In today’s data-driven world, skilled developers are much sought out for their ability to build applications that serve the Big Data needs of organizations. The sheer size, complexity, and diversity of Big Data requires specialized applications and dedicated hardware to process and analyze this information with the aim of uncovering useful business insights that would otherwise be unavailable.

Most organizations have at least one thing in common: every year, they’re generating and consuming more and more data. Dealing with all this data can be overwhelming, and especially so for those organizations that haven’t fully embraced the digital transformation and the cultural shifts that come along with it. As your data grows, so too does the risk that your data will be exposed to unauthorized parties in a security incident called a data breach or a data leak.

Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is a top priority for companies that have government and defense contracts, especially with the changes being rolled out in CMMC 2.0. We’re pleased at announce a new NC Protect watermarking feature to support CUI Designator labelling capability to assist US Defense and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) with meeting the new CUI document handling and tagging requirements. The feature will be globally available during the July 2022 timeframe.

The volume and frequency of ransomware attacks have increased significantly this past year. In fact, the number of ransomware attacks has nearly doubled in 2021 as compared to 2020. The impact of a breach is multi-fold and stretches well beyond the commonly acknowledged risks of downtime cost, impact on the brand, and the actual ransom paid. This has prompted a paradigm shift in how organizations and system integrators look at their cybersecurity strategy.

At the beginning of every startup’s journey, the question plaguing every technical founder and their team is how to build their tech stack. A lot of thought must go into this question because it informs how the startup will adapt to the demands of business growth and any necessary adjustments or pivots of the business. In a recent webinar, we discussed this question in detail with Jim Walker of Cockroach Labs.

The pandemic has caused havoc on business and personal lives. It also highlighted the importance of personal data and its vulnerability. To combat this, governments across the globe have reviewed and modulated their privacy laws and regulations. Including the African governments and legislators. Over the recent years, Internet usage has increased significantly on the African continent. The usage was aided by continued investment in local digital infrastructure and improved user access.

As we explained in a previous blog post, we decided to pivot at the end of summer 2020. Pivoting our products has been a major change in our cross-functional team’s organization, and we used it as an opportunity to start our UI/UX and an engineering processes from scratch. One of the aspects of that change is the organizational changes it implied, driven by our desire to iterate fast with the first pioneer users of the product that were—and still are—helping us build it.

Businesses have never been more vulnerable than they are today. While cybercrime cost companies an already whopping US$300 billion in 2013, damages have since skyrocketed to US$945 billion in 2020. That’s 300% growth in just a short span of seven years. The worst part is, that we can expect this number to continue rising exponentially in the coming decade.

With the rise of ransomware and cyber attacks, the term defense-in-depth has risen to the forefront, but what exactly does it mean? At its core, defense-in-depth is a protection mechanism for network security–an approach that involves layering or using multiple controls in series to protect against possible threats. This layered concept provides multiple redundancies in the event systems and data are compromised.

We’re excited to announce Nightfall’s partnership with Cribl, the high scale, data processing and observability platform. Cribl’s platform gives companies greater value out of their data by serving as the core plumbing connecting all of your data platforms, allowing users to set up workflows and extract essential data for processing, analysis, or storage.