Antivirus programs are vital to protect your PC, laptop, and your other devices from any harmful spyware, malware, ransomware, and adware. Both domestic users and companies alike are beginning to understand the importance of cybersecurity and taking steps to address potential threats.

Yet, when it comes to choosing antivirus software, it can be difficult to decide between traditional options or the latest cloud-based solutions. So cloud antivirus vs traditional antivirus programs how do you determine which is the best choice?

Traditional Antivirus Solutions The Issues

Antivirus programs scan files and check them against a virus database. If it finds a program or file matching a definition in its database, it removes it from the device. However, as there are millions of virus definitions out there against which files must be compared, its easy to see why this can pose problems to developers of traditional AV software.

While developers want antivirus software to be as easy as possible on computers, the amount of activity during a scan means that all-too-often, they become so slow that, during a scan, they may even be unusable. Yet, antivirus software must have as many up-to-date virus definitions as possible to provide optimal service. Without this, countless new viruses popping up each day can enter and attack the computer system, making the software useless.

Cloud Antivirus Solutions Solving The Problems?

Cloud antivirus programs have been designed to solve this exact problem. Cloud solutions keep all of the virus definitions on the providers server. Since the millions of comparisons arent being made on the computer itself, there is less impact on the devices performance during scans. This means its possible to carry on working with no unwanted interruptions.

Even better, cloud antivirus software always remains up-to-date as the provider takes care of all of the definition updates on the users behalf. This means there is no need for the user to check for updates.

Are There Any Downsides To Cloud AV Solutions?

One of the biggest issues with a cloud-based antivirus solution is that to obtain complete real-time protection the user has to have a working internet connection. If the device isnt online, any running programs or open files arent being checked against the most up-to-date antivirus definition database.

One further issue is that, since everything is carried out via the internet, whole files usually arent being sent by the device to the antivirus software to be scanned. Rather, only some of the file information is sent to the software to be evaluated. If something suspicious shows up that is inconclusive, the entire file may then be flagged up and sent for full scanning.

Are There Any Solutions For Cloud AV Issues?

Although a device isnt entirely protected by a cloud AV application while not online, it is still safer offline as risks are limited. Also, since the majority of cloud antivirus programs will keep some data on the device, the programs run regularly will usually be safe.

Cloud-based software also uses several methods to protect your systems and computer such as behavior monitoring. This method checks how files act to ensure theyre safe. When those behaviors are spotted, the software will block the program or file and notify the user, allowing the malware to be removed safely. Behavior monitoring will check for files that modify hosts files, send large numbers of emails in short time frames, change auto-run registry keys or generate executable programs.

Why Opt For A Cloud-Based Antivirus Solution?

Since the antivirus providers server has many users connected to it at the same time, instant protection can be obtained from new viruses affecting the devices of the other users. This is possible as, when a malicious program or file is spotted anywhere, updated definitions enter the primary system, giving immediate protection from the new threat.

These days, cloud solutions have begun to be incorporated into the more traditional antivirus software solutions, so its likely that soon, all AV software will be found in the cloud. Even better, cloud-based software is more affordable and can help to save time since theres no need to regularly carry out device scans or update and maintain traditional AV software. With these advantages in mind, its easy to see why cloud-based antivirus programs are overtaking the more traditional options.

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Traditional or Cloud Antivirus Solutions Which is Best? - PC Tech Magazine

Harnath Babu, KPMGBy Harnath Babu

Hundreds of thousands of employees working from home are waiting to return to normalcy, but for many it may not mean going to the office. Are we accelerating towards the digital future we once imagined? Will it be the new normal? Read on to find out how COVID-19 is acting as a catalyst of change and fast-tracking digital revolution.

The outbreak of the coronavirus worldwide has fundamentally shaken up the business landscape and changed the way we work. While we were already preparing for the digital future of work driven by mobile connectivity, cognitive tools and cloud, COVID-19 accelerated the transformation pushing enterprises to enable remote working for 100 per cent of their workforce and increase business resiliency by embracing virtual collaboration platforms at unprecedented speed all exclusively remotely.

Although it cannot be foreseen when all of this would be over, but whenever that happens commuting to office and interacting face-to-face with our co-workers may not be the same. As we ponder, some companies are reportedly making a big move and considering permanent work from home for majority of their workforce.

Work

Work will most likely be as it is right now with the future already making its way to the present. As we adapt to work from home, our reliance on email, chats, and videoconferencing is increasing, we are getting accustomed to interacting with companies virtually as well as depending on e-learning platforms over the traditional classroom trainings. This is leading to not only limited physical contact in response to the COVID-19 pandemic but also shaping the way work works.

