Recent Blog Posts

For much of IT history, your options for acquiring IT solutions were pretty limited. It was a choice between a one-off capital charge, combined with annual maintenance fees, and a three year lease ...

A recent survey of 50 of the UK’s biggest firms conducted by the BBC, has reported that 24 have no plans to have staff return to their offices. Many workers do not feel compelled to return to the ...

Predicting the future is full of potential pitfalls, but analysts still insist on trying to do it, even when a study of the evidence illustrates how wild some forecasts have proven to be. But back ...

It’s the time of year when many IT leaders will be setting budgets for 2021 and trying to persuade their boardroom why they should have more money to invest in technology. After the year we’ve all ...

Digital overload from video collaboration The pandemic has created a surge of both personal and professional video conferencing. Zoom has seen use of its platform skyrocket as a result of the ...

Uncertainty is the new certainty. As lockdowns ease across Europe, IT leaders are surveying the wreckage of their carefully planned pre-pandemic strategies. Nothing is what it was – according to ...

“I’ve never been more productive!” With so many people getting their first experience of working from home, it's a sentiment that we're hearing more than ever. The speaker often credits the ability ...

Two months into lockdown, Gartner is forecasting an 8% decline in global IT spending in 2020 – a figure that would be seen as catastrophic in any other year. But considering that some economies are ...

There’s a new UK government, one with a comfortable majority, and it’s clear it wants to use that advantage for radical change. The new prime minister says the government has “a mission to ...

Every year when Computer Weekly announces its UKtech50 list of the most influential people in UK technology, it’s an opportunity to look at what the names that feature tell us about the latest ...

This is a guest blog post by Tom Dailey, chief international legal, policy and regulatory officer at Verizon The regulatory and policy landscape is a really important topic for all businesses given ...

Amid the repetition of mendacious claims, meaningless mantras and fake news, some Brexit questions are off limits. No wants publicity for answers which reveal what is feallt at stake and for whom.

BT’s new chief executive, Philip Jansen, is to revise Openreach’s targets for its full-fibre broadband network roll-out upwards when he reveals BT’s full-year financial results on Thursday 9 May, ...

“Nothing changes, on New Year’s Day,” sang U2 many years ago. This piece of self-evident wisdom doesn’t stop the world of tech punditry from excitedly making hyperbolic forecasts at the start of ...

Google Chrome Enterprise. What is it and how might it affect your digital workplace strategy? Take control now and don't loosen your grip.

Gone, or so it seems, are the days when Computer Weekly laments after every Budget statement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer that tech has been overlooked. There is little doubt that ...

A large and toxic cloud has hung over NHS IT since the failure of the £12bn National Programme that saw billions wasted on systems that barely worked. Since then, we’ve seen the collapse of ...

There is an impending storm heading towards corporate IT, and the outlook doesn’t look sunny for cash-strapped, time-constrained IT departments. Just like in 1999 with Y2K, there is an absolute ...

I met Mike Bracken, the first leader of the Government Digital Service (GDS), in 2011, not long after he had started the job, for an off-the-record briefing about his ambitious plans to overhaul IT ...

It’s all too easy to conflate the kind of AI being hyped in the industry at the moment with the science fiction notion of machine sentience. We are still a long way from the latter, though, whether ...

Every year, Computer Weekly conducts a large-scale survey of our readers to find out their IT spending priorities for the year ahead – it’s always an interesting take on what’s happening in IT ...

Complete this sentence to win a prize for your technology insight: “2018 will be the year of…” Rather like the missing word round in Have I Got News For You, the answers will range from the obvious ...

Congratulations to everyone on Computer Weekly’s 2017 list of the most influential people in UK IT – our task of choosing 50 people becomes harder every year. It’s clear from analysing this year’s ...

It would be churlish not to applaud the government’s pre-Budget commitments to the tech sector – an increase in funding to support tech startups and expanding visa availability for bringing in top ...

The government’s digital minister, Matt Hancock, is a busy and enthusiastic advocate for the UK’s digital economy. In the past month alone, he’s given five speeches, published an independent review ...

The general election has passed by, new ministers are in place, and so the Government Digital Service (GDS) is coming back out of its shell. As it embarks on a new parliamentary cycle, GDS is a ...

I feel a little sorry for Caroline Nokes, announced this week as the latest minister responsible for digital government - the third to take on that mantle in less than a year. She’s clearly a ...

In one throwaway line, largely ignored among the wider Brexit comments in his Mansion House speech today (20 June 2017), chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond exposed the true scale of the ...

Amid all the chaos, recriminations and excitement on the morning after the General Election, the future of digital government is far from the minds of anyone other than those of us with a personal ...

You would expect, of course, that a publication such as Computer Weekly would call on whoever wins the 2017 general election to put the digital economy on its list of immediate priorities. While ...

