IT departments in businesses across Europe are still focused on saving money, and not on adding value to the company, or innovating to support further growth. Those are the results of a new survey by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Claranet.

Polling 900 European IT leaders, it was unveiled that despite growing IT budgets, these departments are still looking to cut costs and save money. Today, 46 percent said reducing cost was the top priority, compared to 34 percent a year before. For 29 percent, new revenue streams were their core activity, and for 25 percent, that was increasing customer loyalty.

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Based on my experience around data and metadata, I strongly believe that in today’s business environment, understanding the value of data should be a top priority for almost any organization.

Although there are certainly other core elements that help to define organizations, I would say the three most important are people, processes and technology. What each of these elements has in common is its reliance on data -- without which, nearly any organization’s productivity would quickly come to a grinding halt. Of course, most organizational leaders would agree that data is valuable, at least in a general sense. But it takes an additional focus, and deliberate processes, to measure the actual value of data within your organization, and then set up systems that allow you to take advantage of it.

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One of the largest data breaches in history has resulted in the leak of eleven million confidential documents -- around 2.6TB of data -- from financial firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the most secretive companies in the world.

According to the BBC, the leaked documents reveal how "Mossack Fonseca has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax". The client list features some of the world’s richest and most influential people -- including 12 current or former heads of state -- and their irrepressible greed has now been laid out for all to see. The data shows how thousands of off-shore shell companies have been created in order to hide money from the tax man and also reveals "a suspected billion-dollar money laundering ring involving close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin".

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JavaScript may be today’s go-to for front-end programming, but in many ways it’s a language that mimics what has come before. Just like COBOL, C, C++, C#, Java and Python, JavaScript is a procedural language. There’s nothing distinctive about JavaScript, with one big exception: JavaScript has a code complexity problem.

How could JavaScript, a language based on the same paradigm as many others, have a complexity problem that is so singular? The answer is temporality. JavaScript sits in a unique spot in software development history, rising squarely in the midst of a shift from mostly back-end to mostly front-end development, which was spurred by the mobile revolution.

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Recently an IT friend of mine told me that for the past five years he has been longing for a tool which could alert him when non-routable interfaces went down. To be perfectly honestly my heart went out to the guy -- that’s such a basic monitoring request, why hasn’t it been fulfilled I thought. But when I thought about other monitoring requests I’ve heard over the years it made me realize there is a major contradiction when it comes to IT pros and monitoring.

On the surface no IT professional will accept sub-optimal performance or functionality for any technology. IT pros overlock their systems, exploit back doors, root phones to get the latest (or un-supported) version, memorize complex key combinations to access god-mode -- we won’t settle for anything but the best and do our upmost to support it.

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According to comScore, from September 2010 to September 2014, smartphone usage increased by 394 percent, while tablet usage rose by an astronomical 1,721 percent in the United States. So it’s certainly no surprise that mobile payments are predicted to skyrocket over the next five years. mobilThis shows that the global mobile payment volume in 2015 was 450 billion U.S. dollars, and projects that number to surpass 1 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019.

With the growing interest in and use of mobile devices and payments, users are rightfully concerned with cybersecurity threats. To combat these threats, there has been a surge in using biometric technologies for user authentication.

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One of the most convenient things about connecting to the Internet through your computer, tablet, or smartphone is being able to tap into public Wi-Fi from pretty much anywhere. These days, there are hotspots available all across the country, so you’re practically never without Internet access. However, it’s a smart move to be cautious when it comes to connecting to public Wi-Fi.

When you’re tapping in to an unfamiliar hotspot, you could potentially be putting your personal data -- and the security of things like your bank accounts, your passwords, and your identity -- at risk. Even if a public WiFi hotspot looks secure, you might still miss the small red flags that signal trouble. Let’s take a look at how public WiFi works to connect you to the Internet, some risks that come with it, and how to ensure you’re keeping your data safe while you’re on a hotspot.

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Like the PC, World Wide Web, and virtualization, the cloud is considered a revolutionary technology because it completely changes business processes, cost structures, and time to value. Volumes of information have been written about the benefits of the cloud, with most stories focusing on low-cost storage, reducing hardware costs, anywhere access to applications, and relocating and scaling compute resources.

But another cloud benefit, a cloud-based application integration framework, is just beginning to resonate in many c-suites. This framework has the potential to completely transform application economics by dramatically simplifying business processes, reducing costs and accelerating time to value. Best of all, this particular cloud revolution can be introduced into an organization incrementally, leveraging existing investments.

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Nine in ten (90 percent) of frequent online shoppers are confident that PIN is a good authentication method for mobile commerce transactions. Those are the results of a recent survey by myPINpad, provider of multi-factor authentication technology for touchscreen devices.

Following the survey, the company has released a new report, entitled PIN: From Brick to Click, which takes a closer look at the PIN, and if consumers are ready to use it on their smart devices the same way they use it, for example, at ATM machines.

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Brits would love to share personal data with companies, for the promise of monetary gain. Not only that, but they’d give companies access to their connected home habits, if that means they’d get paid for it.

Those are the results of The Global Internet of Things Smart Home Survey. Sixty-three percent would share data about their daily habits, 61 percent would give companies access to their connected home devices, and 77 percent would do it to get bonus tax credits.

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Facebook Messenger is used by 800 million people globally and now KLM Dutch Airlines will be the first airline to allow its customers to check in, receive flight updates and change their travel itineraries right from within the app.

Facebook believes that customer service can easily be handled and even improved through its Messenger app. The company was inspired by popular messaging services in Asia such as WeChat, Line and KakaoTalk that give their users the ability to schedule many of their day to day activities right from within their apps including hailing taxis, making reservations at restaurants, shopping for shoes, playing games and sending gifts such as coupons for meals and coffee.

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Mobile memory experts Leef quizzed the UK population to see just how important smartphones are for them, and how often they back such devices up. It turns out, not so frequently. As a matter of fact, some people don’t even know what backing up actually means.

So here’s the thing. The quiz polled 1,000 smartphone users across the country, and more than half would be terrified of losing their smartphone, mostly because of "their selfies and other irreplaceable photos from their smartphone", the Leef report says.

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It would be hugely ironic if the UK government’s plans to help it seize back control of the digital age actually pushed technology firms even further down the path of encryption.

The second version of the Investigatory Powers Bill -- or Snoopers Charter, as it has been colloquially dubbed -- was published by the Home Office on March 1. This came in light of criticism of the first version -- published in December -- from three parliamentary joint committees: the Science and Technology Committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee, and the Joint Committee for the bill itself -- which made some 86 recommendations alone.

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Almost half of people living in the UK (48 percent) fear either their identities, or their banking data will be stolen. Those are the results of a new survey from financial technology company Intelligent Environments. According to the report, the fear is well founded, with 20 percent of Britons being victims to some type of cyber-crime, either identity theft or bank details theft.

The report reveals a cybersecurity map of Britain. In it, it says that Birmingham is most concerned with cybersecurity, with 57 percent fearing banking information theft, and 59 percent identity theft. Birmingham is followed by Newcastle and Cardiff.

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Do you want satisfied workers? Give them a well-designed PC, a good and secure mobile device, and let them work when they want to, where they want to. Those are, in a nutshell, the results of a new research by Redshift Research, which had polled 1,016 people, across France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.

For 90 percent of IT decision makers, device security is a current concern, because in the last 12 months, a quarter of Europe’s businesses have been breached. That has resulted in less than a third (32 percent) being completely confident in the level of security offered by their current devices.

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