Utilizing the power of cloud technology and mobilizing the workforce are two key interests for most organizations, but several issues are currently affecting progress in the field.

In a survey conducted by NaviSite and Time Warner Cable on migration to the cloud and BYOD (bring your own device) support, several key points were brought up on the reasoning behind the slow progress.

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Whenever I set up a new router, I always change the DNS settings to point to Google Public DNS. Why? I find the search-giant's solution to resolve addresses faster than my ISP. Heck, when I am connecting to someone else's network, I enable Google DNS in my device settings too.

According to Google its DNS solution handles a mind-boggling 400 billion responses per day. Today, the search giant announces that a recent collaboration with Akamai will improve the speed of accessing location-based Akamai hosted content.

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It takes a brave man to make technology predictions in this day and age. Well, never one to shirk a challenge, I’ve been looking into my crystal ball, and with 2015 looming large, I’m putting my head above the parapet to make my top ten mobile predictions for the next 12 months.

Every year, competition in the smartphone space becomes more intense than ever. But we have reached a tipping point. Even the big guns, such as Samsung, are under massive pressure. All vendors will be looking for a killer new differentiator and this means things can (and probably will) get crazy. So, expect to see some wacky concepts making it to the front line of vendor’s product offerings.

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With increasing pressure to produce new apps to meet customer demand, testing is vital as problems can lead to the loss of customers and revenue.

Yet the test process can often prove a bottleneck as the tools involved are cumbersome and can struggle to cope with modern complex apps and sites.

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Digital media content plays an important role in today's mobile, social, and web environments for global enterprises. The enterprise that delivers quality content the fastest wins the lion’s share of business. The enterprise that delivers digital content the slowest gets left in the dust.

Because content quality is now determined by substance and delivery speed, a strong connection must exist between two leaders in the company -- the CMO and CTO.

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Microsoft has shown more interest in Skype in recent years, including making it far more web-friendly, and introducing a business-centric version in place of Lync. The latest move is designed to break down more barriers, making it easier for people in different countries to communicate with each other, regardless of the language they speak.

Skype Translator preview is the first step towards making language irrelevant. Rather than relying on interpreters, users can communicate through Skype and translations will be automatically performed. English and Spanish are supported as spoken languages, but there is support for more than 40 written languages as well.

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Businesses are keen to harness the benefits of big data, but traditional database solutions are often confined by their design, making them hard to scale.

Aerospike which claims to be the world's fastest database has unveiled new features and enhancements to its product to improve performance, streamline deployment and breed a new generation of real-time, context-driven applications.

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Microsoft plans to launch the next build of Windows 10 in January, and we’ll start to see some focus on the consumer side of things. The company is holding an event at its Redmond campus on January 21 to talk about the "next chapter" of the OS.

But while the tech giant isn’t releasing any new builds for a few weeks at least, there have been several leaks on the internet that reveal what we can expect to see when it does. Here’s what coming to a PC near you soon.

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Detailing a partnership that was made public today, Finnish company Nokia revealed that its HERE division will provide maps to Chinese Internet services provider Baidu to use outside of its home market.

Normally, such an announcement would hardly garner any attention. However, it makes Baidu the first Chinese company that will offer location-based services to Chinese residents who are traveling abroad. That's a big deal. And Nokia is at the center of it.

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Can you keep data safe while on the go? You know your company network is a safe storage option. So why isn’t your data in there? When was the last time you went a week without reading about a new data breach? It has become an almost daily occurrence in the media and has brought compliance and regulation to the forefront of many modern businesses.

A good way to guarantee critical business data remains secure and accessible is to ensure it is stored on the company network -- but changes in the way we work mean that very little business data is now being kept on the network. As more employees at SMEs start to work remotely -- either at home or on the go -- so too is the business’s data being stored in a wide range of places such as inboxes, phones, tablets, PCs and laptops. When data is kept in these places as opposed to the company network, some major problems are set to arise…

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UK-based anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label has published its annual study into how people aged 13-25 are currently engaging with (and abusing) smartphone technology. The Wireless Report (2014) reveals worrying details on the increase in the number of cyberbullying cases which includes death and physical assault threats, and exposure of information, including sharing of naked photos without the subject’s permission.

The report, which was compiled from the results of a survey advertised as being about smartphone apps (without mention of bullying, abuse or sexting) reveals some striking statistics.

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The shift to mobile computing has led to some major changes for enterprises, not least in how the security and confidentiality of data is governed.

A new report, commissioned by data protection specialist Druva from Forrester Consulting, surveyed 205 IT and legal professionals in enterprises in the US and UK. It suggests that 20 percent of CIOs could lose their jobs in 2016 for failing to implement information governance.

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Smart Projects has released ISOBuster 3.5, a major new version of its shareware data recovery tool. Although the program now supports recovery from a variety of different drives, it’s still renowned for its ability to recover data from optical drives including CD, DVD and Blu-ray.

Version 3.5’s headline new feature is support for 64-bit sector addressing. This enables it to correctly support, display and extract data from any partition, file, folder or file system that resides above the 2TB boundary on large drives.

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If you need a laptop, there are generally two routes you can go -- desktop replacement or desktop companion. In other words, a svelte 11 inch laptop is cute and light, but hardly something you would want to use full-time. Such a small screen can be tedious for doing a lot of work. Sure, you can connect it to a larger monitor for enhanced productivity, but that is an additional purchase, and requires a dedicated work area in the home. What about those of us that want a machine that can be used comfortably anywhere -- including a kitchen table -- with a large screen and full keyboard? Not everyone is just surfing the web on their laptops as the Chromebook crowd would have you think. Some of us need an honest-to-goodness desktop replacement for getting work done.

Luckily, this demographic is not ignored, and good ol' fashioned laptops still exist, even if they don't get the same "oohs" and "ahs" as their tiny cousins. I became quite intrigued by the Lenovo Edge 15, because first of all, it is Lenovo -- a durable and dependable brand. More importantly though, it has a 15 inch screen, and a full keyboard...including a number pad! The fact that it is a 2-in-1 partial-convertible, is just icing on the cake. While everything looked good on paper, the question became, did the real-world experience match up? With a desire to find this out on my own, I obtained one for review.

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The UK’s history of cryptography is fascinating, with famous cryptanalysts like Alan Turing, Dillwyn Knox, and W. T. Tutte deciphering different code machines used in World War I and II.

To celebrate the achievements of the past and reinvigorate students on cryptography, the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) has released a code-breaking app on Android, named Cryptoy. An iOS version is set to see a 2015 release.

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