Citrix Managed Desktops for Citrix Service Providers makes it easy for our partners to deliver virtual apps and desktops to their customers. Citrix Managed Desktops is a turnkey virtual apps and desktops solution that includes everything partners need to quickly …
Many governments in many countries around the world recognise that contact tracing plays a very important part to reduce the spread of the deadly disease, COVID-19. In this article, we take a look at the conventional method of contact tracking and comparing it against how technology helps contact tracing and its pro’s and con’s. Traditional […]… Read More
The post Contact Tracing: De-mystifying How an App Designed to Track People Can Ensure User Privacy and Security appeared first on The State of Security.
Sometimes the best way to inform ourselves about how cybersecurity is dealing with a new threat, technology, or situation is to just ask. COVID-19, and the resulting lockdowns, quarantines and economic changes certainly counts as a ‘situation’ for cybersecurity. While it would be nice if cybersecurity could temporarily take a backseat while people and organizations […]… Read More
The post Cybersecurity Must be an Integral Part of any Pandemic Response Plan from Now On appeared first on The State of Security.
連日、新型コロナ感染症がビジネスに与える影響が報じられる中、新しい生活様式である「ニューノーマル」という言葉がよく聞かれる様になりました。多くの企業が導入し始めたテレワークは、「ニューノーマル」の一つの要素になりつつあります。
コロナ禍以前のテレワークへの誤解とは？
テレワークの普及と、それが社会に与える影響を考えるにあたり、参考資料として調査会社である「Owl Labs」が新型コロナウイルス感染拡大以前に発表した『State of Remote Work Report for 2019（リモートワークの現状レポート2019年度）』を見てみましょう。
この調査から、コロナ禍よりも以前にテレワークがどの程度普及していたのか、なぜ企業はテレワークの導入をためらっていたのか、また、そのような企業はテレワークに対しどのような誤解を抱いていたのかが明らかになります。
『State of Remote Work Report for 2019』ハイライト
【テレワークをしている部下を持つ上司】
【テレワークしている従業員】
【オフィス勤務者との比較】
生産性やエンゲージメントの低下、退職が牽引されることを懸念しテレワークの導入をためらっていた企業や部署も、近い将来導入に踏み切らざるを得なくなっています。急遽強制的に始まった一斉テレワークの現状 と上記の調査結果を踏まえると、フルタイムとパートタイム両方のテレワークが拡大すると考えられます。
テレワークの効果…
In business, there’s nothing so valuable as having the right product at the right time. Just ask Zoom, the hot cloud-based video conferencing platform experiencing explosive growth thanks to its sudden relevance in the age of sheltering in place.
Having worked at BlackBerry in its heyday in the early 2000s, I see a lot of parallels to what Zoom is going through right now. As Zooming into a video meeting or a classroom is today, so too was pulling out your BlackBerry to fire off an email or check your stocks circa 2002. Like Zoom, the company then known as Research in Motion had the right product for enterprise users that increasingly wanted to do business on the go.
Of course, BlackBerry’s story didn’t have a happy ending.
From 1999 to 2007, BlackBerry seemed totally unstoppable. But then Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, Google launched Android and all of the chinks in the BlackBerry armor started coming undone, one by one. How can Zoom avoid the same fate?
As someone who was at both BlackBerry and Android during their heydays, my biggest takeaway is that product experience trumps everything else. It’s more important than security (an issue Zoom is getting blasted about right now), what CIOs want, your user install base and the larger brand identity.
When the iPhone was released, many people within BlackBerry rightly pointed out that we had a technical leg up on Apple in many areas important to business and enterprise users (not to mention the physical keyboard for quickly cranking out emails)… but how much did that advantage matter in the end? If there is serious market pull, the rest eventually gets figured out… a lesson I learned from my time at BlackBerry that I was lucky enough to be able to immediately apply when I joined Google to work on Android.
Bonusly, a platform that involves the entire organization in recognizing employees and rewarding them, closed on a $9 million Series A financing round led by Access Venture Partners. Next Frontier Capital, Operator Partners, and existing investor FirstMark Capital also participated in the round.
Bonusly launched in 2013 when cofounder and CEO Raphael Crawford-Marks saw the opportunity to reinvent the way employers and colleagues recognize and reward their employees/coworkers.
“I knew that, in order to be successful, companies would be shifting their approach to employee experience and I thought software could enable that shift,” said Crawford-Marks. “Bonusly was this elegant idea of empowering employees to give each other timely frequent and meaningful recognition that would not only benefit employees because they would feel recognized but also surface previously hidden information to the entire company about who was working with whom and on what and what strengths they were bringing to the workplace.”
Most employers use year-end bonuses and performance reviews to motivate workers, with some employers providing some physical rewards.
