BetaNews Staff

Turn data into knowledge to accelerate innovation

DevOps

Blackberry, Nokia, Blockbuster and Kodak: these are just some of the once-successful companies that failed because they failed to innovate. In our digital world, the difference between sinking and swimming often rests on a business’s ability to provide continuous digital innovations to its customers.

But consumer demands for new technologies and experiences also come with a stipulation: the availability of digital instant gratification must remain uninterrupted. After all, our digital economy doesn’t have normal business hours. It’s always running, and consumers expect to digitally access, interact and purchase at their convenience, at any hour of the day. Digital apps and services must always remain on. And facing an outage or poor system performance, consumers will just switch to another company that provides a better digital experience.

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Tackling the problems of the future with today's data: What the Government can do to prepare itself

How can we best use data to reach our goals? This is a question that every business and public sector organization often asks themselves. Data is an incredible asset, and Government has some of the richest data sets available. The potential of data to drive efficiencies, improve policy making and, ultimately, drive better outcomes for citizens, is well documented.

The UK Government’s National Data Strategy shows its commitment to placing data at the heart of a concerted national effort to improve citizen services. There are numerous Initiatives focused on helping improve the use of data across government. One such example is the collaboration between the Global Government Forum, the Office for National Statistics, NTT DATA UK, and the Cabinet Office, to produce the Civil Service Data Challenge (CSDC), which pushes data innovation a step further.

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What it takes to build a successful remote team in today's climate

You've probably spent the majority of your career in an office. The commute, the quick chats at the coffee maker, the cleanest bathroom on the third floor -- these trivial details became as much a part of your workday as spreadsheets and meetings.

Then, just like that, everything changed. IT teams scrambled to find a secure way to keep people working from home. Managers questioned how to keep productivity up, and the C-suite kept a wary eye over everything (that, at least, didn’t change).

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The great balancing act: How to manage your workloads amidst ongoing change

Amidst the ongoing skills gap and permanent move to hybrid working, workloads are continuing to grow. Two and a half quintillion bytes of data are generated every day, often scattered between the cloud, data silos, and on-premises storage as employees work from a range of locations. Although this flexible approach to working has many benefits -- increased productivity, improved employee wellbeing, and a better work-life balance -- it also can create a sprawl of data.

Left unattended and unmonitored, workloads stack up and enterprises are left with a balancing act to manage data stored in multiple places. Whilst this can be maintained in the short term, it is not sustainable in the long term and will eventually spill over. Many will remember offices before the widespread use of computers and technology, when stacks of paper were piled up on desks and filing cabinets were full to the brim with important documents. Trying to find the single piece of paper with the information you needed was a difficult task that wasted valuable time. Having a disparate IT environment has a similar impact on today’s business operations.

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Countering the risk of ransomware with operational continuity

ransomware laptop

In recent years, organizations all over the world have been hit by increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks. For some, the impact is so severe that normal business operations experience major disruption with a knock-on effect on customers and revenue. For others, the impact can last weeks or even months as they seek to restore IT services and access to vital data.

Since the start of last year, for example, organizations across a huge range of sectors -- from oil and gas to food -- have seen their services impacted by ransomware. KP Snacks suffered an incident that brought its supply chain to a halt, with the company unable to process orders and dispatch products. And most recently of all, The Works, a retailer with over 500 stores across the UK, was forced to close some outlets after an employee reportedly fell victim to a phishing email that introduced ransomware to their infrastructure.

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How to continue the growth of open source in the UK

open source

Open source adoption rates are growing globally, with non-propriety code proving to be both efficient and cost-effective for a variety of organizations. Approximately 82 percent of IT decision-makers are more likely to choose a vendor that actively gives back to the open source community, according to a recent report from Red Hat. ­In the UK in particular, much of the reason for this open source drive is down to increased public cloud usage, the growing demand for rapid digital transformation and a greater understanding of open source’s cybersecurity resilience. 

To help continue this open source upsurge in a sustainable manner, organizations utilizing the technology need to be contributing back to the community, to best enable the development of the technology. 

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How the Ukraine-Russia conflict affects international remote employment

Russia invading Ukraine is just the latest large-scale crisis and source of consternation on the world stage. The effects of a lingering pandemic, decimated economies and the threat of spiraling global war add up to a fraught situation for employees, recruiters, managers and business leaders.

This is a brief look at how the Ukraine-Russia conflict is affecting the stability, availability, culture and safety of international remote employment.

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Chipotle's metaverse ambitions

I recently read a thorough review and watched a playthrough of Chipotle’s new Roblox metaverse game. I use the word "game" here extremely loosely, even though I have the widest palate for games you can imagine. I've played everything from Gameboy to NES, mobile free-to-play to PC, and my newest obsession: the PS5. Though Chipotle’s new Burrito Builder has all the trappings of a mobile game, it has the potential to be much more.

