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Top IT News of the Week (07/2022)

#ITnews

IT news #1: Vodafone addresses possibility of leaving Britain.

Topic: Mobile broadband, unified communications

Telecommunications giant, Vodafone is considering selling off its UK business due to activist pressure. The telecommunications company has reorganised its Global Enterprise unit, which sells telecoms and IT services to large corporations and named it “Project Galaxy”. According to analysts, this would simplify merging or spinning off units in the UK and other countries. Vodafone has been discussing performance upgrades and improving its languishing share price with Swedish investor company Cevian Capital. According to the Mail on Sunday, the Global Enterprise division’s changes took place last year before discussions started with Cevian. It is claimed that a country-by-country reorganisation would enable the company to meet demands for higher shareholder returns through consolidations. Vodafone has been linked with an offer to merge its UK business with mobile network Three.

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IT news #2: Microsoft Azure’s new backup feature can rescue company data.

Topic: Disaster recovery, data backup

Microsoft has announced an update that enables Azure users to restore a 15-day old version of their data instead of the previous 72 hours. The company believes the change should be beneficial for companies if ransomware has gone undetected by antivirus solutions for a few days before spreading. During the first two hours, Azure will take snapshots every five minutes. After two hours, the service will start pruning the snapshots, which will result in fewer instances. Azure will keep an hourly snapshot for the first two past days and concerning the period of 8-15 days in the past, the service will take a snapshot every four hours. This comes with a price, though. Having 15 days’ worth of backups means opting for the Managed Disks (the unmanaged option only offers three days) with Azure storage and data transfers also coming with a price. The application-consistent recovery points that are enabled by default can be switched on and the first 31 days of the service is available for free.

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IT news #3: LinkedIn integration with Microsoft Teams has arrived.

Topic: Collaboration, unified communications

In its latest integration, Microsoft Teams users will be able to access colleagues’ profiles on the networking site.The company’s roadmap for Microsoft 365 states users now will see their colleagues’ LinkedIn profiles when having a one-on-one chat. The recently added feature to the Microsoft roadmap will be available from March. It follows enhancements to MS Teams in public preview, including a compact chat option that allows users to select a view displaying several chat messages and the ability to promote invitees to co-organisers. LinkedIn is not the first service integrating with Microsoft; the company has been tying the collaboration platform closer to its products lately, such as the Teams integration with Windows 11 by displaying Teams contacts on the Windows taskbar directly to Teams personal users.

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IT news #4: SMEs are the main targets for hackers in 2022, agencies warn.

Topic: Cybersecurity, hacking

According to the FBI and NCSC, medium-sized businesses have become the new targets of ransomware gangs. Hackers actively seek to avoid public scrutiny after high-profile public services or well-known brands. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has outlined in a joint advisory that cybercriminals are no longer participating in the sort of “big-game hunting” that has had the chance to make the headlines in recent years. The FBI has discovered a noticeable shift in criminal behaviour after observing attacks on Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods and Kaseya in 2021. Hackers now tend to use cybercriminal services-for-hire along with phishing emails, the exploitation of remote desktop protocols and software vulnerabilities. The agencies warn organisations to update their operating systems, secure and monitor RDPs and increase their use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) – a safety measure that can potentially reduce account breaches by 50%. It is also crucial to implement cybersecurity training to prepare staff adequately for potential attacks.

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