It's no secret that the last few years have been especially dire when it comes to cybercrime. Several large scale ransomware attacks, in which cyber criminals use advanced encryption to lock a person or organization out of their own data until they pay a ransom, have rocked the country.

Last week, we discussed the rise of smart factories, which are modern day manufacturing operations that use top of the line computing and technology to streamline their operations. In truth, however, smart factories are but one aspect of something much larger and more significant--something that has come to be known as the fourth industrial revolution or industry 4.0. The concept was first coined and explored by World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, in his aptly titled 2017 book.

-Quick announcement: Today, we're kicking off a series of blog posts focusing on particular business sectors and how they relate to IT. Our first set of blogs will focus on dental practices. Watch out for more announcements in future posts.

At the end of June, Dentistry Today, the popular online trade magazine, interviewed Mike Baird, the CEO of Henry Schein One, which provides a variety of software products for dental practices.

Quick announcement: Facebook is currently running a trial of integrating voice and video chat into its main application, meaning that users could soon start conferencing over Facebook directly without using the Messenger app. If you'd like to read more of our coverage on how technology has recently affected workplace communication, click here.

This week, a software company called Video Window announced a new addition to its product line, called Video Window Remote. Similar to Zoom and Skype, many of Video Window's products focus on internet-based video communication. This new product ups the ante, so speak, by playing a continuous feed of a worker's office directly onto their home devices.

On July 2nd of this year, a Russia-based, professional hacking group called REvil hit the managed IT service provider Kaseya with a massive ransomware attack, affecting roughly sixty managed service providers and nearly 1500 businesses worldwide. REvil asked for $70 million in ransom to decrypt the files at first, then later dropped their demand to $50 million.

The BBC reported this week that several schools on the Isle of Wight in the British Isles were hit with a string of ransomware attacks. Ransomware is a form of cybersecurity breach in which a cyber criminal either threatens to release private information to the public or block access to their data altogether until they pay some kind of ransom.

If you haven’t moved to the cloud yet, you’re behind the curve. According to the 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Report from Flexera, 94% of their respondents are already using the cloud. And 69% of respondents use at least one public cloud and one private cloud.