It’s easy to read too much into any party election manifesto, but the Conservatives’ plans – should they win the election, as the polls suggest they will – offer plenty of scope for speculation ...

A new survey by Gartner has found that CEOs in the Asia-Pacific region believe that “conventional technologies” such as cloud, ERP, analytics and CRM will help them to improve productivity, rather ...

Like it or not, necessary or not, we have another General Election, and while nobody will decide their vote based on a party’s digital policies, the imminent poll will raise important questions ...

Prior to this week’s publication of the latest National Audit Office (NAO) report on the Government Digital Service (GDS), rumour had it the Whitehall watchdog had pulled back from serious ...

The very best thing about the government digital strategy is that it exists. The areas covered by the strategy are vitally important for the UK’s economic future – not only for our digital economy ...

The long wait for the new government digital strategy may have caused frustration in some places, but clearly within the Cabinet Office the extensive delays have brought expectations to a peak of ...

Computer Weekly’s UKtech50 list of the most influential people in UK IT provides a fascinating insight into the big issues affecting the tech community, as we watch how the leaders who make the ...

Contrary to popular belief, the Computer Weekly team are an awfully discerning bunch when deciding who to interview, with relatively few of the IT industry’s waifs and strays making the cut. One ...

Quocirca is a research and analysis company with a primary focus on the European market. Quocirca produces free to market content aimed at IT decision makers and those that influence them in ...

After another summer of turmoil at the Government Digital Service (GDS), with several senior executives leaving and a new chief brought in to the surprise of many, expectations for its new strategy ...

Computer Weekly’s first opportunity to meet with Kevin Cunnington, the new director general of the Government Digital Service (GDS) answered a lot of questions – but raised plenty too. It’s ...

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is an uncertain place at the moment – or so the rumour mill says. The team are carrying on with their pre-existing strategy – one that was written last year to ...

Followers of the ups and downs of the Government Digital Service (GDS) will be aware of the question marks surrounding the future of the organisation and the Whitehall in-fighting over its role. ...

IBM recently held its customer event, Edge, is Las Vegas. Although totally new announcements were a little thin on the ground, there were various items that are newsworthy. Starting with the old. ...

So, the first phase of changing the Government Digital Service (GDS) is underway, and it’s clear there is a lot more to come. The Cabinet Office pitched the latest news as minister Ben Gummer’s ...

A guest blog by Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM If there’s one thing that the technology industry has learned from the recent EU referendum, it’s to plan for the unexpected. However, despite the time ...

The Cabinet Office and its latest recruit – new Government Digital Service (GDS) chief Kevin Cunnington – are adamant that GDS will not be broken up. Cunnington told us so in his first blog post of ...

The reality of what Brexit means is starting to sink in: no one knows for certain what will happen. Six weeks after the UK voted to leave the EU, the weak pound is already causing IT costs to rise ...

No matter what happens next for the Government Digital Service (GDS), you can assume three things will be true: 1 - The Cabinet Office will make an announcement full of praise for GDS and express ...

The priorities for Digital Policy will change under the new government - but not because of Brexit which means what we want it to mean - provided we help ministers to achieve what we really want, ...

The IT industry, from trade associations to professional bodies, needs to decide what it wants from the Brexit negotiations and work together to achieve it. Business as usual, acquiescing in failed ...

The question is not "What will be the effect of Brexit on the ICT industry?". It is "what do you want the impact of Brexit?" to be. Juncker’s call for “immediate clarity” as to what the UK wants ...

Nobody today has the faintest idea what our government is going to look like or how it will work in a post-Brexit world. We are at least two years, possibly more, away from a settled policy ...

The effect of Brexit will depend partly on how well we exploit the opportunities offered, including to help bring about reform of the European Union after an amicable separation as opposed to a ...

One of the questions most commonly asked of technology journalists is, “What’s the next big thing in tech?” It’s easy enough to answer – at the moment, you would point to emerging trends such as ...

The Computer Weekly editorial team give their take on the latest technology news.

Ransomware is designed to be scare you into parting with money to avoid losing your data; there is no reason that either should happen. Traditional anti-virus and cloud storage services such as ...

Organisations looking to benefit from the IoT opportunity need to think a bit differently about what they are doing

It is often the case that what should be a simple case of agreeing what was said turns into a nasty argument due to a lack of real proof of what was communicated. A surprisingly easy means of ...

The use of public cloud services is not just a risk that needs to be managed but can also do a lot a reduce an organisation's overall IT risk

The lack of flexibility of existing data centres is beginning to consign them to the heap of modern dinosaurs. Just what can be done as an owned data centre facility has to continually morph and ...

