IT Insights

Recent GDPR fines against Amazon and WhatsApp set new records

WhatsApp and Amazon are penalized to pay a fine of 225 million Euros and 746 million respectively in 2021. Organizations should understand the negative consequence of violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), review their privacy compliance plans, perform gap analysis, and take actions to carry out compliance obligations and maintain sufficient internal controls regarding privacy.

HR tech number of the week: HR systems overload

Driven by the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, employers need to support a virtual workforce and adopt employee tracking solutions to employees’ health and wellness, and thus HR technologies are experiencing a drastic growth. Developers have introduced many new solutions and apps to provide employees with information, engagement and access to services.

System Updates

Oracle’s NetSuite adds banking features to its software; HSBC is first partner

Oracle NetSuite formed a partnership with HSBC to automate banking features into its accounting software. With the artificial intelligence in place, the new system can provide the organization with an accurate cash flow and to free up staff in finance departments to work on other tasks such as planning and analysis.

What’s new for Automation 360 in October

Automation Anywhere has released a new version of Automation 360 v.22. With the latest features and capabilities, Automation Anywhere improves the bot building functionality of RPA Workspace. The new improvements in Discovery Bot also enable users to identify the bottlenecks quickly and to assign a time cost with each step in the process. In addition, the updated version of IQ Bot scales document processing for all types of learning instances. Organizations can improve their operation efficiency and reduce manual work with the new improvements.

Cybersecurity News

2021 was a record-breaking year in zero-day exploits – that’s both good and bad news

Zero-day exploits refer to situations where security defender has no experience to protect against an emergent cyber treat. A significant increase in zero-day exploit incidents has been recorded in 2021, confirming at least 66 zero-days are in active use in 2021, which is nearly a double of reported incidents in 2020. The number of zero-days exploits has been increasing since 2018, which poses a threat to business daily operation and continuity.

Enterprise data storage environments riddled with vulnerabilities

Organizations should pay attention to the security of their storage and backup environments. Vulnerabilities in enterprise storage system are often a people and process issue than a technology problem. For example, lack of awareness, lack of segregation of roles, poorly configured protocols, unpatched vulnerabilities, overly permissive access rights, insecure user management etc. Without proper controls, organizations are at heightened risk of a major disruption in the event of a ransomware attack or attacks seeking to steal, clone, modify, or destroy data.