Unisys reveals no link to development of controversial Post Office software
Unisys said it has completed an internal review of its involvement in the creation and distribution of the Post Office Capture system and has found no evidence that it developed the software. So far, the Post Office and Unisys have…
Lords to challenge controversial DWP benefits bank account surveillance powers
Members of the House of Lords are pressing for changes to legislation that will give the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) new powers to require banks to monitor the accounts of every person who receives benefit payments, including the…
CIO interview: Attiq Qureshi, chief digital information officer, Manchester United
Senior executives in any corporate boardroom like to talk about winning. Winning deals, winning market share, winning customers. It’s the sort of language any IT leader needs to be comfortable using, if they’re to make an impact on the organisation….
What is database as a service (DBaaS)?
What is database as a service (DBaaS)? Database as a service (DBaaS) is a cloud computing managed service offering that provides access to a database without requiring the setup of physical hardware, the installation of software or the need to…
Post Office boss said subpostmasters had hands in till and blamed technology for missing cash
The Post Office’s managing director at the time Horizon system problems became public told a senior colleague that he suspected subpostmasters accused of theft were trying to blame the IT for their own actions. Alan Cook, who was managing director…
Storage technology explained: AI and data storage
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) promises a step change in the automation fundamental to IT, with applications ranging from simple chatbots to almost unthinkable levels of complexity, content generation and control. Storage forms a key part of AI,…
IR35: HMRC rushing to restore CEST source code deleted from Github ‘in error’
The source code for the decision engine underpinning HM Revenue & Customs’ (HMRC’s) much-maligned Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool has been erroneously deleted from public view during efforts to decommission the platform hosting it. The tool, released ahead…
Some former Post Office staff should be jailed over scandal, says government minister
The government minister in charge of the Post Office has said former Post Office executives and others responsible for the Horizon scandal should be jailed. Business and trade minister Kevin Hollinrake’s commitment to hold the instigators of the scandal to…
Fujitsu should stop bending rules, stop bidding and pay up, says MP
Fujitsu should stop bending rules, halt bidding for government contracts, pay for Post Office scandal damage and meet the children of victims, the chair of the influential House of Commons business and trade select committee has demanded. The IT firm…
Datacentre outages are happening less often and becoming less severe
The frequency and severity of datacentre-related outages are going down, according to resiliency think-tank Uptime Institute. The organisation’s sixth annual outage analysis report says the number of datacentre-related crashes has been declining for several years, despite marked increases in the…
UK-based cloud provider Civo offers ‘unconditional’ data egress fees waiver to customers
UK-based cloud services provider Civo claims its offer to abolish all data egress fees for its customers goes above and beyond similar commitments recently made by the big three hyperscale cloud providers. As previously reported by Computer Weekly, Amazon Web…
Fujitsu staff instructed how to bid for government contracts during self-imposed ban
A Fujitsu leak has revealed staff were given a flow diagram instructing them how to bid for government contracts during the IT supplier’s self-imposed ban on bidding, which a senior UK executive sees as no more than “an extra gateway”…
Finnish industrial groups launch AI and robotics ventures
Multinational Finnish industrial groups Outokumpu, Metsä and HKScan, are scaling-up deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive international growth and strengthen performance-based efficiencies in their production and product-based core research operations. The AI-focused capital investments earmarked by the three Finnish…
Remote access is the Post Office’s known unknown
The Post Office sent people to prison based on evidence from computer data that lacked integrity – and senior executives knew it. Covert recordings revealed by Channel 4 News will increase calls for a criminal investigation into former Post Office…
HM Treasury builds out its data science team
The UK’s HM Treasury has expanded its headcount of data scientists as part of its plans to drive “data transformation” across the department. According to figures from a recent Freedom of Information (FoI) request, in 2021, the total staff budget…
Podcast: What is distributed cloud storage and what are its benefits?
