Recent Blog Posts

There’s application components and there’s containerisation and there’s all forms of compartmentalisation designed to separate out ‘discrete’ functions of application design in order to align with ...

We know what APIs are now, so what is API health? Firstly, to recap, an API (Application Programming Interface) forms the communications links and bond between different elements of a software ...

In this contributed blog post, Mark Settle, CIO of Okta, talks about millennials and how they have changed the technology industry. The millennial generation, born between the early 1980s to the ...

Guangzhou-based drone company EHang has broken the world drone display record for the most drones used at an airborne show, but the decidedly indifferent Chinese media preferred to point out the ...

The smartphone sales results are in: Android continues to bite chunks out of Apple in UK and France, while iPhone X is eating Android in the East.  The latest ComTech Smartphone OS Market Share ...

In this guest post, Jack Zubarev, president of application virtualisation software provider Parallels, sets what IT departments can do to get the most out of their virtual desktop deployments. The ...

TSB's IT project will go under the microscope as the company attempts to get to the bottom of what went wrong after massive problems.

A new study by Seagate has revealed that APAC organisations are warming up to artificial intelligence (AI), but a significant number have not invested in the data and technical solutions required ...

The action (or practice) of customer service itself is not immune from the juggernaut effect of so-called digital transformation, which, in real terms, we can take to mean the migration of all ...

As all self-respecting geeks will know, it's important to bow to your sensei. But how do we train for Artificial Intelligence (AI) competency? Arboreally named AI company Bonsai from Berkeley, CA ...

When MPs ask TSB what went wrong when it embarked on a core banking system migration they should look at how IT is managed

Enterprise applications company IFS staged its annual user and customer conference this week in Atlanta, Georgia. As one of the technology industry's TLA (three letter acronym) named firms (and ...

Forget large-scale, forget enterprise-scale and forget web-scale says transactional database company YugaByte – now is the age of planet-scale cloud applications. Is this grandiose showboating ...

IFS used its annual IFS World Conference user and customer event this year to launch product updates to its SaaS-based fleet and line planning solutions for the commercial aviation industry. While ...

Banks will increasingly rely on suppliers to help them out when IT disasters strike because they simply don't have enough in-house IT experts after years of cuts.

In this guest post, Pavan Belagatti, a DevOps influencer working at automation software provider Shippable, shares his top five tips for securing senior management buy-in for your team’s agile ...

Is the use of Agile and Devops partly to blame fir the increasing number of IT failures at banks on recent years and is there anther way?

For some time, my office PC had suffered from multimedia niggles. Some were relatively minor, such as Facebook and Twitter videos failing to play, but others were more problematic. For example, ...

Banks are taking their brand names off the high street and might increasingly do so for services they offer to ecommerce companies

The "scandal" concerning the "Windrush Generation" appears to be collateral damage from the failure to agree coherent policies for sharing public sector identities and personal information after ...

Where will the next Silicon Valley developer hub spring up? The Saudis and the Emiratis are hoping that their (respective) year-2020 and -2030 'vision' programmes will help develop the next ...

One of machine learning’s most well-known use cases is fraud detection, an area that has drawn the attention of a growing number of technology suppliers looking to develop the best algorithms and ...

Kanye West’s recent Twitter meltdown, in which he professed his love for Donald Trump, has seen many fans turn on him, but our interest lies more with his denunciation of Microsoft Excel. The ...

Innovation and innovative people are spread evenly around the globe. But there is more of an uneven challenge to bring products and services successfully to market. Many times this is due to a lack ...

If customers don't want to suffer glitches in their banking service they should ask about complexities of a bank's IT systems before selecting where to out their money

The only real surprise about TSB’s IT disaster this week is that people are still surprised when a retail bank has IT problems. There are few organisations with a more complex and difficult ...

TIBCO extends its open source credentials this month with commercial support and services for Apache Kafka as part of the firm’s branded Messaging product line. Apache Kafka is a distributed open ...

French object storage specialist Scality recently raised $60m of funding, but what will that money go towards? The company – most well-known for its RING object storage product – is in the middle ...

More details of RBS's digital bank revealed

Human error to blame for problems at Ulster bank but a computer was involved

Low-code business process company Appian has detailed its current updates and future road ahead as part of its annual Appian World user and customer conference. Essential a mostly graphical visual ...

Low-code software application development company Appian held its annual user conference and exhibition this week in Will Smith’s favourite holiday hangout, Miami Beach Florida. Appian founder ...

Low-code software application development company Appian holds its annual user conference and exhibition this week in Will Smith's favourite holiday hangout, Miami Beach Florida. First to the table ...

TSB customers have experiienced serious proiblems as the bank migrates to its new core banking platform

The House of Lords report on AI and UK economy and society came out this week, with the guardedly bullish title: “AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?” The question mark is moot. I think a strong ...

