CyberScout shares key cybersecurity predictions for 2020; predicts persistent threats in areas of privacy and cybersecurity

As 2019 comes to an end, cybersecurity experts are preparing for a new year—and a new decade—and all the cyber scams, breaches, attacks and privacy concerns that threaten consumers and businesses. CyberScout continues to strengthen defenses against the constantly evolving cyber threats that will shape the 2020 security landscape, encouraging consumers and business owners to stay informed and aware. 

"While consumers and business leaders are more aware of cybersecurity and privacy than ever before, cybercriminals continue to innovate," said CyberScout founder and chairman Adam Levin. "As defenses improve, the attack vectors become more nuanced and technically impressive. You are your best guardian when it comes to your privacy and personal cybersecurity."  

Levin's has listed the following 20 cybersecurity predictions for 2020:

1. Cybersecurity workforce shortages. There will be a shortage of experts, adding pressure on CISO's charged with tackling an increasing issue environment. With the demand for cybersecurity professionals far exceeding supply, the market will have to start filling openings with less qualified people. 

2. The disinformation blob will grow. With the success of weaponized misinformation campaigns in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, expect to see more of them in the private sector, with businesses adopting troll farm tricks to hurt the competition. 

3. Ransomware will continue to thrive. Phishing attacks will continue to lead to ransomware infecting more and more networks. Businesses, municipalities and other organizations will continue to pay whatever they must in order to regain control of their data and systems, and will also see better backup practices that will help minimize or neutralize the threat of these attacks.  

4. IoT botnets will make dystopian paranoia seem normal. IoT will continue to grow exponentially. In 2020, there will be somewhere around 20 billion IoT devices in use around the world. Unfortunately, many are not secure because they are protected by nothing more than manufacturer default passwords readily available online. They will be weaponized (like in years' past), but with increasing skill and computing power.
   
   
   

5. The integrity of the U.S. elections will be questioned—for good reason. There are still voting machines in use that are far from secure and would not pass the simplest of audits. Some states continue to use machines that leave no paper trail. Look forward to questions regarding election security all year.  

6. Cryptocurrency miners will continue to get rich off stolen electricity. Related to the botnet craze, we will see an increase in computing power theft used to mine cryptocurrency. With bots becoming exponentially more effective as the result of AI and cloud computing, a renaissance of Wild West behavior in the global blockchain digital ledger can be expected. 

  

7. Zero-trust environments will be talked about. A few may exist. The assumption that one can trust the home team—people within one's organization—has been replaced with zero-trust policies. Zero-trust simply means that no one can be trusted, in or outside the organization. With this assumption foremost, new systems make breaches and compromises harder to happen. 

8. More people will know what "protect surface" means. Protect surface is part of the zero-trust environment. An organization's attackable surface includes every error-prone human in its employ as well as the mistakes in configuration they may have committed along the way and any number of other issues. The protective surface is much smaller and must be kept out of harm's way. The more the subjects is spoken about, the stronger its cybersecurity is expected to be. 

9. Cars will be frozen. Driverless cars are going to hit things as well as get hit by hackers. Cars that talk to satellites are toast. It's going to happen. (Or not. But it totally could.) 

10.  5G will make the cyber smash grab a thing.  5G is going to make everything move fast, as will the new generation USB4 devices. With quicker speed, it will take much less time to transfer data. Coincidentally, criminals appreciate this as much as the rest of us.  

11. Social media will no longer need to be private. Social media companies will probably become a bit more responsible when it comes to the way they gather, store, crunch, analyze and sell our data to marketing companies and small to medium sized businesses looking to connect directly with consumers. 
    
    
    

12.  State-sponsored traffic jams will be a thing. Hackers are going to target operational systems with an array of tactics that include ransomware and more DDoS attacks that will snarl things up in ways we've not yet seen. The targets will be financial institutions, the power grid, elections, proprietary business information, city services and infrastructure like traffic lights and much more that can wreak havoc on our day to day lives.

13.  You're going to have personal cyber insurance. Insurance companies will be writing more comprehensive cyber liability policies for businesses and offering innovative personal cyber coverage for consumers. 

