Author Archives: Mary Branscombe

If you pay $1.99 to download an ebook for your Kindle, it’s protected by DRM that stops you sharing the contents, and if Amazon wants to, it can revoke the document so you can’t read it any more. Is your company’s current price list protected nearly as well?

With information rights management (often known as enterprise DRM, short for digital rights management), you could make sure that price list was only shared with your customers, blocking them from sending it on to your competitors and automatically blocking it at the end of the quarter when you come out with new prices. Or you could share specifications with several vendors in your supply chain during a bidding process and then block everyone but the winning vendor from opening the document after the contract is finalized. You can make sure that contractors aren’t working from out of date plans by making the old plan expire when there’s an update. Tracking and visibility is useful for compliance as well as security; you could track how many people had opened the latest version of the employee handbook, or see that a document you’d shared with a small team was being actually read by hundreds of people.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security tools are getting more sophisticated. DevOps is bringing us automation in operations, and a more holistic way of looking at how we manage infrastructure. But all too often, we’re not doing basic things to improve security and reliability, like protecting against known vulnerabilities.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2016 Cyber Risk Report points out that “29 percent of all exploits samples discovered in 2015 continued to use a 2010 Stuxnet infection vector that has been patched twice.” It takes an average of 103 days for companies to patch known network and security vulnerabilities, according to a study vulnerability risk management vendor NopSec ran last year; that goes down to 97 days for healthcare providers and up to 176 days for financial services, banking and education organisations. That’s not taking into account misconfigurations, or lack of communication between different teams.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Whether your business is making jet engines, delivering towels or emptying rat traps, you need to be looking at how you can improve margins and customer satisfaction with the Internet of Things – because your competitors is.

Services like Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite mean you don’t have to become experts in distributed systems to make IoT work for your business. That’s handy, because it’s more often business leaders than IT teams buying IoT. It’s not about gadgets or wearables, but the fact that what you do with sensors and big data can change your business model. In fact, McKinsey & Company estimates that nearly 70 percent of the potential value in IoT – which it estimates as high as $1.1 trillion a year by 2025 – will come from B2B use.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here