Twitter has been fined over half a million dollars for violating European Union data protection laws in the first EU-wide privacy case.

The EU’s chief data watchdog today announced that it has issued an administrative fine of 450,000 euros ($547,000) to the social media titan for being too slow to notify Android phone users located across the EU of a data breach that threatened their privacy.

A further finding of the investigation into the breach by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) was that Twitter failed to adequately document the security incident.

The DPC’s investigation into the incident commenced in January 2019 following receipt of a breach notification from Twitter. On Tuesday, the DPC stated that Twitter “infringed Article 33(1) and 33(5) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in terms of a failure to notify the breach on time to the DPC and a failure to adequately document the breach.”

Under EU data protection rules, it is a requirement to report a breach within 72 hours of discovery.

The commission described the not insignificant financial penalty levied on the American company as “an effective, proportionate and dissuasive measure.”

According to the Binding Decision of the Board, the data breach arose from a bug in Twitter’s design that caused the protected tweets of Android device users to become unprotected without their consent if users changed the email address associated with their Twitter account.

The bug, which affected 88,726 EU and EEA users between September 2017 and January 2019, was traced back to a code change made on November 4, 2014. It was discovered on December 26, 2018, by the external contractor managing Twitter’s bug bounty program.

Referencing the significance of the Twitter inquiry, the DPC stated: “The draft decision in this inquiry, having been submitted to other Concerned Supervisory Authorities under Article 60 of the GDPR in May of this year, was the first one to go through the Article 65 (‘dispute resolution’) process since the introduction of the GDPR and was the first Draft Decision in a ‘big tech’ case on which all EU supervisory authorities were consulted as Concerned Supervisory Authorities.”

 

Square Enix shifting to permanent remote work makes the transition seem inevitable, but it needs to be embraced for the right reasons

This week, Square Enix’s Japanese operations announced that the remote working arrangements put into place to cope with COVID-19 are being made permanent. It’s unlikely that this will be the last such announcement; many companies around the industry are grappling with the question of what to do regarding remote work, and what the “new normal” after the pandemic will actually look like.

Many employees will be happy to see game companies starting to take this kind of flexible working arrangement seriously. In truth, remote working has been popular with enough staff that it was always going to be extremely hard to go entirely back to the old way of working. The cat’s out of the bag; it’s clear that the industry’s business doesn’t entirely fall apart when people work remotely, and thus convincing everyone to go back to their old style of work was never going to fly.

Moreover, having been forced to do so by COVID-19, a lot of companies are actually seeing benefits from certain aspects of remote work. A certain degree of cruft and overhead has been cut out of working practices — as someone at a major studio told me recently, “after spending years complaining about meetings that could have been emails, we’re actually finding out which meetings really do work as emails” — and while it’s too early to make any sweeping pronouncements about productivity yet, it’s not terribly controversial to suggest that employees who are happy about getting to spend more time with family and relaxing will also be more focused during working hours as a consequence.

These are good reasons to integrate remote working as a key part of how a studio or publishing business functions — employee satisfaction and work-life balance, and improvements to process and productivity. Unfortunately, however, there are also bad reasons out there; and as companies try to figure out how to shift gears from remote work being a crisis response to remote work being a long-term change in workplace policy, the reasons underlying that decision-making process are going to be make-or-break for the medium- to long-term viability of those workplaces.

The worst reason is, unfortunately, one that I hear pretty often: cost-saving. Lots of executives — not just in the games industry but in every other industry you can mention — are starry-eyed at the prospect of downsizing their office space and staffing overheads by moving to a largely remote working style. Some companies have already begun the process, cutting back on office floor-space and shifting what remains over to a hot-desk environment; the notion being that employees largely work from home and just take an available desk to pop their laptop onto when they come into the office.

There is a pretty wide spectrum of ways to implement things like hot-desking, of course, and some are worse than others — the worst I’ve come across thus far was a kind of hot-desking absolutist approach wherein employees didn’t even get lockers or small storage spaces in the office and their departments were billed whenever they used a desk — but the concept could certainly have some limited applications even for game companies.