14.  HR will save money by spending some. More employers will offer their employees identity protection products and services as part of their paid or voluntary benefits programs. An employee who has their identity stolen is not very productive and if, as part of that identity theft, their user ID or passwords are exposed, a thief might have what he or she needs to access an employer's network and sensitive databases. 

15.  The cloud will leak. The parade of stories about misconfigured cloud clients and data stored without any password protection on cloud services will continue apace, perhaps in part because of the CISO and cybersecurity workforce shortage discussed in the first prediction.  

16.  AI will gladly take one’s job. AI is here and it's willing to work. The CISO shortage as well as many of the innovations discussed in this list of predictions will be increasingly addressed and powered by Artificial Intelligence. 

"Disinformation efforts, election security and continued attacks on local governments and major metropolitan hubs are escalating concerns of how disruptive and dangerous cybercrimes are becoming," continued Levin. "2020 promises to be an interesting ride. Be smart and stay safe by staying informed and seeking cyber insurance protection for you, your family and your business."  

Centilytics releases initial cloud management platform to debut flat fees and widget-based pricing

In the cloud management industry, Centilytics becomes the initial management platform that offers widget-based pricing. With cloud computing having almost limitless benefits, cloud vendors deliver benefits to attract customers; and this strategy is working quite well. Cloud computing is becoming a preferred choice by entrepreneurs, whether for a startup or a well-established enterprise.

It was all a walk in the park up until the first data breach, or an unexpected cloud bill that can shrink the numbers in the bank account, ergo the dawn of cloud management. 

Gartner was the initial vendor to advocate the importance of a cloud management platform. They acknowledge that a management platform is needed to see through the complexities of the cloud. It should be equipped to protect the user's data under industry defined regulations and provide solutions for any additional cost overhead.

Centilytics is a fully-automated SaaS solution that helps organizations with the management and control of their infrastructure. It is an intelligent cloud management platform that enables public cloud users to gain 360-degree visibility, identify loopholes and deploy one-click fixes on their cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) can safeguard the data and prevent cost leakages from the accounts. Typically, a CMP charges a percentage fee on the cloud consumption; In other words, that's a part of savings.

Which seems to be a conflict of interest, doesn't it?

On a percentage pricing model, the CMP's revenue becomes directly proportional to cloud spending. It means they'll earn more when the cloud bill increases. This conflict has been generalized and never been visible because users have gotten used to it. Cloud already has a complex pricing model, and in no way, percent pricing going to ease that complexity. When Centilytics, noticed this conflict, it went ahead. It introduced a flat fee model for its customers.

Centilytics is the only CMP that eradicates the conflict of interest by charging one fixed amount, which is independent of increased bills.

The users have finally understood the conflict and are now moving away from the percentage pricing. Not only did the previous pricing take away a chunk of there savings but also that they had to pay for the whole platform, even for the services that they were not using.

Centilytics, yet again, disrupt the market by introducing a widget-based pricing model. To offer this pricing, The entire Centilytics platform was broken down to 5 products, 12 services, and 2200+ widgets. With widget-based pricing, the users can pick and choose only those services which they require. They also get the capability to bundle widgets as per their unique infrastructure requirements. This model eliminates the need to pay for the entire platform and genuinely save money.

Gartner expects global public cloud revenue to grow 17% in 2020, with IaaS secures highest growth due to data center consolidation

The worldwide public cloud services market is forecast to grow 17 percent in 2020 to total US$266.4 billion, up from $227.8 billion in 2019, according to data released Wednesday by analyst firm Gartner.

Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the largest market segment, which is forecast to grow to $116 billion next year due to the scalability of subscription-based software. The second-largest market segment is cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which will reach $50 billion in 2020. 

IaaS is forecast to grow 24 percent year over year, which is the highest growth rate across all market segments. This growth is attributed to the demands of modern applications and workloads, which require infrastructure that traditional data centers cannot meet.

Various forms of cloud computing are among the top three areas where most global CIOs will increase their investment next year, according to Gartner. As organizations increase their reliance on cloud technologies, IT teams are rushing to embrace cloud-built applications and relocate existing digital assets. 

