Recent Blog Posts

Worldwide VPN downloads reportedly reached 277 million last year, with one reason for the surge being a lockdown-induced appetite to circumvent streaming services’ geo-restrictions. How can anyone ...

Inspect-a-Gadget is of course a real person.  He/she/it is gender-neutral, but the elves that work for Inspect-a-Gadget are very much of this Earth and composed of a pound (or more) of flesh, just ...

Among the uncomfortable truths about the government’s response to the pandemic is the fact that some people have and will continue to play the system. At the time it was introduced, the furlough ...

Software application developers are working hard to adapt to a changing landscape. Software tools are changing, codebases are changing, cloud formats and data integration practices are changing, AI ...

Around this time last year, I was in London to cover off an event on platform migration for Rimo3, which I duly covered in this blog back then. ...

As every good developer knows, when you want to learn more about what a platform or tools provider is bringing through the release pipeline: ignore the news, delete the press releases, don’t look ...

The Computer Weekly Developer Network examines the impact of Covid-19 on the software application development community. With only a proportion of developers classified as key workers (where their ...

The Computer Weekly Developer Network examines the impact of Covid-19 on the software application development community. With only a proportion of developers classified as key workers (where their ...

In this guest post, Spencer Lamb, vice president of Harlow-based colocation firm Kao Data, sets out why legacy datacentres may struggle to accommodate the growing demand for HPC workloads The ...

One of Donald Trump’s last acts as US president was to pardon Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer who faced 18 months for being caught with his fingers in the intellectual till. Citing ...

If you’re going to ask a customer a question, ask them a proper one! You can’t get much bigger than looking at the future of enterprise networking and security, but that’s what a recent survey by ...

Just in case you spent 2020 on a different planet, the world has been living through an unimaginable pandemic in the shape of the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) contagion. As well the tragic loss of life ...

You might still have a Hitachi television at home or perhaps even a briefcase-style retro radio from the 1980s… but these days the company wants to be thought of in broader terms. The company’s ...

For a lot of people, the first reaction experienced when exposed to the term ‘hyperautomation’ is the groaning sense of marketingspeak overload. It’s almost as if the marcoms people get a sense of ...

Previously, in this blog space we looked at cloud application acceleration and how it might finally kill off the wounded beast that never dies that is MPLS, and how SASE can be an underlying ...

As every good software engineer knows, not all clouds are equal. Where some instances are optimised for compute processing, some are tuned for analytics, specific Input/Output (I/O) prowess, ...

Camera-envy used to be that ‘thing’ that long-lens-toting tourists would exhibit when parading around beauty spots, well-known tourist locations and perhaps even Disneyland. That time has passed. ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a regular stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  “Continuous innovation and real-time steering are needed in the ...

There are some things that require a permanent internet connection. One cannot listen to internet radio, watch YouTube or take part in a video conference, without a permanent, live, high-quality ...

As a rule of thumb, we wish only misery and ruin on Bitcoin investors for daring to make the phenomenon sound any more sophisticated than a Bet365 advert. But our maniacal propensity for ...

If you want Post-It Notes, go to 3M. If you want independent MongoDB software tools with incremental security and management layers, go to 3T. That’s the message from the Berlin-based softwarehaus, ...

In September 2019, the then civil service chief executive John Manzoni told Computer Weekly that the new digital leader he wanted to recruit for the UK government would “have to be very wise, very ...

Red Kubes is a provider of a turn-key out-of-the-box (Ed: enough hyphens already!) Kubernetes-based container platform product. The company has now open sourced the Otomi Container Platform ...

Let’s take a quick dip into Open Data Lakes Analytics. But before we do, we need to cross off some names and definitions. This story starts with Ahana, a self-styled ‘self-service’ analytics ...

Take a deep breath… Oracle’s eponymously named Oracle MySQL Database Service with integrated MySQL Analytics Engine is a mouthful. Why did the company use such extended language to name one of its ...

As everybody knows, there’s no hot dogs, pretzels or pork roast without mustard. Microservices, it has been suggested, also need a solid relish (and a bun backbone), without which they fail to be ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  The New Year is traditionally a time for reflections as well as ...

Mainframes need love too, it’s not all public cloud out there - plus, anyway, some mainframe resources are used to further deepen the density of many cloud services in the first place. Despite the ...

Brian Clough once said that if he was given a magic wand and wanted to improve the standard of UK life overnight, he would have Rupert Murdoch removed from this planet. For 12 hours on Tuesday 5 ...

First, we had WanOp, then we had “son of WanOp” AKA SD-WAN (and its much misunderstood – mainly by vendors – sibling, SDN) and then the cloud came along and, well, clouded the scenario somewhat. If ...

With the UK now in the third coronavirus lockdown, organisations are again leaning on IT departments to ensure remote working can continue. It has been nine months since the UK first went into ...

Are we all feeling stable right now, in 2021? No need to answer that question, obviously. But, in fact, application stability management is now a defined parameter for software application ...

COVID has exposed our failure to bring education into the 21st century. The Open School concept is an ideal way of facilitating best practice (both online and face to face) in blended learning. It  ...

