Articles about 2015

COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, with ever greater numbers of cases and deaths being reported on a daily basis. It’s having a huge impact not just on people’s health, but on our way of life and on the global economy.

While at the start of the year no one expected us to be where we are now, the threat of a fast-spreading virus has been anticipated for quite some time. Indeed, back in 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk on this very subject.

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Almost a half (43 percent) of UK companies did not experience a security breach in 2015, a new report suggests. Released by IT management software provider SolarWinds, it includes answers from 109 IT practitioners and managers from small, medium-sized and large UK companies.

According to them, just 30 percent suffered a breach last year. Quite surprising.

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IDC has released its report on smartphone shipments in 2015, revealing record numbers for both Q4 and the whole year. In the last three months of 2015, vendors moved just shy of 400 million units, out of a total of 1.43 billion units. Samsung and Apple lead the pack, but rivals like Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi are coming strong from behind.

"Usually the conversation in the smartphone market revolves around Samsung and Apple, but Huawei's strong showing for both the quarter and the year speak to how much it has grown as an international brand", says IDC senior research manager Melissa Chau. "While there is a lot of uncertainty around the economic slowdown in China, Huawei is one of the few brands from China that has successfully diversified worldwide, with almost half of its shipments going outside of China. Huawei is poised to be in a good position to hold onto a strong number three over the next year".

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The demise of the tablet seems inevitable, as shipments percentage dropped in double digits for the first time ever. Market intelligence provider TrendForce reported that in 2015 a total of 168.5 million units were shipped, representing a 12.2 percent drop year-over-year.

Notebook analyst for TrendForce, Anita Wang, confirmed what we all already knew -- smartphones, phablets and two-in-one devices were interfering too much with the tablet market, and with the devices having a somewhat longer lifespan, the results are a decrease in new shipments.

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American email and web security firm AppRiver has released its end-of-the-year report, where it showcased a detailed analysis of malware and spam trends in 2015.

The report, entitled Global Security Report, says that the number of email messages containing malware doubled, year-on-year. From January to November, AppRiver quarantined 944 million messages, and in December alone, another 705 million.

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It’s been a busy year for security firms everywhere -- cyber-attacks, malware, ransomware and other malicious online behavior reached new heights in 2015.

Those are the results of a report by Bromium, a company which deals in threat isolation in service of data breach prevention. Its report, entitled Endpoint Exploitation Trends 2015 analyzed the security risks of popular websites and software.

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Things are not looking good for the PC market. The fourth quarter of 2015 registered the biggest-ever year-over-year drop in shipments, as IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker revealed a 10.6 percent fall compared to the same period in 2014. For the whole of 2015, shipments are said to have dropped by 10.4 percent compared to the year prior.

Lenovo was the vendor with most PCs shipped in 2015, followed by HP and Dell. However, with the exception of Apple, all other vendors in IDC's top five have seen their shipments dropping last year. Mac shipments rose by 6.2 percent, according to the report.

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The cloud sector’s revenues, both IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) have grown 51 percent in the last year, a new research by Synergy says. It has had the strongest growth out of all cloud services.

Private and hybrid cloud infrastructure services grew 45 percent, while operator and vendor revenues grew 28 percent.

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According to man-made calendars, today is New Year's Eve. Tomorrow is the first day of 2016, which in the grand scheme of things is inconsequential. Still, it is fun to reflect on the last year and choose the tech that I enjoyed the most.

Yeah, I'm like Oprah or Ellen. Here are my favorite things -- tech related, of course -- for 2015; laptops, smartphones, tablets, and more. While there are many products on my list, there are two products that stand out to me as being rather exceptional -- the crème de la crème, if you will.

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To some this will come as a surprise, to others not as much, but the Distributed Denial of Service, also known as DDoS -- was the most popular type of cyber-attack in the past year.

According to a report by security firm Akamai, there has been a jump of 180 percent in the number of DDoS attacks in 2015. The ending year also saw records broken in the size of the attacks, as well.

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10Fold recently evaluated the seven largest breaches this year and found that hackers had absconded with more than 193.4 million personal records. To get to this figure, the agency reviewed 720 data breaches that occurred throughout the year. To narrow the list to a more manageable size, the team made five million the barrier to entry.

10Fold selected these data breaches based on independent research and review of third-party resources such as ID Theft Resource Center and Information is Beautiful.

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As 2015 draws to an end, we can look back on a year that has seen cyber security rapidly ascend the corporate, journalist and consumer agendas.

The cost of the average corporate data breach continued to rise, and with hacks on firms such as Car Phone Warehouse, Talk Talk, Ashley Madison and even the Internal Revenue Services in the USA, the last twelve months have seen a marked escalation in Black Hat activity.

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I was recently reading in Forbes Magazine that the U.S. has had the best first quarter for mergers since 2000 with $414.7 billion (£267 billion), and it was the best first quarter ever for Asian (non-Japan) M&A with $199.7 billion (£128 billion).

In fact, the first quarter of 2015 will go down as the richest first quarter for mergers and acquisitions since Q1 2007. According to data from Thomson Reuters there has already been more than $843 billion (£543 billion) in global M&A activity this year. That’s 23.3 percent higher than the $694 billion (£447 billion) of M&A activity in the first quarter of last year, and nearly 72 percent higher than Q1 2013.

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Marty McFly visits the year 2015 in Back to the Future Part II, the sequel to Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 masterpiece "Back to the Future".

Now that we’ve finally hit the year portrayed in the film it’s time to give them a report card on the things they got right.

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It’s time, finally, for my long-delayed 2015 predictions. Things just kept changing so fast I had to keep re-writing, but have finally stopped. 2015 will definitely be the Year of Monetization, by which I mean it’s the year when the bottom line and showing profits will become a key motivator in almost every market. And while profit -- like beer -- is generally good, it isn’t always good for everyone.

So here are my 10 predictions in no particular order.

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