If you follow a market long enough and if it's a successful marketplace, you notice that some of the companies in it go through a succession of moves; first in new products and then in finance. The confusion comes when a company like Oracle lives through multiple up and down cycles. When you look at Oracle today, what do you see?

The "Linux Threat Report 2021 1H" from Trend Micro found that Linux cloud operating systems are heavily targeted for cyberattacks, with nearly 13 million detections in the first half of this year. As organizations expand their footprint in the cloud, correspondingly, they are exposed to the pervasive threats that exist in the Linux landscape.

Organizations are taking advantage of online learning platforms to provide fast and cost-effective knowledge transfer, to and from anywhere in the world. We spoke with several experts in the field of learning management systems to get a sense for what's happening with e-learning in the business sphere, and where it'll be trending from here.

Beginning in October, which is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Amazon will make available to the public the training materials it's developed in-house to keep its employees and sensitive information safe from cyberattacks. It also offer "qualified" AWS customers a free multifactor authentication device designed to strengthen the security of their cloud environments.

Microsoft's new Cloud PC with Windows 10/11 service potentially offers a way for some Linux users to sidestep what could be the last barrier for businesses to adopt the Linux desktop without leaving behind must-have Windows applications. But if you lack a company's backing, you can expect Microsoft's new platform to consider you unsuitable.

Today the Linux community is estimated to be 86 million users strong. It has become the backbone of large enterprises and is installed in government systems and embedded in devices worldwide. As people around the world celebrate and discuss 30 years of Linux, the focus, rightly so, is on supercomputers, Martian helicopters and many other developer-centric initiatives, noted GigaOm analyst Chris Grundemann.

Businesses are flocking to software-as-a-service applications as a means to improve the efficiency of their operations and the productivity of their employees, but weak control of access to cloud apps is putting the data of many organizations at risk. According to a study by DoControl, the average 1,000-person company using SaaS apps is exposing its data to between 1,000 and 15,000 external collaborators.

August 25 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of a free computer operating system that revolutionized nearly every industry and helped spread the open-source movement globally. Today, Linux is everywhere in industry as it dominates servers and networking; is the driving force behind cloud computing; and is the foundation of Google's Android and Chrome operating systems.

Even as operations as diverse as factories and hospitals are moving at least portions of their daily computational processes out of the centralized cloud and into various edges, edge computing for many people remains a mysterious concept. To provide some clarity and insight, we spoke with several experts to detail what edge computing is, why it's needed, and where it's going.

The information technology sector, including companies that are directly and indirectly involved in providing IT products and services to the federal government, will be especially affected by the provisions of the "Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity."

Google's new service aimed at beefing up the search capabilities of retailers' websites may make those sellers more competitive with Amazon. Google Cloud Retail Search hopes to address the staggering problem of "search abandonment," which costs retailers more than $300 billion a year in the U.S. alone, according to research performed by The Harris Poll and commissioned by Google Cloud.

IT has not been simply about data processing for a long time. Recent data breaches show the increasing importance of things like encryption, automated database management, and taking security measures to safeguard vital data. All of that is necessary overhead that must be supported by CPU cycles. The cheaper and faster those cycles, and the lower their energy demands, the better.

New research by threat detection and response firm Vectra AI shows that the most common threats to corporate networks remain consistent throughout all companies -- regardless of their size. Researchers calculated the relative frequency of threat detections that were triggered during a three-month span. The results detail the top 10 threat detections that customers receive by relative frequency.

Advancements in 5G connectivity and accelerated digital transformation of business operations creates heightened risk and expanded attack surfaces for security teams to harden and protect. Now, efforts by several internet industry groups are focused on new measures to fix inherent security weaknesses with the rapidly expanded use of IoT devices for enterprises and consumers.

Microsoft has announced it is purchasing Nuance Communications, a natural language to computer processing company, in a deal valued at $19.7 billion. "Nuance's popular healthcare-focused products and services will provide Microsoft an instant revenue stream and relationships with existing Nuance customers," noted Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT.

Even the most customer-centric businesses can overestimate their performance or miss the broad trends in customer behavior. That is why NICE inContact conducts annual surveys that track the customer experience from the perspective of businesses and consumers. CRM Buyer discussed the recent findings and related issues in more detail with the company's CEO Paul Jarman.

