It's common for businesses to insure against the risk of losing their systems to natural disasters or power outages, but a new product allows you to insure against fraudulent use of IT and telephony, including cloud and internet-based services.

San Francisco-based cyber insurer Coalition is launching Service Fraud coverage that reimburses organizations for the direct financial losses they incur as the result of being charged for fraudulent use of business services including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), and telephony services.

Europeans have the highest cloud adoption rate in the world at 84 percent according to a new report, up by 27 percent since 2016.

The study of 20,000 organisations' use of cloud technology was carried out by cloud security company Bitglass finds that Office 365 is the most widely adopted cloud application across EMEA.

In a new survey released ahead of this year's VMworld, cloud protection and management company Druva reveals cloud adoption is growing for virtualized workloads, with 90 percent of respondents running, or planning to run, virtual machines in the cloud in 2018.

But the survey also highlights significant risks associated with this shift, as organizations discover that on-premises approaches to data management are outdated and no longer adequate for the cloud era.

Acronis has launched Acronis True Image 2019 for Windows and Mac, a major new release of its popular local and cloud backup tool.

The 2019 version is dubbed the 15-year Anniversary Edition, celebrating the milestone release. New features added include a dedicated survival toolkit, ability to manually clean backup files and widened anti-ransomware protection.

Enterprises now acknowledge that technology drives business today. Because of this, IT departments now face plenty of challenges as business processes transition to digital. New technologies such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) are also finding more use in enterprise computing as they already have shown to be game-changing advantages for those who adopt them.

Companies are shifting more of their workloads and infrastructure to the cloud to maximize the flexibility that cloud computing provides. However, this also means that IT departments now face new challenges of managing complex hybrid infrastructures.

One of the best things about there being so many Linux distributions, is it can be fun to try them all. Believe it or not, "distro-hopping" is a legit hobby, where the user enjoys installing and testing various Linux-based operating systems and desktop environments. While Fedora is my reliable go-to distro, I am quite happy to try alternatives too. Hell, truth be told, I have more fun trying distributions than playing video games these days, but I digress.

A unique distribution I recommend trying is the Ubuntu-based Bodhi Linux. The operating system is lightweight, meaning it should run decently on fairly meager hardware. It uses a desktop environment called "Moksha" which is very straightforward. The Enlightenment 17 fork is a no-nonsense DE that both beginners and power users will appreciate. Today, version 5.0.0 finally becomes available. This follows a July release candidate.

In the world of non-console gaming, the Windows platform reigns supreme. That's not to say that Mac and Linux users aren't gamers, but their computer-based gaming choices are rather more limited thanks to developers' tendency to offer Windows support over anything else.

Now Valve is looking to change things with its Steam platform. The latest version of Steam Play makes it possible to play some Windows games on Linux, greatly increasing the size of the gaming catalog available to Linux-based gamers.

If you're in the UK, you'll know that this weekend is the August Bank Holiday. This not only means a day off work -- for most people, at least -- but also big Black Friday-type sales from major retailers.

Amazon is one of those offering big discounts, and you don't have to wait until the weekend to make a saving. For the next week, from today until next Wednesday, the online retailer has some incredible deals on Surface tablets and laptops meaning that there's never been a better time to buy one.

Microsoft continues to roll out new releases for the next big feature update of its operating system -- Windows 10 Update 1809 (aka Redstone 5). We’re getting them at a rate of two a week now.

As you’d expect, Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17744, coming to the Fast ring now, doesn’t offer any new features, just improvements and fixes.

The world is a terrible place right now. In Pennsylvania, it was revealed that thousands of children were allegedly abused by Catholic priests over several decades. The President of the United States -- who some say is mentally unstable -- has been separating immigrant children from their parents. Mr. Trump -- who should be a role model -- is also calling human beings dogs on Twitter. In Florida, red tide is killing precious marine life, such as manatees and dolphins. Shockingly, all of that negative news is just from the USA! There are many other horrific things happening in other countries.

With all of this going on, it can be hard to get out of bed in the morning. Thankfully, Google is here to save our sanity and hopefully lessen our negative news-driven depression.. The search giant has added a new experimental feature to Google Assistant called "Tell me something good." As you can imagine, the feature is quite literal -- the user asks the voice assistant for some positive news stories. If you say "Hey Google, tell me something good," you will be reminded that the world isn't all bad through a rundown of "good news."

Microsoft’s plan with Windows 10 was to hit a billion devices within a couple of years, but that all hinged on the OS being a hit on PC, tablet, and mobile. Sadly, Windows 10 Mobile was a costly flop, and ultimately led to Microsoft’s exit from the mobile market.

It’s been rumored for a while that the tech giant might be planning a return to the space with a folding Surface Phone, but it’s going to need more than the right hardware -- the operating system will have to appeal to users of Android and iOS, and give them a reason to switch. Windows XP Mobile -- 2018 Edition is just such an OS.

Increasingly businesses don't have all of their secondary data and apps in one place. Instead they are spread across multiple locations in house and in the cloud.

Storage specialist Cohesity is launching a SaaS-based management solution that empowers customers to see, manage, and take action on their secondary data and applications globally.

As systems move to the cloud companies are faced with increased complexity and the need for flexibility. In addition there are roadblocks including intensive data migrations, reliance on legacy systems, and security and regulatory concerns.

Information management company M-Files is launching a new information management system that enables organizations to flexibly combine cloud and on-premises deployments with a single user license and without having to lock into one model.

One of the incentives to pay for a service -- from Spotify through Duolingo to YouTube Premium -- is the pleasure of an ad-free experience. Advertising exists in the free versions to help pay for the services, so it only seems fair that those who decide to pay a monthly fee aren't pestered by ads.

Twitch doesn't agree. Starting next month, even if you pay for a Twitch Prime subscription you will still be subjected to ads. The reason? Money, of course.

Although some of us are keen Mac users, most of our work is produced for the Windows operating system. We manage to achieve this via Parallels running on an iMac or MacBook Pro and, frankly, it’s so fast you really do not need to run Bootcamp.

It never used to be this way. Back in the late 90s, when Apple still used PPC chips, Windows emulation was dire. Beyond dire. Almost unusable. Even for basic tasks. It made far more sense to use Bootcamp when it was released, even after the migration to the Intel chips, if you needed native-like performance for using Windows. Luckily, not now.