This is a guest blogpost by Emil Eifrem, CEO, Neo4j. In his view, four major trends driving interest in graph technology are starting to surface. Let's look ahead to what could be in store for the ...

CloudLinux OS is a Linux distribution intended for use by shared [web] hosting providers.  But there is more to the story than just the arrival of this distro, developed by software company ...

Gadgets come and go. There's always something better on the horizon. But some things seems to last and last. They pass down generations but then they eventually break. A decade ago I wrote about a ...

This is a guest blogpost by Anthony Finbow, CEO of Cambridge-based biotech firm Eagle Genomics. For data to become truly powerful, we need more collaboration and more data exploration technology, ...

SAP is many things. It is a database company, it is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) company, it is a data analytics company, it is a User eXperience company, it is a financial software tools ...

The is a guest piece written for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider by Ruby Raley in her position as VP of healthcare at Axway, a company known for its ‘full lifecycle’ API management ...

The  Dissolution of the Monasteries expedited changes that had been gathering for around a century.  The Internet has had an impact akin to that of the printing press in the way thought and ...

The Kyvol Cybovac S31 Robot Vacuum sucks - and we mean that. But here’s the thing, we mean it in a good way. One might argue that robot vacuums have been brought to market before their time i.e. ...

This is a guest blog by Andy Cotgreave, technology evangelist, Tableau Charts: they're all over the news. The NHS chief executive mocked others’ charts in their briefings; the science committee ...

The combination of the Cyber Resilience Centres, Police Cyber Alarm and The Cyber Helpline  provides a major advance towards joining up the UK approach to policing the on-line world,

This is a guest post by Sujith Abraham, senior vice-president and general manager at Salesforce ASEAN No one could have predicted what 2020 would bring. Across every industry, we have learned the ...

My fine friends at Netevents have continued to battle the global lockdown elements (and we now know in England that the words "lockdown" and "tier" mean the same thing - who would have guessed?) ...

GUEST BLOG: In this guest post, Amy Franz, software engineer at DirectlyApply, talks about her journey into software engineering, and that often touted alternative routes into tech are not as ...

Let us go back in time to 2019 – a time when we could actually attend IT events in a physical way. There I am, on the top level of a stand, having a coffee and scanning the hall, seeing “me too” ...

Google open sourced its flowery-named Fuschia Operating System (OS) for IoT and mobile applications some four years ago. Know as a capability-based operating system, the project is now open for ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  Back in the summer of 2008, we surveyed almost 1500 IT ...

Appian is a patient company. Despite the fact that the whole tech industry is falling over itself to tell us that it now offers low-code software automation advantages, the arguably more pure-play ...

Question: what’s better than project management? Answer: Invisible real-time data-driven project management, that’s what. Holy Land and US-based LinearB plays in this arena and the company insists ...

A new variant of Covid has been detected among infants in the Bethlehem area. After receiving intelligence from a committee of experts, King Herod has decreed that all hospitality facilities will ...

If not quite a future predictions analysis (we've all had far too many of those by now anyway) market intelligence lead at Exasol Helena Schwenk has spoken to the Computer Weekly Developer Network ...

When I first heard the news, my reaction wasn't as an industry analyst, but as a small business owner – and it wasn't positive.

As cyberattacks continue to increase, capitalising on the new vulnerabilities of remote working, securing the print infrastructure – across the office and home environments – must be a strategic ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Dr. Jon Sneyers in his capacity as senior image researcher, Cloudinary. Dr. Sneyers is the co-chair of JPEG XL adhoc ...

For Christmas, we got you the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime. A special surprise from October 2020. A hologram of Robert Kardashian. Here is the transcript in full: “Happy Christmas, reader. ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  To say that server – and indeed data centre – virtualisation has ...

“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” or so the oft-repeated quote from philosopher George Santayana goes. Where the UK’s Home Office is concerned, a far more meta version is ...

I very recently spoke at a webinar for a long-time client emanating from the artist formerly known as helpdesk market - Sunrise Software - on the increasing importance of APIs - usable ones, not ...

GUEST BLOG: In this contributed blog post, Eleanor Bradley, MD of registry and public benefit at Nominet, explains how digital skills and competency must be the post-pandemic focus to ensure young ...

Data is, just in case you hadn’t heard, the new lifeblood of business. It is the new oil, the new commodity, the new key ‘good’ and it is (of course) the lifeblood that drives the applications we ...

More than ‘just’ a low-code software company these days, Portugal-founded OutSystems will be 20-years old next year and the company now stands for an application platform designed to provide ...

The Inspect-a-Gadget lab elves had some slightly unusual moments testing out the Razer Kaira Pro headset designed for Xbox, in a good way. Where’s the dongle?  We were sure there must have been a ...

If anyone were in any doubt, the future is cloud. Just to clarify, the future is cloud and the future of cloud is hybrid cloud. For the record, the future is cloud and the future of cloud is hybrid ...

