“Copilot is so much more than a new feature within Microsoft 365. It’s about transforming the way people work.”

Whether it’s drafting a job description, sorting help desk tickets or visualizing complex data in seconds, Copilot is already creating huge value in the hands of millions of workers. 

A study from the Boston Consulting Group found AI-assisted workers were 25% faster. They produced 40% better quality work. And they took on 12% more tasks than a comparable group without AI assistance.

Notably, this study used open generative AI platforms, suggesting the real impact of AI tools fully integrated with proprietary data and applications could be much higher.

It’s hard to ignore the implications for competitiveness, both on the organizational and in one’s personal career. The age of AI is here, like it or not.

Charting your “flight path” to Copilot adoption

To tap into all this potential, we recently expanded our 30-year partnership with Microsoft to better help our customers get the best value from this investment.

Taking your most important asset – proprietary data on your customers, products and markets – and having that generate truly game-changing outputs for your business takes a lot of planning and data integration capability. This needs to happen without losing sight of security and governance.

To get it right “customers should not be looking at AI or Copilot for Microsoft 365 as a simple transaction or a services project,” says Chris Woodin, Sr. Vice President – Solutions and Alliances at Softchoice.

Instead, they need to see Copilot adoption in terms of a long-term journey. That journey has multiple stages that form what we call the “flight path” for Copilot adoption. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Plan your business case for Copilot

The first stage of the flight path is to define the vision, goals, and success criteria for using Copilot for Microsoft 365 in your organization.

We call this the “Plan” phase. Here, we look at the universe of potential use cases that might create meaningful change in value for the business and justify the case for change.

For example, you may want to use Copilot to improve the productivity and quality of your content creation, marketing, sales, or customer service teams. You might consider deploying it to IT to improve service desk ticketing, security alerts or any number of other applications. How Copilot shows up will depend on the context in which you operate today and where AI can make a difference in real productivity terms.

To help, we can support as you plan, build and win support for your business case, create a roadmap and align those with a stake in decision-making on the scope and timeline of the project.

Getting Clear on Copilot Adoption – The Business Case

Step 2: Assess your technical and organizational readiness

The next stage is to evaluate the current state of your IT environment, licensing, security posture, and organizational readiness for Copilot for Microsoft 365.

This is the “Assess” phase. In this phase, you need to make sure that existing applications, business processes, and data can be integrated effectively into Copilot. This involves a gap analysis to identify any risks, issues, or dependencies that are going to need remediation before you deploy.

For example, you may need to upgrade your Microsoft 365 subscription, update your applications, or resolve any compatibility or performance issues.

To help you gauge your readiness for Copilot, we offer a Copilot Readiness Assessment, that provides a comprehensive review of your IT environment, security posture, and Copilot requirements. This yields a detailed report with recommendations and best practices to prepare for deployment and minimize errors during the process.

The Catalyst Gets Clear on Copilot Adoption – Getting ready 

Step 3: Run a pilot with select users, configure and implement

The third stage of the flight path is to configure and deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365 according to best practices and your specific requirements. This is when you integrate your custom data sources, including enterprise data, industry-specific terminology, and so on.

Then, you test and validate the functionality, performance, permissions, and security of Copilot within your IT environment with a focus on integration with enterprise data.

Note that we strongly recommend deploying Copilot as a pilot project to a select group of users first. This gives you the chance to collect valuable user feedback and course correct where needed before going organization wide.

To help you implement and pilot Copilot, we have a Copilot Implementation Service, including expert guidance and support to set up and deploy Copilot. This includes a Copilot Pilot Program with a custom plan and toolkit for deploying to an initial group of select users.  

The Catalyst Gets Clear on Copilot Adoption – Implementation

Step 4: Adopt Copilot and manage the people factor

Copilot for Microsoft 365 won’t have any impact if people don’t know it’s there or why they should use it.

This means a continuous management approach to end user adoption focused on realizing the actual benefits, whether that’s increasing employee productivity or transforming the way they work with their customers.

The next phase is built to heighten awareness, engagement, and adoption of Copilot among your end users at every level. The importance of training, communication, and support to help people understand and use Copilot can’t be overstated.

You‘ll also need a clear process to monitor and collect feedback from the users on their experience and satisfaction with Copilot and apply their feedback as you go.

This is where our Copilot Adoption and Enablement Services come in. It’s meant to give you a detailed strategy and plan to drive user adoption of Copilot in your organization.

