BULLETIN 01732 759725 6 Organisations rely on legacy security protocol dating back to 1999 A new study conducted by Tenable has illuminated for the first time ever the immense challenge organisations face identifying and protecting their internetfacing assets. An inventory of the external attack surface of 22 of the UK’s largest organisations [as listed by the FTSE top 50] were examined on Friday, October 29, 2022. The results show how complex, geographically dispersed, and hybrid these environments have become, and illustrate the sheer scale of the cybersecurity architecture that needs to be secured. Of the companies examined, most have a sprawling expanse of internet-facing assets, with an average of 76,600 to identify and protect. One organisation alone has over 500,000 such assets. One striking observation is that 100% of organisations had web-based assets that still support TLS 1.0 [a security protocol first defined in 1999 for establishing encrypted channels over computer networks] that was disabled by Microsoft in September [2022]. Over half (12 companies) had instances of SSL 2.0 – the predecessor to TLS. In addition to the risk of eavesdropping on sensitive internet traffic by adversaries, this is just one example demonstrating how challenging it’s become for organisations with large internet footprints to identify and update outdated technology. “The infrastructure that underpins organisations today is only vaguely recognisable from three years ago, especially pre-COVID. Internet-facing assets are not just commonplace, but essential for organisations in the modern business world,” said Jeremiah Grossman, Security Strategist, Tenable. “The flipside of this is that any one of these assets is a potential entry point for an adversary into the organisation. Threat actors are probing these openings, looking for any single one that is left insecure, so they climb through. As defenders, security professionals need to know what assets they’re protecting in order to secure themselves.” www.tenable.com Inflation and rising costs to slow down DX 58% of healthcare industry professionals globally believe that digital transformation initiatives – involving the implementation of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, application programming interfaces (API) and others – would be slowed down due to inflation and rising costs, according to a survey by GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. The survey, which was published in GlobalData’s latest report, ‘Digital Transformation and Emerging Technology in the Healthcare Industry - 2022 Edition’, reveals that 63% of healthcare and pharmaceutical industry professionals in North America expected a disruption to digitalisation initiatives in their business units due to inflation. The same opinion was expressed by 55% of industry professionals in Europe and 47% in the Asia-Pacific region. However, more than 20% of respondents believed that inflation may actually serve as a catalyst for digital transformation efforts, most likely due to technologies’ ability to drive cost reduction. www.globaldata.com IT reseller confidence remains resilient IT resellers across much of Europe and beyond are largely positive about the future despite strengthening economic headwinds, according to the latest ChannelWatch report from CONTEXT, the IT market intelligence company. The annual CONTEXT report polled 5,308 B2B and B2C resellers of all sizes and across a range of core businesses in Europe, Turkey and South Africa. It found that 62% expected their business to perform better over the coming 12 months, marginally down on last year (67%). Around a quarter (27%) said there would be no change in the next year and just 10% expected worse performance. Those sentiments are doubly positive considering the answers were gathered in April to July, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and at a time when rising inflation and energy costs were already clear to respondents. For B2B resellers, cloud products and services will be the number one area of investment in the coming year, with close to 50% saying they plan to spend here, as they have done over the past four years. However, there was a notable increase in the number of respondents saying they plan to invest in networking, cybersecurity and managed print services versus last year. In cybersecurity, the growth follows the trend observed in the CONTEXT sales data. In the B2C space, over 65% plan to invest in PCs in the coming year in spite of softening consumer demand and stock issues: a reassuring sign of confidence in the market. Other areas seeing a rebound in popularity from last year are components, HDDs/SSDs and printers. www.contextworld.com Improving sustainability In response to the global climate crisis and the recent energy crisis, Nutanix has sponsored an in-depth report to help business decision-makers not only minimise energy costs but radically cut the carbon footprint of their datacentre assets. Key findings include: n Measurable benefits could be achieved across a range of organisations from large scale hyperscalers and managed service providers to large enterprises and small businesses. n In comparison to traditional 3-tier IT platforms, next generation hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) could potentially reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint by roughly 27% per year. n Across the EMEA region HCI transformation has the potential to reduce energy consumption by 56.7 TWh and cut emissions by 14.2 million tonnes of CO²e over the period 2022-2025. n Large-scale co-location datacentres offer a much lower PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) factor than typical on-premise facilities. Switching these to HCI architectures could potentially boost energy saving towards 30-40%. www.nutanix.com 10 years · I00 issues Winners – see page 24
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=