Author: Nick Farrell

IoT rollouts stymied by connectivity problems

Inmarsat Research reveals that poor or unreliable connectivity is a key barrier limiting the success of IoT projects for most organisations.

According to the research report ‘Industrial IoT in the Time of Covid-19’ 75 percent of businesses experience connectivity challenges when trialling IoT projects and don’t feel that public terrestrial networks are completely suitable for their IoT needs.

UK Telecom’s R&D spending increasing according to Catax

Annual R&D spending in the telecoms sector has risen 4.5 percent to a nine-year high of just over £ 1 billion, according to ONS (Office of National Statistics) data.

R&D tax relief specialist Catax has broken out the UK figure and found that R&D spending across telecommunications businesses in the UK climbed £44 million to £1.02 billion in 2020 having risen for three years in succession.

However, the industry is unusual in that it hasn’t grown its R&D spending at all over the past decade.

UK government to work with experts to sort out cybersecurity

The UK government will work with industry experts to develop policies that will increase the cybersecurity of digital solutions and has asked if it should enforce new cybersecurity measures on MSPs.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) issued a call for views in May on the existing advice for supply chain risk management and said it was considering asking MSPs to meet new cybersecurity measures to make the UK more resilient against cyber threats.

“Sustainability” should be a “significant driver” behind “digital transformation”

Manufacturers need to put more emphasis on so-called sustainable practices rather than just focusing on the banal objectives of efficiency and productivity improvements, according to InfinityQS Global Channel Programs Director Jason Chester.

After COP26 it became clear that the actions needed to fix climate change are now becoming a serious priority among world leaders, Chester said.

Westcon-Comstor expands distie agreement with Zscaler

Westcon-Comstor has expanded its distribution agreement with cloud security outfit Zscaler.

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange is already part of Westcon-Comstor’s product list but this expansion of the agreement, brings Zscaler’s Zero Trust offering to new markets throughout Europe.

Zscaler’s proxy-based architecture, built on an industry-leading SASE. It reduces the attack surface by directly connecting users to applications, via a Zero Trust approach.

Zscaler Vice President EMEA and APJ Alliances Arun Dharmalingam said that the things were at a point where the SMB community is actively looking to double down on cybersecurity in the modern distributed cloud environment.

“High profile attacks have been regularly hitting the news and the pandemic has, for a variety of reasons, increased the attack surface of SMBs resulting in a greater impetus to get cybersecurity right”, he said.

Redcentric sees profits slip

MSP Redcentric’s sales and adjusted operating profit slip for the six months ending 30 September.

Total revenue slipped by 4.1 percent to £44.3 million compared with the same period last year while adjusted operating profit fell from £7.6 million to £7.4 million, a fall of 2.6 percent. Its adjusted basic earnings per share fell from 3.61p to 3.55p year-on-year, while recurring monthly revenue dropped from £41 million to £39.6 million and adjusted EBITDA decreased from £12.3 million to £11.9 million.

The outfit’s CEO Peter Brotherton said the business is still seeing “aftershocks” from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kaseya adapts UK GDPR product for UK channel partners

Kaseya, which provides IT and security management solutions for managed service providers (MSPs) and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), has updated its platform to cope with the UK’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The update, which was introduced at Kaseya’s Connect IT Europe conference, generates key documents – including Evidence of Compliance which are demanded by the new law.

Kaseya announced today the launch of the UK GDPR module for Compliance Manager which the outfit claims simplifies assessing, maintaining and documenting compliance.

UK government to gut privacy laws to favour business

The Open Rights Group says that the government is planning measures are designed to favour business and government interests over those of the individual.

The group thinks that the government will gut the data protection rights and weaken the oversight and transparency into how personal data can be used by businesses and government agencies.

ORG’s Legal and Policy Officer, Mariano delli Santi, said the authorities are seeking to “steamroll” anything that might get in the way of government and commercial use of personal data, to avoid the sort of reversals they suffered in bringing in Palantir and Google DeepMind to the NHS without sufficient transparency and contractual safeguards.

The only thing that is stopping Boris’s boys killing the entire thing stone dead is that they cannot afford to lose EU adequacy status, which is up for review by the European Commission in 2024. Losing adequacy would mean data could not flow freely between the UK and countries in the EU, with severe adverse economic consequences likely.

CompTIA: Things will get better next year

Companies in the business of technology and information technology (IT) professionals are optimistic that the new year will bring a return to growth and new strategic innovations, according to a new report published by CompTIA.

The nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce report with the catchy title “IT Industry Outlook 2022” finds an industry and workforce eager to move on from nearly two years of keeping business and careers afloat and getting back to mindset that was in place prior to the pandemic.

SS&C making a bid for Blue Prism

Financial technology giant SS&C has made a £1.2 billion takeover proposal for robotics process automation firm Blue Prism, which is already the subject of a separate private equity takeover deal.

September that it had agreed a £1.1 billion takeover deal with private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which plans to merge the company with data analytics firm TIBCO.

Sky’s the limit for cloud use

The pace of cloud use is increasing, according to Rackspace Technology’s global survey.

The survey, with the catchy title,  Future of Compute, highlights the increasingly rapid pace of cloud adoption. According to the survey, the question is no longer whether organizations should migrate to the cloud, but how they can leverage the cloud for innovation, efficiency, and growth.

More than half of survey respondents said that all their applicable infrastructure now resides in the cloud, while the rest said they plan to move more of their workloads into the cloud as possible.

SME employees log on with security free devices

Research from Avast has found that employees in almost a third of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in the UK are connecting to the corporate network using personal devices that do not have any security controls in place.

Since the pandemic began, SMB leaders have had to quickly adapt to changing working behaviours. Whether teams are fully remote or hybrid, trying to ensure employees have the right technology in place hasn’t been straightforward.

UK retailers hit by hackers

The UK’s retailing sector has experienced 44 cyberattacks in the last year – roughly one every eight days – according to research by Keeper Security.

As part of the 2021 Cybersecurity Census Report, three-quarters of retailers believe that the number of cyberattacks they are faced with will only increase in the next 12 months and, with that, disrupt the retail ecosystem.

The retail sector has been under immense pressure over the past 18 months. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit retailers’ front line with store closures on the high street and major supply chain disruptions as a result of Brexit.

With IBM behind it, Kyndryl makes Microsoft deal

A not so mobile X86 PCWith IBM in its rearview mirror, spin-off Kyndryl has made a deal with Microsoft to build products on its cloud.

According to the pair, they will jointly work on a co-innovation lab where they will build products on the Microsoft Cloud, with Kyndryl making them available on Microsoft’s AppSource and on the Azure Marketplace.

Meanwhile, Vole will make products developed by the two companies available for its global enterprise sales force and create a training programme for Kyndryl’s 90,000 employees, dubbed Kyndryl University for Microsoft, which has been designed to teach workers how to best use Microsoft’s cloud tools.

Atos flogs carbon-neutral laptops

Atos has expanded its decarbonisation portfolio to offer clients what it is billing as the “world’s first” certified carbon neutral laptops.

The deal has been set up with its global partner, Circular Computing.

The French systems integrator said the newly formed partnership will enable Atos to expand its Net Zero Transformation portfolio with carbon-neutral remanufactured laptops to support its clients to reach their sustainability goals.

Circular Computing is a member of Atos’ Scaler accelerator programme and a remanufacturer of carbon-neutral laptop products as well as the world’s first BSI Kitemark certified laptop remanufacturer, according to Atos.