Author: Nick Farrell

Security threats doubled last year

Posted on July 1, 2022 by - News

Security breach detections in the first quarter of the year were double that of the whole of 2021, according to the WatchGuard Threat Lab.

The latest quarterly Internet Security Report from the WatchGuard Threat Lab showed that in the first quarter, WatchGuard blocked a total of more than 21.5 million malware variants (274 per device) and nearly 4.7 million network threats (60 per device).

That’s despite Threat Lab’s fourth quarter report showing that ransomware attacks were trending downwards year-on-year.

Acronis signs for West Ham

Posted on June 30, 2022 by - News

Cyber security outfit Acronis has scored a contract with English Premier League Football Club West Ham United.

Ingram Micro will support the partnership as the Acronis’ #CyberFit Partner, in line with the Acronis #TeamUp program for services providers and cloud distributors.

The Club‘s IT department will use Acronis Cyber Protect. This technology, it is claimed,  combines automation and integration, ensuring the prevention, detection, response, recovery, and analysis needed to safeguard workloads while “streamlining” protection efforts. 

HPE launches yet another partner programme

Posted on June 30, 2022 by - News

Former maker of expensive printer ink HPE has launched a new partner programme.

Dubbed Partner Ready Vantage, it is designed to “create enhanced opportunities for partners to build repeatable profitability and deepen longstanding customer relationships”.

Ready Vantage will be split into three separate tracks – build, sell and service. Build is designed for partners who want to integrate with HPE technology and provides proven pre-packaged solutions from HPE and HPE’s technology partners. Partners will also be able to develop their own applications using HPE’s open platforms.

Sell is designed to help partners grow their as-a-service business by offering value-added solutions from across the HPE portfolio while Service track is for partners specifically focused on delivering services such as consulting, assessment, design, integration, deployment, migration, support and management.

Nokia and BT team up on power efficient IP networks

Posted on June 30, 2022 by - News

Nokia said that BT will test its FP5 network processing silicon, including its 800G interfaces. The collaboration is part of the companies’ relationship to make sure the UK’s largest network has reduced power consumption in the future.

Nokia has added support for high-density 800G routing interfaces, a new embedded line rate, flow-based encryption capabilities, and a 75 per cent reduction in power consumption, which supports BT’s sustainability objectives to run the  network in the UK.

Scality supported on VMware vSphere

Posted on June 29, 2022 by - News

Scality announced that Scality ARTESCA lightweight, cloud-native object storage software is now officially supported on VMware vSphere/ESXi virtualisation environments.

This provides production-level ARTESCA virtual machine (support for vSphere users, with functionality equal to that on physical servers, along with additional deployment flexibility, it claimed.

Enterprise-grade storage has historically required hardware with integrated processing, memory and disk capacity.  ARTESCA apparently gets away from all that to support production-level workloads on flexible, commonly used VMware vSphere virtual infrastructures including support for VMware vSAN and live migration capabilities.

Public cloud reigns supreme

Posted on June 29, 2022 by - News

Public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operator and vendor revenues surged 26 percent to total $126 billion during the first quarter of 2022.

New numbers freshly crunched by Synergy Research Group said the biggest growth was seen in IaaS and PaaS, with Q1 revenues jumping 36 percent to reach more than $44 billion.

In the other service segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $54 billion in service revenues, having grown by an average 21 percent from last year.

Synergy Group found that to support both these and other digital services, public cloud providers splashed out $28 billion on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 20 per cent from Q1 2021.

Across the whole public cloud ecosystem, companies that featured the most prominently were Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and Google.

CloudCoCo triples revenues

Posted on June 29, 2022 by - News

CloudCoCo has almost tripled its revenues for the first six months of its financial year.

The MSP produced revenues of £11.6 million for the six months until 31 Match 2022, up 183 percent year on year. Some 70 percent of that came from recurring contracts.

Gross profit more than doubled – by 119 percent – year on year to £3.5 million.

Factoring in the £124,000 in costs related to the Connect business puts its profits at £302,000 or 17 per cent lower than the same period last year.

CloudCoCo claims that IDE Connect is performing at a monthly breakeven since March 2022 after the firm implemented “corrective measures” on the business. When CloudCoCo acquired the outfit in October 2021 it was producing annual losses of £800,000.

Target Components gives majority ownership to staff

Posted on June 28, 2022 by - News

Target Components has transferred majority ownership of the business to its 60 employees as the distributor moves to become an employee-owned trust (EOT).

Targets employees now own the majority of the distributor’s shares, and an employee representative will be appointed to the EOT board.

Documents related to the sale of the business by former MD, Paul Cubbage, and owner Ian Prescott were signed last week, marking the beginning of Target as an employee-owned business.