In this podcast, we look at distributed cloud storage with Enrico Signoretti, vice-president of product and partnerships at Cubbit. We talk about how storage has shifted to hybrid and multicloud modes and how distributed cloud storage separates the control plane…
Leaked comms reveal Fujitsu eyeing huge UK government bounty, despite Post Office scandal promise
Leaked internal communications have revealed Fujitsu is targeting about £1.3bn worth of UK government contracts over the next 12 months, despite its promise to stall bidding for new contracts amid the Post Office scandal fallout. The IT giant is aiming…
Sums of money Post Office ‘stole’ from subpostmasters may never be known
The amount of money the Post Office took from subpostmasters who were wrongly blamed for accounting shortfalls may never be known due to “system limitations”. Subpostmasters paid the Post Office “millions upon millions” of pounds to cover phantom accounting shortfalls…
Fujitsu won’t sign any new business in Ireland
Fujitsu has told staff it will no longer seek new business in its Republic of Ireland operation and will instead focus on fulfilling existing contracts. In an internal email, UK and Ireland boss Anwen Owen said the decision followed a…
How to Repair a Damaged Flex Circuit PCB
Repair a Damaged Flex Circuit PCB A damaged flex circuit PCB can cause electronic devices to stop working properly or fail to function altogether. However, the good news is that it is possible to repair the problem and restore functionality…
Post Office scandal fallout for Fujitsu could open UK public sector to Indian giants
IT services companies are primed to sweep up UK public sector business if Fujitsu’s huge share of the sector declines, amid fury over its role in the Post Office scandal. Suppliers such as India’s Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), already a…
What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?
What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)? Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web-based service that enables businesses to run application programs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. With Amazon EC2, companies can access scalable and secure…
SAP S/4HANA data migration beset by poor and fragmented strategy
German software giant SAP’s S/4HANA data migration and management is a huge challenge. Organisations in the midst of transitioning to the platform lack comprehensive data strategies, find responsibilities split between departments, lack skills, can’t access data and report slow progress…
CCS slammed over errors in G-Cloud 14 data protection documents
Known as Schedule 7, the data protection part of the G-Cloud 14 framework agreement is being described by prospective suppliers as poorly drafted and nonsensical. And CCS is now facing urgent calls to revise its contents, amid concerns that –…
Global McDonalds IT outage result of third-party error
A global IT outage that forced fast food chain McDonald’s to temporarily suspend its operations in multiple countries has been blamed on a third-party provider error made during a configuration change, with no suspicion of any form of cyber attack….
Controversial Post Office Capture software was completely rewritten in 1994
More details of problems with a pre-Horizon accounting system used by subpostmasters emerges, despite the Post Office’s failure to respond to demands for answers. There have been question marks over the reliability of the software, known as Capture, and a…
Questions raised over NHS deletion of thousands of emails during whistleblower tribunal
NHS doctor Chris Day has won the right to challenge a tribunal decision which raises questions about information governance in NHS hospital trusts and the use of digital evidence by employment tribunals. Day blew the whistle on acute understaffing at…
TechUK calls for next government to introduce ‘industrial strategy’ for AI
Tech companies have urged the next government to adopt an “industrial strategy” to accelerate the take-up of artificial intelligence (AI) across UK businesses. The recommendation is one of seven urgent policy interventions identified by the UK’s technology sector for the…
American Express customers exposed through third-party breach
American Express has written to customers warning that their account details may have been breached after a third-party supplier to various merchants reported unauthorised access to its systems. Details emerged following a letter to regulators in the US state of…
MPs call for Post Office exclusion from compensation schemes, as trust hits rock bottom
Trust in Post Office management has fallen so low that MPs and subpostmasters are demanding it is removed from the process of compensating those whose lives it wrecked. The organisation, which used to refer to itself as the “UK’s most…
Fujitsu should pay half of Post Office scandal costs, says select committee chair
The government’s starting point for negotiating Fujitsu’s contribution to the costs of the Post Office scandal should be a 50:50 split, according to the chair of a Parliamentary select committee. Fujitsu stood by and watched as the Post Office used…
Dutch organisations start building a federated European cloud
The European Commission (EC) approved the Project of Common European Interest – Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS) programme in late 2023. In this programme, around 100 companies and knowledge institutes from 12 EU countries will cooperate on developing new and…
‘Brutal’ decisions required to sort out Post Office mess, says select committee chair
If the government produces a bill that does not remove the Post Office from the process of delivering financial redress for former subpostmasters and fails to set hard deadlines, MPs believe they have the necessary support to amend it. Speaking…
Post Office prosecutions during Horizon go-live phase are ‘frightening’
The Post Office’s decision to prosecute subpostmasters using Horizon evidence during the software’s early roll-out phase was “frightening”, according to an IT expert who exposed its deficiencies. With the Post Office accused of perverting the course of justice in its…
Unexpected costs hit many as they move to cloud storage
Most organisations spend more on cloud storage than they budget for, with large numbers migrating more data to the cloud than planned. Those numbers are even higher for companies that have adopted cloud storage in the past two years, with…
Own Data targets SaaS backup and offers analytics insight
Cloud-based SaaS applications don’t have backup built-in, so third-party products have to fill that gap. Also, customers often never really gain the full benefit of information locked into software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that could provide insights of value to the customer….
