KuppingerCole Blog

What is it that connects Covent Garden in London, The Roman Baths in Bath and Los Angeles? The answer is 5G mobile communications used by media organizations. On January 29th I attended the 5G Unleashed event at the IET in London. (The IET is the body that provides professional accreditation for Engineers in the UK). At this event there were several presentations describing real world use cases of 5G as well as deep dives into the supporting infrastructure. While 5G is being sold to consumers as superfast mobile broadband there is a lot more to it than that. It has the potential to...

Every day we are experiencing the intersection of IoT and AI. The interactions of users, sensors, robots, vehicles, smart buildings, and much more is creating a new status quo for digital experiences. This growing range of smart devices – both in the IoT sense and the intelligent AI sense – mean we are moving beyond a singular focus on the smartphone. This heightened immersion into increasingly distributed, decentralized digital networks is what KuppingerCole has termed “Ambient Intelligence”. The synergy of AI and IoT that Ambient Intelligence enables will be a...

The turn of the year has been an occasion for many cybersecurity news outlets to talk about trends and challenges in cybersecurity. Despite the importance of knowing what the trends and challenges are, we want to give you some hands-on recommendations to increase security for your company. Of course the following recommendations are just a selection out of many possible measures. We are happy to discuss with you in more detail the implications for your concrete business model. 1. Beyond detect, prevent, respond: recovery & Incident Response Management While AI helps in increasing...

The current discussion around Huawei and whether or not it should be endorsed as a supplier for 5G mobile network hard- and software has reminded us on how dependent we are on the integrity and reliability of such manufacturers and how difficult it is to trust their products if they are closed source and proprietary or otherwise hard or impossible to examine. Due to its undisputed vicinity to the Chinese government, Huawei has come under suspicion primarily by the US authorities to provide undocumented access capabilities to Chinese intelligence agencies enabling them to globally wiretap...

Recently I had an opportunity to attend the Next Generation Cloud Summit, an event organized by Oracle in Seattle, WA for industry analysts to learn about the latest developments in Oracle Cloud strategy. This was the first Oracle’s analyst summit in Seattle and coincidentally my first time in the Cloud city as well… Apparently, that’s a legitimate nickname for Seattle for a few years already, since all notable cloud service providers are located there, with Google and Oracle joining AWS and Microsoft at their historical home grounds by opening their cloud offices in the...

Microsoft is currently running ads extoling the virtue of AI and IoT sensors in helping farmers produce more and better crops, with less waste and higher yields. Elsewhere in manufacturing, supply chain management is being transformed with digital maps of goods and services that reduce waste and logistical delays. In Finland, a combination of AI and IoT is making life safer for pedestrians. The City of Tampere and Tieto built a pilot system that automatically detects when a pedestrian is planning to cross the street at an intersection. Cameras at intersections accessed algorithms...

The status on cybersecurity is fairly clear: 82% of employers report that their cybersecurity skills are not enough to handle the rising number of cyber incidents ( Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2019. The Cybersecurity Workforce Gap ). There is a gap – a gap between the skills needed for strong cybersecurity, and the skills you actually have. It is an individual problem, but also an enterprise problem and a global problem. The vast majority of the world simply does not have the skills to keep up with the cyber risks that we know exist. Three Critical...

Shifting IAM to Modern Architecture and Deployment Models There is a lot of talk about IDaaS (Identity as a Service) these days, as the way to do IAM (Identity and Access Management). There are also fundamental changes in technology, such as the shift to containers (or even serverless) and microservice architectures, which also impact the technology solutions in the IAM market. However, we should start at a different point: What is it that business needs from IAM? If we step back and take a broader perspective, it all ends up with a simple picture ( figure 1 ): The job of IAM is to...

KuppingerCole has accompanied the unprecedented rise of the cloud as a new infrastructure and alternative platform for a multitude of previously unimaginable services – and done this constructively and with the necessary critical distance right from the early beginnings (blog post from 2008). Cybersecurity , governance and compliance have always been indispensable aspects of this. When moving to the use of cloud services, it is most important to take a risk-based approach. There is nothing like “just the cloud”. It is not a single model but covers a wide and...

There is an old saying that goes like this: “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. Nothing personal against anyone in particular, but it seems to me that it perfectly represents the current state of cybersecurity across almost any industry. Although the cybersecurity tools are arguably becoming better and more sophisticated, and, for example, cloud service providers are constantly rolling out new security and compliance features in their platforms, the number of data breaches and hacks continues to grow. But why? Well, the most obvious answer is...