Industry Insight
Many UK businesses are losing out both financially and on productivity levels due to their workplace IT systems, new research has revealed.
Ten years ago, being in charge of a large enterprise IT operation meant you were also in the real estate business, operating one or more climate-controlled facilities with raised floors and lots of server racks.
Microsoft is warning of an active spam campaign targeting European languages that leverages an exploit to infect simply by opening the attachment.
Jack Bedell-Pearce, Managing Director at 4D Data Centres, considers the remaining opportunities, threats, and challenges businesses will face in the second half of this year, sharing some advice along the way.
Customer experience is increasingly important to the modern service desk. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to make sure that your service delivery always meets your customer's demands. These are some of our favourites.
As enterprises continue to rapidly migrate applications and infrastructure to the cloud, SD-WAN technologies are quickly gaining traction.
This new Bitdefender forensic investigation reveals a complete attack timeline and behaviour of a notorious financial cybercriminal group, known as Carbanak.
So, you’re ready to improve your services. Making a customer journey sounds like a plan, but what’s the goal of customer journey mapping? And once you’ve decided it’s the right approach for your service desk, how do you create customer journeys for your services?
Spring cleaning season has almost finished and summer is almost here, if you haven’t gotten around to giving your network a good spring cleaning yet, it’s never too late to step back and sweep out the cobwebs to improve your security posture.
Digital transformation is shaking up the way companies do business. One key outcome is the focus on new ways to unlock value from existing data, even whilst embracing next-gen social, mobile, cloud, and analytics technologies.
In a recent blog post, I gave some insight into some of the fascinating customer-facing work we do inside the Office of the CTO at Citrix and, at the same time, introduced eight of the most commonly observed shifting dynamics that are on the minds of today’s CIOs and CTOs.
With Dublin overtaking London as Europe’s largest data centre cluster, modular uninterruptible power supplies are key to powering this processing revolution.
Experts at security firm Sophos discovered a new strain of ransomware dubbed MegaCortex that is targeting corporate networks.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), effective from 25 May 2018, enhances existing data protection rules for all businesses handling personal data of EU citizens and extends responsibilities from data controllers to also cover data processors.
Weak passwords are a major information security issue, accounting for an astonishing 81% of hacking-related data breaches according to a recent Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report. The good news is that everyone can begin taking small steps to improve their own password security and stay safer online.
In Service Departments, there’s a tendency to focus on resolving immediate Incidents rather than addressing the underlying Problems.The catch-22 is that those Problems lead to more Incidents.
In August 2018, Bitdefender researchers stumbled across an Android malware framework, dubbed Triout, which packed massive surveillance capabilities.
We often hear from customers that their employees complain that Salesforce.com (or Office365 or Workday or any of myriad SaaS apps) is more responsive from home or from Starbucks than from the branch office.
SMBs may dislike refreshing IT equipment but they dislike refreshing disaster recovery solutions even more. These aren’t revenue-generating systems after all, and small businesses have other things to spend their money on. Still, DR solutions can fall out of date just as quickly as primary IT infrastructure.
Once upon a time, IT managers had a piece of paper in their hand detailing every IP address and MAC address within their organisation. But how could such an approach work now? The modern enterprise has to cope with BYOD with any number of workers bringing any number of devices; with IoT where even parts of the building’s infrastructure will have their own IP addresses.
The intangibility of DevOps makes it hard for leaders to come up with a clear-cut roadmap for adopting DevOps in their organisation. The meaning of DevOps is highly contextual, there are no popular methodologies with prescribed practices to abide by. However, healthy organisations exhibit similar patterns of behaviour, organisation and improvement efforts.
Ecuador suffered 40 million cyber-attacks on websites of public institutions since the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Hosting applications in Azure involves careful consideration of the costs generated by three main components: computing, storage and network. IT administrators need to understand the resources associated with each category and their associated charges.
Once confined to just a handful of primitive PCs, today the internet has become so deeply integrated into all facets of our lives — from sensors in public trash cans to app-controlled Batmobiles — that the line between physical and virtual has begun to disappear.
No-one likes getting a bill they’re not expecting and that
goes for IT managers too. Spiraling costs for storing data can be a constant
headache, especially if you’re under budgetary pressure.
As
businesses increasingly embrace digital transformation, it has become critical
for CEOs to ensure their infrastructure investment supports the initiative.
According to Gartner*, 47 percent of CEOs say they are being “challenged” by
their board of directors to show progress in shifting toward a digital business
model.