It includes a Copilot Adoption Toolkit for educating, training and supporting users on integrating Copilot into daily work as well as in cultivating an “AI-first mentality.”

Step 5: Sustain the momentum over the long term

No genuine transformation is going to be a one-and-done effort.

The final stage of the flight path involves proactive steps to keep the early momentum going. The aim is to avoid a drop-off in usage and ensure people truly integrate the tool into their work. This is more an ongoing journey than a destination.

It involves reviewing and updating the vision, goals, and success criteria as your needs and priorities evolve and as Microsoft adds new features and capabilities. You’ll want to monitor and analyze the metrics against outcomes. It may be necessary to throw in additional training, guidance, and support to the users. Remember that new hires will also need to learn the specific ways your organization uses the technology.

To help you sustain and optimize Copilot, Softchoice offers a Copilot Sustainment Service, where you can get ongoing support and guidance to maintain and enhance the performance and value of Copilot in your organization. This comes with a Copilot Sustainment Toolkit, where you’ll find the latest resources and tools to keep your users informed, engaged, and satisfied with Copilot for Microsoft 365.

The Catalyst Gets Clear on Copilot Adoption – Sustain 

Ready to take off with Copilot?

You plan to adopt Copilot for Microsoft 365. Why should you trust us to help?

We know people and technology. To succeed with Copilot deployment, you’ll need to account for both and have them work in harmony.

We bring over 30 years’ experience as a Microsoft partner. This comes with a deep bench of Microsoft certified specialists who deliver thousands of Microsoft assessments and implementation projects every year.

We were our own first Copilot customer. As a member of Microsoft’s Early Access Program, we were among the first companies to use Copilot in a real-world environment.

Every Copilot needs a navigator

Explore Copilot for Microsoft 365 services

The EU has done it, the UK will probably do it, the US is considering it, and now India plans to follow suit with competition laws to regulate big technology firms, including Apple. Cupertino isn’t happy.

India’s Digital Competition Bill is a similar piece of legislation to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) that is forcing Apple to open up its ecosystem, most visibly through support for third-party app stores. India’s bill will prevent companies from promoting their own services above those of rivals, stop them from exploiting non-public user data, and also require support for third-party app purchases.

Free trade where we want it

Apple isn’t the only technology firm that’s unhappy about India’s proposals. Google and Amazon are also full of rue. 

That is why a US lobby group that represents all three big firms is pushing for India’s government to rethink its proposals, warning that the draft law goes further than the DMA. “Targeted companies are likely to reduce investment in India, pass on increased prices for digital services, and reduce the range of services,” the US-India Business Council reportedly said.  

(The irony that the US Chamber of Commerce should make that argument, even while the US Department of Justice struggles to bring in similar constraints on Apple and other big companies, is hard to ignore.)

A threat to Apple’s India plan?

Threat of this new law may also displease Apple’s latest manufacturing partner, Tata, which is making big investments to stake space in Apple’s India-based iPhone supply chain. The top tech company in India by market capitalization, Tata holds a senior seat on the US-India Business Council board. Most of the country’s big names have some representation on the group. 

In truth, Apple’s major investments in India may spell “iPhone” to the rest of us, but to those involved in its manufacturing supply chain there, the same word spells “profit” — and they are unlikely to want that nascent business beaten quite yet. 

We shall see what happens ahead, but the stage does seem set for some wrangling over the content of the new legislation. The proposals specifically target entities with a turnover in excess of $30 billion and at least 10 million local users of digital services — which basically means the big tech firms, whose market power the bill aims to constrain.

Apple wants to build business across the nation of 1.4 billion people and is well on the way to achieving that. As it seeks to reduce its reliance on China, the company is making huge efforts to build manufacturing centers and attract new users in India, so anything likely to make that work more challenging won’t be seen as ideal. 

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said the company generated record revenues in India during the March quarter, though critics may claim part of this success reflects company control of the apps market on its platforms. 

Control of the means of production

Wrong or right, the extent to which big firms control the digital economy is what India’s regulations, just like those elsewhere, seek to constrain. Attempts to dent such market power is very much reflected in the work of India’s Competition Commission, which has already fined Google more than $160 million over app purchases and pre-installed apps. Apple is also undergoing investigation at this time. 

The act won’t become law immediately. The government is gathering feedback before submitting the regulations for approval by parliament, and there is no set timeline for that process to take place, according to Reuters.