MPs demand Fujitsu be ‘nailed down’ on financial promise to Post Office scandal victims
MPs demand more guarantees over Fujitsu’s contribution to the costs UK taxpayers face as a result of the fall out of the Post Office Horizon scandal. A business and trade select committee hearing focused on the financial redress for victims…
Post-production company to go ‘all-in’ on Deep Green’s heat-reusing datacentre in Devon
London-based post-production company Dirty Looks has committed to moving all of its computing and storage workloads to Deep Green’s flagship datacentre, which is housed in a public swimming pool in Exmouth, Devon. As previously reported by Computer Weekly, Deep Green…
Hycu uses AI to develop APIs for SaaS application backup
It’s just a year since backup product maker Hycu announced R-Cloud, and already it can protect 64 software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Now, it plans to integrate many more, with AI capable of generating its own connectors from a small amount of…
Government should face legal deadlines on paying Post Office victims
The government may have to reopen previously agreed financial settlements with subpostmasters and should face legally binding deadlines on making payments to victims of the Post Office scandal, MPs have been told. During a mammoth five-hour business and trade select…
Post Office scandal roundup: Fourth Estate in full throttle
The Post Office scandal has become markedly political, and while Computer Weekly continues to investigate, the journalistic resources of the mainstream media have also gone full throttle. It’s no longer just Computer Weekly, Private Eye and freelancer Nick Wallis making…
Storage and backup spend in 2024 targets risk and resilience
Storage and backup investment plans for 2024 show a significant bias towards averting risk and building resilience. At the same time, storage spending plans lean towards the cloud, but with very robust on-premise storage spending plans also present. Those are…
Virtus plots colocation campus in Buckinghamshire as demand for London datacentres soars
West London-based colocation provider Virtus Data Centres is planning to build a server farm campus on a 50-acre freehold plot in Saunderton, Buckinghamshire that will house up to 75MW of IT capacity. The company, which is part of the ST…
IR35 legislative tweak to remedy settlement offset issue by April 2024
A tweak to how the IR35 tax avoidance legislation works means that from 6 April 2024, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) can no longer be accused of over-collecting tax from non-IR35 compliant public and private sector organisations. The change means…
Stannah looks to enterprise cloud software to lift IT systems
Stairlift and lift manufacturer Stannah Group said it has made a “significant investment” in a cloud-based enterprise software roll-out to modernise its IT systems and prepare for the company’s future growth. Stannah is one of the UK’s leading engineering companies,…
Law to clear hundreds of wrongfully convicted subpostmasters expected in July
The government expects a law to overturn Post Office Horizon scandal-related criminal convictions in July, but said it “will not set a precedent”. Fears were raised about the planned legislation amid questions about the relationship between Parliament and the judiciary….
Unisys investigating potential involvement in controversial Post Office system
Unisys has launched an investigation into its role in the distribution of the Post Office’s Capture accounting software, which is now being linked to the potential wrongful prosecutions and suffering of subpostmasters. Since the airing of ITV’s drama about the…
Co-op signs TCS deal for cloud-first push
The Co-operative Group (Co-op) is adopting a cloud-first model as part of a plan to reduce its carbon footprint, with the migration of IT from datacentres to the cloud. Working with Indian outsourcing giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the diversified…
Competition in the cloud: Microsoft’s ‘unfair’ licensing tactics go under the microscope
Microsoft’s hold on the global cloud infrastructure sector is on the rise, with data released in the wake of its most recent set of financial results revealing that it’s gaining share at the expense of market-leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS)….