Again, the problem is motivation. A company that wants to move to hot-desking as a sensible way to use resources to support employees and their projects in a largely remote working environment can probably come up with sensible ways to make it work, even for tricky situations like a game nearing an important milestone. This is likely to see much of that team move temporarily to in-person working, thus annexing a lot of the hot-desk resources and potentially disrupting the work of other teams if there’s no plan to handle such a situation. If a company sees hot-desking merely as a way to cut down on the rent and bills for office space, it’s setting itself up for failure.

Here’s the thing; there’s almost certainly no actual cost saving to moving to a remote work paradigm. In fact, if a company is taking this seriously, it should be budgeting a slightly higher per-employee cost for remote workers than for in-office workers, because keeping staff together in an office effectively combines and discounts a lot of costs that will now be distributed across individual staff members.

Oh, what, you thought that employees would just pay for their own broadband, lighting, heating, in-home office space and high-quality office furniture and equipment? Sure, many staff have been doing just that this year, but this year was a crisis — a one-off, hopefully. If remote work becomes a default way of working, that grace period will quickly expire.

Freelancers get tax deductions to help cover those costs, which they then spread across multiple clients; salaried employees do not, and in many if not most jurisdictions it’s likely that the courts will back them to the hilt when they demand that their employer cover their home office costs. As this kind of working rolls out across many industries, we’ll also likely start to see legislation being proposed in many countries that forces companies to properly pony up for safe, healthy and suitable work environments for their remote employees — and I guarantee that’s going to work out more costly per-head than a regular office.

That doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do; it just means that it’s not going to be a short-cut to cost savings, and it means that planning for remote work needs to be executed from the perspective of productivity and employee satisfaction, not penny-pinching. Moreover, it also needs to take into account thorny questions about workplace culture to which, honestly, no real answers exist just yet.

There has been a tendency as this year has drawn on for some people to get a bit fundamentalist about remote work. Perhaps fearing a return to the old status quo after the pandemic, those who have been enjoying the new arrangement will loudly declaim anyone who questions it. Their enjoyment of the new flexibility — the ability to spend more time with family, to cut out the commute and ultimately to move out of the city and save costs while still living in a larger home, etc. — leads them to assume that this must be what everyone desires, to the point that I’ve heard many people suggesting that the coming decades will see an emptying out of major cities at a grand scale.

I’ll make the actually not terribly bold prediction here that COVID-19, for all that it’s been disruptive, is not going to reverse thousands of years of gradual urbanisation, much of which rather predated widespread office work. Taking full advantage of the flexibility offered by remote work will appeal to a great many people, but for many others city living is actually a pleasure, rather than an evil to be tolerated for the sake of gainful employment. As companies roll out remote working provisions, a cultural divide between those two groups of employees is going to emerge that’s going to need to be handled and managed very closely.

Some staff will stay in close proximity and go to the office often, as much for the social aspects as through necessity for work. Others will take the “remote” aspect of remote working to heart, and appear in the office very infrequently. It will take significant effort and careful management to ensure that those divides don’t solidify into cliques — that remote workers, in particular, don’t find themselves locked out of decision making processes and opportunities. Balancing that against the genuine advantage of having people physically working together and bouncing ideas off one another — essential in many creative processes — will be a very tough problem to solve.

Ultimately, as companies start this process of integrating remote work as a core part of their practices, it’s going to be worth going back to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments quite early in the pandemic, when he observed (paraphrasing here) that many firms who had switched to remote work were spending social capital they had no way of recharging.

This has held true through experiences related from many companies that have been trying to figure out remote working this year; old employees who have been colleagues for years fare far better than new staff who struggle to establish social relationships with people they only ever see on Zoom. Teams working on long-running projects with well-established goals do pretty well; teams trying to start new projects grind to a halt as the technology for online collaboration slows or entirely stops effective brainstorming. Combine this with the cost aspects — it won’t be cheap, let alone being a saving — and the trickiness of managing social relationships within a company where some staff are remote and some maintain in-person contact, and you’ve got a very major challenge ahead for this industry and others like it.

