Maintaining and increasing research and development spending in the COVID-19 era is critical for high technology vendors to deliver new solutions and services, continue to innovate, and position their businesses to rebound from the negative effects of the global pandemic. Analysts, financial advisors, and investors concur that, wherever possible, vendors should continue to aggressively invest in R&D.

The PC market ended 2020 with a big bang, as shipments during the final quarter rose 25 percent over the same period in 2019, according to a report by research firm Canalys. Much of the market growth during the year was driven by notebooks and mobile workstation shipments, which increased 44 percent over 2019, reaching 235.1 million.

More than 80 percent of 650 cybersecurity and IT professionals surveyed by Check Point Software Technologies in July said their traditional security solutions either do not work at all, or only provide limited functions in the cloud. This indicates that organizations' cloud migrations and deployments are racing ahead of their security teams' abilities to defend against attacks and breaches.

Downtime can cost enterprises that depend solely on a data center's ability to deliver IT and networking services to customers -- such as e-commerce companies -- up to $11,000 a minute. The cost to businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals who use subscription services in their work has yet to be calculated.

Machine learning, which has disrupted and improved so many industries, is just starting to make its way into software testing. Heads are turning, and for good reason: the industry is never going to be the same again. Let's delve into the current state of affairs, and explore how ML techniques are radically changing the software testing industry.

CRM giant Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to purchase enterprise communications platform Slack. "Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce.

The @ Company wants to give you a more secure and human-centric Internet built on providing you with true ownership and control of your personal data. To that end, the company has launched an app built on its new privacy protocol. This new standard will attempt to change how online vendors and companies wheel and deal with the personal information of billions of Internet users.

The Linux Foundation today announced at KubeKon that it is hosting the Servo web engine, an open-source, high-performance browser engine. "Servo is the most promising, modern, and open web engine for building applications and immersive experiences using web technologies," according to Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of projects at the Linux Foundation.

A report by open source security and license management company WhiteSource explores various factors contributing to the siloed software development culture and what steps are needed to achieve agile, mature, DevSecOps practices. TechNewsWorld discussed with David Habusha, vice president of product at WhiteSource, the state of DevSecOps in light of the report.

Apple pulled the wraps off its first computer models based on its new Apple Silicon chip at an online event aired Tuesday. The Mac Air, Mac Mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro are all being refreshed with the company's new ARM-based M1 chip. The move is the beginning of a transition, expected to take two years, away from Intel chips and to Apple Silicon.

Although DIA can have a steep price tag and some installation complexity, most companies will opt for a dedicated connection at offices or data centers with mission-critical operations. Let's explore the benefits of a DIA circuit, as well as some potential considerations and drawbacks, to help determine if dedicated Internet is something your business should consider.

The Linux Foundation is doubling down on open source collaboration to drive more innovation in technology that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. The LF AI Foundation and ODPi merged on Oct. 25 to form the LF AI & Data Foundation. This new organization will build and support an open community and a growing ecosystem of open source AI, data, and analytics projects.

More than 90 percent of IT leaders surveyed for a recent report expect to expand their cloud services in the next one to three years. Despite this testament to the benefits of cloud adoption, enterprises may find a lack of qualified IT workers to fill those positions. A majority of cloud team leaders identified a lack of internal skills and knowledge as a top barrier to cloud success.

Powerful events and product launches by Cisco, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Qualcomm promise to make our future brighter. From more effective courts and legislators, to flexible and intelligent robots, to tools we can use to improve remote productivity, to validation that our justice system works -- last week was remarkable.

The Linux Foundation and learning platform edX have released the latest open source jobs report which shows that, despite the pandemic, demand for open source technology skills continues to be strong. The 2020 Open Source Jobs Report reveals a spike in demand for DevOps talent, along with a continued lack of applicants with open source skills.

The BizOps Coalition hopes to bridge the gap between technology investments and business outcomes through an effort called the BizOps Manifesto. The BizOps movement has gained traction with leading organizations, helping them to better align IT with business outcomes. But more needs to be done. That led to the Manifesto's creation.

Red Hat, a major provider of open source solutions, has never had a comprehensive document guiding associate participation in open source projects, until now. Perhaps under the influence of its recent purchase by IBM, Red Hat recently announced the external publication of its open-source participation guidelines. The company released the guidelines on GitHub under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

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 China-sourced products by federal agencies and government contractors.

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.