As employees' work lives have changed, so have the companies themselves. We can experience how online food delivery platforms jumped the bandwagon to make essential services and groceries available to us as we sit in the comfort of our home.

And as we get comfortable with online shopping, retailers will need to rethink their business strategy and focus more on online delivery of products even if they maintain a brick-and-mortar store. This would mean a strengthened logistics and delivery system, less staff in-store and more gig workers to handle surges in online shopping demand.

In banking and financial services, we can see how digital way of interaction is becoming the new normal as artificial intelligence and machine learning frontends to automate several processes and customers getting comfortable with online and mobile banking.

It implies that financial institutions will have to relook at their infrastructure that can support both digital and physical services efficiently with their manpower deployed to work from anywhere.

Similarly, hospitals and healthcare service providers are implementing virtual consultations that can be done through audio and video conferencing tools giving rise to telehealth. And as we move towards the future of work, doctors and patients will be able to connect virtually over collaboration platforms instead of an in-person visit.

The education sector has also undergone a huge transformation as the outbreak forced schools and universities to shut down. There has been a distinctive rise of eLearning where children are being taught remotely and on digital platforms.

And this integration of technology with education will get accelerated and online education will become an integral component of school education creating a hybrid model with significant benefits.

Impacting almost every industry sector, COVID-19 has made us transition to a world of automation and brought a radical change in the way we work by taking off the administrative tasks that could be performed by robots.

This would certainly not mean job destruction but job augmentation wherein the tasks performed by humans are most likely to shift to non-routine, more complex and innovative. In such an environment, humans and machines will be enabled to do what they do best independently as well as with each other.

Workforce

Workers across the globe have been affected by lockdown in several ways. While for those in white-collar jobs, it has meant remote work; for several service/blue-collar workers, it has provided a peek into the future where machines may replace humans especially as enterprises consider automation; and for gig workers, there is a struggle these days.

However, several companies across sectors such as automotive, media to business process management will explore areas that can be equipped with remote working models using freelancers and gig workers on a continued basis. There will be reluctance to add full-time roles when they could add flexible roles instead.

Enterprises will also focus on engaging people with the right blend of expertise and experience to achieve their goals while enabling new ways of working while enhancing virtual work support systems. And all this will be accompanied by continuous learning to support the upskilling needed across the workforce to address the forthcoming talent shortages.

The pandemic has also shown that we do not need to fly to other cities or countries for business reviews. These meetings can be as effective when done through video-conferencing platforms. And not having to travel would not only save companys cost, but also make leaders more efficient, while reducing the stress and time spent in travelling.

However, on the flip side, as we employ remote working environment, humans being social animals, would miss the connecting with their peers and colleagues. While working from home, they may also feel like they never leave work, which can ultimately impact productivity.

Hence, leadership teams will have the responsibility to address such pitfalls and beat the collaboration, productivity, and emotional disadvantages that can arise.

Workplace

As our work gets supported by an ecosystem of virtual resources, we are certainly going to leapfrog into a new mode of work that will be defined by the thing we do, not the place we go.

Technology is also going to play a pivotal role in transforming our workplaces which will be a blend of the physical and virtual experiences to deliver a consistent employer identity to stakeholders, employees as well as clients.

As enterprises consider to significantly reduce the number of employees working from office, they will not only save cost on real estate but also will have to transform work floors in a way that social distancing can be maintained.

This could not only mean decluttering the office space but also doing away with the collaboration workspace for employees. The cramped cubicles would make way for spaced out workspaces.

Co-working spaces which work on the concept of shared desks would lead to more segregated and private places. For instance, a meeting room that would normally fit eight individuals might now only hold seats for four.

Conclusion

While it is still unclear when this pandemic will get over, what is certain is that our work life will never be the same again. Enterprises will become more resilient because the fully distributed nature of the model is inherently less risky and well suited for business continuity and agility, and employees will have more flexibility over their schedules as they work remotely.

For efficient communication and collaboration, investment will shift from real estate to newer technologies that make remote working more functional and productive. The focus on data security would also increase, making it essential for enterprises to invest in technologies and ensure data and information is not compromised.

So, let us gear up for the change brought in by virtual work capabilities.

The author is CIO at KPMG in IndiaDISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCIO.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCIO.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.

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Moving beyond Covid-19: what does the future of work look like? - ETCIO.com

It seems much longer than just a couple of months ago when the spreading coronavirus outbreak began make its presence felt in the tech industry. Like in most of society, it started with calls for social distancing between people and then led to the steady domino effect of vendors canceling major technology shows or announcing that they were moving them online. The first big one to hit was Mobile World Congress, an event in February that tends to draw more than 110,000 people but that also is hosted in Barcelona, in a country that soon was consumed by coronavirus cases and deaths.

