This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 98 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In this blog series we are exploring the latest fraud-related events and issues on the rise in our digitized world. The first installment in the series explored account takeovers (ATO) and the $7 billion yearly loss affecting even the largest organizations.
In this post, we are examining three current trends contributing to increased fraud in the retail and e-commerce verticals:
This topic is especially timely as we are well into the holiday season. With the dramatic surge in online transactions driven by the pandemic, fraudsters are showing no hesitation targeting the unprecedented volume of new accounts and new methods for getting products and services to consumers. Deloitte is forecasting e-commerce sales to grow 25 35 percent with sales expected to reach $182 $196 billion, compared to a 14.7 percent increase in 2019.
In April, ACI Worldwide reported a 209 percent year-over-year growth in global ecommerce retail sales. A significant contributor to this rapid growth is new customer accounts which now represent 30 percent of transactions, a fivefold increase from pre-pandemic times, according to Help Net Security. Less experienced online users are at increased risk of fraud, as they are less likely to employ advanced security steps. With the responsibility of providing quick and seamless customer experiences, retailers must protect customer data while keeping up with the surge in new customer accounts.
The explosion of online shopping transactions is diluting the percentage of fraud attacks across all channels, giving the false perception they are on the decline. While the percentage is shrinking, the number of fraud attacks in real terms has risen. Large online merchants selling digital goods and physical goods have been hit hardest. They’ve seen an average monthly increase in fraudulent transactions of 37.1 percent and 14.3 percent, respectively, according to Digital Commerce 360.
Additionally, there’s been a 66 percent increase in fraudsters re-targeting websites that previously failed to identify their attacks. Often these repeat attacks are occurring in newer and more vulnerable areas of the customer journey including loyalty programs and return policies.
Also on the rise is the cost of fraud for United States-based merchants. Shooting up 7.3 percent from 2019, both store-based and online retailers are paying $3.36 for every $1 of fraud. For United States e-commerce merchants it’s $3.73 per $1 of fraud, according to Digital Commerce 360. What’s more, United States merchants in 2020 were projected to see roughly $33 billion in payment card fraud loses before the pandemic.
In a survey of 500 e-commerce companies, 96 percent agreed that this year’s holiday shopping season is more important to their business than in 2019.
However, it will also be a prime time for fraudsters to capitalize for a few reasons. Primarily it’s due to the same confluence of events that already made more fraud possible: high transaction volumes, minimal or legacy security measures, and merchants and users who are new to online retail. Second, is the speculation that fraudsters will operationalize data they’ve already stolen. Chaos and confusion early in the pandemic created opportunities for data breaches and social engineering scams. The holidays offer an opportunity to exploit that data with fraudulent purchases, money stolen, or rewards points and credits usurped, according to TechRepublic.
With the overnight changes in the ways that retailers could sell and consumers could buy, omnichannel delivery options became a must. However, as merchants have been pushed to provide new channels to serve customers, it has exposed new vulnerabilities. Therefore, omnichannel fraud is also on the rise. Buy Online, Pick-Up In Store (BOPIS) fraud rose 55 percent, according to Help Net Security. This trend is expected to increase with the surge in online shopping over the holidays.
While many of the challenges that retailers and e-commerce merchants are facing are a result of operating in a vastly different landscape, several are coming from their legacy fraud prevention systems. That fivefold increase in new users we mentioned earlier is taxing to a legacy systems’ ability to identify legitimate users. Companies trying to keep up with the overwhelming number of fraud signals often rely on systems that generate false positives, incorrectly rejecting legitimate and loyal buyers. During a time when a single transaction can seemingly make or break a business, merchants cannot afford to lose customers or sales.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps merchants combat against the types of fraud and legacy security systems gaps that are threatening to make the holiday shopping season less than merry.
A cloud-based solution recently awarded the Juniper cybersecurity platinum award, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is designed to help e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, and omnichannel merchants protect revenue and reputation. Deploying adaptive AI technology that continuously learns, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection defends against purchase, account, and omnichannel return and discount fraud while reducing operational expenses and increasing acceptance rates. It also safeguards user accounts from fraud exposure helping to retain customers and maintain satisfaction.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection offers three capabilities which can be integrated together or used individually, providing merchants the option to use the capability that best suits their business needs:
1. Account protection helps protect online revenue and reputation and safeguard user accounts from abuse and fraud by combating fake account creation, account takeover and fraudulent account access.