HM Treasury signs AWS hosting environment management deal with Keysource
HM Treasury has signed two three-year deals with datacentre specialist Keysource, including one involving the maintenance of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment that hosts the second iteration of the department’s cross-government public spending database. The system, known as the…
Controversial Post Office Capture system was developed in-house
The Post Office’s second controversial accounting system, known as Capture, was developed in-house in the early 1990s. Following the explosion of public interest in the Post Office Horizon scandal, concerns over a system that predated the software have emerged. As…
Music agency halves space and energy costs with switch to Pure
Switzerland-based copyright and royalties agency SUISA has cut datacentre rackspace and energy costs by 50% following a move from EMC all-flash hardware to Pure Storage arrays. The move also allowed it to overcome capacity limitations on the old XtremIO arrays…
Green IT: How Google’s cloud and AI tools are supporting a methane-tracking satellite project
A satellite due for launch will track how much methane is being emitted by oil and gas facilities, aiming to encourage moves to reduce the amount of harmful gas emissions in the atmosphere, with some help from artificial intelligence (AI)…
Post Office CEO refused to meet government minister without her lawyer after 2015 Horizon report
Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells refused to meet a government minister without a lawyer in 2015 when he insisted on a briefing to discuss the damaging findings of a landmark investigation into the Post Office Horizon system. This set…
Podcast: What is the impact of AI on storage and compliance?
In this podcast, we look at the impact of the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) on storage and compliance with Mathieu Gorge, CEO of Vigitrust. We talk about the state of play of compliance frameworks for AI, and how to deal…
Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry: Two years of shocking revelations
The statutory public inquiry into the Post Office scandal has gone relatively unnoticed over the past two years, but in that time, those au fait with the case have been shocked on an almost daily basis. The airing of ITV’s…
A decade after breaking HMRC’s Aspire deal, the Post Office scandal exposes glaring similarities
Ten years ago, as IT transformation director at HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), I led the team that successfully renegotiated the £800m per year Aspire outsourcing contract with Capgemini and Fujitsu, saving taxpayers over £200m and dismantling a system riddled…
More than 1,000 subpostmasters could have used second faulty Post Office system
More than 1,000 subposmasters could have used the Post Office’s Capture software, as more details emerge about how they were blamed for unexplained shortfalls on the system. Following the recent ITV drama about the Post Office Horizon scandal, a growing…
The rising prominence of hybrid cloud in the Nordics
Joen Meier Olsen, senior manager of strategy advisers in EMEA for Apptio, says: “The hybrid cloud conversation in the Nordics focuses more on a cloud-if-it-makes-sense principle, rather than a cloud-first principle. Companies are moving to the public cloud if it makes sense from a financial or operational…
HSBC and Google Cloud partner up for climate tech startup growth push
Google is teaming up with HSBC to make it easier for climate tech companies that run their infrastructure on the internet search giant’s cloud platform to access financial support. The partnership will see members of the Google Cloud Ready –…
Swedish CIO contributes best practices for ethical use of artificial intelligence
OpenAI writes on its website: “The amount of compute used in the largest AI [artificial intelligence] training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a two-year doubling period).” According to OpenAI, this…
What is cloud modernization? Benefits and best practices
What is cloud modernization? Cloud modernization is a multistep process where existing on-premises applications, infrastructure and data sources are migrated, updated and transformed into a cloud-based architecture and environment. Why is cloud modernization important? Simply moving an on-premises application to…
The Post Office scandal shows how much AI can and must help humans
The rise of ChatGPT and its many imitators has changed the world. While the generative artificial intelligence (AI) narrative has been widely negative to some, there are others, especially entrepreneurs, who believe it to be a positive force for…
Post Office scandal: Phase four’s rogues’ gallery
The public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal has just completed its fourth phase, with the closing statements of barristers condensing months of hearings, often covering complex issues of law, into easily digestible statements that raise the question…
‘People are now listening’, Post Office inquiry told as latest phase ends
The statutory public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal was told that the public are now paying attention, as barristers closed its fourth phase. After months of questioning and several delays, the inquiry phase investigating the Post Office’s…
What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
What is AWS? AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. It includes a mixture of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and packaged software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. AWS offers tools such as compute power, database storage…
French TV giant sticks with Dell NAS for channel upgrade
It saved 42% in energy costs, 50% in datacentre rackspace and got 4.5PB where previously it had 3.5PB in its NAS storage hardware refresh. That’s the result achieved by French TV giant TF1, which replaced 80 nodes of Dell…
Russian IT sector still under serious pressure
The IT sector of Russia continues to be under serious pressure from Western countries, with a significant expansion of sanctions in recent months. At the end of 2023, several large Russian IT companies were included in the 12th…
Cloud is not always the answer: Five reasons why
For a growing number of organisations, the default option for new IT projects is the cloud and cloud storage, with even the more cautious businesses have adopted “cloud-first” or “cloud-preferred” strategies. That’s because startups and fast-growing firms can build…
What is a Cloud SLA (Cloud Service-Level Agreement)?| Definition from TechTarget
What is a cloud SLA (cloud service-level agreement)? A cloud SLA (cloud service-level agreement) is an agreement between a cloud service provider and a customer that ensures a minimum level of service is maintained. It guarantees levels of reliability, availability…
Committee chair asks minister to back ‘Mr Bates clause’ in Post Office compensation legislation
The chair of the department of business and trade select committee has called on the government to consider enshrining deadlines on payments to subpostmasters into the Post Office Compensation Bill, which is currently processing through parliament. The bill is…
Podcast: Storage and compliance outlook for 2024
In this podcast we look at the year ahead in 2024 with Mathieu Gorge, CEO of Vigitrust. We talk about upcoming updates, and changes to law and regulation such as in PCI, NIST, EU data protection regulations, post-Brexit divergence between…
Fujitsu agrees to support former subpostmasters’ families beyond financial redress
Fujitsu will engage with Post Office scandal victims and their representatives to establish how Fujitsu can support them and their families in the future, in addition to paying its share of the financial redress owed to the former subpostmasters….