It wasnt long before vendors in the United States began canceling their in-person events. There were some that went ahead as planned the RSA 2020 security conference in San Francisco in late February being the most high-profile example, despite companies like IBM and AT&T pulling out but by that time the torrent of show cancellations had begun.

Amazon Web Services decided to do with its annual Summit conference what many others did with theirs make it a strictly virtual event online. And it was a decidedly different event this week. AWS CTO Werner Vogels, known in past Summits for stalking the stage and wiping sweat from his brow as he introduced one new feature after another, instead was on the small screen, beaming in from his home studio. And instead of the parade of new technologies and services being added to the massive numbers already available in the AWS atmosphere, his message was about taking advantage of the forced slowdown brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic to get back to basics and learn new skills, like machine learning, much of which can be done with such AWS services as Well Architected Tool and Amazon Builders Library.

Vogels also touted a range of other technologies, from S3 object storage to the Route 53 and CloudFront DNS web services. He pushed all this because, in his mind, the fallout from the Covid-19 crisis from the massive numbers of employees suddenly working from home to enterprises turning in large numbers to public clouds for business continuity to consumers turning to content streaming companies for entertainment as they stay sheltered inside has proven the resiliency of cloud infrastructures to handle skyrocketing demand for services. As proof, he pointed to a recent Nielsen study that found that on March 13, more than 161 billion minutes of video content was streamed. A year earlier, that number was fewer than 70 billion minutes.

In addition, the new reality brought on by the pandemic is changing business models going forward.

I believe that if nothing else, these past few months have truly ushered in a new era in technology, where we are seeing a fundamental shift in how everyone is viewing not only technology itself, but how to access that technology as well as how we build the technology, the CTO said. Thats what AWS helps you do. In many ways, its accelerating the path to realize a world that we had predicted many years ago. You had video conferencing inside the car from spy movies as far back as the 1960s and 3D printing was seen as pure science fiction in 1980s. It is my assertion that in 2020 and beyond, most organizations are going to be transforming into a completely cloud-based environment. Anywhere I can access any application or service from anywhere at any time.

Indeed, weve written about the rise in demand for public cloud services during the past three months and how in an IT industry that is being hit hard by the economic battering the coronavirus is delivering, some segments the public cloud and cloud-based video conferencing being two are faring well, AWS included. Gartner analysts added another proof point to this, forecasting this week that global IT spending in 2020 decline 8 percent year-over-year due to Covid-19 outbreak. That said, public cloud services spending will see a 19 percent jump this year, as will cloud-based conferencing (a 24.3 percent increase) and cloud-based telephony and messaging (8.9 percent).

Vogels also noted that industries like telemedicine are seeing demand grow and are relying on public cloud infrastructures to help them meet those demands. He pointed to a healthcare startup called Kry, which created its Care Connect online platform enabling video consultations between doctors and patients and which has seen growing demand since the pandemic began. The platform is built entirely on AWS and was launched in less than two weeks.

The focus of the Summit and of Vogels 45-minute talk was primarily on teaching developers and engineers how to build architectures within AWS and leverage the cloud giants services to ensure security, resiliency and scalability. That said, there was some news coming out of the company this week. Among that was the availability of AWS sixth-generation Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) general-purpose instance the M6g which is powered by Graviton2, the latest iteration of the companys Arm-based processor. It was designed by AWS and Annapurna Labs which is owned by Amazon leveraging Arms 64-bit Neoverse N1 cores. The first Graviton-powered EC2 instances were launched in 2018 and first talked about the Graviton2-based instances in December.

As we at The Next Platform have noted, the Graviton processors are among a growing number of Arm-based server chips making their presence felt in a space dominated by Intel and x86 architecture. After years of promise, Arm and its manufacturing partners such as Marvell and its ThunderX2 processors (inherited when it bought Cavium in 2018) and Ampere, a startup led by ex-Intel executives are making inroads. Graviton comes in as the chip developed by the company that owns about 40 percent of the booming public cloud market and is putting them in its cloud instances.

The Graviton2 processors support 256-bit DRAM encryption and include dual SIMD units to double the floating point performance of their first-generation predecessors. To accelerate machine learning inference workloads, they also support INT8/FP16 instructions. The M6g instances come in eight sizes ranging from one to 64 virtual CPUs or as bare-metal instances, come with up to 256 GB of memory, 25 Gb/sec of network performance and 19 Gb/sec of EBS bandwidth. Theyre powered by AWS Nitro System platform.