In the first trend above, new customer accounts represent 30 percent of transactions. These online users with weaker security could utilize account protection capability to help safeguard accounts. Businesses and merchants with account protection could protect their customers’ data by preventing fraudulent account access. Rather than worry about keeping their customers data safe, merchants can focus back on seamless customer experiences. With both fraud attacks and cost of fraud to United States merchants rising, there is no better time to add the account protection capability to your toolkit.
2. Purchase protection helps protect revenue by improving the acceptance rate of e-commerce transactions with insights and tools that help balance revenue opportunity verses fraud loss and checkout friction.
The second trend highlights the need for purchase protection. With a higher number of transactions and new online users entering their card information, purchase protection can help keep good customers happy while helping mitigate fraud loss.
3.Loss prevention helps protect revenue by identifying anomalies on returns and discounts arising from omnichannel purchases, enabling store managers and loss prevention officers to quickly investigate potential fraud and take action to mitigate losses.
Our third trend, omnichannel delivery, is a growing area for fraudsters to strike. Loss prevention helps analyze merchant’s data and to identify patterns of anomalies to increase merchants’ visibility into potential fraud on returns and discounts while notifying store managers so action can be taken to prevent losses. It’s time to fight Buy Online, Pick-Up In Store (BOPIS) fraud with the loss prevention capability.
Learn additional information about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection capabilities including account protection, purchase protection, and loss prevention and check out the ebook, Protecting Customers, Revenue, and Reputation from Online Fraud.
Questions? Please contact your Microsoft sales representative to learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection capabilities.
The post Fraud trends part 2: holiday fraud and account protection appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Curious if and how Microsoft’s monthly security updates will impact your server applications? We have got you covered! With Test Base for Microsoft 365, you can now validate your applications against Windows Server 2016 and 2019, including Server Core!
Software vendors and test engineers: you spoke, we listened. Prior to now, Test Base users could only validate their applications against upcoming security updates for Windows 10 client operating systems. However, understanding the importance of servers in the software application ecosystem and the essential role they play in this space, we are empowering you to achieve more on our platform.
Simply upload your applications to the Test Base server on Azure, then select that you’d like your apps to be validated against pre-release monthly security updates for Windows Server 2019 and/or Windows Server 2016, including the Server Core edition.
Not sure how to get started? Check out the step-by-step guide below to find out how to use this new feature.
Not yet using Test Base for Microsoft 365? Complete our short sign-up form to join the private preview.
To get started with validating your applications against pre-release updates for Windows Server 2016 and 2019 operating systems on Test Base for Microsoft 365, log on to our self-service onboarding portal. From the left-side navigation menu, select Upload new package under Package catalog and fill out the Test details.
Selecting the OS update type in Test Base for Microsoft 365Note: We do not support feature update testing for Windows Server at this time. |
Selecting the OS version against which you want to test your applications in Test Base for Microsoft 365Note: If you select to test your application against both server and client operating systems, please make sure that the app is compatible and can run seamlessly on both. |
Where to find security update test results in Test Base for Microsoft 365As we continue to innovate and build our service to meet all your application testing requirements, we look forward to hearing your comments and feedback on this new feature!
You can also email us at testbasepreview@microsoft.com.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
There is a rich opportunity for organizations to optimize and bring more comprehensive digital transformation to the forefront. With a pandemic shifting how we work today and likely in the future, a new question about business comes to mind: Can change drive optimization in your business?
This new normal is well, still new to a lot of us. Some elements of the business need urgent help with technology, like the rapid shift to remote work. Supporting a workforce that is suddenly remote comes with an increased time investment. Other parts of the business might need to be put on pause in order to focus on more immediate needs. Maintaining business continuity, keeping up with the digital landscape, and meeting demands are all part of the job – and now more than ever, IT departments need to stay focused and remain confident during these changing times.
A recent IDC report1 may help set you on a path to relevant trainings and certifications for your team to be successful in keeping pace with technology. In the report, a finding that stands out: The skills most needed in your organization depend on the stage the business is in. Is your organization working to maintain continuity? Have you already returned to growth?
One of the requirements to being a proactively supportive IT team lead is understanding the current stage of growth.
For each stage of business growth, there are specific IT skills that seem to take precedence, with cybersecurity taking the lead.
Cybersecurity, IT Operations, Data analytics, Digital innovation, Software development
Whereas Artificial Intelligence (AI) was an important IT skill pre-pandemic, research shows it gives way to software development as an organization moves through the stages of business recovery. It could be that AI requires more investment in capital and time, both of which were more abundant to organizations pre-pandemic. Moving to a “necessities only” IT position can help a business move out of the trough and into growth.