Upgraded Arabic large language model is twice as big
Just under three months since its first release of Jais, the consortium that released what it calls the world’s most powerful large language model (LLM) for Arabic has finished training a second version, which is more than twice as…
Fujitsu boss admits to missed opportunities to prevent miscarriages of justice
Fujitsu’s UK boss admitted that the IT company missed an opportunity to take action and prevent subpostmasters from being convicted for financial crimes after its software showed unexplained shortfalls in branch accounts. During the latest Post Office Horizon scandal…
Google invests $1bn in expanding UK datacentre footprint with Hertfordshire facility
Google is reinforcing its commitment to the UK by building a $1bn datacentre on a 33-acre site in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, to provide enterprises with locally hosted access to its public cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) services. The build…
Gartner: The big IT outsourcing contract returns
Two recent major contracts point to the return of big outsourcing deals. Earlier in January, Canada Post announced it has entered into an agreement to transition Innovapost, its IT shared-service provider, to Deloitte Canada, in a bid to improve…
Anger sparked by TV drama forces Fujitsu to put public sector contract bidding on hold
Fujitsu has put bidding for UK public sector contracts on hold during the current public inquiry into the widest miscarriage of justice in UK history, in which the Japanese supplier is implicated. Under-fire Fujitsu has also confirmed it will…
Paula Vennells fails to practice what she preaches in Post Office scandal
I met Toby Jones at the BBC in the week before Christmas. He was in for Radio 4 to discuss Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Having supported the subpostmasters’ campaign since 2015, I was interested to hear how…
Michelle Donelan aims high on tech innovation growth
Science, innovation and technology secretary Michelle Donelan has unveiled a new initiative to support UK innovation. The scale-up forum capitalises on government’s power to bring together leading figures from across the UK’s growing science and technology sector. Discussing the…
Google Cloud abolishes data egress fees for global customer base
Google will no longer charge customers fees for transferring their data out of its cloud when switching to a new provider, as part of a concerted push to distance itself from its public cloud competition. Amit Zavery, general manager,…
Octopus Energy invests £200m in datacentre heat reuse startup Deep Green
Heat reuse-focused datacentre compute provider Deep Green has secured £200m in investment from Octopus Energy’s generation arm, which will be used to help the UK-based startup scale. Deep Green specialises in the development and deployment of small-scale, edge-style datacentres…
How the UK is supporting the Ukraine tech community
You may not assume that an online IT tuition course could have a big impact on the war on Ukraine – but technology is playing a vital role in Ukraine’s defence against Putin’s illegal invasion. The government recognises the…
CES 2024: Volvo Penta advances sea vehicle intelligence
Using the CES 2024 event to reveal “the industry’s most advanced” technology and propulsion platform for superyachts and commercial marine vessels, Volvo Penta unveiled its IPS Professional Platform, the next part in the evolution of its integrated helm-to-propeller experience….