You think it will never happen to you. You assume your hard
drive, server, network or perhaps your entire data centre is safe from
unexpected outages. But when IT disaster strikes, it comes without warning, and
can be in some bizarre forms.
According to the Agile Manifesto, customer collaboration
goes beyond contract negotiation. You can use this principle to professionalise
your service catalogue. But how do you go about doing so?
A topical Q&A with a leading light within the enterprise IT community, discover more about what Chris's day to day consists of, why he chose IT as a career, how to be successful, and his predictions for the future...
Back in 2015 on International Women’s Day,
Former UN Director General Ban Ki Moon published a statement. “The world will
never realise 100% of its goals if 50% of its people cannot realise their full
potential,” he said. “When we unleash the power of women, we can secure a
future for all.”
Oftentimes, it is said, we fight the last war. It happens
when strategists fail to account for changes in the security environment, like
the birth of the machine gun, the tank, or the improvised explosive device –
technological innovations that altered how conflicts unfold.
A topical Q&A with a leading light within the enterprise IT community, discover more about what Matthew's day to day consists of, why he chose IT as a career, how to be successful, and his predictions for the future...
SIEM
technology has been in existence for more than a decade, providing consolidated
security reports from correlated event logs, often in order to achieve
compliance with security standards. But SIEM can do better, by leveraging
correlated security events to trigger alerts and appropriate reaction from SOC
(Security Operations Center) teams.
It is often thought that a computer’s central processing unit (CPU)
handles everything within a computer. To some extent, this is true; however,
CPUs have delegates per se. These delegates are referred to as chipsets and
they have dedicated and specific tasks to carry out.
A topical Q&A with a leading light within the enterprise IT community, discover more about what Sue's day to day consists of, why she chose IT as a career, how to be successful, and her predictions for the future...
At the start of a new year, it’s popular to opine on what the new year
might bring in terms of technology advances. My predictions for the WAN in 2018
have been covered in several publications here, here and here. In this blog,
I’m going to expand on one of my predictions.
Discussion of cyber threats is often focused purely on technical issues,
but it is an organisation’s employees that can, ultimately, define the strength
of its security.
With
the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation last May, the
ability of any organisation to recover data in the event of a crisis has become
much more of an issue.
A topical Q&A with a leading light within the enterprise IT community, discover more about what Aidan's day to day consists of, why he chose IT as a career, how to be successful, and his predictions for the future...
For the last couple of years, Western Digital and 451
Research have taken a snapshot of the industry’s data challenges, by collecting
the experience and opinions of real IT practitioners. This year they once again
reached out to survey IT professionals to learn about current unstructured data
trends.
The role of the CIO is changing dramatically, and expectations have
never been greater. What was once central to the job — namely operating IT —
has made way for the pursuit of digital transformation.
A topical Q&A with a leading light within the Cyber Security community, discover more about what Marc's day to day consists of, why he chose Cyber as a career, how to be successful, and his predictions for the future...
Recent research has predicted that women will represent more than 20 percent of the global cybersecurity workforce by the end of this year. While this is certainly an improvement from their representation in 2013 at 11 percent, it’s suffice to say that there’s still a lack of women in the industry.
Each year Martin Hingley of IT Candor makes a set of
predictions for the IT and Communications (ITC) industry and this marks his 10th
set of annual predictions.
No sooner have we accepted IoT than innovations
are transforming how this hyperconnected world will be implemented. Among the
emerging technologies is fog computing, which moves computing closer to the
end-user to decrease latency and bandwidth overload while improving access.
Does the incredible rise of edge computing mean ‘death’ to
enterprise data centres and the cloud?
Windows servers running Internet Information Services (IIS)
are vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks carried out through malicious
HTTP/2 requests.
Test your enterprise IT pop culture knowledge, share your score with colleagues, and see if you could do with a visit to IP EXPO Manchester this April!
A topical Q&A with a leading light within the IT community, discover more about what Nicola's day to day consists of, why she chose IT as a career, how to be successful in IT, and her predictions for the future...
The way we consume services has changed significantly over
the last decade but when it comes to the Wide Area Network (WAN), the
architecture we use to deliver services to our branch users is often stuck back
in the 90s.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is placing huge challenges on network
managers across all industries. With booming endpoint numbers and generated
traffic, device management and network efficiency become of paramount
importance.
Jamie Graves from ZoneFox gives an insight into how we can
use AI more effectively. It was standing room only when Jamie Graves of ZoneFox
took to the stage at AI-Analytics X to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of AI.
The New Yorker calls Christopher Wylie “a pink-haired, nose-ringed oracle sent from the future." But he’s probably best known for his role in setting up – and then taking down – the cyber-warfare firm Cambridge Analytica!