The training and certifications your team adopt are critical to business recovery. Why? IDC research2 has discovered that certification leads to professional influence. With the skills needed to be certified, in many ways a certification provides tenure that prescribes professional respect – especially when businesses need subject matter experts during recovery mode. Having an IT expert in house gives a business agility, security, and responsiveness, all of which can greatly impact the speed of recovery and optimization.
This is an important moment for IT leads. Organizational recovery from the pandemic depends on IT skills. And IT can significantly influence the organization with certifications. Choosing the right certification focus for yourself and your team helps build not just a path to recovery, but the ability to respond to whatever comes next. Ultimately, certification empowers the team, which helps your business succeed – whether in recovery or growth.
Wherever you are on the path, certifications are key to helping your organization succeed in a digital world. Explore Microsoft Learn to find the right training and certifications for your team.
Related post:
The most important factor for business success
1. Source: IDC, Road to Recovery: What Are the Most Important IT Skills Worldwide to Support Organizational Recovery?, Doc # US46713620, July 2020
2. Source: IDC, Do Certifications Increase IT Professional Impact in the Enterprise?, Doc # US46090520, February 2020
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
For so many of us, meetings form an important part of how work is done. With new applications and updates inside of Microsoft Teams, you will be better equipped to handle the ebb and flow of meetings throughout your day.
We’ve recently released apps in meetings, and there are nearly 20 apps now available. To get started with apps in meetings, edit the meetings you have scheduled and sent out within Teams, and select the + button at the top to add apps to your meetings:
Many apps in meetings have a pre-meeting preparation experience you can engage in before a meeting starts (e.g., setting up an agenda, designing simple poll questions.) Then, during a meeting, you can call up your tools as needed and as it fits the conversations you are having. Just like that – you can transform your meeting experiences with different apps to suit the types of meetings you are in.
1. Structured meetings are productive meetings with Decisions
For all the time that you and your colleagues spend within a meeting, you want to ensure you actionable outcomes and next steps. Decisions has extended their Teams integration with an app for meetings – starting with an easy-to-edit agenda that allows you to tag and organize the expected timelines. This will help you, as a meeting organizer, become instantly better structured and outcome-oriented for the meetings you run. Within a meeting, Decisions takes advantage of the meetings pane so that you can see and interact with the agenda, alongside your colleagues, in real time during a meeting. With the power to keep the agenda always in view – alongside capabilities for adding notes, tasks, and taking votes – you can ensure that every great idea and every action follow up is recorded.
See more about Decisions available on Microsoft AppSource.
2. Connect with your team via Teamflect
For managers and their team, the 1-on-1 meeting is a critical tool for team members to shape their relationships– including their status review, yearly plans, mentoring relationships, and more. Teamflect, a new app in Microsoft Teams, provides a way to manage and structure the process of those management relationships within an organization. It evaluates your connections with other colleagues and makes it easy to record follow up notes and feedback from your management conversations with your teammates. Because it particularly focuses on 1-on-1 conversations between managers and their team, it has focused tools to help structure plans for growth for everyone on your team. To have better and more structured 1-on-1s, give Teamflect a try within your next management meetings.
Add Teamflect from AppSource.
3. Poll the meeting audience with Slido
During a meeting – especially a large meeting – you will want to plan for ways to keep the audience engaged. At several points, consider asking the audience questions so you can encourage conversation or tailor your pitch to the mood of the audience. Slido is a simple but flexible polling tool you can integrate into your meeting workflows that help you get a broader sense of the room. Supporting several different question types – including word clouds, multiple choice questions, quizzes and ratings, there are a number of options for pausing during a meeting to ask for more audience participation and engagement.
Add the Slido app to your meetings from Microsoft AppSource.
4. Take a mini-break from meetings with Breakthru
Finally, with more and more digital meetings it is more important to pay attention to your individual workload and sense of fatigue. We have found that ensuring you get time in between meetings to take some time out, relax, and shift your focus can make a big impact to your overall sense of wellbeing, and help you stay refreshed for that final late-afternoon meeting. Breakthru is a new application in Microsoft Teams that helps you do just that – it helps you take 2-minute mini breaks with meditative exercise that can help you and your team re-energize. Whether within a meeting with colleagues, or just by yourself, you can enhance your overall well-being with these helpful restorative pauses that can help clear your mind for what comes next.
Add the Breakthru app to try it out for yourself, or within a meeting.
For all the decisions and actions that take place in meetings, apps within and outside of meetings give you the right tools to get to better outcomes. With these apps in your toolbox, you can run more meaningful and engaged meetings throughout the week – and keep everyone engaged as well.
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