A new report has revealed that the UK government could save £2 billion by 2020 if it took the appropriate actions needed to shift its citizens to digital services and away from outdated technology and legacy contracts.

Independent charity the Institute for Government argued these points in its latest report titled Making a Success of Digital Government, in which it noted how the government has yet to see a significant return when it comes to the savings that could be generated by a transition to digital services.

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Business intelligence, like military intelligence, is sometimes jokingly described as being a contradiction in terms. But in fact, in the era of big data and the Internet of things, the potential benefits to be gained from BI are greater than ever.

BI is about turning raw data into useful information for business analysis in order to aid the decision making process. The technology therefore needs to be able to handle large volumes of structured and unstructured data, turning it into reports that are easily understood and deliver insights that can provide businesses with a competitive advantage in the market and help their long-term stability.

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Cash is overrated among businesses, a new study by NTT DATA suggests. Consumers don’t really use it that much, and expect the payment industry to move more towards digital wallets in the future.  This is according to a new report, based on a poll of 2,000 consumers and 300 executives.

A third of consumers expect mobile money to dominate within a decade. But there is a strong discrepancy between executives and consumers -- 40 per cent of executives, in various industries, think people will pay the same for transactions in a decade than they do today. Among consumers just 27 percent expect transaction values to stay the same.

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In an era when data is seen as an increasingly valuable commodity, the tools and techniques used to analyze that data gain extra importance.

Historically analysis, even using computers, has been something of a labor intensive task because the raw data needed to be verified and complex models built to process it. But due to the growth of machine learning and data mining techniques we’re now seeing an increase in predictive analysis where machines can take historical and current information and apply it to a model to predict future trends.

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Service oriented architecture is a principle that allows businesses to manage their IT and business transformation in order to give themselves a competitive edge. It offers benefits including insight into the running of the entire business, seamless integration of systems and the cloud, and linking of front and back office systems.

The World Wide Web Consortium defines SOA as "A set of components which can be invoked, and whose interface descriptions can be published and discovered".

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Thanks to the likes of smartphones, the internet and big data, we now have access to more information in various shapes and sizes than ever before.

In most cases, having more information is a good thing for businesses, but there comes a point where there is simply too much to keep track of. This is especially true in large enterprises, where invoices, word documents, receipts and purchase orders are in abundance and could be needed by anyone at any time.

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Like other cloud computing packages, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) delivers virtualized computing resources over a network connection, most commonly the Internet. Infrastructure as a service is an example of the wide range of cloud services now being used by businesses. IaaS packages will vary from organization to organization, but typically involve hardware, storage, servers, as well as system maintenance and security features.

The breadth of services offered by cloud providers often makes IaaS an attractive proposition for businesses that do not have the resources to effectively purchase and maintain their own hardware. Of course, as with other cloud services, IaaS still comes with its risks, so businesses must ensure that they are well versed on the finer details of infrastructure as a service before committing to a contract.

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Pretty much all IT operations professionals (99 percent) agree: adopting a DevOps culture can improve application security. This is according to a new report by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The report, titled Application Security and DevOps Report 2016, also emphasizes that just a fifth (20 percent) of respondents test their application’s security during development, and 17 percent are using no technologies whatsoever to protect their apps. The conclusion of the report is simple: there is a significant disconnect between perception and reality of secure DevOps.

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Qulacomm has announced that it will be acquiring NXP Semiconductors in order to fast track its way into the automotive industry as it tries to expand beyond the smartphone market.

The deal is valued at around $47 billion with Qualcomm agreeing to pay $110 a share for NXP. The company will be paying with a mixture of cash on hand and new debt at a price per share that is 11 percent higher than what semiconductor company's shares were trading for when the market closed on Wednesday.

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The cloud computing landscape is incredibly diverse with a broad range of vendors each offering their own unique features. One of the best ways to ways to get to grips with this is to break it down into the most prominent cloud models: software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

In this post we’ll examine the latter and how modern businesses are using it to gain a competitive advantage.

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Sandboxes provide environments for developers and testers to reproduce even the most complex infrastructures, from data centers to public and hybrid clouds.

Sandboxes allow ITOps and dev/test teams to create personalized replicas of production environments with self-service, on-demand environments that can quickly allow even the most complex environments to be created, modeled, orchestrated and deployed -- from physical patch panels to distributed applications. This can rapidly speed up release cycles while drastically lowering cost and reducing risk.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a hot topic in the last couple of years, thanks primarily to the rapid progression of software and the development of new and exciting (or new and scary, depending on your view) technologies.

Movies and TV have long made us aware of the potential of AI, but many of the seemingly farfetched ideas are now closer to becoming a reality. And, as investment continues to grow, so too will the interest and success of such projects.

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"There is a time to take counsel of your fears," General George S. Patton once famously said. Halloween marks the end of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). Let’s make this the time to take counsel of the cyber security fears that keep us up at night.

We asked more than 250 business professionals from across the country to share their concerns. Their answers seem influenced by recent headlines, the pending election, and the coming shopping season.

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Imagine standing in line at a coffee shop, the place is brimming with people all shouting their order at the one overwhelmed barista. You place your order but he can’t hear you. You shout it, you scream it over the din of the thousands of people also ordering their coffee, but the barista just shrugs because he can’t get your order much less process it. No coffee for you. As you leave you realize those thousands of other customers aren’t even customers, they were just noise generated to keep you from getting your coffee.

Welcome to DDoS.

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Despite the fact that consumer awareness of mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay is growing all the time, the use of mobile payment solutions in the United States and Canada has so far been low. In fact, in both markets mobile payments account for only 3 percent of all transactions.

While the two payment landscapes are very different, there are similar reasons why the result has been largely the same. By the same token, there are also common factors that could see mobile payments explode in both markets sooner rather than later.

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