Data and analytics are some of the most important new skills you, as an employee, can have today. This is according to Alteryx, whose new report dives into the most important skills and competencies in the workforce today. That being said, data and analytics have surpassed some interesting skills, like multilingualism.

Knowing a second language isn’t really that important any more, even though a 2014 report suggested otherwise. The Alteryx report, entitled The Business Grammar Report, also says data is no longer "confined to the IT department or technical specialists". Just 15 percent of UK businesses are still doing it the old fashioned way while almost a third (31 percent) are empowering their employees with self-service analytics tools.

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Cisco wants to transform into a software company and to further move towards that goal it announced the acquisition of CointainerX, a small start-up formed by engineers from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware.

The container-as-a-service business creates virtual containers for data centres, for Windows and Linux.  The financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. ContainerX didn’t try to hide the excitement.

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Tech-stress may be a relatively new phenomenon in the corporate world, however it is also the latest in a long line of issues which have a significant impact on the performance of today’s employees. Largely a symptom of the "always on" culture that stems from the nation’s growing reliance on digital devices, tech-stress is reported to be placing additional pressure on the corporate world as many workers struggle to switch off and relax.

According to the 2016 Quality of Working Life study carried out by the Chartered Management Institute, employees are now working 29 days extra a year and are suffering rising levels of stress. Citing an apparent "tech-addiction", the study found that this obsession with checking emails outside of work hours is making workers more stressed and less productive.

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Dangerous vulnerabilities are present in a large number of today's websites, and the percentage is only going to keep on growing, according to a new report by Acunetix.

The automated web application security software company released its annual Web Application Vulnerability Report 2016, based on 45,000 website and network scans, done on 5,700 websites over the past year. The results are worrying.

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HP has launched three new products to help businesses move their workloads into the cloud computing environment easier. The trio includes the t630 Thin Client, ThinPro 6, and VMware Blast.

The t630 Thin Client allows for the streamlining of current cloud-based deployments, comes with next generation, x86 quad-core systems-on-a-chip developed by AMD, and offers AMD Radeon graphics.

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Mobile was once the concern of IT managers. But now that the responsibility for business mobility has spread to every part of the enterprise, with a mobile first strategy becoming increasingly prevalent, it’s essential that the CEO sits up and pays attention.

Mobile is now an intrinsic part of everyday life and has spilled into the workplace via Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Chose Your Own Device (CYOD). As a consequence the CEO needs to have mobile as a key consideration, because as the old adage goes "not having a plan is planning to fail".

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How much money do you think it needs to kickstart a business in UK? A couple of thousands? Maybe go straight into five figures? Wrong. According to a new report by cloud accounting software provider FreeAgent, you probably don't need any money.

The company surveyed micro-business owners and freelancers in the UK, and according to the results 44 percent of business starters required no funds at all. Almost the exact same percentage (43 percent) used their personal savings, and that was enough. Four percent borrowed money from friends or family, two percent used either credit card or bank loan, while just one percent used government assistance.

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Ransomware is a powerful cyberthreat that can bring any organization to its knees. It’s a popular tactic among hackers looking for financial gain, or to take down an organization for political or moral reasons -- and it works. In 2015, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 2,453 complaints identified as ransomware, resulting in more than $1.6 million in company losses.

While some think ransomware is only a threat to large enterprises or government organizations, recent activity shows that it doesn’t discriminate based on the size or significance of an organization. According to a warning from the FBI earlier this year: "Hospitals, school districts, state and local governments, law enforcement agencies, small businesses, large businesses—these are just some of the entities impacted recently by ransomware, an insidious type of malware that encrypts, or locks, valuable digital files and demands a ransom to release them".

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There's a new calculator online which will tell you exactly how much your digital data is worth. This tool, created by Totally Money, asks you to name the price for 13 different data types, including email address, health condition, or credit rating. After giving your price, the calculator then tells you the real price.

The whole project was basically designed to show people just how easy and cheap it is for companies to buy your personal data. Following the release of the calculator, the company also did a survey of 1,000 UK adult consumers. Forty percent of Facebook users, for example, didn’t know the social media giant sold their data to third parties.

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Software-defined networking will enable today’s explosive data growth to continue by making telecoms more agile and scalable.

Network traffic is growing at an astonishing rate. We attribute this to video conferencing, dynamic cloud workloads and unified communications. Data traffic on the AT&T wireless network grew more than 150,000 percent between 2007 and 2015. This is only the beginning, though. New technology will continue to push bandwidth demand even higher in the future. This includes the Internet of Things, 4K video, virtual reality and augmented reality.

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When I was younger, I used to think of the classical manufacturing companies as dinosaurs, part of the old economy. For me, they were large and slow lumbering beasts, many of them soon to be extinct, and rendered obsolete by emerging high-tech companies like Nokia, Intel, Microsoft. I was not alone in this feeling.

Manufacturing companies built cars, compressors, drilling equipment and all sorts of other products that I rarely encountered in daily life. In my mind, I contrasted these traditional manufacturers with the new economy in which I was working. High-tech and software was cool, innovative and forward looking. Manufacturing was boring, dirty and obsolete.

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We recently sat down with George Brasher, the managing director for UK and Ireland at HP, to discuss his approach to business and how the company has changed since the split from HP Enterprise.

You can read the Q&A below.

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Last week marked the end of the 2016 Summer Olympics and this year we witnessed several impressive moments. The image of Usain Bolt, giant smile and legs a-blur, is hard to forget. But equally memorable are the times that team efforts outshone those of any individual. This concept of building a cohesive, top-performing team that is more than the sum of its parts is echoed in an emerging security trend: the new cybersecurity stack.

Like the Olympics, the security industry is a highly-visible playing field, with all the fanfare and expectations and often failed dreams. Security hopes are pinned on New Gen "superstars" that are highly hyped yet don’t deliver the promised gold. However, the failure isn’t necessarily the product, but the expectation that one solution can keep endpoints secure.

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If someone told you passwords were a thing of the past, you might well laugh in disbelief.

Undoubtedly, passwords have been the cornerstone of digital security for a long time. As technology has improved, however, passwords have become increasingly easy to hack, forcing the IT community to search for new solutions. Most people regularly use weak passwords -- in fact we’re getting worse at this -- but with the constantly expanding list of websites and services, the demand for us to remember unique usernames and passwords for is growing all the time.

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Russian internet giant Mail.ru has been hacked once again, and some 25 million accounts associated with forums run by the company have been compromised.

Among the data that was stolen are usernames, passwords (easily crackable, according to Secure CloudLink), email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays and IP addresses.

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