Security Continues to be a Key Subject Across the Technology Spectrum

The RSA annual conference is in a few weeks, and companies are already queueing up their news to address likely hot topics -- among them, mobile security and human behavior as a security risk factor.

An Amarach Research survey commissioned by Microsoft Ireland found that human password management is not secure, at best:

According to a report by Microsoft Ireland, 22% of employees write down their passwords and 8% of them keep the passwords in a document on computer. 44% of employees recycle their personal passwords, which means that they tend to use the same passwords for both work and home devices.

 Although this doesn't help with the password issue, Microsoft did announce this week that Microsoft Teams now has Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection. The collaboration workspace tool joins fellow communal productivity tools Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive in having protection against phishing and spam as a built-in feature with ATP.

Ahead of Mobile World Congress, Samsung and Pradeo announced Pradeo Security for Samsung, a threat detection and mitigation tool that analyzes all activities performed on a mobile device to determine threats operating at application, network and device levels.

Finally, a new study from data protection provider Virtru found that enterprises are now adapting their security strategies to the cloud. According to the results, 46% of director, VP and C-suite employees polled are “abandoning traditional perimeter-based security strategies and focusing on securing the data… on peripheral systems, devices, [and] networks” in reaction to the one-two whammy of an increasingly mobile workorce using more cloud-based tools. The report concluded:

As IT organisations seek to find ways to deliver on their initiatives more quickly and with a greater focus on regulatory compliance, many struggle to keep these two objectives from conflicting with one another. To address these challenges, firms are turning to data-centric data protection solutions, while seeking to overcome challenges with costs, use, and integration that can arise with onboarding new technologies.

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Enterprise management company Okta just released its fifth "Businesses @ Work" report: Microsoft Office 365 is the most commonly-deployed app among enterprise customers. Salesforce is second, followed by Amazon AWS, then G Suite and Box.

In an earnings call, Dropbox announced a new Multi-Team Admin feature. The new feature will allow Dropbox Business customers to customize admin privileges across different departments. So long as IT admins are granted access to different teams, they can jump back and forth between all the accounts they manage without having to sign in and out repeatedly. 

On Monday, infrastructure problems took down Microsoft Teams for three to four hours. The company brought its collaboration tool back online via a change to its authentication structure. The outage points to a workplace reality that Slack users have also confronted: Sometimes, your cloud-based productivity tool goes down when you're working.

Microsoft will be debuting a cloud-based "virtual agent for customer service" In April. The company will also bring its analytics-driven data tool dashboard, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, to general availability in April.  

Google lowered prices on its Cloud Speech-to-Text service, cut pricing for the premium video model by 25%. The service, which uses AI-based speech technologies to interpret one language to another, also increased the number of languages and variants to 21.