Technology

I recently had a scheduled video conference call with a Fortune 100 company.

Everything on my end was ready to go; my presentation was prepared and well-practiced. I was set to talk to 30 business leaders who were ready to learn more about how they could become more resilient to major outages.

Unfortunately, their side hadn&t set up the proper permissions in Zoom to add new people to a trusted domain, so I wasn&t able to share my slides. We scrambled to find a workaround at the last minute while the assembled VPs and CTOs sat around waiting. I ended up emailing my presentation to their coordinator, calling in from my mobile and verbally indicating to the coordinator when the next slide needed to be brought up. Needless to say, it wasted a lot of time and wasn&t the most effective way to present.

At the end of the meeting, I said pointedly that if there was one thing they should walk away with, itthat they had a vital need to run an online fire drill with their engineering team as soon as possible. Because if a team is used to working together in an office — with access to tools and proper permissions in place — it can be quite a shock to find out in the middle of a major outage that they can&t respond quickly and adequately. Issues like these can turn a brief outage into one that lasts for hours.

Quick context about me: I carried a pager for a decade at Amazon and Netflix, and what I can tell you is that when either of these services went down, a lot of people were unhappy. There were many nights where I had to spring out of bed at 2 a.m., rub the sleep from my eyes and work with my team to quickly identify the problem. I can also tell you that working remotely makes the entire process more complicated if teams are not accustomed to it.

There are many articles about best practices aimed at a general audience, but engineering teams have specific challenges as the ones responsible for keeping online services up and running. And while leading tech companies already have sophisticated IT teams and operations in place, what about financial institutions and hospitals and other industries where IT is a tool, but not a primary focus? Itoften the small things that can make all the difference when working remotely; things that seem obvious in the moment, but may have been overlooked.

So here are some tips for managing incidents remotely:

There were many nights where I had to spring out of bed at 2 a.m., rub the sleep from my eyes and work with my team to quickly identify the problem… working remotely makes the entire process more complicated if teams are not accustomed to it.

At USD 230 from Gearbest (rough

As the floor drops out from under many startups, some tech companies are finding a path forward by meeting new government needs.

Among them is Palantir, a secretive government-friendly big data operation thatable to ingest vast amounts of information to visualize trends and track individuals — useful tasks as the spread of COVID-19 threatens to overwhelm healthcare systems and ravage economies.

In mid-March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir was working with the CDC to model the potential spread of the virus. Forbes reports that CDC staffers are now regularly using Palantirweb app to visualize the spread of the virus and to anticipate hospital needs. According to that report, Palantir is eschewing dealing with sensitive personally identifying information in its coronavirus efforts, instead providing analysis of anonymized hospital and healthcare data, lab results and equipment supplies through a platform called Palantir Foundry.

In the U.K., Palantir is also providing the National Health Service (NHS) with COVID-19 data analysis through the companyFoundry software. In a blog post that mentioned the partnership, the U.K. government said that it will use Foundry &which has been primarily developed in the UK& to &[enable] disparate data to be integrated, cleaned, and harmonised in order to develop the single source of truth that will support decision-making.&

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Palantir is also pitching its analytics software to government officials in France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The company is apparently pitching both its Foundry software and a tool called Gotham, which is best-known for helping intelligence and law enforcement agencies track individuals, as in the case of the companywork with ICE. Those two tools are being proposed to European health agencies as a blended solution that could help countries get a bird&s-eye view of the pandemic.

As interest in surveillance technologies ramps up to meet the mounting crisis, privacy advocates are already sounding the alarm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation cautioned that &governments around the world are demanding extraordinary new surveillance powers& to fight the virus and urges close scrutiny of new relationships between governments and private companies that arise out of the pandemic.

Among those relationships: Palantirco-founder and chairman Peter Thiel is one of the Trump administrationmost prominent allies in the tech world. His sometimes controversial projects and investments generally attract attention, Palantir included.

Likely aware of its reputation as the shadowy tech giant that helps to power ICEdeportation machine, Palantir is apparently acknowledging the privacy implications of its new work. In a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal, Palantirprivacy lead Courtney Bowman asserted that privacy and civil liberty must be taken as &guiding concentrations& in any data-driven COVID-19 response, ¬ as afterthoughts.&

While it appears to be taking on a new role with the U.S. COVID-19 response, Palantir has worked with the U.S. federal government on infectious health threats for years. In 2010, the CDC used Palantir to monitor an outbreak of cholera in Haiti.

Some of that work is very recent. In late January, Palantir signed a $3.6 million contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide software for PEPFAR, a long-running international HIV relief program.

Slack users can now launch Microsoft Teams calls right from within the popular workplace chat app as the company has launched a new app to allow them to do so.

The Microsoft Teams Call beta app has arrived just a few days after Slack first revealed that it was working on the integration. However, Slack users will only be able to launch Teams calls

Okta, the popular identity and access management service, today used its annual (and now virtual) user conference to launch Lifecycle Management Workflows, a new tool that helps IT teams build and manage IFTTT-like automated processes with the help of an easy to use graphical interface.

The new service is an extension of Okta existing automation tools. But the key here is that IT teams and developers can now easily build complex identity-centric workflows across a wide range of applications. With this, these teams can easily automate an onboarding process, where setting up a new Okta account also immediately kicks off processes on third-party services like Box, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack to set up accounts there. The same goes for offboarding workflows and username creation. A lot of companies still do this manually, which is not just a hassle but also error-prone.

&Adopting more technology is incredibly beneficial for enterprises today, but complexity is a significant side effect of a changing technology ecosystem and workforce. There is no better example of the potential challenges it can create than with lifecycle management,& said Diya Jolly, chief product officer at Okta. &Oktavision of enabling any organization to use any technology goes deeper than just access; itabout improving how organizations use technology.Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows improves the efficiency and security of enterprises through its simple user experience and broad applicability, keeping organizations secure and efficient without requiring the complexity of writing code.&

Okta, of course, had lifecycle management features before, but now it is also putting its acquisition of Azuqua to work and using that companygraphical interface and technology for making it easier to create these automation processes. And while the focus right now is on processes like provisioning and de-provisioning accounts, the long-term plan is to expand Workflows with support for more identity processes.

As Okta also stresses, administrators can also manage very granular access across the supported third-party tools like assigning territories in Salesforce or access to specific group channels in Slack, for example. For temporary employees, admins can also set up automatic de-provisioning workflows that revoke access to some tools but maybe leave access to payroll services open for a while longer. There are also built-in tools for automatically managing conflicts when two people have the same name.

&Millions of people rely on Slack every day to make their working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive,& said Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack, one of the early adopters of this service. &Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows has significantly increased efficiency for us by automating the provisioning and de-provisioning of users from applications in our environment, without us ever having to write a line of code.&

This new feature is part of Oktanew Platform Services, which the company also debuted today and which currently consists of core technologies like the Okta Identity Engine, Directories Integrations, Insights, Workflow and Devices. The core idea behind Platform Services is to give Okta users the flexibility to manage their unique identity use cases but also to give Okta itself a platform on which to innovate. One other new product that sits on top of the platform is Okta Fastpass, for example, which allows for passwordless authentication on any device.

Optus has now slashed the price of the Google Pixel 4, giving you the chance to get your hands on one of our favourite smartphone snappers for half the price of its RRP – that’s saving you a massive AU$524.16.

It follows on from a similar deal from Vodafone, who last month also cut the price of the handset by 50%. Unlike Vodafone though, Optus is