Technology Reseller v35

01732 759725 06 TECH TRENDS Managers waste 50 days a year on routine tasks Managers in UK businesses are each wasting 54 working days a year on routine tasks that could be done by robots, software bots or intelligent automation. New research from ABBYY shows that senior decision-makers waste almost 2 hours (111 minutes) on mundane tasks, equating to 54 wasted days a year, compared to an average of 1 hour 23 minutes or 40 days per year by all UK employees. Almost two thirds (62%) of UK employees want their business to simplify manual, paper-based and overly complex processes like banking customer onboarding, insurance claims or retail returns. Survey respondents who have experience of working with ‘digital workers’ feel positive about the technology: 89% agree that they bring benefits and 88% find the technology easy to use. The most beneficial uses of digital workers are for sorting data & documents (39%), reminding or prompting staff to do tasks (37%) and digitising paperwork (36%). www.abbyy.com/company IT leaders feel under threat from AI IT leaders are fearful that their jobs will be replaced by AI within the next ten years, according to a survey of 500 UK IT directors and managers, CIOs and CTOs by cloud security company Trend Micro. More than two fifths (41%) of respondents believe AI will replace their role by 2030, with just 9% confident AI will definitely not replace their job within a decade. Nearly one third (32%) believe technology will eventually automate all cybersecurity, with 24% claiming that by 2030 data access will be tied to biometric or DNA data, making unauthorised access impossible. In the short-term, IT bosses plan to focus investment on staff training and education (45%) and on deploying more automation to support SOC teams (38%). In its recent report, Turning the Tide , Trend Micro predicts that home networks, remote working software and cloud systems will be subject to a new wave of attacks in 2021. As well as targeting home networks as a way to compromise corporate IT and IoT networks, cybercriminals are expected to exploit vulnerabilities in online collaboration and productivity software soon after they are disclosed. www.trendmicro.com UK workers can’t keep up with pace of change Only one third (37%) of organisations have the skills and technology needed to keep pace with digital projects initiated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So says integration and API platform provider MuleSoft in its The State of Business and IT Innovation report, based on a survey of 1,739 line of business (LoB) employees in organisations with at least 250 employees. More than half of LoB employees are frustrated by the speed with which their IT team can deliver digital projects (51%) and the challenge of connecting different IT systems, applications and data at their organisation (54%). More than 80% say they need quick and easy access to data, IT systems and applications to do their jobs effectively and remain productive. Yet less than one third (29%) think their organisation is very effective at connecting and using data from multiple sources to drive business value. www.mulesoft.com The weakest link Bosses are the weakest link when it comes to cyber security, claims a new study by OneLogin. Its Covid-19 State of Remote Work Sur vey 2.0 reveals that senior managers are more than twice as likely as junior counterparts to share a work device with someone outside the organisation (42% vs 20%); to share confidential passwords with someone in their family (19% vs 7%); or to work from public WiFi networks (30% vs 15%). www.onelogin.com Accelerated change More than two thirds (69%) of organisations have accelerated their digital transformation plans because of Covid-19, according to The Cloud Industry Forum’s new white paper, Adapt, innovate, advance: Digital transformation in the Covid-19 era . Public sector missing opportunity to tackle IT overspend Almost all European public services organisations (94%) are under pressure to reduce costs due to the corononavirus pandemic, claims Insight. Its research shows that as a result 52% have downsized their workforce, 46% are making an effort to sweat IT assets for longer and 23% have downsized their IT teams. However, the same organisations are also overspending on IT, with each wasting an average of £2.4 million on unused software licences alone – enough to cover the wages of 50 skilled IT specialists, says Insight. Other sources of overspend are: duplicate technology because of lockdown purchases (cited by 66% of organisations); unexpected purchases by departments outside IT, which adds an average of £1.2m a year to cloud services costs; an inability to negotiate effectively with software vendors (75%); poor lifecycle management (72%); and lack of IT consolidation, with different departments using multiple applications with the same functionality (74%) or having separate contracts for the same software (61%). https://uk.insight.com Hard to detect insider risk is on the rise Cybersecurity risks related to insiders are now more common than those from external threat actors, claims cybersecurity vendor Netwrix in the 2020 Netwrix Cyber Threats Report . This reveals that, since organisations went remote, four of the six most common cybersecurity incidents are caused by internal users: accidental mistakes by admins (suffered by 27% of respondents), accidental improper sharing of data by employees (26%), misconfiguration of cloud services (16%) and data theft by employees (14%). More than three quarters (79%) of CIOs worry that users are now more likely to ignore IT policies and thus pose a greater threat to security. The research also found that incidents relating to inside actors are among the hardest for organisations to detect. For Tech trends: ICT in the UK today The state of business and IT innovation M U L E S O F T R E S E A R C H 4 trends every IT leader needs to know to empower the enterprise R E P O R T

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