But for Apple this new attempt to regulate its business surely makes it far more likely that it will eventually be forced to open up its platforms to third-party apps on a global basis, rather than just in the EU. I don’t see that happening swiftly, however. The cautious approach would be for consumers, competitors, the company, and any sensible regulators to review the potential failures of such openings-up in Europe, where third-party stores are now opening at a trickle, rather than a flood.

Pending further evidence, the jury remains out on the extent to which sideloading in Europe will undermine user security and privacy, or dilute the value of the user experience.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

A year ago, GoDaddy didn’t have a single large language model running with its backend systems. Today, the internet domain registry and web hosting firm has more than 50, some of them dedicated to client-side automation products while others are being readied for pilot projects aimed at creating internal efficiencies for employees.

The first of the company’s generative AI initiatives was to build an AI bot that could automate the creation of company design logos, websites, and email and social media campaigns for the small businesses it serves. Then, earlier this year, it launched an AI customer-facing chatbot, GoDaddy Airo. With a culture of experimentation, GoDaddy has moved to formalize the way it documents more than 1,000 AI experiments to help drive innovation. Because “innovation without some kind of hypothesis and some kind of measurement is novelty,” said GoDaddy’s CTO Charles Beadnall.

Beadnall has led the GoDaddy engineering team’s pivot to building AI solutions; he spoke to Computerworld about those efforts, and challenges. The following are excerpts from that interview:

Tell us about your AI journey and how others can learn from your experience. “We’ve been focused on AI for a number of years. We’ve used different variants of it. AI’s a big term and it’s got lots of different subcomponents: machine learning, generative AI, etc. But what we’ve been focused on over the past several years is building out a common data platform across all of our businesses, such that we have inputs coming from our different interfaces and businesses so that we can understand customer behavior better. That’s really enabled us, along with a culture of experimentation, to really leverage generative AI in a way that we can measure the benefits to our customers and to our bottom line, and do that in a way that we continue to iterate against it.

“We’re all about delivering results, ether to our business and our bottom line or to our customers, and so we want to have a measurable hypothesis or what it is that generative AI will deliver to those. That’s something we’ve been building out over the past several years with common data platforms, a culture of experimentation and now leveraging generative AI in practice.”

How important is it to have measurable deliverables with AI deployments? “Ultimately, if you don’t know what it is you’re going to expect to deliver and have some way of measuring it — it may be successful, but you won’t know that it is. It’s been really important for us to have that controlled A/B test, such that we launch a new feature and measure the results against that. So, if you don’t have some form of data you can measure, whether that’s purchase conversion or product activation or something of that nature…, you won’t really know whether they’re having the intended benefit.”

Do you have to create new data lakes or clean up your data repositories before implementing generative AI? I’ve often heard the refrain, garbage in, garbage out. “There is definitely significant implications here. It’s definitely a concern people need to be aware of. The majority of the quality assurance is being performed by the large language model vendors.

“What we’ve done is built a common gateway that talks to all the various large language models on the backend, and currently we support more than 50 different models, whether they’re for images, text or chat, or whatnot. That gateway is really responsible both for implementing the guardrails…, but also to evaluate the responses back from the LLMs to determining if we’re seeing some kind of pattern that we need to be aware of showing it’s not working as intended.

“Obviously, this space is accelerating superfast. A year ago, we had zero LLMs and today we have 50 LLMs. That gives you some indication of just how fast this is moving. Different models will have different attributes and that’s something we’ll have to continue to monitor. But by having that mechanism we can monitor with and control what we send and what we receive, we believe we can better manage that.”

Why do you have 50 LLMs? “This space is moving at a rapid pace with different LLMs leapfrogging each other in cost, accuracy, reliability and security. The large majority of these are in use in sandbox and test environments with only a very small number currently run in production behind Airo. Some of these will be dropped and never make it to production and others will be deprecated as newer models prove more accurate or more cost effective.”

Can you tell me about this gateway. How does it work and did you build it, or did you get it through a vendor? “It’s something we built and it’s going on a year now. We built it to manage the uncertainty of the technology.

“It started out with our initial push into the space as a way to coordinate among the different LLMs. If you think about it logically, a year ago there was one vendor [OpenAI] but it was clear this was going to be a very exciting space. There were going to be a lot of companies that wanted to get into this space, and so we don’t know who’s going to win. And, I think it’s probably a more nuanced discussion of who’s going to win for what. It may be that one model is better for images and another is better for chat. Still another model is better for text. This is going to evolve in such as way that vendors are going to leapfrog each other. So the gateway is a way for us to be somewhat agnostic to the underlying model that we’re using and adapt quickly in changes to cost and changes in accuracy on that path.”