In Graham Cluley's absolute belter of a session, we delve into the extraordinary,
like the companies who pretend to be hacked when they haven’t, or the attackers
who went to exceptional lengths to steal millions from their employers.
Anyone that’s been paying attention knows that fileless
malware has been on the rise for the past few years. But, did you know that
we’re likely to see this infamous threat transform in new and menacing ways
this year? Enter the Vaporworm.
Today, cloud services providers (CSPs) are
facing their own signs of aging. Discover the problems for maturing CSPs and their data
centre operations.
There is
growing pressure on IT to provide faster and more agile platforms for business,
Red Hat’s James Allen discussed why those adopting open source tooling and
practices are succeeding at the expense of those who don’t.
Researchers at the CenturyLink Threat Research Labs
discovered that the operators of the TheMoon IoT botnet are offering it as a
service.
By 2020 over 90% of companies will be utilising cloud
services offered by multiple providers, using various orchestration tools. To
ensure they retain full mobility and flexibility, businesses need to be wary of
components which could potentially cause cloud lock-in.
Samantha Humphries, Senior Manager of Global Markets &
Compliance at Rapid7 discusses SIEM myths, how to arm your Jedi (first
responders), analytics and more. Discover the tools and techniques hackers use
to defeat the expensive security safeguards used in many corporate environments
today.
The events of annus horribilis 2008 changed the
world forever. The change was dubbed the "New Normal" and in turn
gave rise to shifts in economic and political power which would have been
considered the stuff of fantasy fiction as 2008 came to a close.
People
counting technology is regarded as one of the most effective ways to understand
how a building functions throughout the working week. This kind of intelligence
is invaluable for many businesses but none more so than support service
providers looking to gain a more accurate way to deploy resource and make increasingly
thin margins more profitable.
SD-WAN is now making its case. Allan Paton, Director of UK
and Ireland at Silver Peak explores the evolution of SD-WAN and how it will
replace the complexity of router-centric WAN architectures.
Z-WASP attack: Phishers are using a recently fixed flaw in
Office 365 that allows them to bypass protections using zero-width spaces and
deliver malicious messages to recipients.
Are British businesses firing employees unfairly as a result of possible data breach negligence? Ian Osborne, Vice President UK & Ireland at Shred-it, tackles this thorny issue.
In 2018, 11.2 billion devices worldwide are connected to
the internet, and it is predicted that by 2020, a staggering 20.4 billion
devices will be connected.
While everyone seems to be treating
‘artificial intelligence’ as the latest in-vogue topic, it’s important to
remember it is far from a new development. It is not my intention to dilute the
excitement of AI’s minefield of potential but, like anything that has the power
to change the world, it requires an element of respect and a lot more know-how.
Malware researchers at Trend
Micro have discovered a Powershell-based backdoor that is very similar to a
malware used by MuddyWater
APT group.
Ed Broking is a wholesale insurance and reinsurance broker, sourcing policies and coverage across a broad range of industries. Based in London, Ed Broking operates a number of international offices to support their global operations. Faced with replacing an ageing hosted server system, Ed Broking took the decision to move to fully hosted Microsoft Azure platform. This is their story.
The cloud is driving change in the media industry at an incredible rate, thanks to benefits achieved by its scalability and affordability. In an exclusive roundtable interview, industry experts debate the unique needs of the sector and outline strategies for success in the years ahead.
Security experts at Imperva reported an attack against Drupal Web servers running on Linux-based systems. Hackers exploited the Drupalgeddon2 flaw (CVE-2018-7600) along with other issues. The Drupalgeddon2 could be exploited to take over a website, it affects Drupal versions 6, 7 and 8.
BYOD is a thing of the past - or is it? Gary Cox, Technology Director for Infoblox in Western Europe, explores the troubling rise of Shadow IoT and how to detect it. With the Internet of Things (IoT) continuing to grow, and with employees connecting an increasing number of consumer devices to enterprise networks, IT teams find themselves faced with greater complexity and more security issues than ever before.
Blockchain is more - much more - than Bitcoin. Jonathan Wilkins, Marketing Director at EU Automation explains how blockchain can automate a range of business processes. Blockchain was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamato. He is thought to be a man living in Japan, born in 1975, but there remains speculation about the inventor's true identity.
The survey, which was conducted at IP EXPO 2018, found that over a quarter (26 percent) of the IT professionals questioned selected “Give 110 percent” as their most frustrating office jargon of the year, followed by "Blue sky thinking" (19 percent), and "Low hanging fruit" (17 percent).