“At this point, cloud adoption is mainstream,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “The expectations of the outcomes associated with cloud investments therefore are also higher. Adoption of next-generation solutions are almost always ‘cloud-enhanced’ solutions, meaning they build on the strengths of a cloud platform to deliver digital business capabilities.”

“The cloud managed service landscape is becoming increasingly sophisticated and competitive. In fact, by 2022, up to 60 percent of organizations will use an external service provider’s cloud managed service offering, which is double the percentage of organizations from 2018,” said Nag. “Cloud-native capabilities, application services, multicloud and hybrid cloud comprise a diverse cloud ecosystem that will be important differentiators for technology product managers. Demand for strategic cloud service outcomes signals an organizational shift toward digital business outcomes.”

AES partners with Google to develop and implement solutions that enable broader adoption of renewable energy

The AES Corp. announced that it is entering into a ten-year strategic alliance with Google to accelerate the growth and adoption of clean energy by leveraging Google Cloud technology to pioneer innovation in the sector. This alliance builds on the recent agreement between Google and AES to provide long-term renewable power to Google’s data center in Chile.

As part of this alliance, AES will use Google Cloud technology to help create the grid of the future and improve the experience for energy customers. AES innovation partner, Uplight, will also utilize Google Cloud technology to enhance its end-to-end energy action system, to increase customer satisfaction and reduce carbon emissions. 

Google Cloud’s platform, tools and technology will help redefine and improve AES and Uplight’s delivery of customer solutions through advanced cloud computing, data analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

The two companies will work together to improve the experience for corporate energy customers and to develop and implement solutions that enable broad adoption of clean energy. 

AES will collaborate with Google Cloud on energy management and opportunities to sponsor clean energy projects in targeted markets in the United States and Latin America that have the potential to help Google meet its clean energy objectives.

“AES has been working with its customers to accelerate the transformation of the electric sector through energy storage, renewables and energy efficiency. Today, we are one of the largest renewables solutions providers and developers in the world,” said Andrés Gluski, AES president and CEO. “We’re proud to have been selected by Google to form this strategic alliance. By combining the capabilities, footprint and experience of both companies, we will be able to provide better and more efficient energy solutions.”

“Cloud technology is an enabler for forward-leaning organizations seeking to put customers at the center of their business strategies,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Together, AES and Google Cloud will leverage the cloud, AI/ML and data analytics to help transform the energy industry’s infrastructure, while driving wider adoption of renewable energy around the world.”

Fedora 31 generally available; begin push towards innovations around emerging IT use cases like IoT and Linux containers

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat Inc. sponsored and community-driven open source collaboration, announced general availability of Fedora 31, the latest version of the fully open source Fedora operating system. Fedora 31 includes new features that help to address a host of modern computing challenges, from building and running cloud native applications to driving innovation in the connected world.

Each Fedora edition is designed to address specific use cases for modern developers and IT teams with Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server providing open operating systems built to meet the needs of forward-looking developers and server projects. 

Fedora 31 also sees the continued evolution of emerging Fedora editions, including Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue. Fedora 31 brings enhancements to all editions with updates to the common underlying packages, from bug fixes and performance tweaks to new versions. 

This release now includes updated compilers and languages, including NodeJS 12, Perl 5.30 and Golang 1.13. Additionally the "python" command will now refer to Python 3. It also provides support for Cgroupsv2, bringing kernel level support for the latest features and functionality around cgroups in the base packages of Fedora 31. This helps lay the foundation for improved performance and new capabilities in building and running containerized applications.

The new version offers switching RPM compression to ztsd, which decreases the amount of compression time needed and improves the overall performance of processes using binary RPMs; and comes with support for RPM 4.15, the latest version of the RPM Package Manager for enhanced performance and stability across all versions of Fedora.

Fedora 31 also includes key updates to Fedora’s desktop-focused edition, Fedora 31 Workstation. Fedora 31 Workstation provides new tools and features for general users as well as developers with the inclusion of GNOME 3.34. 

GNOME 3.34 brings significant performance enhancements which will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware. Fedora 31 Workstation also expands the default uses of Wayland, including allowing Firefox to run natively on Wayland under GNOME instead of the XWayland backend as with prior releases.

