This Week's Gurus

Soon to be enacted across the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation – better known as GDPR – has caused no end of concern among CIOs. Although it represents good news for consumers, from a business perspective, things aren’t quite so simple. While the regulation will be helpful in making it easier and more cost effective for cloud providers to offer pan-EU solutions, as well as making customers feel safer in entrusting valuable data...

A recent Software Vulnerability Report revealed that of the 46 products appearing in the list of top 20 products with the most vulnerabilities during August – October in 2016, 11 were security-related products from vendors such as AlienVault, IBM, McAfee, Palo Alto and Splunk. Many of the vulnerabilities in these security products are actually vulnerabilities discovered in open source, or third-party components embedded within them.  This highlights how important it is that software producers understand...

Cybercrime was big business for fraudsters in 2016 with cybercriminals racking up an estimated £1 billion in damages to companies across the UK.  But more than the ever increasing financial and reputational risks affecting the corporate and commercial sectors are the very real possibilities of cybercrime being used to execute large scale terrorist attacks, assassinations and even murders. As programmes like ‘Humans’ and ‘West World’ play out a fictional world of cyborgs turning on mankind,...

Organisations are looking to digitally transform – at pace The drive for agility is fuelling key transformations, including the move to cloud, in IT processes and organisations in the enterprise. Application development teams demand it, which is putting immense pressure on infrastructure teams to deliver. At the same time, the shift to DevOps processes is empowering teams to deploy applications much more quickly, often several times a day; and they’re looking to leverage new architectures...

Every year around this time those in the industry look to predict what will happen in security over the next twelve months. Predictions can be hit and miss, with some failing spectacularly making far-fetched or grandiose statements that never have any chance of becoming reality, although they are funny to look back on. Here I focus on the key trends I believe will grow significantly during 2017. The cybersecurity industry has featured in the news...

With a new year comes new advancements in technology, and 2017 will surely include many impressive innovations. Let’s take a look at some of the tech that’s likely to gain momentum during the coming year. Virtual Reality Although virtual reality was once a concept that was largely only familiar to people who could afford extremely expensive systems, the assortment of virtual reality headsets and associated equipment has become significantly broader. Now, the technology is much...

Tony Evans from Wick Hill (part of the Nuvias Group) highlights the risks of Wi-Fi and provides some advice for delivering a secure hotspot The fact that Wi-Fi stands for Wireless Fidelity hints at how long Wi-Fi has been around, but it was only in 1999 that the Wi-Fi Alliance formed as a trade association to hold the Wi-Fi trademark, under which most products are sold. Today, Wi-Fi is on the top of the list...

Only a few short years ago ‘drones’ were thought to be a phenomenon dreamt up in the latest sci-fi film or the latest military surveillance tech. Who would have thought drones would soon be filling the UK’s skies. Consumers can now expect faster deliveries to their doorstep than ever before, following Amazon’s announcement to be the first public company to authorise trials of autonomous flying drones in the UK. An ingenious idea that will see...

We’re all aware of the benefits of IoT, and how it is set to make tasks quicker and easier. But these intuitively connected cars, fridges and utility devices haven’t really gone mainstream yet, and they won’t until an IoT standard is introduced. That’s because the connected nature of these devices means they all need to be talking to and understanding each other. If manufacturers don’t make their products interoperable with one another, the IoT is...

Adam Vincent, CEO, ThreatConnect With state-sponsored hacking now a mainstay of the global threat landscape and cybercriminals pushing into new, powerful forms of ransomware, 2017 is shaping up to be a challenging year for the security community. Organisations face new, powerful threats and adversaries playing a much longer game against specific victims. The era of so-called “scattergun scams” is gradually evolving into a trend for far more finely-targeted exploits designed to achieve strategic goals, both...