Reactions from Cisco Live Europe, VMware layoffs hit hard, Google looking to compete with Microsoft Teams. Rich Stroffolino and Tom Hollingsworth are talking about all these and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown, your weekly IT news briefing.
This week on the Rundown:
Google Bug Bounty Payouts up 91%
Thunderbird Goes Corporate
App Maker Shutdown
LoRaWAN Security Issues?
Long Range Wide Area Network, or LoRaWAN is a ultra-low power radio-based protocol to connect IoT sensors, often on battery power back to an edge site or DC. This integrates two layers of 128-bit encryption to authenticate the device to the network server and against backend applications. But security researchers at IOActive say that the tech is prone to misconfiguration to an almost comical extent. QR codes meant for initial configuration with Device IDs and encryption keys are often left on devices, encryption keys from open source libraries are left in place on production hardware, and insecure network servers.
ServiceNow Shifts Focus
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has been on the job since October, and is looking to shake up the company. He’s announced that the company will focus on developing workflows and digital transformation services for banking and telecommunications verticals. They’ll be furthering integrations with Deloitte and Accenture, and have already begun acqusiitions to better fillout their offerings, from chatbots with Passage AI to AIOps company Loom Systems.
Google Testing Comms App for Business
The Information reports that Google Cloud is working on a unified messaging app aimed at businesses. This would reportedly integrate emails from Gmail, online storage through Google Drive, text with Hangouts Chat, and Hangouts Meet video calling, with Google Calendar hooks, although it would not replace that as a standalone app. A mobile app is in testing, and a source tells The Information “G Suite team is almost exclusively working on products with enterprise customers in mind.”
Proposed UK IoT Rules
The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport and National Cyber Security Center recently proposed measure to deal with the consumer IoT security hellscape. They would require all internet-connected device passwords to be unique and not offer a stock password factory reset option, basically so someone doesn’t reset it a known stock answer. IoT manufacturers would also have to provide a public point of contact so any can report a vulnerability and provide a timely response. And devices must have an explicitly stated minimum length of support time for things like security updates from point of sale.
VMware Layoffs
If you were on IT Twitter in the last day, it will come as no surprise that VMware announced it seemingly annual layoffs, reportedly affecting over 200 people. This comes after the company announced about 150 employees from their Pivitol acquisition were laid off last month. The layoffs seems to have hit the vSAN inside sales team particularly hard. VMware employees over 20,000 worldwide, so by percentage this is not huge.
AI But For WebEx
Last year we covered Cisco buying the AI startup Voicea, now Cisco is rolling out its first integration of their IP. The company announced that WebEx Assistant will now be able to assist with things like translation, closed captioning and transcriptions. Users can ask the assistant to highlight certain portions of meetings and create action items as well. Cisco also announced Voice Integration with Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI, which can now do transcription, call summaries, and sync highlights to CRM systems.
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