The mainframe is dead. Except it isn't - it still runs mission critical workloads the world over, and you will touch a mainframe application pretty much every day. A new approach of running ...

Embracing the digital workplaceAn information managed service (IMS) is emerging as a key approach to enable digital transformation. Such providers are building on their traditional print heritage ...

There are more and more bots crawling over our IT systems and more and more ways to control what they can do,

I want to consign a couple of current technology terms to Room 101. Can I do this in a novel way while carrying out a major change?

The ability to use big data analytics to identify anomalies in BGP routing behaviour, will also allow infrastructure operators to monetise the user traffic behaviour they log, but seldom use.

Keeping meeting room technology under control and working effectively is increasingly a complex IT task

Quocirca research shows many UK organisations are moving forward with Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. Should they be turning to cloud service providers for the necessary resources?

Trade agreements between the US and EU may level the playing field for the many businesses that trade on both sides of the Atlantic, but the EU will still have different rules regarding data protection

simple technology appliances that can remove some of the everyday pain from work should be applicable pretty much anywhere

Over the last 20 years Blue Coat has grown from a niche player in the network performance to stand alongside the giants of IT security. This has mainly been achieved through a long series of ...

The concept of a 'datacentre' is changing - it is now time to move away from any thoughts of a single facility, and plan for a more nuanced IT platform.

Cloud enthusiastic digital natives are now gaining business management positions, whilst shadow IT is becoming an accepted norm. The choice IT departments face is no longer whether or not to adopt ...

A business should not be interested in technology for technology's sake. It is dependent on the information that it needs to make decisions and that create revenue. Securing this information as ...

Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) aims to address by concatenating all the network access channels and managing them as a single virtual channel for any kind of WAN traffic.

Network related activities are the fastest growing part of Intel's business, and will continue to lead in the 2016-2020 timeframe.

...after dominating the PC space since 1981 Intel is facing the decline of the 'fat desktop' and shifting its attention to focus on cloud services.

Many European businesses now see targeted cyber-attacks as an inevitability that must be managed. New Quocirca research looks at the experiences of 600 European enterprises over the last 12 months ...

Neustar, a supplier of real time online information services, is re-thinking its priorities as it has had to re-align its business in the USA. The growth of the internet of things should see its ...

Plastic cards have long been the payment instrument of choice, but perhaps these are not the final devices we should be looking for, and we should move along to something new?

Containerisation is proving to be a popular and effective way of deploying apps, especially in a DevOps environment. This poses new security challenges, but also new security solutions.

Security posture must be accompanied by ready-laid plans for disaster recovery and re-establishing customer trust.

Using social identities to login into other services can make our online lives more convenient and secure. However, there must be choice and backend identity management must evolve the support the ...

Printer vendors are having to make major changes to their business models to sustain their leadership and relevance. Long term survival will depend on their ability to adapt to market disruption ...

Data is nothing without context. Only through adding enough context for analysis to be valuable does data move through to information, then to knowledge and on to the wisdom required to create the ...

With all the current hype about the IoT, mobility and interconnected everything, something important risks being missed. It is not simply about the connection, but the purpose - that is the message.

...the first thing all mobile apps need to do is sell themselves, otherwise all that development effort runs the risk of being abandoned very quickly

..user experience is significant as it impacts directly on the ability of an individual to do their job as effectively and efficiently as possible

Dell made some announcements at its recent DellWorld event - but could not go into any great detail on its proposed acquisition of EMC. What can be read into what was announced?

With highly connected businesses and their supply chains increasingly becoming digital, messages are sent automatically as instructions and alerts, which have important consequences if not ...

Quocirca believes that the future for VMware will be a high growth one. Dell's future is somewhat less apparent.

Is capacity planning just a nice to have tool, or is now something that is an imperative in dealing with the dynamic nature of modern workloads and distributed platforms? Quocirca took part in a ...

Amidst a rapidly evolving threat landscape, where malware and exploits continue to proliferate, endpoint security often fails to adequately protect networked printer and multifunction printer (MFP) ...

it would be great to see more vendors thinking along radical lines every once in a while

Is the rise of the robots something to fear - or something to welcome? Through rose-tinted spectacles, the increased use of robots could free up time for us all to be better people - and for the UK ...

Adoption is critical; get people engaged, find out preferences before even investing in any tools

The circular economy is fast gaining ground as the latest buzzword in sustainability, bringing together emerging practices such as collaborative consumption and traditional concepts such as ...

Intel is having to face up to a world where simply having faster processors is no longer enough. This year's IDF gave some pointers to where Intel believes its future lies.

the IoT has many practical tactical benefits by holding a digital mirror up to the real world

IT service continuity (also known as high availability) has been seen for a long time as too expensive for general adoption. However, virtualisation, cloud computing and containers may be bringing ...