Insight

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated years of change in just eight months, particularly in the way companies across the globe conduct business. Specifically, it has driven an unprecedented number of people online, to shop and perform numerous transactions which they can no longer do in person - and companies and industries, including retail, have responded in turn. There is no doubt retail has been one of the sectors most disrupted by the pandemic. As the...

The pandemic’s effect on our relationship with technology is a profound one. Lockdown ushered in a sudden and wide-spread adoption of remote working, and the uncertainty brought with it a slew of opportunist cybercriminals. The result of this rapid rate of change highlighted that the UK’s already glaring tech skills gap has been stretched to the extreme. Currently, nine in 10 (88%) organisations admit they have a significant shortage of digital skills which is negatively...

It may have had a negative impact on the UK economy, but COVID-19 doesn’t appear to have dampened enthusiasm for Christmas shopping. More than 70 percent of consumers intend to spend at least as much on presents this year as they have in the past. But, while this may be good news for embattled retailers, it’s even better news for opportunistic cybercriminals. With lockdown measures forcing consumers online, ecommerce has never been so popular -...

The global race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on. The European Commission (EC) has developed an ambitious AI strategy and its implementation will require member states to join forces. Yet in the face of a pandemic, fractures among states have appeared to only be widening. What is at stake for Europe and how could it achieve a pole position?  What is at stake? While the international community hasn’t yet agreed a universal definition of the...

Booking.com and Expedia recently made the headlines – and not because of the hotel deals they were offering as people eased out of lockdown.  Instead, it had been discovered that one of their software providers had not stored sensitive data correctly, running the risk that the details of millions of hotel customers could have been exposed. Around the same time, Ticketmaster UK was fined £1.25 million following a cyber attack in 2018 which flagged that...

It’s fair to say that we have all been spending less time jumping onto Wi-Fi hotspots at cafes, hotels, airports or company guest networks, over the last sixth months. But as lockdown measures were eased, we saw more people looking for a change of scenery in coffee bars and pubs offering workspaces. Whether at home or out and about, Wi-Fi has become something we have come to rely on for work and pleasure, while mobile operators increasingly use ‘hand-over’ to...

Ransomware attacks are on the up. Due to low execution costs, high rates of return, as well as a low risk of being caught, ransomware has become the preferred method of attack for those operating illegally within the online space. In fact, research highlights a surge in the number of ransomware attacks against businesses. In the UK, for example, there was a 195% increase in reported incidents, which equated to an estimated 6.4m ransomware attacks...

In what now seems like a lifetime ago, in late summer 2019 Gartner first coined the phrase Secure Access Service Edge. Since then, “SASE”, as it is now more commonly referred, has generated the kind of hype the industry hasn’t witnessed since SD-WAN first emerged around 2014. The promise was simple enough: enable enterprises to realise all of the long-held (but never fully realised) benefits of moving applications and workloads to the cloud and maintaining...

Two-factor authentication is ubiquitous and it’s a really valuable tool to protect systems and data assets. But with increasing reliance on home working and remote access in the current pandemic, what mechanism should we choose? It’s very common these days for SMS messages to be used for two-factor authentication – many cloud service providers use this mechanism, government departments have adopted it, and it is also quite common in the banking industry. When shopping online...

The title of this article might seem contradictory, but it is not as conflicting as you might think. Sure, we all know that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prescribes us to protect personal data, wherever it may be. Production, development, testing, QA, training environments – data is stored everywhere. Most people assume that all of this data needs protection at all times, but actually that is not the case. Test data, for example, doesn’t...