Also this week, AWS made Kendra, its new enterprise search service, generally available. The company launched a preview of the technology late last year. It was designed to address the challenge of quickly and easily finding information in the fast-growing amounts of data that is being generated. Among the key problems are that most enterprise is unstructured and that its often spread across locations and stored in a range of sites, from regional databases to third-party applications. There also is the challenge of finding the right keywords.

The machine learning-powered Kendra services can index structured and unstructured data stored in a range of backends, including file systems, applications and relational databases, and can understand complex language from an array of domains, such as IT and healthcare. The data is encrypted in flight using HTTPS and at rest with AWS Key Management Service.

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Pandemic Shows The Value Of The Public Cloud - The Next Platform

Sustainable data centre operations are becoming more of a priority in the data centre sector, and rightly so. Matthew Underhill, Head of Infrastructure at Alfred H Knight, takes a closer look at how some of the largest data centre leaders are ensuring they operate sustainably and how others can follow suit.

These strange times have revealed some truly amazing sites. With almost no travel by air or vehicle, the Himalayas are visible from more than 100 miles away for the first time in decades and this is down to a reduction in air pollution.

In my home town of Nairobi, you can now see Mt Kilimanjaro, Africas tallest peak and its second tallest peak, Mt Kenya. This is something that hasnt happened for many, many years.

This got me thinking about just how eco-friendly the cloud actually is and exactly how aware we as IT professionals are of our impact on the environment.

As IT professionals, we spend our time either in the physical data centre or in the cloud. Lets take a closer look at how some of the largest data centres are ensuring they operate sustainably.

At its core, a green data centre is a sustainable data centre. These data centres make use of renewable energy, more efficient equipment and effectively eliminate waste where possible the latter driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

But theres good news: many hyperscalers have been working towards being greener for the last decade. Studies have shown data centres globally use 1% of the worlds energy, which has remained constant year-on-year despite capacity increasing by over 500% in the last decade.

Building a green data centre starts from the ground up. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system from the US Green Building Council helps to define green standards for buildings around the world. The LEED standards help save water, energy, resources, reduce waste, and support human health.

The LEED standards give us a green building, but how can we ensure our data centre is green to the core?

Renewable energy sources are a key starting point. Using sources such as solar, hydro, geothermal and wind can help to reduce the carbon footprint on the data centre. Solar power in conjunction with fuel cells can make this more efficient, with increased resiliency.

Thermal containment offers improved efficiency by containing either hot or cold air or both into their specific areas. This improves the efficiency by offering greater control of the inlet air temperature, helping to eliminate hot spots making the requirements more predictable. In turn, this can enable increased utilisation of free air cooling.

Free air cooling uses low outside air temperatures to help cool the data centre and is one of the reasons that the Nordic countries are favoured for big data centre installations. Granted, this air still needs to be filtered and moisturised but this process requires much less energy over typical cooling methods.

More energy-efficient server infrastructure is also key if the server itself requires less cooling overall then less energy is expended. This also goes hand in hand with eliminating waste, achieved by switching off unused servers and tapping into every watt of energy on existing ones.

Making use of energy-efficient lighting and cooling systems seems like a no-brainer but even just installing LEDs and motion-activated controls makes a big difference. And not only is LED lighting more efficient, it lasts longer so the fitting does not need to be changed as often this results in fewer man-hours and less waste.

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can greatly reduce power consumption. Google is a great example as it uses AI to automatically optimise cooling in its data centres. By utilising smart sensors and feeding those numbers into the companys AI, Google saw a 30% improvement in efficiency.

And its not the only one, Facebooks data centre in Odense, Denmark has the potential to reuse the heat waste generated to heat over 6,000 homes. One of IBMs data centres in Switzerland is using its heat waste to warm a local swimming pool. Amazon is using the heat waste from its Seattle data centre to heat a biosphere nearby.

And none of this has to be exclusive to large players. There are options for everyone such as waste heat is integrated into building and campus heating water systems.

These principals can be applied to smaller data centre installations and arent the reserve of the big hyperscalers alone. By following some of the ideas above, we can achieve a greener data centre.

We should think about the impact of our IT requirements on the environment in the same way we think about sourcing food and clothes. Being carbon-neutral is a step in the right direction, as is ensuring the entire supply change is sustainable and ethical.

Some easy steps we could make are ensuring that we source our equipment with ethics in mind:

If we want to go green, we need to start with people if the people producing raw materials are happy, healthy and educated, theyre more likely to look after their immediate environment. This kind of approach can be used throughout the supply chain and by doing so, I believe we will end up with not just a greener data centre, but a greener earth.

The time is now to usher in the age of the ethical cloud lets all work together to ensure that we never lose sight of those majestic peaks again.