It’s a truism that IT essentially reinvents itself every decade or so. In some ways this can be rightly seen as a cynical way to repackage the same old tosh and sell it again to confused.com IT ...

One thing that is also clearly understood is that, even with an outsourced, “in the Ether” service, such as a public/private cloud, the EMEA market – with its geo-cultural fragmentation – is a very ...

The Windrush scandal has revealed many disturbing things about government policy that have nothing to do with IT. But the issues raised amply demonstrate the importance of technology considerations ...

Cloud communications software company Twilio has announced Twilio Programmable Wireless. This is programmable cellular communications software that offers APIs to power web-connected Internet of ...

Timed to coincide with the RSA security conference, Microsoft has announced Azure Sphere, a new solution for creating highly-secured, Internet-connected microcontroller devices. But there's a bit ...

At Huawei’s annual analyst summit in Shenzhen this week, the Chinese technology giant unveiled its predictions about what the future holds from a technology perspective in its Global Industry ...

A decade ago storage journalists were quite keen on a new technology around at the time. That was MAID – Massive Array of Idle Disks – which were basically disk-based backup target devices with ...

What the cloud computing industry needs is an increasing number of platforms, right? Okay perhaps not, platform plays are already many and multifarious in their nature and the formally defined ...

Fintech is being deployed by traditional banks as they fight to reduce their cost bases as challengers win customers at a lower cost

Cloud security firm Qualys, like every vendor today, is pushing the automation mantra. The company’s Web Application Scanning (WAS) 6.0 now supports Swagger version 2.0 to allow developers to ...

Consumers are set to become much more aware of the privacy settings on the websites they use

Hive Connected Home products are great and the support is outstanding, but they will crash... or at least ours did and here's what we hope is an interesting analysis in terms of trying to work out ...

Developers need to know more about workflow automation, it appears. As analyst ‘thumb in the air’ pontificating predictions have ‘suggested’, the workflow automation market is expected to reach ...

Pishing is when you get fed plenty of booze and then start mouthing-off, reveal a few secrets, passwords and PIN

The farming industry is arguably one of the last frontiers in digital transformation efforts, but not so in Australia, which has one of the biggest agriculture sectors in the world. Since 2013, ...

The British Army marches on its stomach, fights for king, queen, god and country, upholds itself as a bastion of exemplary standards and is never afraid to say ‘stop it, that’s silly’ if things get ...

Tim Berners-Lee is rightly famous as the originator of HTTP, a fundamental of the World Wide Web as we know it. But according to some, HTTP is old hat. It has helped create a web full of dead ...

Red Hat changes its tagline from time to time, but this year the firm appears to happy being labelled as 'the world's leading provider of open source solutions' -- perhaps, with Microsoft and so ...

It’s the week of the 2018 London Book Fair at Olympia, and the worrying news has reached Downtime that our jobs are indeed under threat from the rise of the robots, with the publication of the ...

As cybercrime becomes ever more widespread and the actors involved diversify, targeted organisations must become more sophisticated and timely in their ability to detect and respond.

In this guest post, Craig Stewart, vice president of product management at cloud integration provider SnapLogic, spells out why the more traditional transport operators need to take a leaf out of ...

What will happen to London's high streets when robots replace the people that buy all the flat whites?

There’s DevOps and there’s DevSecOps -- heck, come to think of it there’s even DevLoBDOps (Developer Line of Business Database Operations). Of all the DevOps subsets, Microsoft SQL Server tools ...

This is a guest blogpost by Jim Conning, Managing Director of Royal Mail Data Services (RMDS). The forthcoming 25 May implementation date for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is ...

Social media platforms will face increasingly stringent regulations which might limit their scope as governments clamp down on data abuse

Google has attempted to shine a light on Application Performance Management (APM) technologies built in what the company calls ‘a developer-first mindset’ to monitor and tune the performance of ...

On April 6th at the launch of the Apprenticeships Anthology Sir Gerry Berragan, the Chief Executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships outlined progress over the past year and updated his 10 ...

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 ...

HTC has been forced to apologise and remove an advert starring Olympic diver Tom Daley, which wrongly suggests its HTC U11 device can be submerged any deeper than one metre. Smartphones are ...

Asset tracking is arguably the lowest-hanging use case that enterprises can consider in testing the potential of the internet of things (IoT). From airport operators to mining companies, the use of ...

This is a guest blogpost by Neo4j’s CEO Emil Eifrem, in which he says graph databases are about to grow up Graph technology has come a long way: from financial fraud detection in the Panama and ...

Open source at its heart and essentially a web server technology, Nginx (pronounced: engine X) is the company that would like to have its name capitalised in the media but can’t, because it’s not ...

