Make Cyber Security A New Year Resolution: Start with a plan

Cybersecurity checklist for the New Year

 

With the ring in the New Year, there is hope that 2023 brings abundant health, prosperity, and success in all endeavors.  A new year is a beginning, a fresh start for everything.  And of course, it’s also a time to think about making cyber security a priority as everyone is back from the holidays to prevent future headaches and costly prevention. 

Now is a great time to assess your current cyber security setup and make sure you’re starting out the New year right.  A quick checklist can help you to determine if your cyber security is adequate or if you need to step up your game plan.  Questions are needed to ask about quality firewalls to block unwanted traffic to the network.  Are you using two-factor authentication?  What’s about anti-virus and anti-malware software to protect you from cyber threats?  Are all your passwords more than 12 unique and strong characters?  And any backup and restore plans?

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Citizen Developers

The latest buzzword on the Internet is citizen developers in an ever evolving landscape of new technologies, new words, and new phrases. But what is a citizen developer? According to Gartner Glossary, a citizen developer is an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT. All citizen developers are business technologists. However, all business technologists are not necessarily citizen developers. There is no required designation of proficiency or time allocation for citizen developers but they must be legal employees of an organization. In a nutshell, a citizen developer is a business professional that is not IT or IT-trained professional in such fields as marketing, finance, accounting, operational, human resources and others, who see opportunities for using technologies to improve efficiency and functionality in a digital transformation era. They are the first ones to see the problem, and are able to come up with a solution on their own without going through the IT department.

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Is Low Code No Code (LC/NC) the Future?

From a previous post Benefits and/or Drawbacks AI-powered Code Assistant Such As GitHub Copilot provided many examples, benefits, drawbacks with AI-powered assistant that enables developers and engineers to be more efficient in coding. With shortage of specialized skills, strong labor demand, and the great resignation of 2022, some estimates nearly 57 million people have quit this year. Because of the pandemic, employees have re-prioritized and re-examined their personal and professional life. In turn, there is a real challenge to complete IT projects, or IT projects are “shelved” for an extended period of time. This can lead to being less competitive and losing its edge.

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