Ian Barker

The IT services industry revolves around service level agreements (SLAs) but they don't often provide adequate compensation for damage caused to business by an outage of providers' systems.

Operations and performance management specialist PagerDuty is so confident of its product that it's putting its money where its reliability is and introducing Downtime Insurance, the IT operations industry's first reliability service-level agreement to be backed by a multi-million dollar insurance policy.

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Big data can provide many benefits for businesses, but the complexities of dealing with systems like Hadoop can make it expensive and time consuming to roll out projects.

California-based Kyvos Insights is launching a new product specifically designed for big data that enables business users to easily and quickly derive powerful insights from their data for more informed decision-making, with no programming required.

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Thanks to the Internet of Things and the growth in the use of mobile devices, network traffic is growing faster than ever. But the tools used to manage and monitor that traffic haven’t kept pace.

Network visibility specialist Kentik (previously known as CloudHelix) is launching a SaaS platform to enable full visibility into networks of any size giving real-time, actionable insights into network traffic activity, DDoS attacks and peering efficiency.

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Businesses need their employees to be able to collaborate on projects but the increasingly mobile nature of the workforce and the pressures of BYOD use can make that hard to achieve.

Collaboration software specialist Huddle is updating its iOS apps to provide iPhone and iPad users with a simple and secure way to collaborate on content and manage projects while on the move, as well as delivering a more social experience by focusing on team activity around content.

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It's not uncommon for businesses to have multiple access points, whether on a single site or in multiple locations. This can lead to challenges when it comes to managing access and ensuring software and security are up to date.

To make life simpler NETGEAR is launching a software as a service platform called Business Central designed to provide small to mid-sized organizations with an affordable way to establish and manage key IT networking services and network devices.

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In an audit of 1,000 websites, including those of leading retailers, banks, social media, news and government bodies, 46 percent were found vulnerable to known online security threats.

According to the non-profit Online Trust Alliance, which conducted the study, sites belonging to Internet of Things companies are most at risk. The audit included the websites of 50 leading Internet of Things device makers, focused on wearable technologies and connected home products. 76 percent of these sites failed the assessment, while only 20 percent scored highly enough to qualify for the OTA's Online Trust Honor Roll.

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Just as drug dealers try to get people hooked on progressively more addictive substances, it seems that the hijacking of a device to perform simple click fraud can quickly lead to the distribution of nastier malware.

According to the latest State of Infections report from threat protection specialists Damballa, a compromised device, originally exploited for the relatively low-level purpose of committing of click fraud -- a scam to defraud pay-per-click advertisers -- became part of a chain of infections, which led within two hours to the introduction of the toxic ransomware CryptoWall.

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Marketing departments today operate across multiple channels from traditional routes to digital campaigns and social media. That means they're dealing with more data than ever before.

But being data rich isn't an answer in itself as the information can be fragmented and difficult to analyze. Big data insights specialist Datameer is launching its Multi-Channel Marketing Analytics App which offers an end-to-end view of the marketing process from lead-to-customer.

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With mobile devices becoming increasingly popular there's ever increasing demand for apps, but that can prove a bottleneck for businesses.

With the launch of a new version of its RhoMobile developer platform, Illinois-based Zebra Technologies Corporation is aiming to make multi-platform development easier.

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It may be hackers and cyber criminals that are in the front of most people's minds when thinking of security, but a worrying number of attacks come from organization insiders.

New crowd-based research from user activity monitoring and behavior analysis specialist Spectorsoft shows that 62 percent of security professionals saw a rise in insider attacks over the last 12 months, while 22 percent saw no rise, and 16 percent were unsure if they had been attacked or not.

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More and more businesses are publishing their own apps, and that involves the use of APIs. Yet many existing API tools focus only on publishing and ignore the user and partner side of things.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) company WaveMaker is releasing its new WaveMaker Gateway, to make it easier for enterprises to open up their APIs to partners and external developers.

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Security of the endpoint is often the weakest link in enterprise security as users may not be aware of the risks from malicious content that can slip past traditional protection.

Endpoint security company BUFFERZONE is announcing today that it's joining the Intel Security Innovation Alliance (SIA) program as a Sales Teaming Partner and that it's been certified as McAfee Compatible with the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) platform.

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Monitoring applications and their infrastructure can involve the use of multiple different products. According to recent research by Enterprise Management Associates, some 65 percent of enterprises report owning 11 or more commercial monitoring/management tools.

Application intelligence specialist AppDynamics is launching an update to its Application Intelligence Platform that introduces Unified Monitoring to trace and monitor transactions from the end user through the entire application and infrastructure environment to help solve performance issues and improve user experience.

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For smaller businesses organizing backups can be a chore which is why they often choose to buy a service solution from their systems provider rather than do it in house.

Backup and data protection specialist Intronis is one of the leaders in backup platforms for IT providers and is launching a new release of its ECHOplatform designed to deliver simplified operations and improved value.

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Bluetooth speakers usually need some sort of distinctive feature to help them to stand out from the crowd. In the case of the LuguLake that distinctiveness is in the way it looks.

The first thing that strikes you is the funky design, it's about the size of a tennis ball, or an apple if you prefer, with a shiny black finish and a sort of suspended saucer over the speaker cone itself. On the top of this is a touch pad that acts as a volume control as well as allowing you to pause and skip tracks, and answer calls so you can use it as a speakerphone.

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