Personal data in all its forms is becoming a valuable commodity for businesses, but people will be more cautious as legal and illegal abuse of data continues to hit the headlines

In this guest post, Allan Brearley, cloud practice lead at IT services consultancy ECS, takes a look at what enterprises need to bear in mind before they take the plunge on multi-cloud. There’s no ...

There is no shortage of talent, only of employers who train that talent. Thirty years ago it took around 18 months turn a University Graduate into a competent analyst programmer. During that second ...

This is a short but punchy guest post written for the Computer Weekly Developer Network by Mike Kail in his capacity as CTO of Cybric. Described as a continuous application security platform, ...

Microsoft makes Windows, but Microsoft isn’t really as focused on Windows these days as it is on its Azure cloud platform and new extensions that emanate into the world of Artificial Intelligence ...

In this guest blog post Andrew Gardner, senior divisional director at Reed Technology, discusses what technology talent the UK will need in a digital age.  Although we’re only a few months into ...

Cloud computing is great news, apart from one thing. The option to now build complex heterogeneous cloud environments gives us a massively expanded choice of deployment options to bring ...

Microsoft loves Linux, yeah okay we know that bit. Microsoft loves Linux, because it wants to create a wider transept of interoperability with its core stack, initially perhaps via its well-known ...

In this guest post, Steve Lowe, CTO of student accommodation finder Student.com, weighs up the risks and benefits of relying on machines to carry out Ops jobs within cloud infrastructures. The “if ...

We appear to be learning, on a daily basis, that you don’t just ‘throw applications over the wall’ to into deployment, into the hands of operations. Yes, we’d had the DevOps ‘revolution’ (spoiler ...

An internet connection is as important as food and water to the displaced

There’s a drive towards hybrid cloud evident at the moment. From hyper-converged products that offer cloud capability to single namespace file and object systems that allow seamless working between ...

Energy smart meters will increasingly be targets for cyber attacks

It would take someone over five million years to watch the amount of video carried across IP networks each month in 2021 – that’s how much video content we’ll be consuming over the next few years. ...

Software application development professionals often have to fix problems with software code - source code in particular; it’s a simple fact of life. Much is made of the balance between Agile rapid ...

Customers are being caught in the crossfire of the Battle of the Cost Bases being fought by banks on the streets of the UK

Fintech professional predicts that tech forms carrying news will need government approval over next few years to fight against fake news

When you want cloud, you just turn it on (or off), right? That’s the beauty of the eminently controllable datacentre-driven services-centric cloud computing model of application processing and ...

In this contributed blog post Maria McKavanagh, COO of Verv  discusses unconscious bias in the technology industry and how we can tackle this issue faced by women every day.  While we are seeing a ...

The position of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has become well established in recent years, but where is it heading next? For many it is often perceived as an inward directed role more ...

The story of how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data collected by an Academic intermediary to supposedly help Remain "steal" the UK referendum campaign and Trump "steal" the US Presidential ...

Quocirca’s Global Print 2025 report reveals that print manufacturers are set to lose their influence on customer relationships in favour of IT service providers that deliver print services as part ...

In this guest post, Susan Bowen, vice president and general manager at managed service provider Cogeco Peer 1, takes a look at the history of cloud computing, and where enterprises are going with ...

The growing use of artificial intelligence and big data has put a strain on hyperscale datacentres, particularly traditional, standardised storage infrastructure that has been unable to adapt to ...

I am fond of my Amazon Echo smart speaker (other brands are available). Some would say perhaps too fond. I am wont to ask, “Alexa, do I look good today?” and ‘she’ sometimes says I look great, ...

Channel 4’s hidden-camera exposé on data firm Cambridge Analytica has made familiar faces of the puppeteers of democracy who wished to remain invisible, but we’re glad to meet them. Not since the ...

There are many magic rings in this world Frodo, just as there are many job titles spanning the ever-growing realm of software application development, programming and all related disciplines that ...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its entry to the graph database market at its AWS reINVENT conference in Seattle in November last year. It was a notable announcement for a couple of reasons: it ...

Apple and IBM have been working together for a few years. Thought to be an unlikely couple by some, the two firms established a partnership in 2014 to work on integration projects. Fast forward to ...

Director at IBM Research Arvind Krishna opened IBM’s Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas this week by introducing the firm’s ‘5 in 5’ presentation. Delivered as an almost TED Talk style opener, this ...

The technology industry is still relatively young, and certainly has a lot more growth to come. But it’s old enough now for us to see the repeating trends that make regulatory and legal ...

Fintech is coming of age and faces all the challenges that growing up entails

In this guest post, Thibaut Ceyrolle, vice president for Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) at data warehousing startup Snowflake Computing, makes the business case for using cloud to boost ...