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Today’s topics include Google becoming the first foreign ISP in Cuba; SAP’s Next-Gen innovation hub turning to the Big Apple for inspiration; Verizon releasing a data breach report that reveals a spike in ransomware; and Microsoft rolling out Outlook Customer Manager for small businesses.
Google is the first foreign internet service provider to host internet content in Cuba. The company confirmed in an April 27 email to eWEEK that its Google Global Cache service has gone live in the Cuba, but provided no other details.
Cuba’s government-owned telecommunications company ETECSA will use the GGC service to cache YouTube videos and other high-bandwidth content so it can be delivered faster to local internet users.
Google announced plans to launch its GGC service in Cuba last December when it entered into the partnership with ETECSA in an effort to improve service quality for Cuban internet users seeking to access Google services in the country.
SAP is tapping the expertise of New York City area universities, entrepreneurs and partner companies to help grow the tech startup scene there and accelerate innovation in business technology.
In partnership with the Hasso Plattner Institute, an IT-focused university in Germany named after the SAP co-founder, the company has set up SAP Next-Gen in one of the newer buildings to sprout up in the up-and-coming Hudson Yards district in Manhattan.
Located on the 48th floor of SAP’s new offices with floor-to-ceiling windows that offer panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline and surrounding areas, SAP-Gen has an open and modular floor space that encourages experimentation and the sharing of ideas.
Verizon has released its 10th annual Data Breach Investigations Report, providing insight into how cyber-attackers are exploiting organizations.
Among the key trends that Verizon observed in 2016 is the growing use of ransomware, though overall, the techniques used in past years to exploit organizations are still being used.
The 2017 DBIR report doesn’t measure everything in quite the same way as past reports. And this year’s report has increased detail around specific industry verticals.
“It turns out that the attacks that target organizations can be different from industry to industry,” Gabe Bassett, senior information security data scientist at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, told eWEEK.
“For example” he noted, “manufacturing has the lowest median [distributed denial-of-service] attack level, but the highest level of espionage-related breaches.”
On the heels of Microsoft’s release of its To-Do app, slated to replace Wunderlist, the software giant last week announced several new updates and enhancements to the Office 365 suite.
Among them is the worldwide rollout of the upgraded Outlook Customer Manager, a software tool that enables Office 365 small business users to keep track of their customer communications and engagement efforts without leaving the email client.
Essentially, Outlook Customer Manager helps users of the email client ensure that tasks and deadlines don’t fall through the cracks by automatically surfacing reminders based on the contents of customer emails. Microsoft says it will take a few weeks for the software, which is available in 39 languages, to reach all customers.