Target’s board will continue to manage the company, led by managing director Michael Lawrence, who replaced Cubbage last year after he moved to a non-executive director position.

Huge staff turn over in IT

Posted on June 28, 2022 by - News

More than 40 percent of the workforce at leading IT services firms was hired in the last 12 months, according to data from ISG, the technology research and advisory firm.

In an advisory note, Stanton Jones, Director and Principle Analyst at ISG, said: “We’ve been discussing attrition in the IT services sector for a couple of quarters now. And rightly so. It’s the number one issue impacting enterprise IT services buyers today. The good news is that the data shows attrition has likely peaked at most IT services firms.

NTT DATA UK announces Civil Service Data Challenge 2022

Posted on June 28, 2022 by - News

NTT DATA UK announced its second Civil Service Data Challenge 2022 which invites Civil Servants to share their ideas on how government can improve its use of data.

The challenge, which sees civil servants pitch their ideas to a panel of senior leaders in a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style competition, is a collaboration between NTT DATA UK, Cabinet Office, Global Government Forum, and the Office for National Statistics.

As part of the Data Challenge, teams of Civil Service volunteers will develop the most promising of these ideas, pitching them to the judges at semi-final and final events – after which the best will receive both technical advice and development support from partner NTT DATA UK, and the backing of top Civil Servants.

Peer signs pact with Pulsar

Posted on June 27, 2022 by - News

Peer Software has formed a strategic alliance with Pulsar Security.

Through the alliance, Peer Software will use Pulsar Security’s team of cyber security experts to continuously monitor and analyse emerging and evolving ransomware and malware attack patterns on unstructured data.

PeerGFS which aims to ease the deployment of a modern distributed file system across multi-site, on-premises and cloud storage, will use these attack patterns to enable an additional layer of cyber security detection and response. These capabilities will enhance the Malicious Event Detection (MED) feature incorporated in PeerGFS.

Pulsar Security CTO Duane Laflotte said that by understanding the unique behaviour patterns of ransomware and malware attacks and matching these against the real-time file event streams that PeerGFS collects across the distributed file system, Peer can now empower its customers with an additional layer of fast and efficient cyber security monitoring.

“We are excited to be working with Peer Software on this unique capability”, he said.

Infosecurity Europe hit by train strikes

Posted on June 27, 2022 by - News

As if there were not enough things going wrong with the world,  Infosecurity Europe was hit by a good old-fashioned train strike.

Each year the event brings more than 13,000 visitors from all around the UK & Europe but last-minute talks with train workers to avoid the strikes broke down and there were 24-hour walkouts by members of the RMT union occurring on Tuesday and Thursday, with 10,000 London Underground staff also striking on Tuesday.

Infosec organisers claimed the event was successful but some vendors reported that numbers were down from what they expected.

Wednesday was very busy given no strikes were going ahead but Tuesday and Thursday were a bit tumbleweed.

Some vendors claimed that the walkouts meant they were unable to capitalise on the event. This was disappointing because vendors spend a fortune on massive booths which was wasted.

Enterprise asset tracking spending increasing

Posted on June 27, 2022 by - News

A new study from Juniper Research has found that global spending on asset tracking by enterprises will increase from $16 billion in 2022 to $45 billion in 2027 – a substantial growth of 184 percent.

According to the report, the management and security of high-value assets is becoming of increasingly significant importance for many stakeholders, and demand for technologies that provide real-time monitoring within the supply chain is ever more demanded.

The report with the catchy title Fleet Tracking & Logistics: Key Trends, Vendor Strategies, and Market Forecasts 2022-2027 said that modern systems use wireless connectivity to remotely monitor assets’ locations, based on real-time data with the aim of better managing asset conditions.

Using bitcurrency could get you sued

Posted on June 20, 2022 by - News

Suggesting cryptocurrency for clients could get you sued, as poor-little-rich-boy Elon Musk has found out.

A Dogecoin investor is taking Elon Musk and his two companies Tesla and SpaceX to court, over claims of running a pyramid scheme with Dogecoin, which Musk once hailed as the “people’s crypto”.

Musk was so fond of Doge that he would tweet about it regularly. He also announced the sale of Tesla merch for Doge and asked customers whether they’d like the chance to pay for Tesla cars with the token. He would share memes and insights into Doge, and ended up branding himself the DogeFather.

Fujitsu builds a C-CAT in North-West

Posted on June 17, 2022 by - News

Fujitsu is investing  £22 million in a cognitive and advanced technologies (C-CAT) centre in the North West of England.

Fujitsu says the centre will bring “further innovation” to the UK and bring 200 high skilled jobs over the next year.

The company’s global CTO Vivek Mahajan said :”Fujitsu is committed to and has confidence in the UK. We share the UK Government’s ambitions to thrive as a science and technology superpower.