With most workers continuing to work remotely, CRM has become an important tool for managing relationship risk. Financial firms have to deal with market and operational risk, consumer retailers have to focus on supply chain risk, and all companies have to keep an eye on economic risk. Relationship risk is no different, and the role of the CRM is right at the center.

Cloud cybersecurity -- or a lack of it -- is feeding a frenzy of companies out of the public cloud. A similar concern about managing compliance obligations is keeping organizations from moving to the cloud in general. However, much of the growing concerns over cloud cybersecurity result from experiences with public and private cloud platforms. A trend toward hybrid cloud computing could be an approach to better ensure data security.

Personalization and automation, two of the hottest buzzwords in the lexicon of CRM practitioners, are all the rage for marketers these days. But only 14 percent of organizations are using artificial intelligence or machine language to automate their marketing campaigns. A survey by Rackspace Technology reveals that the majority of organizations worldwide lack the internal resources to support these high-powered CRM initiatives.

In the old days you could identify weak spots in your business and purchase software systems designed to eliminate or at least to significantly reduce those liabilities. Performing an ROI analysis usually consisted of two parts: a before study to determine the business' steady state; and a post implementation analysis to determine improvement. Good as that sounds, such studies left out a lot.

Nvidia is in the process of working through regulatory approvals to buy Arm from SoftBank -- a technology holding company with mixed success husbanding its acquisitions. Let's explore this acquisition, the most significant regulatory hurdles the effort needs to overcome, and what might result once the two firms are one. We'll close with the product of the week: Nvidia's GeForce Now.

Those familiar with open source know that it works and comes with many benefits. A testament to the rising adoption of open source is the recent moves by software giants such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle into the open-source community. This corporate migration to open source is continuing as many organizations, both large and small, turn to open source in tough economic times.

Globally, we throw out 50 million tons of electronics waste every year, which is the equivalent of 1,000 laptops every second. This month the EU addressed this problem with a comprehensive "right to repair" law to dramatically reduce this waste. Let's explore electrical hardware sustainability issues this week, and look at a laptop that seems to anticipate these new e-waste regulations.

Two CRM vendors made news recently. Zoho had an analyst conference that reminded us that many businesses don't benefit enough from verticalized suites; and Microsoft introduced several vertical industry systems, including one for nonprofits. One could say that Zoho and Microsoft displayed mirror image solutions in some ways. Let's take closer look.

Desktop as a Service provider Shells offers a new component to virtual cloud computing. It brings Linux distros and Windows 10 to any computer, mobile device, and some game consoles, via any Web browser. The U.S.-based startup went online in the first quarter of last year. Since then, CEO and founder Alex Lee has been drumming up favorable responses from businesses, casual users, and Linux developers.

Oracle's continued strides in the tech space say a lot about perseverance and deep pockets. It was a darling of the 20th century tech era, rising from a startup in the database wars and becoming the sole surviving independent database company. But at some point, success leveled out its rise and it became just another big company. Then came the challenge of cloud computing.

Jeff Bezos last week announced he will be stepping down from his role of CEO Amazon. Bezos is following Microsoft's lead and putting his cloud executive Andy Jassy in charge of the company. Given that Microsoft was exceedingly successful with putting Satya Nadella in the same role, it would seem that this would be a slam-dunk success. But the issue is that Amazon is not Microsoft.

Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency, ramping up the data privacy threats they pose to government agencies and businesses alike. Governments both domestic and foreign need to step up efforts to pass legislation that bolsters technological defenses this year, warn privacy groups. Stiffer privacy laws are gradually being reviewed and signed into the U.S. market. But that process is mostly taking place at the state level.

Amazon gets a new chief executive this summer. Jeff Bezos plans to step down from that role and transition into a new job -- executive chair of Amazon. The chief of Amazon's cloud computing division, Andy Jassy, will become Amazon's new chief executive. Jassy served in that post in a temporary capacity along with another Amazon executive in recent years. The change will be effective in the third quarter, which starts in July.

If you step back and look at what the tech sector has demonstrated to us through COVID, you can feel impressed. Early in the crisis vendors like Salesforce and Zoho began offering their products for free, or at low cost, to companies and end users suddenly faced with working at home. Oracle, Salesforce and others also developed tracking apps that could be easily deployed on the Web to help health authorities track exposure and quarantines.