The encryption system implemented by popular solid-state drives (SSDs) is affected by critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a local attacker to decrypt data.
Today, the user experience of digital services has the greatest impact on the perception of an organisation’s ability to operate competently and successfully in a digital world. It is the key competitive differentiator, and is essential for avoiding the risk of customer churn.
Whether or not you literally “own” the infrastructure, application or networks that deliver your apps and services, as an IT leader or technology professional you own the outcome. Here are five factors that you should consider to deliver an optimal user experience while using AWS.
The term cloud computing became popular somewhere halfway the first decade of this century, short before the launch of Amazon S3 and EC2. In the little over 10 years since, we have come a long way. However, I believe we still have to uncover the full potential of cloud computing. Although not part of the formal characteristics of cloud computing, there have been are two simmering expectation of cloud computing that we have failed to meet up to now.
The Challenge: Modern data centre's are changing rapidly. Thanks to virtualisation, more and more organisations are shifting to resilient, on-demand, private cloud environments, delivering applications faster and more cheaply than ever before. Software defined data centre's (SDDCs) are the new norm.
The warnings have been out there: Mobile and social accelerating customer interactions. Big data providing deep lakes of potential knowledge. Billions of connected gadgets bringing forth a global Internet of Things (IoT).
We think of Enterprise organisations as closed societies, working in isolation in pursuit of the advantage over their competitors. It might come as a surprise then to think about how much Open Source software is used within even the largest and most secretive companies around the world.
There is no need for data scientists to be outright software experts thanks to emerging tools for using data delivered through the cloud. Making use of the cloud as a shared platform ensures the delivery of the right data to the right people at the right time, without the inefficiency of workflows passing through many hands through hand-overs.
Serverless is an emerging “new normal” for web-based applications and services where the unit of deployment and billing is a single function a few lines of code in length. Serverless enables radical transparency in billing and radical ease of use for developers; when combined with with marketplace (“app store”) offerings from cloud vendors like AWS.
Due to its cryptographic background, a common perception is that blockchain is inherently secure. But blockchain is not un-hackable or hidden from potential manipulation.
Smart homes and smart cities will likely be top of mind in conversations around the Internet of Things (IoT), but the application of IoT is becoming far more widespread than these two areas as a growing number of industries adopt IoT devices.
With the soaring number of mobile and IoT devices, and the onslaught of new apps that businesses are faced with on their wireless network, it is time for innovation that can help IT scale and meet these new requirements.
Our recent research uncovered that just over a third of Brits (35%) would not trust an organisation using blockchain technology to keep their information secure. But with so many uses beyond recording cryptocurrency transactions, we think people need to wake up to the real potential for blockchain. Here are five of the most interesting use cases for blockchain from the last year.
AI and robotics are going to create almost 60 million more jobs globally, that’s according to a new report from the World Economic Forum. The Swiss think tank released its Future of Jobs report to put facts behind the much-debated topic of AI and job displacement.
Today the world faces one of its most daunting, but also exciting tasks - how organisations will transition into the future with Artificial Intelligence entering the workplace. However we look at it, AI directly threatens a large portion of the global workforce whose jobs will be competing with digitisation, automation, and continuously improving AI.
With the explosion of cryptocurrency over the past of years, many have been debating the longevity and legitimacy of cryptocurrencies in our global economy. However, those with a keener eye were fascinated with something far more useful and widely applicable: Blockchain — the technology that made cryptocurrency possible in the first place.
Cybercriminals have never been so notorious. As technology innovation seems to outpace security defenses, organizations are turning to ethical-hackers to assess risk and see where they are most vulnerable.
Dr Greg Benson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco and Chief Scientist at SnapLogic, shares his tips for hiring the best AI talent and a what it means to work across both industry and academia for AI development.
Stegware, the weaponisation of steganography by cyber attackers, is on the rise. Find out why this is bad news for IT professionals.
In a world of sensitive data and tightening regulations, discover what you should do as an organisation!
On any given day AI is both the saviour and the doom of human kind. Opinion on the technology can change as quickly as the wind. But behind the curtain of doubt AI programs are already making incredible benefits to our lives, often without us even realising.
Troublesome political climate has put the NHS, like many other Public-Sector organisations, under immense pressure to cut costs and drive operational efficiencies whilst simultaneously embracing new digital methods, in a bid to improve services. As a result, proper and necessary data security controls have not yet been totally embraced…
From ransomware and exploding power plants to AI and identity theft - new survey from IP EXPO Manchester uncovers the cyber fears of the UK.