Yet in the end, it will be worth doing — and it’s probably unavoidable, because those staff who have had a taste of how effective remote working can be aren’t going to willingly go back to the old paradigm. Remote work will, and must, find a place alongside other styles of work as an established, accepted and well-considered part of how companies function. Those that succeed will be those who approach remote work policies with the right objectives in mind, a sense of flexibility, and a willingness to put in the elbow grease to get these policies and systems to work well for everyone involved.

 

The pandemic has changed so much about our lives, including how we work. COVID-19 forced companies to switch to remote working quickly, but as more and more people work from home for more extended periods, many believe it will become the new normal for the way work gets done.

A study by global digital consultancy Publicis Sapient found that remote workers want the flexibility to work from home in some capacity even after offices reopen. Close to 40% of US respondents said they’d prefer to work remotely full-time, and only 16% said they would want to go into the office every day.

But even with reports of greater satisfaction and productivity, remote work is not without its challenges. Distractions at home, isolation from colleagues, difficulty separating work and personal lives, and reduced guidance from managers are a few of the more common problems remote workers face. So here are five ways to help overcome these challenges and make remote working your new and better normal

 

Clearly Defined Physical and Mental Workspaces

Separating your work and home life is one of the biggest remote work challenges. If you never fully disconnect from work, you might also be increasing your risk for burnout.

Ideally, you should have a dedicated workspace to work from home, but only 20% of remote workers have an at-home office.  Instead, most people repurpose a desk in a bedroom or living room, work from a couch, a kitchen table, or anything in-between. The benefit of a clear and dedicated workspace in your home, though, is that you can feel as though you are physically “entering” and “leaving” each day. This separation will help you turn “on” at the beginning of the day and turn “off” when the day is done.

Just as you define your physical workspace, it’s also important to clarify what times you are working and when you’re not. You should also be transparent to team members, your manager, and those around you at home about your hours so you can establish boundaries, reduce distractions, and be more “present” within both your work and home life.

 

Carve Out Time for Transitions

Most people view the lack of a commute as one of the significant benefits of working remotely. In fact, 67% of remote workers feel the time lost each day from commuting and getting ready for work is a drawback of returning to the office. But one overlooked benefit of the daily commute is that it gives your brain time to transition between your home life and the workday. That time you spend in the car or on the train also allows you to mentally prepare for your day before you start or decompress once the workday is over. This extra time is an important buffer to help you make the mental shift each day, so without a physical commute, you still need to create that transition time for yourself. Build a daily habit of listening to music, working out, taking a walk, or any activity that signals to you that you are switching from home to work, and vice versa.

 

Strong Team Communication

Without in-person, real-time office communication with colleagues, communication can feel fragmented, impacting team collaboration, and productivity. Managing your communications through messaging platforms, using document share and collaboration platforms, and video chats for daily connection points are critical to making sure you stay connected, updated, and can handle issues and solve problems as they occur.

 

Regular Connection with Boss

One prevailing fear that many companies had of remote work was that employees would be less productive without constant physical oversight. The good news is that there is strong evidence for the opposite—surprisingly large numbers of employees said they have been able to maintain or even improve their productivity. You want to make sure that you are not out of sight, out of mind, so regular check-ins with your boss serve a few purposes. One is to let them know what you are working on and to receive feedback. Another goal is to recap your accomplishments so that your achievements do not go unnoticed and you remain top-of-mind for new opportunities.

 

Stay Socially Connected

As humans, we are wired for connection. For all of the benefits of working remotely, one of the downsides is the lack of spontaneous brainstorms, lunches, or conversations that occur when you are physically co-located with your colleagues. These human touchpoints reduce isolation, break up the monotony of repetitive tasks, and provides motivation when needed.

A few ways to stay connected with your colleagues is to set aside time for activities such as virtual lunches, social hours, and book clubs. These kinds of social connections are now more important than ever as we continue to navigate and adapt to uncertain times.

 

When it comes to effectively managing a multicloud environment, there are a ton of network and application metrics that enterprise customers should be watching.

Among enterprises, the trend is toward multicloud environments, which can include workloads running on-premises and in public clouds run by multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM/Red Hat, Google Cloud Platform and others. Gartner predicts by 2021, more than 75% of midsize and large organizations will have adopted some form of a multicloud and/or hybrid IT strategy. Likewise, IDC predicts that by 2022, more than 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.

