With more and more businesses storing data in the cloud, protecting and controlling it as it travels back and forth has become a major concern.

To address this McAfee is acquiring Skyhigh Networks, one of the pioneers of the cloud access security broker (CASB) model of protection.

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We're used to digital assistants controlling more and more aspects of our daily lives, but a UK police force is looking at how Amazon Echo could help in fighting crime.

Police in Lancashire, north west England, are looking at how Alexa could relay information about missing persons or updates on local crime to citizens. It could also be used in the reporting of minor offenses, freeing up police call centers to deal with more serious issues.

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Barely a week seemed to go by in 2017 without news of a new data breach exposing customer or commercial data.

But just how bad was it? File transfer specialist Ipswitch has put together an infographic looking at the year in breaches.

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In a cautionary tale for the festive season, unorthodox security guru John McAfee claims to have had his Twitter account hacked.

The account sent out a number of 'coin of the day' Tweets on December 27th encouraging followers to buy some lesser known crypto currencies. Nothing especially strange in that as McAfee has himself sent this type of message in the past.

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In 2017 we've see Internet of Things devices enter many more areas of our lives. We've also seen them exploited to launch cyber attacks.

So, how do industry experts think the IoT will develop in 2018?

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One of the most interesting trends we've seen in 2017 is the spread of artificial intelligence into areas like marketing and security.

Is this set to continue into next year, and are there new fields where AI is set to make a significant impact? Here are the views of some industry experts.

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The shift of systems towards the cloud has showed no signs of slowing down this year, and industry experts still see a bright future for the technology in 2018, although not without challenges along the way.

Hybrid systems could see the fastest growth. "I expect hybrid to experience the largest growth spurt, because most companies have a legacy IT department and they can’t just change the business and systems to operate only on public cloud services. On the other hand, I believe net new companies will operation mostly in the public domain with only private/hybrid systems based on security and compliance," says Paul Stephenson, field evangelist and principal systems engineer at OVH US.

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As well as being a handy way of storing items you've bought from the site, Amazon Music also allowed you to upload your own tracks and stream them from its cloud.

Now though the company is quietly pulling the plug on this aspect of its service. Previously you could store 250 tracks for free, or 250,000 if you paid an annual subscription. But the ability to upload new songs is now being withdrawn.

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It's the time of year when industry experts like to dust off their crystal balls, examine the pattern of tea leaves in the bottom of their cups and try to predict what the coming year is going to hold.

As far as security is concerned most commentators think we can expect the increase in numbers and sophistication of attacks we've seen in 2017 to continue, but there are some new things to worry about too.

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Cyber attacks have been on the rise throughout 2017. According to endpoint security specialist Carbon Black, from January to December there has been a 328 percent jump in attacks against endpoints.

This means a business with 10,000 employees seeing about 1,000 attacks every single day. It's ransomware that continues to be a main attack vector for criminals though. Not only is it proliferating in underground markets on the dark web, it also cost global businesses an estimated $5 billion in 2017 - according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

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In many businesses Christmas is seen as a quiet time when things slow down and staff get the chance to relax.

But according to enterprise file sharing company Egnyte that's not necessarily the case.

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Researchers at cyber security company Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new Android mobile Trojan called Loapi.

It uses a modular architecture, allowing functions to be added to the software so it can be used for anything from crypto currency mining to DDos attacks. Crucially though Loapi can create such a heavy workload on an infected device that the battery overheats and destroys the phone.

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Almost 60 percent of enterprises adopting big data cite both increased productivity across the organization and improved efficiency leading to reduced costs as their biggest gains.

This is among the findings of a survey by enterprise software company Syncsort, which finds that the most dramatic increase in reported benefits was higher revenue and accelerated growth, which 55 percent named as a benefit this year compared with only 37 percent last year.

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With consumers spending more of their smartphone time in apps worldwide, in-app advertising continued to be the main growth area in worldwide mobile ad spending and video ads are increasingly dominant.

Data from real-time advertising platform Smaato reveals in-app ad spend taking at least 85 percent of mobile ad spending in each of the top 20 mobile advertising markets worldwide.

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New research from cyber exposure company Tenable reveals a widespread lack of consumer awareness surrounding the impact of data breaches.

The results based on an online Harris Poll of more than 2000 US adults show that only 12 percent think their data has been stolen over the past year. But given the Equifax breach exposed up to 143 million Americans, that number is statistically impossible.

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