At a time when the speed of application development is vital to commercial success, the DevOps methodology -- based on communication, collaboration, integration and automation -- has become one of the biggest IT moves around.

However, it’s more than just a business philosophy; to do it right requires genuine infrastructure investment and development.

Continue reading →

It is being predicted that the ever-growing market of the Internet of Things will support total services spending of $235 billion (£155bn) in 2016. At the same time, the number of connected devices will grow 30 percent year-on-year, reaching 6.4 billion units globally.

But the growth won’t stop there. As a matter of fact, it will speed up, reaching 20.8 billion units by 2020. According to a Gartner report, the professional category will dominate. In it, businesses contract with external providers in order to design, install and operate IoT systems.

Continue reading →

Apple is set to announce the expansion of its Irish subsidiary, creating up to 1,000 new jobs in the area. Company CEO Tim Cook reveal the plans to staff at the firm’s Hollyhill facility in Cork.

The expansion had been expected, with more that €120 million (£8.5 million) invested in the Cork plant since 2012 and it seems that Apple’s enthusiasm for the country has not been dented by recent controversies surrounding the amount of tax it pays.

Continue reading →

Microsoft has partnered up with Brooklyn-based blockchain start-up ConsenSys to bring the technology to financial institutions.

Blockchain is the technology that underpins Bitcoin. It is essentially a vast, decentralized ledger that registers every transaction anonymously, and because the ledger is public, it makes blockchain tamper-proof and ideal for financial clients.

Continue reading →

Adobe today announced Audience Marketplace, a new data exchange in Adobe Audience Manager, the company’s data management platform (DMP).

Audience Marketplace is a private data marketplace that connects advertisers and content publishers to buy and sell second and third-party data faster and with more simplicity. The data exchange also enables companies to scale their high-value audience segments for personalized and targeted content across marketing channels.

Continue reading →

The number of "serious" cyber-attacks against the UK has doubled in just a year, BizTek Mojo reported on Tuesday, saying the company responded by forming a cyber-security academy to tackle the issue.

According to the report, GCHQ says there are, in average, seven serious threats faced by the country each day, and just last month it recorded 200 attacks, including state-sponsored assaults.

Continue reading →

Cloud adoption is continuing to grow amongst enterprises and small businesses alike and, as competition in the technology industry becomes ever-more intense, it has never been more important to be able to respond to network outages and unplanned downtime.

This is where disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) comes in, providing a failsafe in the event of man-made or natural catastrophes through the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third-party.

Continue reading →

This year’s Black Friday, a growing UK shopping phenomenon imported from the US, is happening later this month and is predicted to be the biggest one yet. With retail analysts suggesting that online UK sales could hit £1bn on that day alone, UK sellers are preparing for consumer spending like they’ve not seen before.

Last year in the UK, online spending hit an estimated £810m on Black Friday as consumers were successfully lured in by retailers that significantly discounted their products. This unexpected purchasing shift caught many retailers off-guard and exposed those that were unprepared. The event highlighted nationally that online merchants should devote just as much time to optimizing their digital commerce experience as they do their brick-and-mortar stores. The companies most likely to come out on top started planning many months ago. As consumers put the finishing touches on their shopping lists this year, they can expect more -- and will get more -- from their shopping experiences this Black Friday:

Continue reading →

Intel has announced new products in the Xeon processor family, in a move which seeks to boost the Internet of Things industry.

The new products and collaborations will "accelerate the move toward more agile and cloud-ready communications networks that can address today’s demand for new telecommunications, cloud and data centre services and handle tomorrow’s devices and services", the company said.

Continue reading →

October 6 was quite an interesting day for consumer privacy. After 15 years in place, the Safe Harbor agreement was declared invalid by Europe’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Driven by data localization trends and consumer privacy concerns in the wake of the "Snowden Effect", the ruling empowers each country in the European Union to set its own consumer privacy rules and regulations. The court’s decision has complicated implications for U.S. organizations conducting business overseas. In light of Safe Harbor’s invalidation, can international businesses continue to operate as usual?

Continue reading →

The past five years has seen businesses enter a period of breakneck digital transformation with IT departments undergoing rapid change. Most large enterprises are either executing an IT transformation program or are about to embark on one.

When doing this, businesses need to ensure that it doesn’t turn out to be "Yet another IT transformation initiative" but one that actually delivers substantive value to the organization.

Continue reading →

With high-profile data breaches continuing to make headlines with disturbing regularity, the general consensus on the cyber security front is that we need to be doing more. Of course, if you’re sitting down to discuss your company’s IT security budget, you’re going to need to get more specific than that.

Determining the right cyber security budget can be a challenge, especially for companies that are looking into security seriously for the first time and unsure where to start. While one approach is to look to industry benchmarks -- averages by vertical, percentage of overall IT spending, etc. -- the truth is there is no universal right answer to determining your security budget.

Continue reading →

Did you ever consider that keeping sensitive business files on your mobile device could be risky, as your device could be lost or stolen? Did you consider protecting those files, or the mobile device in general, with a password?

A new research by Imation looked into this idea and the results are quite disappointing. According to the study, 44 percent of organizations believe a member of their senior management has lost a mobile device in the last year, whilst 39 percent say senior management had a device stolen.

Continue reading →

With shrinking IT budgets it is crucial that businesses ensure they are spending their IT budget wisely. As a result, organizations are already taking advantage of the economies of scale that cloud computing offers.

However, despite the benefits being clear, businesses still have applications running on legacy environments. Moving legacy applications to the cloud is one way to reduce operating costs and relieve staff from managing tasks that are better served in the cloud, freeing them to focus on tasks that contribute to business growth.

Continue reading →

Out of all websites on the entire internet that have any sort of content management system (CMS), WordPress powers more than half.

Considering the fact that half of the internet doesn’t use any recognizable CMS system, it brings us to the conclusion that WordPress, the open-source content management platform, powers 25 percent of the entire Internet

Continue reading →