“As enterprises increasingly embrace multicloud, they must consider what KPIs [key performance indicators] will best measure their success in managing multicloud environments,” said Briana Frank, director of product management with IBM Cloud.

“There’s a variety of KPIs that can help evaluate success, including financial metrics, such as cost, return on investment, and rate of change in the reduction of total cost of ownership,” Frank said. “However, enterprises should go beyond financial metrics alone and also consider measures of other critical causes for concern, such as downtime caused by outages and security breaches,” Frank added.

Useful KPIs in a multicloud setting include those that measure costs and billing, network and application performance, said Roy Ritthaler, vice president of product marketing in VMware’s cloud management business unit.

 

Financial KPIs

Optimizing multicloud costs and eliminating waste are key goals for IT and lines of business, and metrics should include budget tracking and detailed spend analysis, Ritthaler said.

“They should also provide capabilities to uncover hidden costs, flag anomalies, reallocate cloud spend for showback and chargeback, and provide proactive recommendations to purchase and exchange reservations and savings plans,” Ritthaler said.

Common multicloud KPIs include looking at the cost of all untagged resources, such as databases that might be using resources. Tagged resources can include myriad items such as the owner of a resource, the environment its operating in, and project name, for example. The idea is to most effectively identify, manage and support resources.

Customer experience – the CIO’s perspective

CIOs are uniquely placed to influence or drive customer experience in the increasingly digital business.

Other financial KPIs include a look at the percentage of infrastructure running on demand and the percentage of total bill charged back, Ritthaler said.

 

Security and network KPIs

Visualizing the security posture of the connectivity in a multicloud network is absolutely necessary, as there are too many components to consider individually, Ritthaler said.

“Identifying bad actors or bad security posture is handled in a single tool for monitoring and guarding,” Ritthaler said. “Capabilities include monitoring traffic to detect vulnerabilities and to design app-centric security and generating recommended firewall rules to implement application security.”

Some common KPIs include measuring security incidents per month by team, the number of security lapses, and the time to remediate security violations measured in hours, Ritthaler said.

 

What comes next? Preparing for the future of IT

Security is critical, but so it getting a handle on access policies, managing QoS, and providing consistent measuring capabilities across such a diverse group of systems, said Nabil Bukhari, chief technology officer with Extreme Networks. “Applications are the star of the multicloud show, but getting a handle on network performance metrics – like latency, packet loss– is important too,” Bukhari said.

Additional network-related KPIs include measuring response time, bandwidth usage and throughput.

Network monitoring must include end-to-end network visibility across physical and virtual environments, and it’s built from flow-based traffic monitoring using NetFlow, sFlow and SNMP device monitoring, Ritthaler said.

 

Application performance KPIs

On the applications side, each application will have its own performance metrics to monitor, and it’s important to have tools that can tie these applications to the infrastructure that they’re running on, to deliver an end-to-end picture of the infrastructure.

“Many organizations already have multiple application performance monitoring tools. However, these tools do not provide the end-to-end visibility that you need to troubleshoot over different teams,” Ritthaler said. “Being able to consolidate those tools into a single solution brings teams together when problems occur.”

Ritthaler said some common application KPIs include user experience measurements from APM (application performance management) packages; configured versus used resource consumption (such as CPU and memory); response times; and connection counts.

“Applications tend to spread out over multiple clouds; the path of least resistance will typically be taken. Documentation will fall behind, and this is where automatic discovery is necessary,” Ritthaler said. “Application discovery works over the multicloud architecture to make organizations aware of where their applications are running, who they are talking to, what application dependencies there are, and how they are secured.”

 

Compliance KPIs

Compliance is another area that requires management attention, experts say.

“Compliance KPIs require continuously inspecting cloud-resource configurations and benchmarking them against cloud, industry and custom security and compliance standards. It should track compliance score, violations, and resolution progress,” Ritthaler said.

Customers need to safeguard the health of hybrid and public cloud services using logs and metrics to proactively monitor and troubleshoot issues with native cloud services as they occur and suggest remediation steps, Ritthaler said.