The U.S. government's policy to restrict federal agency exposure to products and services associated with Huawei Technologies and other China-based companies has gained the support of the U.S. information technology industry. However, a wide swath of U.S. companies, including those in the IT sector, registered significant concerns about federal regulations designed to control the employment of

Some of the world's largest, most regulated, complex and centuries-old industries have several essential things in common with today's rapid development, bleeding-edge innovation. They are all dependent on open source software, and they are building open source into the fabric of their R&D models.

The Linux Foundation last month announced its intent to form the Linux Foundation Climate Finance Foundation to empower investors, banks, insurers, companies, governments, NGOs, and academia with AI-enhanced open-source analytics and open data to address climate risk and opportunity. Allianz, Amazon, Microsoft, and S&P Global have committed to be founding members.

Instead of legacy security models that differentiate a "trusted" interior from an untrusted external one, zero trust instead assumes that all networks and hosts are equally untrustworthy. Once this fundamental shift in assumptions is made, you start to make different decisions about what, who, and when to trust, and acceptable validation methods to confirm a request or transaction is allowed.

Earlier this month, a woman with a life-threatening condition passed away after hackers crashed the IT systems of a major hospital in the city of Dusseldorf. Incidents like this raise the question of why corporations do not patch vulnerabilities as soon as software manufacturers issue a fix.

At Microsoft Ignite last week, the breadth and focus that Microsoft demonstrated were arguably well beyond what any other company is capable of doing. This lesson is worth remembering because Microsoft, unlike its peers facing antitrust action, is showing how to become powerful without becoming a threat. The result is far more powerful and far less risky than the company's prior path.

Even in these changing times of shuttered shops and pandemic-driven corporate layoffs, a flood of tech jobs goes unfilled due to a lack of Linux skills among IT workers. That combination is contributing to a slowdown or delay in enterprise plans to migrate their local computing base to public cloud operations, as an already existing Linux tech pool gap has widened since the pandemic.

Surely spurred by the work-from-home necessities of 2020, people have connected a multitude of non-business devices to their corporate networks, making it progressively difficult to implement cybersecurity because every device is a potential weak point. So, who will ultimately be responsible for cybersecurity of an IoT network?

Nvidia last week announced they are buying Arm, which will result in some exciting changes. This merger will open up opportunities for the company to create new, innovative, and compelling products across the technology ecosystem. Let's talk about that this week, and we'll close with my product of the week -- a new business class notebook from HP, the EliteBook 840 G7.

The stampede from offices to working from home has strained IT security teams to their limits. As a result, SMBs find they need to get more bang for fewer bucks to fight off cybersecurity threats. However, even IT departments with limited resources can implement foundational strategies to address network security issues, and lay the groundwork for future investments.

Computer systems design and related services added 13,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's August jobs report. IT employment in July was up by more than 203,000 positions since the COVID-19 outbreak; and there were more than 235,000 job postings by U.S. employers, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association.

Corporate cybersecurity has been increasingly compromised since organizations began implementing work-from-home policies in March as the pandemic continued its spread. In addition to the risks created by increased stress on personnel and depleted staff, IT leaders might be overconfident about the cybersecurity protocols and procedures they have in place.

Tech and finance professionals are joining the ranks of workers in other industries by delaying their return to in-person office work. According to thousands of employees and managers polled about their companies' plans regarding working from home, many U.S. employers have postponed return-to-office plans until as late as the third quarter of next year.

Since its early inception open source has been embraced by technologists the world over. Let's examine five ways that Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 enterprises can take advantage of open source software to provide technology solutions to the enterprise -- and best practices for corporate IT to consider when adopting open source for their business needs.

A new coalition is building a low-cost solution to save lives in earthquake-threatened regions, rather than garnishing a profit from a new early-warning system. OpenEEW is an open-source IoT project with the goal to save lives by reducing the cost of earthquake early-warning systems and accelerating their deployments globally.

With hurricane season in full bloom and the additional prospect of natural disasters, the importance for companies to have disaster data plans in place is paramount. TechNewsWorld discussed disaster preparedness with a panel of IT experts. Check out their recommendations -- and make sure that you have not forgotten that one key thing that many companies forget to protect but regret afterward.