Bonusly thinks recognition should happen year round. The platform works with the employers on their overall budget for recognition and rewards, and breaks that down into ‘points’ that are allotted to all employees at the organization.
These employees can give out points to other coworkers, whether they’re direct reports or managers or peers, at any time throughout the year. Those points translate to a monetary value that can be redeemed by the employee at any time, whether it’s through PayPal as a cash reward or with one of Bonusly’s vendor partners, including Amazon, Tango Card, and Cadooz. Bonusly also partners with nonprofit organizations to let employees redeem their points via charitable donation.
In fact, Crawford-Marks noted that Bonusly users just crossed the $500K mark for total donations, and have donated more than $100k to the WHO in six weeks.
Bonusly integrates with several collaboration platforms including Gmail and Slack to give users the flexibility to give points in whatever venue they choose. Bonusly also has a feed, not unlike social media sites like Twitter, that show employees who has received recognition in real time.
The company has also built in some technical features to help with usability. For example, Bonusly understands the social organization of a company, surfacing the most relevant folks in the point feed based on who employees have given or received points to/from in the past. In a company with tens of thousands of employees, this keeps Bonusly relevant.
Bonusly has also incorporated tools for employers, including an auto-scale button for employers with workers in multiple jurisdictions or companies. The button allows employers to scale up or down the point allotments in different geographies based on cost of living.
There are also privacy controls on Bonusly that allow high-level employees and leadership to give each other recognition for projects that may not be widely known about at the company yet, like say for an acquisition that was completed.
Bonusly says that peer-to-peer recognition is more powerful than manager-only recognition, saying its nearly 36 percent more likely to have better financial outcomes.
The company also cites research that says that a happy workforce raises business productivity by more than 30 percent.
Bonusly competes with Kazoo and Motivocity, and Crawford-Marks says that the biggest differentiation factor is participation.
“We set a very high bar for how we measure participation and engagement in the platform,” he said. “You’ll see other companies claiming really high participation rates but typically if you dig into that they’re talking about getting recognition every six months or every year or just logging in, rather than giving recognition every single month, month over month.”
He noted that 75 percent of employees on average give recognition in the first month of deployment with an organization, and that number gradually increases over time. By the two-year mark, 80 percent of employees are giving recognition every month.
Bonusly has raised a total of nearly $14 million in funding since inception.
A passenger railroad service announced that a data breach might have affected some passengers’ personally identifiable information (PII). In a “Notice of Data Breach” letter sent to the Attorney General’s Office of Vermont, Amtrak revealed that it had discovered the data breach on April 16 2020. Amtrak looked into the matter and discovered that an […]… Read More
The post Passenger Railroad Service Says Data Breach Might Have Affected PII appeared first on The State of Security.
Fast Company's Meet John Krasinski’s secret weapon that helped make ‘Some Good News’ a hit covers how Krasinski used Communo, an online creative talent marketplace, to find and engage his post-production team.
Key quote from the article on the team:
On post-production were the New York-based shops Senior Post and Leroi. Nashville’s Made In Network handled video distribution across other platforms. Calgary’s Arcade ran social media. And Giflytics in New Haven, Connecticut, did the GIF analytics.
"Some Good News" started with a tweet on March 25th asking people to submit stories and the first episode was March 30th (see below).
There are now 8 episodes and the series was sold to ViamcomCBS for a reported $100 million +. Pretty good for a couple of months' work, although many fans are unhappy that Krasinski sold the show.
A couple of things jumped out at us about this story:
1. Krasinski was able to scale up a very successful, professionally produced TV show is in just weeks using distributed nonemployee labor.
2. "Some Good News" bypassed the traditional media gatekeepers by using YouTube and going directly to consumers.
3. All the players involved are very small geographically distributed firms or independent workers who collaborate on this project.
Of course, the show's success would have been much less likely - and probably not possible - without the talent and star power of John Krasinski.
But the show's success still illustrates how teams of distributed, independent workers and small firms can quickly form and produce world-class results.
And this is not just happening in creative fields. It's happening in almost all industries and professions.
The coming of widespread 5G technology promises more than just faster everything, enhanced capacity and greater reliability. Leading proponents of the wonders of 5G, such as the theoretical physicist and author Michio Kaku, paint a picture of a true technological “paradigm shift, a game-changer.” The self-described futurist invites us to imagine a lightning-fast global communications […]… Read More
The post The Cybersecurity Implications of 5G Technology appeared first on The State of Security.
Tripwire’s May 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, Adobe, SaltStack, and VMware. Up first on the patch priority list this month are patches for VMware vCenter Server and SaltStack Salt. The Metasploit exploit framework has recently integrated exploits for VMware vCenter Server (CVE-2020-3952) and SaltStack Salt (CVE-2020-11652, CVE-2020-11651). Administrators with […]… Read More
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