Cyberthreats have become more sophisticated over the years, improving methods to take advantage of software information and even completely shut down systems to hold data ransom. As a result, developers and testers must be able to ensure that their programs have the necessary protections in place to prevent attacks and keep business information safe. Here are a few tips to help teams address security measures during testing.

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Cloud computing is here to stay. The agility and scalability of the cloud model – as well as its ability to transform up-front capital expenditures into flexible operating expenditures – are too compelling to ignore. For CIOs in organizations of all sizes, the question is no longer whether to take advantage of the cloud … but how. Unfortunately, that question isn’t as easy to answer as it might sound. Not all cloud providers are created equal. Different vendors offer different features, terms and service levels. And once you engage with one vendor, it can be difficult to change your mind down the road – even if that vendor’s offering doesn’t fully mesh with your existing IT practices and policies.

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Application downtime is an enterprise’s worst nightmare. On top of that, it’s fairly common. According to a survey conducted by Dun & Bradstreet, 59 percent of Fortune 500 companies experience a minimum of 1.6 hours of downtime per week. Each time a business application fails, the IT admins have a herculean task ahead of them. They must figure out the root cause of the problem, rectify it and get the business running – all within a short span of time.

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I work from Boston 4 days a week and we’re in the middle of a blizzard. (Note: I commute to Boston. I live 4 days a week at Unitrends’ Boston/Burlington offices and 3 days a week at Unitrends’ Columbia South Carolina offices. So it’s fair to note that given my South Carolina roots that a single snowflake could cause a massive panic attack. Nevertheless, I think Winter storm Niko is a fairly big deal even to folks who have lived their whole lives in the Northeast.) It reminds me of all of the winter-related disasters I’ve seen since I joined Unitrends.

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One minute of utilized operating room (OR) time can be worth more than $70 in revenue and one minute of staffed OR time can cost $50 or more, making underutilized OR time a huge problem. Each year, roughly 51 million surgeries are performed in the 5,000+ hospitals and 5,000+ surgery centers in the U.S. MGMA estimates that the corresponding utilization of operating rooms across these centers is, at best, 55-60 percent.

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The first thing you need to know about blockchain is that it enables the creation of virtual currencies and intelligent contracts. At its core is the concept of a “distributed ledger,” where data on transactions is recorded across a range of specified databases. Every transaction can be tracked and replicated in real time. That’s how the identities of user accounts, even if they are anonymous, can be verified and secured behind advanced cryptography and digital signatures.

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Chat apps characteristics make them very appealing to businesses and marketers. Prominent ones include their size, user retention, usage rates, and user demographics. In fact, the combined user base of the top four chat apps is larger than that of the top four social networks. Chat apps also have higher retention and usage rates than most mobile apps. Finally, the majority of their users are young, an extremely important demographic for brands, advertisers and publishers.

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Serverless is considered the successor to containers. And while it’s heavily promoted as the next great thing, it’s not the best fit for every use case. Understanding the pitfalls and disadvantages of serverless will make it much easier to identify use cases that are a good fit. This post offers some technology perspectives on the maturity of serverless today.
First, note how we use the word serverless here. Serverless is a combination of “Function as a Service” (FaaS) and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS). Namely, those categories of cloud services where you don’t know what the servers look like. For example, RDS or Beanstalk are “servers managed by AWS,” where you still see the context of server(s). DynamoDB and S3 are just some kind of NoSQL and storage solution with an API, where you do not see the servers. Not seeing the servers means there’s no provisioning, hardening or maintenance involved, hence they are server “less.” A serverless platform works with “events.” Examples of events are the action behind a button on a website, backend processing of a mobile app, or the moment a picture is being uploaded to the cloud and the storage service triggers the function.

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With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @CloudExpo | @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 – November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.

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Digital transformation is a process, not a destination. It’s a fundamental reshaping of an organization’s culture that reorients it around the customer experience, business value and constant change. It’s not about executing a ‘digital transformation project’ and finding a new normal. The essence of digital transformation is the destruction of the static state.

This essence is a challenging concept to grasp, ironically, because while we talk about digital transformation, we do it through an industrial era filter. It’s difficult to imagine a change of state this fundamental, so it’s easier to put in a box we understand.

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