A new cybersecurity law has been passed in China which will give the country even more control over the Internet and will require foreign companies to store their data locally.

The National People's Congress Standing Committee passed the new law on Monday, causing a great deal of concern amongst human rights groups and foreign businesses. China already limits access to the Internet through its own online security system known in the west as "the Great Firewall" but this new cybersecurity law will allow the country to further censor and control the internet.

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Enterprise application company SAP is releasing a new version of its in-memory SAP HANA real-time computing platform.

SAP HANA 2 builds on the proven HANA technology to add new and enhanced functions that can enhance data management and accelerate application development.

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Data warehouses are at the core of many information driven business initiatives. They’re used to store large volumes of historical data which can then be used in business intelligence projects to create knowledge-based reporting.

But a data warehouse isn’t just a single, huge repository of data, they come in a number of different types. What they all have in common is that they’re separate from day-to-day operational systems. Data is uploaded to a warehouse after it has served its primary purpose, so that it can be used for statistical analysis and decision support, once out of date for this purpose it can then move on to be archived.

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Of employees in the US who use their personal smartphones for work, 45 percent are required to do so by their employers and 55 percent do so voluntarily. However, of those voluntary users 42 percent feel pressured to use their phone for business use outside of work.

This is among the findings of a new survey by platform services company Syntonic which reveals mounting pressure on employees to use their personal devices for work even if not required by their employer.

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The rite of passage from youth to adulthood is filled with "morning after” moments  --  those times when you realize that only 24 short hours ago (or less) you had bad judgment. Last Wednesday is Slack’s morning after... it thought it mattered as much as Microsoft.

Slack is a great product with deeply devoted fans, there’s no doubt about that. Its management has embraced the "accidental genius" narrative ("We don’t know why people use our product"), have talked about revolutions, and have driven one hell of a valuation. Good for them. Sadly, witty narratives, claims that your technology is disruptive and a lot of paper wealth doesn’t often translate into success as an enterprise software company.

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Enterprise collaboration, sometimes abbreviated to EC or ECS for enterprise collaboration systems, is becoming an increasingly vital tool for many businesses. Essentially, it comprises various forms of hardware and software used to enable the seamless and efficient sharing of information and resources within a particular company.

Enterprise collaboration systems can simply be relatively common communication tools such as email and instant messaging. Increasingly though businesses are turning to more bespoke solutions that combine these functions with project management and document management software. It is also worth noting that enterprise collaboration can prove beneficial for teams based in the same office, or those separated by thousands of miles. Collaborative technology is about breaking down the barriers preventing enterprise co-operation from taking place, whether they are departmental, geographical, temporal, or anything else for that matter.

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Just as in shipping physical cargoes where a load in a container can share transport on a train or ship with other similar loads while remaining separate, so in computing a containerized application is able to share machine space with many others whilst remaining separate in its own "box".

You might be wondering how this differs from full virtualization? A virtual machine provides a complete environment running an operating system and applications totally separate from the OS of the host server. A containerized application on the other hand is fully self-contained in terms of a business application, but is designed to work with the operating system kernel of the host. This provides a lighter weight alternative to full virtualization, allowing the application to be run on any physical machine that shares the same operating system, but otherwise behaving as though it’s independent.

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Anyone who works in IT knows that there are times when it can be an extremely stressful occupation. Especially when you’re expected to drop what you’re doing and fix a problem.

Meeting technology specialist Highfive has put together an infographic looking at some of the most common causes of stress and how they can be managed.

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For all the recent buzz surrounding the cloud and big data, it remains a fact that at the heart of much business computing there is still some form of database. In particular the operation of digital currencies like Bitcoin relies on databases that are able to track large volumes of transactions and keep them secure.

The solution used by digital currencies -- though it’s increasingly finding other applications too -- is the blockchain. First implemented in 2009, blockchain technology consists of blocks that hold batches of timestamped transactions, each block is linked to the previous one, thus forming a chain.

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Have you ever needed to access an important piece of information from an old document, and ended up spending hours rifling through filing cabinets and searching for the folder where you think you might have put that required piece of paper?

Or maybe you know what information you need, but can’t remember exactly which document it’s on. You’ve got shed loads of stored documents, and you know it could be a 'needle in a haystack' attempt to check multiple files and find the necessary document. It’s these time-consuming, frustrating and inefficient processes that document imaging addresses. When done correctly, it can change the way your business operates for the better, and save you both time and money.

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The importance of social media to businesses has long been recognized. According to a recent survey, time spent on social platforms represents 28 percent of all online activity, so if it’s important to customers, it naturally becomes important for companies too.

While some firms are content to carry out intermittent checks on Facebook and Twitter, many businesses are now demanding more nuanced ways of monitoring social media content. Social relationship management, or SRM, is a software solution that promises to strategically analyze social network interactions to give your business a competitive edge. With organizations from a broad spectrum of industries all realizing the importance of social media, gaining greater insights in this field could make the difference between success and failure.

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According to a new study 43 percent of app developers spend between 10 and 25 percent of their time debugging application errors discovered in production, rather than developing new features.

The survey carried out by ClusterHQ found that a quarter of respondents report encountering bugs discovered in production one or more times per week.

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Unified communications (UC) refers to a technology whereby a number of different communication media or platforms are connected and accessed as if they were a single entity. In practical terms, this enables businesses to employ a less fragmented approach to communication, allowing them to access and manage their internal and outward comms more easily.

The breadth of applications covered by unified communications is relatively wide and growing to accommodate new methods of interaction. UC may incorporate email, instant messaging, smartphones, landlines, fax and social media outlets. Unified communications tools are also capable of handling both audio and video content, which is why they are increasingly being adopted by businesses located across a broad spectrum of industries.

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The increasing commoditization of malware means that you no longer need to be a technical expert to launch an attack. You can simply buy the tools off the shelf.

Researchers at Skycure Research Labs have uncovered just such an off-the-peg spyware attack targeting senior company executives.

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The concept of machine learning has been around for some time. Deep learning is an area of research aimed at taking things further still and getting closer to an artificial intelligence system by using neural networks in a way that imitates the human brain.

Sometimes also referred to as hierarchical learning or deep structured learning, it seeks to model data in order to solve problems like object and facial recognition, natural language processing and speech recognition.

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