When things are going right in an organization, it’s easy to put supplier data on the back burner. When things go wrong in an organization, most people hesitate to invest in quality supplier data tools. In a world where most of the population has access to technology, it’s easy to assume that the large procurement technologies are working with accurate and up to date supplier information. However, this assumption is wrong, and when procurement technology fails to deliver promised results, supplier data is usually the point of breakdown. Companies of all sizes require better supplier data, and up until now, doing this has been a demanding endeavor without much success. Thankfully, there are tools on the market that can help take the burden of supplier data off the hands of employees and countless working hours working on manual tasks.

Once this conversation starts, those presenting should highlight how poor supplier data has held the company back. Oftentimes, the ROI for better supplier data is hidden within increased compliance on other modules. Adding specific examples of how insufficient supplier data affects the company and sharing how each of those situations could have been avoided can share a viewpoint that has possibly been looked over in the past. Here are three tips to get c -suite leaders on board with improving the company’s supplier data platform.

Continue reading →

Companies can now gather more information about their customers than ever before. But according to a new study data science is not benefiting marketers, with 84 percent of marketing executives saying their ability to predict customer behavior is guesswork.

The report from predictive analytics company Pecan AI, based on surveys carried out by Wakefield Research, finds four out of five marketing execs report difficulty in making data-driven decisions despite all of the consumer data at their disposal.

Continue reading →

Critical infrastructure is a prime target for cybercriminals and nation state actors. It often operates on legacy operational technologies (OT) which have vulnerabilities that can't be fixed easily or directly. 

We spoke to John Moran, technical director, business development at Tufin, to discuss how organizations can protect themselves. John is a former incident response consultant and is a cybercrime forensics expert.

Continue reading →

Businesses today face a wider and more dangerous array of cybersecurity threats than ever before. In the UK alone there were more than 400,000 reports of fraud and cybercrime in 2021. Those crimes come with significant costs too. In addition to the reputational damage that comes with cybersecurity incidents, data breaches cost UK companies an average of US$4.35 million.

That makes it critical that organizations have the best possible cyber defences in place, not just for the threats they face today but also for those of tomorrow. This is especially true for business-critical applications like ERP systems that need to be run continuously in order for the organization to keep operating smoothly and servicing its customers.

Continue reading →

The pandemic led to a boom in online commerce, but as it fades away enterprises are keen to find new ways to understand and reach their customers, at the same time as addressing increasing privacy concerns.

Customer experience company Acquia commissioned Vanson Bourne to seek the views of 2,000 consumers and 200 marketers in the UK and the US on the digital marketing landscape.

Continue reading →

IBM is unveiling a set of new AI capabilities that aim to reduce some of the top barriers to AI adoption and drive down the cost and time investment it currently takes to build and implement AI applications.

The expansion to its embeddable AI software portfolio sees the release of three new libraries designed to help IBM Ecosystem partners, clients and developers more easily, quickly and cost-effectively build their own AI-powered solutions and bring them to market.

Continue reading →

2021 marked a dramatic step change in global climate conditions, with a significant increase in the incidence and severity of extreme weather events resulting in flooding, hurricanes and heatwaves across the globe. The UK and Europe experienced the hottest summers on record during the past three years. This year’s extreme, record-breaking heatwave in July took the UK climate beyond 40 degrees Celsius, and posed serious threats to UK infrastructure.

This ongoing and accelerating trend is now sadly locked into the Earth’s system for decades to come. In Western Europe, heatwaves are increasing in frequency, at about three times faster, and in intensity, roughly four times faster, than in other midlatitude regions according to a recent study. This is having a knock-on impact for business, as evidenced by July’s West London data center outages for Google and Oracle Cloud and heatwave related IT issues for NHS Trusts. The need for C-suites to consider climate-related events as a serious risk to business continuity can no longer be seen as a problem of the future.

Continue reading →

The IT world is littered with acronyms and one of the latest is CNAPP, standing for Cloud Native Application Protection Platform. If you haven't heard about it already you almost certainly will do soon.

We spoke to Stanimir Markov, CEO at Runecast, about CNAPP, what it is and how it can benefit modern enterprises and their cloud environments.

Continue reading →

With more open source being consumed than ever before, attacks targeting the software supply chain have increased too, both in frequency and complexity. A new report reveals a 633 percent year on year increase in malicious attacks aimed at open source in public repositories -- this equates to a 742 percent average yearly increase in software supply chain attacks since 2019.

The latest State of the Software Supply Chain Report from Sonatype, released today at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, also finds that 96 percent of open source Java downloads with known-vulnerabilities could have been avoided because a better version was available, but was ignored.

Continue reading →

The internet has changed the way that most people shop and increasingly we want to get the things we've ordered fast.

This has given rise to on-demand commerce, with deliveries supported by armies of gig workers. But it's also driven rapid technological innovation in the logistics sector. We spoke to Kashyap Deorah, founder and CEO of logistics app specialist HyperTrack, to learn more about the new the phenomenon of 'instant commerce' and what it means for both enterprises and consumers.

Continue reading →

Information and work overload, insufficient downtime, lack of tool integration, and alert fatigue mean that 71 percent of security operations center professionals say they're likely to quit their job.

A new report from logging and security analytics company Devo Technology shows SOC leaders continue to face a tricky balancing act when it comes to retaining SOC analysts amid major talent shortages and turnover.

Continue reading →

According to new research from Tessian, 18 percent of UK and US security leaders work over 25 hours extra a week, double the amount of overtime they reported in 2021.

On average, they work 16.5 hours over their contracted weekly hours, up from 11 hours in 2021. Also three-quarters of security leaders say they aren't able to always switch off from work, 16 percent of these say they can rarely or never switch off.

Continue reading →

The popularity of Kubernetes has led to its rapid adoption, but as with any advanced technology, the benefits come alongside challenges.

Being able to take full advantage of the technology means understanding what it can offer and how it fits with other developments like artificial intelligence. We spoke to Tobi Knaup, CEO of independent Kubernetes platform D2iQ, to find out about the current state of Kubernetes and what it promises for the future.

Continue reading →

The short-term costs of a cyberattack are significant. Investigating and containing a breach, rebuilding IT systems and implementing new security controls, as well as the loss of productivity, can all cause severe financial strain.

However, the long-term costs of a breach are often even more damaging. Enterprises that do not handle an attack well can suffer a number of further consequences, including reputational damage, a loss of customer loyalty and a drop in share prices.

Continue reading →

The average enterprise uses more than 130 cybersecurity point solutions, creating siloed data that is hard for security teams to apply in meaningful ways.

To address this problem, Tenable is launching a new exposure management platform, aimed at giving customers a unified view into their organization's assets and vulnerabilities across the whole attack surface.

Continue reading →