Additionally, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue continue to evolve and be updated to better meet the requirements of modern IT, which is powered by Linux containers, Kubernetes and cloud computing. The emerging Fedora editions remain available in preview.

Rancher Labs’ Longhorn offering now part of Cloud Native Computing Foundation as Sandbox Project

Rancher Labs announced on Tuesday that The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted Longhorn, its vendor-neutral container storage solution as its latest Sandbox project. Longhorn joins 20 other current projects and was accepted in recognition of the unique value it brings to the cloud-native ecosystem.

Key capabilities of Longhorn (currently v0.6.2) include enterprise-grade distributed block storage, volume snapshots, built-in backup and restore, live upgrades without impacting running volumes, cross-cluster disaster recovery with defined RTO and RPO, one-click installation, and an intuitive user interface. 

Longhorn is much simpler than traditional storage software. Longhorn implements its enterprise-grade storage features with only 30,000 lines of Go code, including both the data plane (Longhorn engine) and the management plane (Longhorn manager). Longhorn is lightweight because Rancher builds on storage technologies that already exist in the Linux operating system. The speed and capacity of modern storage hardware like SSD and NVMe also led to a greatly simplified design.

Most users interact with Longhorn through its free UI, and it exposes a storage class for easy provisioning of replicated volumes. Longhorn can be installed and upgraded with a few clicks, without needing to first read all of the documentation to understand every nuance. The Longhorn UI not only offers visibility into storage volumes, but it also helps teams understand the Kubernetes workload that created the volume.

Longhorn protects data at multiple levels. As enterprise-grade distributed storage, Longhorn replicates data synchronously across multiple nodes. Users can create snapshots directly in primary storage and revert to previous snapshots from the UI. They can also make backups of snapshots to secondary storage and recover the volume to the same cluster or a different one. 

Users can even create a read-only asynchronous replica in a different cluster, making it possible to quickly recover data and the application in case of a cluster failure.

As enterprises increasingly look to use containers to manage stateful apps -- any program that saves client data from the activities of one session for use in the next session – they require support for persistent storage. 

However, the market for persistent storage is still nascent with complexity and a lack of enterprise capabilities as key challenges. Longhorn helps teams manage stateful workloads in Kubernetes by providing a solution for persistent storage that can be deployed, while simplifying use and management.

Alibaba Cloud collaborates with Animal Logic to create better animation production experience

Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, and Animal Logic announced Tuesday a partnership to meet the growing and demanding requirements of media production. Animal Logic has started backing-up its on-premise production content onto Alibaba Cloud’s world-class computing platform. Through this partnership, the parties hope to drive efficiencies of media production by utilising more cloud computing technologies.

Alibaba Cloud and Animal Logic will continue working on future cross-regional storage and backup projects, large scale rendering farm requirements and migration of legacy applications to the cloud. These projects will support Animal Logic’s multi-cloud, whilst retiring a number of critical legacy applications, and ageing on-premise hardware.

“Alibaba Cloud is thrilled to announce our partnership with Animal Logic, in which we will bring increased efficiency and safety to the artists at Animal Logic and in turn, push the boundaries of animation and VFX to a new level,” said Raymond Ma, General Manager for Alibaba Cloud in Australia and New Zealand.

Alibaba Cloud’s cross border network covers 20 regions and 61 availability zones globally. It is also the first Cloud provider to fulfil the additional requirements of Germany’s Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) and has more than 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide.

As one of digital production studios that created animation and visual effects for various films including Peter Rabbit, The LEGO Movie 2, Captain Marvel and Happy Feet, Animal Logic requires a high-performance cloud storage platform that can quickly scale up for backup requirements, especially during peak production periods, in which 150TB of data can be generated in a 24-hour period. 

Animal Logic required a partner that could not only provide them with secure data protection capabilities, but also secure backup solutions for the increasingly large amount of data generated within a short period of time.

“Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud will provide us with the best technology to secure our content more efficiently,” says Darin Grant, Animal Logic’s Chief Technology Officer. “With Alibaba Cloud, we have the capability to backup large amounts of data and in turn, operate seamlessly even during our busiest times.”