How did you approach training your workforce on AI, and perhaps more importantly, how did you get them to engage with the technology? “I think that’s been surprisingly easy. We had a business unit that came up with our first use case for it, which is helping customers build content for their site and find the right domain name to put on that site. That’s something that a lot of customers get stuck on initially, because it takes a lot of mental cycles to figure out what domain name you’re going to pick, what content you’re going to put on your site — and if you want to start selling product, you have to create descriptions of those items. So, it’s a customer need that we wanted to address.

“Clearly identifying how AI will help us along a path, that business unit really made it a top priority and surged resources against it to come up with some of our first tests within this space. That really did help the team rally behind it to have that clear, compelling use case. We’re running these tests and getting data back and not every experiment was successful. We’re learning things along the way.

“In some ways, experiments that aren’t successful are some of the most interesting ones, because you learn what doesn’t work and that forces you to ask follow-up questions about what will work and to look at things differently. As teams saw the results of these experiments and saw the impact on customers, it’s really engaged them to spend more time with the technology and focus on customer outcomes.”

Is AI ready for creating real-world products you can sell to clients? Or is it more of an assistant, such as suggesting textual content, checking code for errors, or creating video? “We think it’s definitely ready for prime time. Now, it really depends on what the use case is. This is where I think being able to test in a way you can determine [whether it’s] ready for prime time in this particular usage scenario. But it’s definitely adding value to customer interactions, because it’s a set of steps they don’t need to take, but a majority of our customers are leveraging. There are lots of different use cases. Use cases that require deep expertise, it will continue to get better. If the customer wants assistance in completing something more routine…, that’s certainly a prime candidate for leveraging AI.”

What is GoDaddy Airo? What does it do? “It’s basically the AI enablement of our products and services. It’s our underlying AI technology built on top of our data platform, built on top of our experimentation platform and gateway we’re leveraging against our LLMs. Over time, it may turn into additional new products, but right now we’re focused on it making the products we already sell today that much better. It will evolve over time as we experiment our way into it.”

Do your clients use Airo, or do you use it and offer your clients the AI output you receive? “Basically, as soon as you buy a domain name and website, we’ll jump you directly into that experience. We’ll help you build out a site and if you upload inventory items to it, Airo will fill automatically fill that [textual] description for you. If we can get them from having an idea to having a live business online, that’s our major objective. That’s where we’ll be rewarded by our customers. That’s our focus. We do have a metric we track for improving the customer’s value and achievement. It’s still early innings there, but we are improving our customers’ ability to get their businesses up and running.”

How accurate is Airo? “It think it’s reasonably accurate. We run experiments where we have a threshold of accuracy, which is relatively high. We wouldn’t be promoting something that didn’t have significant accuracy and [was] benefiting our customers. I’d say it’s been surprisingly accurate most of the time. Again, there are permutations where we continue to learn over time, but for the core experience, so far, it’s proven to be more accurate than we would have expected.”

Where did you obtain your LLMs that power the generative AI? “The actual LLMs we’re using…are ChatGPT, Anthropic, Gemini, AWS’s Titan. So, we are leveraging a number of different models on the backend to do the genAI itself. But all the integrations into our flows and products is the work we do.”

What are some of the barriers you’ve encountered to implementing AI within your organization, and how did you address them? “We moved quickly but also thoughtfully in terms of understanding the security and privacy ramifications. That’s the area I’d say we spent a reasonable amount of time thinking through. I think the biggest barriers is having the creativity in deciding where these LLMs can be applied and how do you design the experiments to address those needs? Basically, building out the capabilities. That’s where we spend our time today with a common platform approach, which can then account for the security.

“It’s easy to spend enormous amounts of money without much benefit. So it has to be about those factors as well as the customer’s needs. Balancing those factors has been a major focus of ours.”

What’s next? “The big opportunity for us is leveraging AI in more places across the company — internally as well as to make our employee experiences more effective and efficient. There’s a lot of territory for us to cover. We’re under way in all the different avenues now. We’ve got a lot of activity going on to finalize how we augment these LLMs with our own data for more internal use cases. We’re in the thick of it right now. We’re identifying which pilot projects to launch internally.”