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The age of the ethical cloud is green and for everyone Intelligent CIO Europe - Intelligent CIO Africa

With the advancements in deep learning, the recent years have seen a humongous growth of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and services, traversing from personal assistant to recommendation systems to video/audio surveillance. All the more as of late, with the expansion of mobile computing and Internet of Things (IoT), billions of mobile and IoT gadgets are connected with the Internet, creating zillions of bytes of information at the network edge.

Driven by this pattern, there is a pressing need to push the AI frontiers to the network edge in order to completely release the potential of the edge big data. To satisfy this need, edge computing, an emerging paradigm that pushes computing undertakings and services from the network core to the network edge, has been generally perceived as a promising arrangement. The resulting new interdiscipline, edge AI or edge intelligence (EI), is starting to get an enormous amount of interest.

In any case, research on EI is still in its earliest stages, and a devoted scene for trading the ongoing advances of EI is exceptionally wanted by both the computer system and AI people group. The dissemination of EI doesnt mean, clearly, that there wont be a future for a centralized CI (Cloud Intelligence). The orchestrated utilization of Edge and Cloud virtual assets, truth be told, is required to make a continuum of intelligent capacities and functions over all the Cloudifed foundations. This is one of the significant challenges for a fruitful deployment of a successful and future-proof 5G.

Given the expanding markets and expanding service and application demands put on computational data and power, there are a few factors and advantages driving the development of edge computing. In view of the moving needs of dependable, adaptable and contextual data, a lot of the data is moving locally to on-device processing, bringing about improved performance and response time (in under a couple of milliseconds), lower latency, higher power effectiveness, improved security since information is held on the device and cost savings as data-center transports are minimized.

Probably the greatest advantage of edge computing is the capacity to make sure about real-time results for time-sensitive needs. Much of the time, sensor information can be gathered, analyzed, and communicated immediately, without sending the information to a time-sensitive cloud center. Scalability across different edge devices to help speed local decision-making is fundamental. The ability to give immediate and dependable information builds certainty, increases customer engagement, and, in many cases, saves lives. Simply think about all of the businesses, home security, aviation, car, smart cities, health care in which the immediate understanding of diagnostics and equipment performance is critical.

Indeed, recent advances in AI may have an extensive effect in various subfields of ongoing networking. For example, traffic prediction and characterization are two of the most contemplated uses of AI in the networking field. DL is likewise offering promising solutions for proficient resource management and network adoption therefore improving, even today, network system performance (e.g., traffic scheduling, routing and TCP congestion control). Another region where EI could bring performance advantages is a productive resource management and network adaption. Example issues to address traffic scheduling, routing, and TCP congestion control.

Then again, today it is somewhat challenging to structure a real-time framework with overwhelming computation loads and big data. This is where EC enters the scene. An orchestrated execution of AI methods in the computing assets in the cloud as well as at the edge, where most information is produced, will help towards this path. In addition, gathering and filtering a lot of information that contain both network profiles and performance measurements is still extremely crucial and that question turns out to be much progressively costly while considering the need of data labelling. Indeed, even these bottlenecks could be confronted by empowering EI ecosystems equipped for drawing in win-win collaborations between Network/Service Providers, OTTs, Technology Providers, Integrators and Users.

A further dimension is that a network embedded pervasive intelligence (Cloud Computing integrated with Edge Intelligence in the network nodes and smarter-and-smarter terminals) could likewise prepare to utilize the accomplishments of the developing distributed ledger technologies and platforms.

Edge computing gives an option in contrast to the long-distance transfer of data between connected devices and remote cloud servers. With a database management system on the edge devices, organizations can accomplish prompt knowledge and control and DBMS performance wipes out the reliance on latency, data rate, and bandwidth. It also lessens threats through a comprehensive security approach. Edge computing gives an environment to deal with the whole cybersecurity endeavors of the intelligent edge and the wise cloud. Binding together management systems can give intelligent threat protection.

It maintains compliance regulations entities like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that oversee the utilization of private information. Companies that dont comply risk through a significant expense. Edge computing offers various controls that can assist companies with ensuring private data and accomplish GDPR compliance.

Innovative organizations, for example, Amazon, Google, Apple, BMW, Volkswagen, Tesla, Airbus, Fraunhofer, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, and Harting are presently embracing and supporting their wagers for AI at the edge. Some of these organizations are shaping trade associations, for example, the European Edge Computing Consortium (EECC), to help educate and persuade small, medium-sized, and large enterprises to drive the adoption of edge computing within manufacturing and other industrial markets.

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The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Edge Intelligence - Analytics Insight