For those who missed it, the new Chipotle game allows players to take on the thrilling challenge of making burritos for digital customers. That’s right -- you get to be an employee at Chipotle in the metaverse, and they’re calling it a game. If making burritos isn’t that fun for you, you can take on the side quest to deliver them as well.

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4 steps to convince a big brand to partner with you

Is it a partnership with Salesforce you dream about? Do you want to get involved with Nike? Innovative startups have never been in a better position to strike partnerships with big industry players. But there are a few things that can help you along the way.

It can seem like an impossible feat for small businesses to partner with household names when you aren't that well known yet. However, If you have built some brand recognition in their industry and audience, getting a big brand to notice you can be easier than you might think.

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5G and the metaverse

5G

The metaverse is a concept that has been around for decades and to many sounds like science fiction: a parallel, virtual universe in which we live our lives as if in a video game. However, recent advances in technology mean that this fiction is becoming a reality. Countless technological components that will make up the metaverse already exist today, and society is increasingly preconditioned to virtual and augmented experiences.

The creation of a parallel digital world opens the doors for organizations to create new experiences for businesses and consumers, and we can expect companies to provide virtual content and services from education to entertainment, medicine to fashion. The possibilities go on as network technologies continuously grow stronger, telecommunication providers offer more tailored offerings, and connectivity becomes interwoven in enterprise operations at all levels.

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The race against hackers to secure EV cyber-grid

The electric vehicle (EV) revolution is here. After decades of hype, EVs are finally starting to get their day in the sun. In the last ten years, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles have grown from 16,000 to over 2 million vehicles, and auto executives expect over 50 percent of US vehicles to be all-electric by 2030.

It is not hard to see why experts make such an optimistic prediction. In addition to the growing fleet of EVs, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal signed earlier this year will include $7.5 billion to help plan and build an extensive network of EV charging stations across the country, a task critical to ensuring full adoption of the technology. It took decades for the current network of gas stations to stretch from one end of the U.S. to the other, and a similar process is now underway for EV charging stations. An infrastructure project of this size requires thorough planning and significant investment, after all.  

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How technology can inspire teamwork and collaboration

Collaboration

The way we work is always evolving, and it makes sense that where and how we work would also change. Office working isn't for everyone and there is a lot more to consider than only your morning commute.

Enter collaborative technologies and with them, a boom in users per day by the millions. Companies are becoming more flexible and accessible to their employees and partners. It has become clear that maintaining an enjoyable working environment is crucial, even when workers are not sat within reach of each other.

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How has UK tech evolved to achieve such landmark success?

The past decade has been a period of sustained growth for the UK tech sector. But it has also seen the industry evolve remarkably -- something that has been apparent to those working within it.

It was reported only last month the sector had surpassed a milestone $1 trillion valuation, becoming only the third country to do so behind rival giants China and the US. Naturally, this puts the UK at the top of Europe’s digital food chain.

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Screen grabbing utility Screenpresso 2.0 features improved video capture and better multi-monitor support

For some people, taking screen grabs is a simple matter of hitting Print Screen and pasting the contents of the clipboard into an image editor, while others with slightly greater needs may turn to Windows' Snipping Tool. While of these options are fine, they are both quite limited, and this is why the likes of Screenpresso remain important utilities.

For the uninitiated, Screenpresso is an advanced screen capture tool that makes it possible to take grabs of what you see on your screen -- but it includes a huge range of tools and options that make it stand out from the competition. The app can also be used to capture video footage, and with the release of Screenpresso 2.0.0 even more powerful special features help take your screen grabbing to the next level.

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The benefits of implementing a multi-layered ransomware defense strategy

Ransomware is becoming a risk that UK organizations cannot afford to take, with rising financial and operational costs. A staggering 75 percent of UK organizations were targeted by ransomware in 2021, and where these attacks were successful, most (82 percent) paid the ransom. This makes the UK the most likely country in the world to make ransom payments. As cybercriminal strategies evolve to bypass traditional network-based defenses, a multi-layered ransomware defense strategy is vital for organizations to protect their mission-critical data.

First, it’s important for us to understand the typical defense strategies that attackers have adapted to, in order to appreciate the rationale for the boost in cyber protection. And, we need to understand the rising costs of these incidents, to prove the business value of initiatives that are aimed at prioritizing prevention and detection of cyber-attacks before they occur. It’s not just a quick fix -- failure to implement these solutions can affect your profitability, reputation and even put your company out of business.

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