In an increasingly digital economy, ransomware might seem unstoppable without security measures in place to proactively detect and prevent it—especially with the relentless cycle of new phishing scams, malware attacks, and cybersecurity threats.

By 2025, Gartner predicts that at least 75% of IT organizations will have experienced at least one ransomware attack; Cybersecurity Ventures echoes this by expecting an average of one ransomware attack on a business every 11 seconds. The dangers of the digital world are relentless; without protection, there is no such thing as secure data. The reality is that ransomware is hard to detect, have long incubation periods, and may have a costly impact on services and business for long periods.

Breaking down anti-ransomware requirements

But what makes a good solution? It should have the right defense systems on the network side, the host side, and the storage side to best optimize data resilience. Protections for these different levels have different priorities, not unlike the relationship between door access controls and coffers.

A good anti-ransomware solution needs to be multilayered, seamlessly integrated, and have clean backup data for optimal recovery. And most of all, given ransomware’s adaptable, ever-shifting nature, good protection must be tailored to the situation at hand, and be able to utilize a range of flexible portfolio solutions. 

Meet Huawei’s world-class ransomware solution

Leading the industry is Huawei’s Multilayer Ransomware Protection (MRP) Solution. It offers two lines of defense with six layers of protection and is more accurate, more comprehensive, and more lightweight than its predecessor.

The MRP Solution complies with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework for enterprise data resilience, having passed all 21 test cases including detection, blocking, protection, and recovery. In 2024, Huawei’s MRP Solution was the first protection solution of its kind certified by Tolly Group at MWC Barcelona for detecting 100% of ransomware through network-storage collaboration. 

Huawei’s MRP Solution is a six-layer systematic system comprising two layers dedicated to networking and the other four to storage: detection and analysis, secure snapshots, backup recovery, and isolation zone protection. Its backup protection uses in-depth parsing to ensure clean data for a strong recovery, with up to 172 TB/h recovery bandwidth. Industry-leading implementation of flash storage and multi-stream backup architecture means significantly faster service recovery and minimal interruptions after detecting malicious encryption. The entire solution has a plug-and-play data card for added flexibility and versatility.

Strong storage protection ensures a strong recovery

One of the key components of a well-integrated ransomware protection solution is a robust storage protection system with multiple fail safes. Where the network is the first layer of security against ransomware, storage is the last line of defense to protect data.

Here, Huawei employs a 3-2-1-1 strategy: three copies of important data, at least two types of storage media, one offsite copy, and one extra copy in the air-gapped isolation zone. The last clean data copy in isolation is used for quick recovery from attacks. Better network-storage collaboration means better proactive defense, including using honeyfiles to attract attackers, and improved recovery speed.

With the growing sophistication of ransomware, businesses can’t afford to underestimate the immediate impact it has on their services—from business outage to data loss—as well as long-term ones such as eroded customer trust and regulatory fines. They must prioritize data resilience and security in an age where data is the backbone of the economy. Huawei offers a world-class ransomware solution that paves the way in proactively defending against changing threats, deploys comprehensive storage protection strategies, and spares no effort in the war against malicious actors.

Learn more about how Huawei’s MRP Solution can work for you here.

Once the dust has settled over the next UK election, Apple might be forced to open up its business there in the same way it is being opened up in Europe — thanks to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.

The measure, expected to become UK law later this year, aims to police digital markets, strengthen digital consumer law, control mergers, and set new standards of antitrust. Among other things, this wide-ranging legislation aims to put limits around the big tech firms to increase competition in digital markets. 

Apple is likely to be a target

When it comes to Apple, the new law brings in a new status similar to the EU’s “Gatekeeper” role.

The Strategic Market Status (SMS) regime gives the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA’s) Digital Markets Unit (DMU) power to designate firms as having SMS if they have “substantial and entrenched market power” and a “position of strategic significance” in relation to digital activities linked to the UK. SMS status will likely be given to Apple along with other major tech firms, including Google, Samsung, Microsoft, who all have market power and strategic significance. 

While this could be seen as a badge of honor, it also means the companies will have to follow a code of conduct created by the DMU. “The scope of permitted conduct requirements is incredibly broad, giving the DMU very wide discretion to decide what obligations should be imposed on each firm,” writes Linklaters.

They may also be given more stringent merger reporting requirements and could be subject to what are called Pro-Competitive Interventions (PCI’s). 

Forced to open up?

