyber-resiliency and DPX vPlus providing data protection for Microsoft 365 and open virtualization platforms.

Woodcliff Lake, NJ — July 12, 2022 — Catalogic Software, a leading provider of smart data protection solutions, today announced the release and general availability of the newest version of Catalogic DPX, the company’s enterprise data protection software. DPX 4.8.1 introduces GuardMode, a feature providing early detection of ransomware and DPX vPlus, cloud data protection for Microsoft 365 and other open virtualization platforms.

“Cybercriminals are constantly innovating, costing US victims $49.2 million in losses to ransomware attacks last year alone – and that is just based on incidents reported to the FBI,” said Krista Macomber, Senior Analyst, Evaluator Group. “Catalogic DPX’s new GuardMode feature can help organizations to minimize business disruption, including financial losses, when they are hit by ransomware. For example, proactive monitoring against over a list of over 4,000 known ransomware patterns that is automatically updated helps to mitigate the spread of ransomware, and the ability to roll back only affected data allows good data that might be interspersed with infected files to be preserved.”

DPX GuardMode is complementary to endpoint and edge protection, monitoring file shares and file system behavior, even over the network, instead of relying on a specific binary fingerprint. GuardMode maintains, and regularly updates over 4000 known ransomware threat patterns, and assesses affected files. Backing up this extensive forensic layer of protection are honeypots as a deception layer to catch ever-evolving types of ransomware strains. GuardMode increases confidence in ransomware detection while identifying and enabling recovery of only the affected data

“DPX GuardMode changes a backup teams’ cyber reliance posture from reactive to proactive with early detection,” said Sathya Sankaran, COO, Catalogic Software. “DPX GuardMode notifies backup and storage teams of suspicious activity and pinpoints the extent of damage caused by cyber incidents. Combined with the comprehensive workload coverage of DPX and instant recoveries, Catalogic DPX customers will be among the best prepared to recover from a cyberattack.”

With DPX vPlus, Catalogic provides data protection for Microsoft 365, and other open virtualization platforms such as RHV/oVirt, Acropolis, XenServer, Oracle VM and KVM.

“We are excited to extend our relationship with Storware and announce DPX vPlus, that adds Microsoft 365 cloud data protection and expands our coverage of hypervisor workloads, said Ken Barth, CEO, Catalogic Software. “DPX vPlus is fully integrated into the DPX vStor backup repository, and it delivers greater workload coverage for an organization’s edge and cloud data.”

Catalogic will host a live webinar “Adding Cyber Resilience to your Data Protection Strategy with Early Detection” on Wednesday, July 13th at 10 AM Eastern Time. Evaluator Group’s Krista Macomber will discuss data protection trends and challenges, including how cyber-attacks are changing best practices for data protection and recovery. Catalogic’s Sathya Sankaran will discuss what storage and backup teams can do strengthen their cyber security posture.

For further information on Catalogic DPX 4.8.1 and earlier releases, please see:

What’s New in DPX 4.8.1 and the DPX Product Page.

Data, News

RKVST shows the future of nuclear waste tracking with Zero Trust Fabric

Digital Catapult publishes Sellafield Distributed Ledger Technology Field Lab report

Cambridge, UK – July 12, 2022 – Zero trust fabric provider RKVST has shown how it can help safely and securely digitise processes for nuclear waste data tracking, creating a secure, irrefutable way to maintain the integrity of data while ensuring visibility for multiple stakeholders and organisations.

Digital Catapult, the UK authority on advanced digital technology, worked in collaboration with Sellafield Ltd, the UK’s largest nuclear decommissioning site, to run a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Field Lab™ to explore how distributed systems and distributed ledger technology can be used to solve current and future nuclear industry challenges. RKVST was selected to partner with Sellafield to solve the challenge of digitising nuclear waste data tracking and Digital Catapult has now published the results of that project in its Sellafield DLT Field Lab Report.

Nuclear waste containers are highly regulated, critical assets. The nuclear industry currently relies on paper-based processes and human verification throughout the lifecycle of each waste container. The challenge was to use advanced digital technologies to create a secure, irrefutable way of maintaining the integrity of this data across extended timelines (from decades to centuries) whilst ensuring visibility for multiple stakeholders and organisations.

RKVST combines cloud-based storage, identity and access management, and permissioned blockchain to deliver continuous assurance in shared asset data. For this project the RKVST zero trust fabric:

  • Provides global waste asset visibility
  • Ensures compliance with waste acceptance criteria
  • Allows device-agnostic access
  • Delivers continuous information assurance with accessibility, security, and resilience
  • Integrates with industrial internet of things (IIoT) sensors
  • Results in cost savings and process improvements

Jon Geater, Chief Technology and Product Officer, RKVST says:

“With one in every five steps of the overall nuclear waste tracking process currently including a paper form or manual traceability requirement, introducing indelible and persistent audit trails will be critical for the long-term safety and security of the UK’s nuclear waste. Cryptographically protected records provide traceability and information integrity of nuclear waste assets both in transit and in storage at various sites. With a DLT-based system such as RKVST, these events are evidenced by an assured, auditable log of historic events which is an irrefutable and immutable record of what has happened, when it happened, and who was responsible for the event. We feel privileged to have partnered with Digital Catapult and Sellafield to demonstrate the benefits of adopting distributed systems to solve modern day business problems.”

Dr Robert Learney, Head of Technology, Distributed Systems, at Digital Catapult, said:

“There are wide ranging benefits that distributed ledger technologies can bring to the nuclear industry from securely tracking and monitoring high value assets to ensuring the safety of the workforce on site, and we are delighted to have partnered with Sellafield on this ground breaking project. This report demonstrates how cutting edge DLT solutions such as RKVST zero trust fabric can help tackle real life business critical challenges and make a tangible impact on the UK’s nuclear industry.”

RKVST is attending DECOM2022, stand 14, 20 July 2022 and NDA Group Supply Chain Event, 21 July 2022, at The International Centre, Telford, UK.