Fujitsu UK employees working for HMRC to strike during self-assessment tax period over pay
More than 300 Fujitsu Services UK employees working for HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) are set to strike from 17 January 2024 in a protest over pay, potentially causing mass disruption to the IT systems underpinning the government agency’s…
How Fujitsu became a central part of the Post Office scandal
In the short few weeks since the Post Office public inquiry adjourned for Christmas, the national mood around the scandal has changed dramatically. When Sir Wyn Williams convenes phase four of the statutory inquiry on 11 January, the focus…
Storage technology explained: Flash vs HDD
The past 12 months saw flash storage nudge into areas from which it had hitherto been absent. In particular, this was because of the availability of denser – and therefore cheaper per-gigabyte (GB) – quad-level cell (QLC) flash storage…
Post Office scandal furore is moment to change digital evidence rules
With the general public now alert to and furious over the mistreatment of subpostmasters, the government must take the opportunity to change the law that made it easy for the Post Office to wrongly convict people based on computer…
Post Office Horizon scandal explained: Everything you need to know
After more than 20 years, what is now referred to as the Post Office Horizon scandal has become headline news. Computer Weekly has played an important part in exposing what has been described as the widest miscarriage of justice…
What is Cloud Application Performance Management (Cloud APM)?
What is cloud application performance management (cloud APM)? Cloud application performance management (cloud APM) is the process of monitoring resources that support software application performance in public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud environments. It takes actions to resolve issues…
Pure Storage: Flash ‘startup’ that brings late entrant advantage
In this storage vendor profile, we look at Pure Storage, which among all the big six storage players comes closest to having been a startup in recent times. This means that Pure Storage joined the market unencumbered by legacy…
Top 10 datacentre stories of 2023
The datacentre news cycle has been dominated by a set of familiar themes throughout 2023, as operators continue to find themselves under pressure to embrace sustainability, while juggling the exponential demand for compute capacity and ensuring uptime. It is…
On-prem vs cloud storage: Four decisions about data location
Nearly all enterprise IT projects involve decisions about where to store data. The public cloud holds perhaps more than half of all business data. That volume of data held on cloud-based systems, especially by the hyperscalers – Amazon Web…
Government reveals its own slow progress in compensating Post Office scandal victims
According to government figures, only 11 members of the over 500-strong Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) campaign group have received full compensation, four years after their huge High Court victory that proved the Post Office computer system was responsible…
Top 10 storage supplier strategy stories of 2023
By the beginning of 2023, the biggest storage supplier (Dell EMC) had seen growth in market share, while a giant of the past (IBM) had seen things slide. At the same time, Huawei consolidated its position near the top…
Post Office gets government handout as Horizon replacement costs increase ‘significantly’
Increasing costs and a lengthening timeline have forced the government to hand the Post Office an extra £103m towards its project to replace the controversial Horizon software used by thousands of subpostmasters. The Horizon system, from Fujitsu, is at…
Government advised to overturn all Post Office scandal convictions
The government has been advised to overturn all the convictions of the hundreds of subpostmasters wrongly accused in the Post Office scandal. In a letter to Alex Chalk, the secretary of state for justice, the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board…
IT Sustainability Think Tank: Navigating towards a greener future for IT in 2024
As we approach the dawn of 2024, the intersection of sustainability and innovation within the IT sector demands a proactive approach from decision makers. The milestones of 2023, marked by progress and challenges, set the stage for a pivotal…
IT Sustainability Think Tank: Green IT resolutions for the year ahead
A new report from the United Nations Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) finds national climate action plans remain insufficient to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees celsius and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The latest science…
Post Office prioritised its ‘bottom line’ over justice
The Post Office rewarded staff with bonuses if they hit targets for recovering money from subpostmasters blamed for accounting shortfalls, but scrimped and saved when it came to paying for vital evidence that would have cleared those suspected of…
Atos selected for UEFA Euro 2024 IT contract
Atos has been awarded the contract to provide core IT services to support next year’s European international football championship in Germany. The UEFA Euro 2024 contract will see the French IT services firm take responsibility for IT planning and…
Customers speak out over Okta’s response to latest breach
Cyber security companies BeyondTrust and Cloudflare have criticised identity and access management (IAM) specialist Okta after both became ensnared in yet another cyber attack against the latter’s systems. BeyondTrust said it detected an identity-centric attack on an in-house Okta…
What is SSAE 16? | Definition from TechTarget
What is SSAE 16? SSAE 16, or the Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16, is a set of auditing standards and guidance on using the standards published by the Auditing Standards Board of the American Institute of Certified…
AWS profit and revenue rises as enterprise demand for new cloud workloads bounces back
Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a 12% year-on-year uptick in its revenue growth during the third quarter of 2023, with the firm reporting a bounceback in the number of enterprises moving new workloads to its public cloud. The company…
Lloyds bank kicks off Hyderabad operation
Lloyds Banking Group has described the opening of a tech delivery centre in Hyderabad, India, as a “pivotal moment” in the bank’s £3bn, three-year, digital transformation journey The tech centre, which was announced in June, will house around 600…
Pension changes set to boost UK tech
The UK’s leading venture capital (VC) and growth equity firms have signed up to Venture Capital Investment Compact, where they pledged to support efforts to unlock British pension investment in high-growth companies. This pledge marks the start of larger…
What is business services ?