Apple could find itself hit with one or more of these PCIs that might bring the UK more in line with the EU in terms of opening up its platforms and services. This outcome is made more probable because the CMA has been investigating Apple for some time, arguing that, “Apple’s restrictions in particular are holding back potentially disruptive innovation that could transform the way that consumers access and experience content online.”

As previously reported, the three main strands of that investigation relate to:

• How control of the browser market affects developers.
• The insistence that browser developers use WebKit.
• Apple’s refusal to permit cloud gaming services/portals on the App store.

This case has been in and out of courts for a couple of years, but the CMA’s dogged pursuit of this action shows how seriously it intends on taking action.

Now armed with the new legislation, the CMA has more tools at its disposal with which to force Apple and other big tech firms to loosen their perceived grip on digital markets, including things like unbundling WebKit from browsers or opening up for sideloading on devices.

Protecting the core business

Apple’s actions in Europe since similar legislation came into effect shows the company is willing to make changes while working to preserve its business and protect consumer privacy and security. Ultimately, its core mission seems to be that of continuing to offer goods and services via an App Store designed to maintain the user experience and consumer trust that digital storefront has already created.

There is still a compelling argument to say that many consumers actually want a curated, safe, purchasing experience, rather than being exposed to a more complex web of competing stores, with varying commitments to the consumer experience.

However, the international regulatory consensus at this point — including the crazed US antitrust case — seems to be that Apple and other big tech firms must be forced to loosen their grip, the hope being that other competitors can grow in the space they leave behind.

There is some risk to the regulatory approach: In June 2023, Apple said the iOS app economy supports over 4.8 million jobs across the US and Europe. This might turn out to mean something should regulatory zeal dent Apple’s business in those places. 

For additional insight into the provisions of the new UK law, you can take a look at the Bill in full here, or explore legal firm Linklater’s commentary on the significance of the Bill here.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Nothing lives forever, and researchers have confirmed that web pages are no exception. They pop into existence at one moment in time and have a habit of disappearing with an abrupt “404 not found” at an unknown point in the future.

The rate at which this happens has a name: “digital decay”, or “link rot”. According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, When Online Content Disappears, we can even put some numbers on the phenomenon.

Looking at a random sample of web pages that existed in 2013, the researchers found that by 2023, 38% had disappeared. If it doesn’t sound surprising that nearly four in ten web pages from 2013 would have disappeared a decade later, they did the same analysis for pages that appeared in 2023 itself, finding that a surprising 8% disappeared by the year end.

But what matters is not simply how many web pages have disappeared but where they disappeared from. On that score, 23% of news pages and 21% of pages on US government sites contained at least one broken link.

The most interesting barometer of all for link rot is Wikipedia, a site which depends heavily on referenced links to external information sources.

Despite the importance of references, the researchers found that at least one link was broken on 54% of a sample 50,000 English language Wikipedia entries. From the total of one million references on those pages, 11% of the links were no longer accessible.

Disappearing tweets

And it’s not just links. Looking at that other cultural reference point, “tweets” on the X (formerly Twitter) platform, a similar pattern was evident. From a representative sample of 5 million tweets posted between 8 March and 27 April 2023, the team found that by 15 June 18% had disappeared. And that figure could get a lot higher if the company ever stops redirecting URLs from its historic twitter.com domain name.

Some languages were more affected by disappearing tweets than others, with the rate for English language tweets being 20% and for those in Arabic and Turkish an extraordinary 42% and 49%, respectively.

Pew is not the first to look into the issue. In 2021, an analysis by the Harvard Law School of 2,283,445 links inside New York Times articles found that of the 72% that were deep links (i.e., pointing to a specific article rather than a homepage), 25% were inaccessible.

As a website that’s been in existence since 1996, The New York Times is a good measure of long-term link rot. Not surprisingly, the further back in time you went, the more rot was evident, with 72% of links dating to 1998 and 42% from 2008 no longer accessible.

This study also looked at content drift, that is the extent to which a page is accessible but has changed over time, sometimes dramatically, from its original form. On that score, 13% of a sample 4,500 pages published in the New York Times had drifted significantly since they’d first been published.

Where is IT going wrong?

Does any of this matter? One could argue that web pages disappearing or changing is inevitable even if not many people notice or care.

While the Pew researchers offer no judgement, the authors of the Harvard Law School study point out the problems link rot leaves in its wake:

“The fragility of the web poses an issue for any area of work or interest that is reliant on written records. […] More fundamentally, it leaves articles from decades past as shells of their former selves, cut off from their original sourcing and context.”

