Articles about Information Technology

The US government could save $5.8 billion in technology cost, and at the same time modernize and improve the efficiency of its systems. This is according to the Information Services Group, a technology insights, market intelligence and advisory services company.

Today, at the headquarters of the General Services Administration, it released a report, together with the Commission on IT Cost, Opportunity, Strategy and Transparency (IT COST).

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According to the latest figures compiled by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), computer science graduates are still at the top of the UK’s higher education unemployment rankings.

During the academic year of 2014/2015, 10 percent of computer science graduates were unable to find a job six months after graduation. This figure is even higher than the 7.7 percent for students, who studied Mass Communications and documentation, Physical sciences, or Engineering and technology, that had difficulty finding work after graduation.

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A new survey by Countercept by MWR InfoSecurity highlights all the frustrations IT security experts are experiencing as they’re trying their best to protect their company’s assets and employees.

The survey, conducted during Infosecurity Europe, asked 301 IT security professionals about their company’s ability to detect and deter cyber-attacks.

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Shadow IT has always been considered a huge risk to an enterprise’s cyber-security efforts, but now we have a new survey which supports the claim and shows the scope of the problem.

The report, recently released by Tenable Network Security, says that both German and UK-based companies acknowledged shadow IT as a problem, but the former reported more cyber-attacks.

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It seems that the constant expert warnings that legacy software should be avoided aren’t really resonating with businesses across the world. According to a new report by Spiceworks, more than half (53 percent) of companies all over the world have at least one instance of Windows Server 2003.

That wouldn’t be much of an issue if the operating system’s EOL (end of life) date wasn’t a year ago (July 14, 2015). After that date, Microsoft has officially ceased supporting the product, stopped releasing patches and new updates, which means that companies still using Windows Server 2003 are actually putting themselves at a lot of cyber risk.

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Global IT spending is expected to be flat this year, hitting $3.41 trillion (£2.63tr), market analysts Gartner says. But an important factor hasn’t been taken into consideration.

Gartner says the global IT spending will be up from last quarter’s 0.5 percent negative growth. These changes are mostly driven by fluctuations in currency, so it should be business as usual. However, the forecast was made assuming the UK would not vote to leave the European Union. As we all witnessed, that surprise move has shaken global economy, so different outcomes are now also a reality.

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For many years forward thinking companies across the UK have been attempting to raise the numbers of women working in the IT professions. They make slow progress, and some might even say "no progress", since we know that around 20 percent of the IT workforce was female at the turn of the century and the number now languishes at about 17 percent. For those involved in the work to attract and retain women in the technical professions, the question arises: "What would the number be if we weren’t already taking action?"

When you look at it, the amount of activity to support the attraction and retention of women to the professions is astounding. It follows the lifecycle of girls and women. Many big organizations offer summer camps for girls (e.g. Apple, IBM, the bigger banks) to show them how exciting the digital world can be. Thousands of people are engaged in programs to talk to girls in schools about the technical professions as a career option.

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Federal government IT professionals are overconfident in their ability to detect insider threats, endpoint security firm Tripwire has found. Analyzing the confidence of IT experts regarding their efficiency in seven key security controls, it polled 763 professionals from various industries.

Almost a third say they would not be able to detect every time a non-privileged user attempted to access files. Almost three quarters (73 percent) assume their system would generate an alert or email within hours if a user inappropriately accessed file shares.

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The notion that cloud computing solutions are being driven primarily by reduced costs, and that they’re causing IT teams to shrink everywhere seems to be significantly in the myths area.

A new report by Six Degrees Group (6DG) points out that there are other, more important reasons, businesses opt for cloud solutions, and that teams are not necessarily shrinking, but reshaping mostly.

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Leadership, understanding of business objectives and project management are the three most important skills among businesses, a new report by IT resourcing company Experis says.

In the report, entitled "Tomorrows Tech Teams", it was also said that IT teams will see an influx of people from a non-tech background, further complicating the existing IT skills shortage.

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With cyber attacks on the rise, organizations are facing pressure to beef up their security to avoid falling victim to such an attack. However, a recent IT security report from Spiceworks shows that 80 percent of organizations were affected by at least one security incident during 2015.

To compile its report, the company surveyed over 600 IT professionals from the US and UK. Shockingly, Spiceworks discovered that few organizations have either an in-house or third-party cyber security expert on call.

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Out of 300 IT professionals attending the Infosecurity Europe conference, almost half (49 percent) believe their CEO has fallen victim to a targeted phishing attack.

The results have been published in a new paper by unified security management and crowd-sourced threat intelligence company, AlienVault.

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More than half of IT decision makers opt to go for third-party maintenance (TPM) and pre-owned equipment, to cut costs and take advantage of improved support independent maintenance providers offer. It was also said they’ve had a "positive experience" with prior-generation hardware.

The news was published by Curvature, an IT infrastructure solutions provider, which polled 500 IT decision makers. Out of the 500 respondents, 60 percent use TPM, and 53 percent decide to purchase pre-owned equipment.

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Intel, SAP, Lyft, Spotify and VMware are just some of the 30 Silicon Valley based companies that have signed a "Tech Inclusion Pledge" as a promise that they will promote diversity in their workplaces going forward.

Two years ago, the civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson pointed out the lack of diversity in the tech companies operating out of Silicon Valley. He went so far as to press a number of companies to release their data regarding the number of African Americans, Hispanics and women employed at their organizations.

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IT pros are feeling the pressure of digital transformation, as nearly 90 percent of UK’s businesses are looking to introduce digital services. According to CloudTalent, an Avanade company specializing in IT strategic advisory services, this challenge is greater than anything IT teams faced before.

Of the surveyed IT decision makers going through digital transformation just 40 percent believe they’re making good progress, and a third (34 percent) are near the end of the process. Two thirds said they need to hire specialist IT consultants, while 94 percent say they’d already used their services before.

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