What are business services? Business services refer to all services that support a company. They do not create or deliver any physical products. Even so, they provide some benefits to the company, such as cost reductions, streamlined operations, increased employee…
VMware consolidates AI push at Explore in Barcelona
VMware Explore in Barcelona this week saw the virtualisation pioneer continue its push to go all-in on generative AI (GenAI) as a core capability for enterprises. This saw VMware extend its vision of a hybrid cloud and multicloud future…
Data-sharing management gap highlights cyber risk, says report
As organisational use of communications tools to share relevant data with third-party suppliers and partners spike, a lack of attention paid to security is cranking up risk levels, according to a global study of 781 IT, cyber and risk…
Engineers slash RPO/RTO as they swap tape for Rubrik backup
Kent-based construction design consultancy Frankham Group has ditched tape-based backup and deployed Rubrik appliances in a move that has seen it slash data restores from days to hours and gain the use of full disaster recovery (DR) provision when…
Spotify and Google Cloud expand tech partnership for AI-led user experience improvement push
Music streaming service Spotify is digging deeper into the portfolio of its long-standing technology partner Google Cloud to explore how its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools can help boost the experience for its 574 million-strong user base….
Luxembourg-based cloud provider aims to transform the AI landscape in Europe
For the time being, most of the world’s artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is in the US. But Gcore’s hopes to change that – or at least move things in that direction. The company is working hard to revolutionise European innovation…
IT Sustainability Think Tank: IT leaders must prepare for green challenges in 2024
As we approach the end of 2023, it’s important to reflect on significant steps that have been taken by businesses to reach net zero. While some of the sustainability hype has fallen off the agenda, at Digital Catapult, I…
‘Excited’ finance firms pump money into digital technology
According to Finastra’s Financial services: State of the nation survey 2023, technology investment is currently constrained for 78% of financial institutions, but 69% expect investments to resume in full in the first six months of 2024. In fact, 87%…
India’s Hexaware creates hundreds of jobs in UK
Hexaware Technologies is opening an operation in the UK which will host 250 employees when fully up and running by 2025. The Indian IT and business services supplier, which has near 30,000 staff globally, is already in the process…
Capgemini and Heathrow strike deal to enhance passenger experience
Capgemini has announced a four-year deal with Heathrow Airport to provide development and operations (DevOps) support for its technology estate. The deal aims to deliver a new experience for airport passengers, and offers up a supplier marketplace with curated…
Cubbit DS3 Composer brings DIY cloud to object storage pool
Italy-based startup Cubbit has announced the availability of the DS3 Composer, which will create S3-compatible private object storage clouds from on-premise, bare metal colocation and cloud storage capacity. DS3 claims its storage is resilient and secure, and can be…
Datacentres denied: West London server farm dispute prompts calls for UK planning system reform
The government’s decision to stop a proposed datacentre being built on an undeveloped piece of protected green land in west London highlights the pressure operators are under when balancing the demands of their investors with meeting the UK’s ever-growing…
World Wide Fund for Nature signs IT deal with Atos
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is harnessing technology to support its mission to conserve the natural world through a deal with IT services supplier Atos. Planned projects set out to use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate environmental monitoring,…
NHS England renews FutureNHS cloud-based collaboration hosting deal via G-Cloud for £1.67m
NHS England has set its sights on growing the number of users who rely on its FutureNHS cloud-based collaboration platform from just over 310,000 today to 600,000 by 2025. The growth projection follows NHS England’s renewal of its hosting…
Microsoft bans SME partners from selling its services via government’s Cloud Compute 2 framework
The decision came to light after the government’s procurement arm, the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) began notifying suppliers on Friday 17 November 2023 about whether or not they had succeeded in securing a spot on the four Lot framework, which…