According to Mark Stockley, an experienced content management systems (CMS) and web admin who now works as a cybersecurity evangelist for security company Malwarebytes, while some link loss was inevitable, the scale of the issue suggested deeper administrative failures.

“People seem to be more ambivalent about losing pages than they used to be. When I first started working on the web, losing a page, or at least a URL, was anathema. If you didn’t need a page any more you at least replaced it with a redirect to a suitable alternative, to ensure there were no dead ends,” said Stockley.

“What’s baffling is when CMSs don’t pick up the slack. While some CMSs will catch mistakes and backfill URL changes with redirects automatically, there are others that, inexplicably, don’t. It’s an obvious and easy way to prevent a particular kind of link rot, and it’s baffling that it exists in 2024,” he said.

Alternatively, if the CMS doesn’t include a link checking facility, admins can also deploy link checking tools that will crawl a site to find broken links.

For CMS admins, spotting and correcting broken links should be a defined process not an afterthought.

Anyone who wants more detail on the methodology behind When Online Content Disappears can follow this link (PDF).

As Apple device use spirals across the enterprise, Apple admins have grown accustomed to maintaining tolerance when it comes to iCloud. But there are some controls they can apply to manage what employees can do with the online service.

Managed or personal Apple ID?

There is a difference between what restrictions can be applied on personal iCloud accounts and Managed Apple IDs. IT has far more control over the latter, but can apply some restrictions to personal devices as well, so long as they are managed by an MDM (Mobile Device Management) system of some kind.

If they are not protected by MDM, then no restrictions can be applied at all.

The big difference is that on personal devices assigned to an enterprise MDM account, IT can use a set of MDM restrictions to reduce access to some iCloud services. Managed Apple IDs have far more power, and can be used alongside personal Apple IDs on employee-owned devices, thanks to Apple’s User Enrollment tools. 

How to control iCloud access with managed devices

Managed Apple IDs cannot access certain iCloud services.  Apple says this is due to “organizational focus and to protect user privacy.” The following services are not available, though in some cases the app might be visible:

• Find My.
• Health.
• Home.
• Journal.
• Wallet (though employee badges in Wallet do function).
• iCloud Mail, iCloud+ and iCloud Family Sharing.

You can also customize access to some other apps using Apple School or Business Manager, Apple Business Essentials, and/or your MDM tools. If your fleet runs the latest operating systems, you might also be able to add further refinements to help lock iCloud access down — for example, whether users can collaborate on Keynote files from within Business Manager. Most MDM services offer similar tools.

The idea is that by preventing people from using these services from within their work-related Managed Apple ID, the natural security of the devices is enhanced. It also means you can deploy your own digital employee experiences on the devices, including use of company email.

Of course, employees with devices that support both personal and managed Apple IDs also have access to all their own personal iCloud services, but not from within your deployed mobile work environment.

What about Personal Apple IDs?

Sensibly, Apple does not let IT restrict use of iCloud on personal devices; someone can access their own iCloud account from any Apple device. 

What Apple does allow is some control of iCloud access from devices enrolled in a company’s MDM system. Using Apple’s provided MDM restriction keys, companies that don’t use Managed Apple IDs can block access to specific iCloud services from a given device. This is a little like using a hammer to crack an egg, but you can block access to the following iCloud services: Address Book, Bookmarks, Calendar, Drive, Keychain, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Photo Library, and Private Relay.

The downside is that by blocking access to these services you effectively limit what your staff can do with a device that is for all intents and purposes their own device, using their own Apple ID. Many workers would likely feel this to be an unwanted intrusion into their personal devices and see such moves as displaying a lack of trust. (IT admins could, of course, argue that they feel forced to deploy such restrictions to prevent exfiltration of valuable corporate or personal data.)

Which approach is best?

For me, if you do need to restrict access to iCloud services across your teams, it feels more appropriate to impose those restrictions via a Managed Apple ID. Doing so provides the maximum benefit — you can control and restrict device use that relates to your business, its services, and data, while also permitting personal use of that device.

The beauty of this approach is that work and personal data on a device is cryptographically separated and stored on different partitions, keeping work data secure and personal data private. While there is no such thing as a guarantee when it comes to device or data security, the combination delivers the best employee experience while enabling close control of any potential data/passcode exfiltration. Apple has also tied this experience up with Focus mode, making it as simple as a tap to switch between the work experience and personal use of the device.

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