As many will know, JavaScript is a programming language that became the standard for browser-based programming, but it has also expanded beyond the client space to become a dominant language on the ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  The first thing that struck me when I re-read our 'Linux on the ...

Over the last few months Computer Weekly has asked readers about their early experiences of computing and their first computer. A number sent in stories of how they learned programming on the home ...

So, we’ve had number of standalone elements emerge in recent years: cloud, SD-WAN, virtual anything and everything that- together – create what you could readily term a next generation network, as ...

Nobody needs to be reminded that 2020 taught us to be kinder, nicer and more caring to people. Many companies have decided to take the chance this year to explain just what they stand for over and ...

A senior lecturer in management at the University of Exeter has suggested a number of wise-cracking robots have the emotional intelligence required to make them suitable for leadership roles. ...

If Jamie Oliver (other celebrity chefs are available) launched a service named Tastiest Ever Chef, you might not think it that unusual… but it’s a brand naming convention that we don’t often find ...

As part of the 2020 Computer Weekly diversity and inclusion event, in partnership with Spinks, we ran a number of workshops in the leadup to the day covering a range of different topics relating to ...

Babel is a term long associated with language and many of us have read the Tower of Babel pages on Wikipedia and elsewhere. When doing this, if nothing else, you can get some bible study in and ...

Welcome to our last edition of Tech in APAC for the year. One of our key stories in November was a piece we did on Snowflake, which made its debut in September on Wall Street as the biggest ...

Deep in the Inspect-a-Gadget lab, our elves don’t always get out and see the light of day that much; they’re quiet reflective characters who sometimes prefer the dim light of the backlit keyboard ...

Within appropriate boundaries governing personal security, identity protection, data governance and information sharing compliance, there’s a strong argument for making all facial recognition ...

Google wants to help the programming community work more confidently with open source software. The search-cloud-platform tech giant has developed a new scorecard system intended to allow software ...

The decision to delay over £3 billion of spend is one that deserves "robust" scrutiny by the hundred or so MPs whose parliamentary majorities may depend on improve on-line access to education, ...

If there is something a CIO could do to enable the business to increase its earnings by 5%, everyone would be listening. McKinsey recently highlighted the difference in performance between those ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  This week we are heading back to 2006, when we reported on that ...

The FT’s ever-excellent, San Francisco-based Richard Waters has reported on a prospective acquisition of Slack by Salesforce. Slack, notes Waters, has evolved from being a chat app to a broader ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Rob Tribe, VP of systems engineering for EMEA region at Nutanix. Tribe contends that today, none of us can attend a ...

This dystopian shambles of a year has reached a new, personal low, after a PR email revealed that a robotics company based in Reading has completed its first successful trial of a VR-controlled ...

The stuff of legends? The original Ali Baba for sure, but the tech firm Alibaba is also hoping to go down in the history books. TechTarget’s Aaron Tang has already detailed some of the firm’s most ...

This has been a shot in the arm for those who have long overlooked their health.

In this guest post, Tony Jacob, vice president of design and construction for Europe, Middle East and Africa at colocation giant Digital Realty predicts what the next decade holds for the ...

After months – some would say years – of frustration and delay, tech suppliers have largely welcomed the latest government initiative to establish a digital identity ecosystem in the UK. The ...

Software intelligence company Dynatrace enjoys tracing, dynamically, obviously. As such then, the fourth generation of its distributed tracing and code-level analysis technology, PurePath captures, ...

Champion of continuous intelligence Sumo Logic spends its time looking inside the state of the modern application technology stack, including changing trends in cloud and application adoption and ...

All laptops are pretty much the same today, right?  Open the packaging and you get your basic clamshell unit, a power cable and adapter, a little warranty leaflet that you leave in the back of the ...

This is a guest blogpost by Stuart Bernard, Iron Mountain’s VP of Digital Solutions. In it he writes about a new study suggesting Covid-driven digitisation of business processes could be ...

OpenUK is the open technology advocate organisation for open data, open source hardware and open source software in the UK - so yeah, pretty open all round. The organisation has now joined the ...

With just a couple of weeks left of 2020, it is worth reflecting on what IT professionals can take away from this year. First and foremost, the hard work put in by IT staff, enabled many, many ...

To emerge stronger in 2021, print industry players must adopt a future forward mindset to address the rapidly evolving cloud and hybrid workplace era – or risk being left behind. The office print ...

As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives.  This week I look at a report we produced back in August 2006, the ...

The Labour Party has called for emergency laws to prevent social media companies from playing host to anti-vaccine content. You’d’ve thought the ruling elite would have already got the memo to ...

As Tears For Fears would say: everybody wants to rule the world…  … but as Equinix, Inc. would say: everybody wants to scale to the breadth of potentially web-scale operational scope and the best ...

Whenever anyone tells you that technology needs an ever-increasing injection of agility, you would be forgiven for a) possibly starting to yawn - but also b) predominantly thinking about the ...

Question: how do you build a hybrid cloud strategy? To start with, it’s a good idea to think about having Kubernetes at the core, to enable the orchestration of container workloads around the ...