Microsoft has announced that it's giving its flagship Office suite a makeover designed to deliver a balance of 'power and simplicity'.

The updates apply to Office.com and Office 365 and will be rolled out over the next few months, the company says it will 'test and learn' as it goes -- those of a cynical mind might see that as code for letting users find the bugs.

Continue reading →

Traditional Hadoop-style big data is giving way to cloud and container solutions like Docker, according to the results of a new survey.

The State of Data Science survey, carried out by Python data science platform Anaconda, among over 4,000 of its users, shows that Docker now makes up 19 percent of data science platforms, beating Hadoop/Spark with 15 percent and Kubernetes at 5.8 percent.

Continue reading →

The rise of fake news has affected many people's faith in the internet as a reliable source. In order to help with the problem, Adblock Plus maker eyeo is launching a new browser extension called Trusted News.

Available free for Chrome browsers, the extension works by checking domains, websites, and news sources against the world's largest network of fact-checking databases.

Continue reading →

As part of London Tech Week, 1,600 new jobs and billions of pounds of investment into the UK economy have been announced at an event hosted by Prime Minister Theresa May in Downing Street.

Private sector funding comes from companies including Salesforce, which is investing £1.9bn in the UK over the next five years, this will include the opening of its second UK data center in 2019.

Continue reading →

Although a large majority of parents (95 percent) say they’re concerned about the risks online gaming poses, they admit to allowing games to entertain their offspring.

A new study by McAfee finds 92 percent of parents allow their children to play at least one hour of video games every day, with eight percent admitting that they allow their children to play more than five hours a day. On average, children play video games for 2.13 hours a day or nearly 15 hours a week.

Continue reading →

According to a new report, 74 percent of respondents believe DevOps enablement capabilities are essential, very important, or important for their organization. Yet only 33 percent believe their organization has the ability to deliver those capabilities.

This is according to research carried out by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by digital business specialist Embotics, which analyzed the results of a survey of more than 600 individuals responsible for cloud management at organizations with an average budget of $147 million for managing hybrid cloud operations.

Continue reading →

Historically, infrastructure systems and operational technology (OT) were designed to work in isolation from IT. But in the modern world these environments are increasingly converged and that can open up new attack routes.

Cyber exposure specialist Tenable is launching a new solution to manage Cyber Exposure holistically across IT and OT systems. This is based on enhancements to the Tenable.io platform and Industrial Security, an asset discovery and vulnerability detection solution for OT systems, delivered in partnership with Siemens.

Continue reading →

New research commissioned by cloud-native analytics platform Sumo Logic from 451 Research, reveals that the degree to which non-IT roles and functions are using machine data analytics for business value is growing faster than anticipated.

The findings show the more software-centric a company is, the more likely it is to have 100+ people who use machine data analytics at least once a week, indicating that these companies are recognizing the value of machine data analytics.

Continue reading →

A new study shows that 87 percent of IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) limit their use of the cloud because of the complexity of managing regulatory compliance.

According to the research by WinMagic, which spoke to ITDMs in Germany, India, the UK and US, 24 percent say this means they only work with a single cloud vendor in their infrastructure, rather than exploit the benefits of a multi-cloud environment.

Continue reading →

As the world increasingly turns to mobile devices to access the internet and conduct business, so firms are eager to put out their own apps.

But new research from security ratings company BitSight reveals that many companies may be rushing out apps that have vulnerabilities which could lead to data leakage, privilege abuse, unencrypted personally identifiable information (PII), and credential theft.

Continue reading →

Currency miners continue to top the malware charts according to Check Point Software's latest Global Threat Index.

May 2018 marks the fifth consecutive month where cryptomining malware has dominated Check Point's index. The Coinhive cryptominer impacted 22 percent of organizations globally during May -- up from 16 percent in April, an increase of nearly 50 percent.

Continue reading →

Using one of four common attack vectors, 71 percent of surveyed IT professionals believe they could successfully hack any organization.

Based on a survey carried out among attendees to the RSA Conference in April 2018 by vulnerability management specialist Outpost24, 34 percent say that they would use social engineering, 23 percent say they would enter via insecure web applications, 21 percent via mobile devices, while a further 21 percent say they would enter via a public cloud.

Continue reading →

As more systems move to the cloud, companies often struggle with factors like costs and incident response due to a lack of visibility.

Operations management platform OpsRamp is launching an update to its SaaS platform that delivers greater visibility for multi-cloud environments and features a new Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) inference engine for more powerful alerting and event correlation.

Continue reading →

Cybercriminals are increasingly using the dark web to facilitate cryptocurrency theft on a large scale, according to cybersecurity company Carbon Black.

The company’s research has uncovered a total of $1.1 billion in cryptocurrency-related thefts during the past six months and finds there are currently an estimated 12,000 dark web marketplaces selling approximately 34,000 offerings related to crypto theft.

Continue reading →

As we enter the summer people start to go away on vacations and visit sporting events like this year's World Cup in Russia, potentially exposing their digital devices and data to extra risks.

VPN advice service vpnMentor has produced a report looking at the particular risks travelers face and how they can protect themselves.

Continue reading →