For those business that got it right reopening their workplaces the first time around, they should be in pretty good shape for round two. But others that struggled to get a handle on operations will likely find themselves again in chaos -- especially where IT is concerned for the transplanted work-from-home employees.

Apple's "Walled Garden" was built to protect consumers from malicious applications, but it can also protect the company from competition, as Microsoft and Facebook discovered recently. Late last week, Apple refused to allow Microsoft to offer its xCloud streaming gaming app for iOS and iPadOS at the Apple App Store. At the same time, it approved a scaled-down version of Facebook's gaming app, sans streaming gaming, into the store.

Last week we ran a survey asking people which of the CEOs that were questioned by Congress last month is the most trustworthy. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took the dubious prize for last place. Tim Cook of Apple was voted the most trustworthy. There shouldn't be any competition; Facebook has the tools and information access to assure it is beloved. Yet Apple, which doesn't have anywhere near that level of reach nor engagement, has a far better image. Let's talk about ironic incompetence.

Salesforce continues to offer new products in an expanding demonstration of its platform's relevance to business and society at large. Sustainability Cloud is best understood as a carbon accounting solution that enables organizations to more quickly audit their carbon emissions and take action in that area. This covers a lot.

Once upon a time, it seemed no organization had its finger on the pulse of technology more than research consulting firm Gartner. Global corporations, technology companies, and the investment community have trusted Gartner for insights and analysis across a range of market sectors. But today, that leading position has eroded, and the merits of one of the company's most widely known and used tools, the "Magic Quadrant," has lost its relevance.

Like a lot of you, last week I watched the congressional testimony from the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google -- and there were a lot of apparent things that were problematic. One is that there are folks in Congress that likely shouldn't be in Congress, and another is that each company has some serious issues they haven't dealt with.

U.S. government agencies will remain active in the information technology market, despite the impact of COVID-19 on agency operations. In fact, there is evidence that the occurrence of the virus has spurred agencies to improve IT resources. For example, the General Services Administration in early July launched a new contracting vehicle offering a potential US$50 billion in federal acquisition of IT products and services.

Counterfeit hardware, especially in corporate settings, is a recurring problem that often goes unnoticed. Having such gear online poses serious financial, operational, and security risks. Cybersecurity company F-Secure has released an investigative report detailing counterfeit Cisco Catalyst 2960-X series switches. The report highlights challenges facing organizations that discover counterfeit devices in their IT infrastructure.

I've been covering video conferencing since before we called it video conferencing. It has been an exciting and somewhat painful technology to watch because it seemed like everyone in the segment fundamentally didn't understand that if you don't have interoperability and didn't focus on ease of use, it wouldn't work. Let's talk this week about why Microsoft Teams is trending to be the new standard for video collaboration.

IBM is chasing two of the three technology areas that I think will change the world as we know it over the next two decades. The three technology changes that I'm watching are robotics, AI computing, and quantum computing. IBM's focus has been on AI and quantum computing. I got an update on their AI efforts last week, and they have moved the ball a lot over the last few months.

The success of The Linux Foundation's first virtual summit may well have set the standard for new levels of open source participation. Summit masters closed the virtual doors of the four-day joint gathering on July 2. The event hosted the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2020 and ended with more than 4,000 registrants from 109 countries.

Artificial intelligence will play a major role as we try to move to a post-pandemic world, especially as it pertains to tracking people's health and wellbeing in public areas. Employers will tap technology solutions to help them face challenges such as adhering to new rules and regulations, monitoring compliance, and ensuring employee confidence and morale remains positive.

Digital technologies can help shift health and public safety agencies from a "detect and respond" approach to a "predict and prevent" stratagem. They can also set the stage for a more connected and data-led approach through robust cybersecurity architectures, efficient remote workforces, and secure connectivity services.

Oracle's new offerings, really packaging of existing recent high-performance products for the enterprise market, enable companies to continue running their data and datacenters on premise while still benefitting from gains made by its autonomous database like eliminating most forms of routine maintenance and operations activities.