UK national weather service has new mainframes that can perform 23,000 trillion calculations a second
Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, has a new IT solution, thanks to a partnership between the service, IBM and Computacenter. It will allow the Met Office to process greater volumes of weather data faster.
Currently, the service collects and safeguards around 200 million weather observations every day. The new environment includes two new mainframes with 44 cores, and 200 terabytes of attached storage.
How millions of Android devices could be at risk of total takeover
Originally developed as a digital camera platform, Android has definitely come a long way. It just surpassed Windows to become the most popular operating system for Internet usage in the global digital realm.
This has been established through a report by StatCounter, which states that the global OS Internet usage market share of Android (37.93 percent) is 0.2 percentage points ahead of Windows (37.91 percent). You can check out the global operating system market share map, here. This is a huge win for Android, which accounted for a mere 2.4 percent of the worldwide Internet usage almost five years ago. Interestingly, Microsoft had been leading this market since 1980.
Debunking the three major ransomware myths
On March 14, the UK National Crime Agency and National Cyber Security Center sounded the alarm about the growing cyber threat. One of their conclusions was that ransomware represents a significant, and growing, threat to UK business. Combine this with the fact that the last 12 months has seen cyber attacks on an unprecedented scale, and you’ve got a melting pot of cyber activity right now.
These warnings come as no surprise. Ransomware use has exploded over the past year or so, particularly in the UK, simply because it is an easy way for cyber criminals to make significant amounts of money. Ransomware works, simply because many firms are forced to pay the ransom because they don’t have the defense systems in place to avoid doing so.
What you need to know about moving monoliths to microservices
There are many benefits to the "monolithic" application model -- especially at the beginning of a project -- but monoliths can become unwieldy over time, limiting companies’ ability to move quickly and flexibly in today’s dynamic business environment.
To overcome this and other issues, companies like Amazon, eBay and Netflix are leveraging microservice architectures. The microservices model has been defined by Martin Fowler, author, software developer and an early supporter of microservices as "an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API."
Global IT spending will reach $3.5 trillion in 2017
Worldwide IT spending will jump another 1.4 percent this year, according to a new report by Gartner. The report says IT spending is expected to hit $3.5 trillion this year. A quarter before, the increase was 2.7 percent, but the difference occurred mostly due to the strengthening of the US dollar.
"The strong US dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast," says John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. "We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of US-based multinational IT vendors through 2017."
Accountants are embracing artificial intelligence
Despite the popular belief that artificial intelligence is coming to take your jobs away, accountants would love some robotic help to get them through the day. This is according to a new report by Sage, which says 96 percent of accountants are confident about the future of accountancy as well as their role in it.
Despite welcoming change, more than two thirds of respondents (68 percent) expect their roles to change through automation, in the future.
Are bot-on-bot battles holding the IoT back?
We know by now that smart home devices have the ability to make our lives more convenient. Moving beyond devices, some IoT providers are deploying bots, which use artificial intelligence to create hyper-personalized services that will take consumer convenience to a whole new level.
Bots are a relatively new term for most, but this past year consumers have become more familiar with bots thanks mostly to conversations around chatbots. Recently, Wikipedia’s content-editing bots made the news too when Oxford researchers found that they were contradicting edits they were making to articles on the website. The bot-on-bot fights went unnoticed because our knowledge and understanding of how bots interact with one another is limited. As bots began to find their way into other services, we’ll see this problem span beyond Wikipedia, proving an enormous need to understand their interactions.
Merchants need to make payments a core part of their commerce strategy
Transactions are the foundation of business, but too often in our line of work we see payments treated as an afterthought.
As a consumer, we’ve all gone through an online checkout only to find they don’t take our card or our preferred mobile wallet, spotted a product online and struggled to find a place we can buy it, had to leave an app, or, worse still, download one to buy something, or landed on a confusing looking checkout page that looks completely different to the rest of the website.
London's Square Mile gets free Wi-Fi
The heart of London’s financial district -- The Square Mile -- is getting free public access WiFi, a new press release from O2 states. The telecoms operator also says this is a multimillion-pound project, one of the largest investments in wireless infrastructure in London, so far.
O2 will be working with Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure, which was awarded a 15-year contract to build and maintain City of London’s wireless network. The network itself will be fully operational by autumn 2017, and will allegedly be "more technically advanced" than those found in other global financial centers like New York.
Wiping out ransomware after an attack? Some UK businesses not confident they can do it
A third (36 percent) of companies in the UK that have been victims of a ransomware attack are not "very confident" they managed to completely eradicate the malware from their systems, according to a new report by Citrix.
The report also shines new light on just how prevalent and dangerous ransomware attacks really are. One in three UK businesses have had more than 100 of their devices affected by ransomware recently.
IT departments need to transform to stay relevant
IT environments require either moderate or significant transformation if they are to meet business requirements over the course of the next five years, a new report says.
The report by 451 research, entitled "Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation," says that 80 percent of organizations agree IT departments need disrupting to stay relevant.
Jailbreaking puts mobile users at risk
Mobile users frequently stray from official app stores when looking for new mobile applications, putting themselves under increased risk from malware, ransomware and other malicious actors. This is according to a new report by RiskIQ, which says that users in the UK are a bit more "conservative," and a bit more on the safe side compared to mobile users in the US.
The report, entitled "Appsession: Is our appetite for mobile apps putting us at risk?" is based on a poll of 2,000 mobile users -- 1,000 in the UK and another 1,000 in the US.
Bitcoin price will reach £3,000 this year
"What leads you to believe that Bitcoin will top £3K in 2017?" The answer does not lie in an analysis of macro-economic or monetary theory but in a more interesting understanding of human behavior. An understanding of human behavior and motivation, similar to that which lead Steve Jobs to develop the products he did and the digital marketing system of today. But first, let’s rewind.
Six months ago, before the Brexit vote, when the world seemed a safe and steady place, I put forward the theory that Bitcoin would surpass gold as the safe haven currency. While I pondered this theory, I realized that given the right conditions digital currencies can only trend up in value. The date was late April 2016, I had just been paid, so I went online and spent all that month’s wages on Bitcoins. I'm not a gambler and I’ve never invested in shares. But this was a sure thing.
Purple announces free Wi-Fi solution for businesses
Purple wants to disrupt the market by offering a free license Wi-Fi solution. It has called the service Purple Free, and claims it delivers "more advanced functionality than other paid-for-utility WiFi solutions" out there.
The service allows businesses and venues to acquire a seamless guest Wi-Fi service, while keeping the Corporate Data Protection Policy in mind. Businesses can expect a "simplistic login," branded splash pages and "a glimpse of' Purple's customer insights."
Brits willing to trade privacy for safety
Two thirds of the UK’s general public would feel more safe if digital communications were unencrypted, according to a new report by Cable.co.uk. The argument?
If the government could access our communications, it would be able to intercept messaging between terrorists plotting new attacks.
© 1998-2026 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.