• Privileged credentials for accessing an airport’s security system were recently for sale on the Dark Web for just $10, according to McAfee.
• 18% of healthcare employees are willing to sell confidential data to unauthorized parties for as little as $500 to $1,000, and 24% of employees know of someone who has sold privileged credentials to outsiders, according to a recent Accenture survey.
• Apple employees in Ireland have been offered as much as €20,000 ($22,878) in exchange for their privilege access credentials in 2016, according to 

Every industry is moving towards a hybrid cloud world – with retail, advertising and marketing making the biggest push.

That’s the key finding from a new report by container and cloud technology provider Mesosphere. The study, which focused its responses on more than 700 Mesosphere users, found that almost two thirds (64%) of retail and eCommerce respondents polled said they had hybrid environments.

Opinion We hear the term ‘the year of the cloud’ many times. I profess that it is ‘the decade of the cloud’ – and what’s more, we haven’t even really started yet.

Having been in the cloud industry for more than 12 years, and had a wealth of opportunity to engage with business across vertical sectors – from small local businesses to global enterprises and across geographic regions...

France is looking to follow in Sweden’s footsteps – by cutting tax rates for data centres’ electricity usage.

As first reported by Datacenter Dynamics, French prime minster Edouard Philippe, speaking at the headquarters of Dassault Systemes, revealed plans to cut TICFE (taxe intérieure sur la consommation finale d'électricité) from €22.5/MWh to...

Cloud cost optimisation and management continues to be a hot area – and Flexera’s acquisition of RightScale, announced last week, plays into that theme even further.

RightScale may be well known for its authoritative yearly State of the Cloud...

The use of the cloud is now mainstream and, despite some concerns, it is generally accepted that the public cloud is not inherently insecure. In fact, in many cases it is more secure than most data centres.

This can be explained when we consider how many opportunities there are for a piece of sensitive information that...

Consumers are using technology to their advantage. With it, they are less tolerant, less loyal and more promiscuous. They have learned how to exercise control over brands.

In this kind of environment, it’s important to remember that the success of any customer-facing organisation depends on the experience they deliver. Consumers want meaningful, timely, and personalised engagements, and to gain this, businesses need a...

A relatively small group of savvy executives have strategies in place to harness new business process automation technologies and thereby advance their digital transformation agenda. Meanwhile, a much larger group is closely following the market leaders, to explore their lessons-learned from pilot projects.

According to the latest worldwide market study by 451 Research, new survey results suggest most organisations are adopting or considering artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) due to...

When emerging technologies, such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things converge, a ‘gestalt shift’ will occur, according to a new book. “The character of the experience will drastically change,” write Mark van Rijmenam and Dr. Philippa Ryan in Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World. “All of a sudden, we can see the world through a different, more technologically advanced, lens and this opens up a completely new...

Multi-cloud initiatives continue to be of great importance to European organisations – and those who aren’t heeding the warning signs today will feel the pinch in five years’ time.

That’s according to a new study from research firm Foresight Factory, alongside application network technology provider F5 Networks. The study, titled ‘The Future of Multi-Cloud’, drew on contributions from...

Mission-critical database applications are often the most complex use case in the public cloud for a variety of reasons. They need to keep running 24x7 under all possible failure scenarios. As a result, they require full redundancy, which involves provisioning standby server instances and continuously replicating the data. Configurations that work well in a private cloud may not be possible in the public cloud. And providing high availability can incur considerably...

More and more enterprise data is being transferred to the cloud, but sometimes the journey can break the network's back - which calls for less virtual and more physical solutions.

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Data Box, a physical box which organisations can order, fill up, and then return to Redmond for it to be uploaded to an Azure environment. 

Companies and users can store up to 100 TB per standard box, with variables either way. The newly announced Data Box Heavy can...

If you run workloads in Kubernetes, you know how much important data is accessible through the Kubernetes API—from details of deployments to persistent storage configurations to secrets. The Kubernetes community has delivered a number of impactful security features in 2017 and 2018, including Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for the Kubernetes API.

RBAC is a key security feature that protects your cluster by allowing you to control who can access specific API resources. Because the feature is relatively...

Many business leaders have a much better understanding of blockchain technology than just a couple of years ago. There's been a surge in R&D, both internally and in partnership with third parties, and a recognition that blockchain has the potential to be deployed in a variety of commercial use cases.

As the number of blockchain research projects increased, awareness among the pilot participants and elsewhere in their industries gained momentum. Now other companies are beginning to consider whether...

Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming ubiquitous. It is estimated that enterprises currently use 16 SaaS applications on average, yet one in seven of these businesses also believe that more than 80% of their applications will be SaaS-based by 2020.

This would seem an especially accurate assessment too by enterprises, as the current market for SaaS products and services is worth £54 billion, yet it is expected to

A couple of partnerships involving Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Accenture and Capgemini have been unveiled, around healthcare and enterprise migrations respectively.

The first partnership, announced with Accenture and Merck, aims to launch a cloud-based informatics research platform which is designed to help life sciences organisations in the early stages of drug development.

The platform will enable healthcare professionals to analyse and aggregate data from multiple applications and a single set of...

• By 2020, more than 20 million job seekers will look for automated advice on how to improve their ranking in job-matching algorithms according to Gartner.
• More than 50% of large enterprises based in North America and Western Europe will include diversity and inclusion enablement criteria in their HCM technology selection processes by 2020.
• By 2022, nearly 80% of organisational skills will have to be reprioritised or revisited due to digital business...

Intel has noted a $200 billion addressable opportunity for the 'data-centric' economy combining cloud, AI and edge - and the latter has come into force following a new partnership with Alibaba.

The collaboration, revealed at Alibaba's Computing Conference in Hangzhou, will see the two companies launch a joint edge computing platform.

The primary use case is for industrial manufacturing and smart buildings, integrating Intel's hardware, software and AI with Alibaba Cloud's IoT products....

Today we work in a world that is increasingly connected, convenient and cloud-based. This comes with a world of benefits not just for enterprises, but also for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs).

It’s now easier than ever to share documents in the cloud, video-conference with colleagues across the world and compile resources so that global teams can quickly access them from shared storage. The downfall,...

Google has rolled out a series of cloudy updates in time for its Cloud Next Tokyo event - around container security, in-memory data, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Container Registry vulnerability scanning, launched in beta, looks to prevent the deployment of vulnerable images by automatically detecting known security vulnerabilities during the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) processes.

Regular readers of this publication will certainly be aware of the importance of security in containerisation and DevOps....