Technology Reseller v36

technologyreseller.co.uk 07 TECH TRENDS new survey of 750 businesses by Fujitsu. Among the 150 UK businesses surveyed, the figure was even higher, at 70%. A key priority for 77% of respondents (83% in the UK) is to become more agile and to react faster to change, with 41% admitting that they are unable to keep up with fast-changing customer needs. The biggest hindrances in this regard are organisational and technological complexity (cited by 30% and 28% respectively). Brad Mallard, CTO for Digital Technology Services, North West Europe, Fujitsu, said: “Organisations need to aggressively shift their focus from reactively increasing resilience to proactively building an adaptive organisation. With the speed of change taking place across all industries, the ‘big-bang’ modernisation plans that businesses and governments have been trying to drive for some time are rapidly becoming unfit for purpose. A more flexible, iterative approach based on continuous improvement and delivery is now far more appropriate.” Priorities include modernising applications (cited by 75%) and increasing usage of the cloud (74%), including cloud platforms (71%), cloud-hosted data (69%) and cloud-native applications (68%). http://uk.fujitsu.com SOFTWARE UK coders buck productivity crisis The UK has notoriously low levels of productivity compared to our main international competitors – with the exception, it appears, of software coding. Analysis of over 55m data points from developers in 44,000 organisations around the world by CircleCI shows that UK developers are amongst the world’s most productive, coding at a higher rate than counterparts in France and Germany. UK developers have a throughput (the median number of times software teams submit new code each day) of 1.26, which is almost double the global average of 0.7 and far ahead of France (1.06) and Germany (0.93). The flipside to this is that the British technology ecosystem is innovating less than competing markets in America and the EU, with risk-averse British teams displaying a very low rate of code failure in a sector where high rates of failure are a sign of innovation and risk-taking. In the UK, the median success rate of tests run on software before it is deployed into the real world is 95%, compared to 83% in the US and a global average of just 61%. DATA SECURITY CISOs focus on mobile devices as weakest link Mobile devices have replaced network security threats as the focal point of cybersecurity strategies for 87% of CISOs in EMEA, according to a new Ivanti report. More than three quarters of the 400 CISOs polled by the automation platform provider believe that remote work has accelerated the demise of the traditional network perimeter (82%) and that passwords are no longer an effective means of protecting enterprise data (80%), as hackers increasingly target remote workers and mobile devices. More than nine out of 10 (92%) said additional IT security measures were needed to address threats associated with mobile and remote working, such as the use of unsecured Wi-Fi to access business resources (cited by 45%) and employees using their own devices and unauthorised apps to access corporate data (cited by 40% and 33% respectively). Top priorities include enhancing user experiences (cited by 58%), improving authentication to remote applications (57%) and moving critical business applications to the cloud (52%). www.ivanti.com Phishing is top cloud security risk The most common types of cloud security incidents suffered by UK organisations in 2020 were phishing (52%), ransomware and other malware (23%) and account compromise (21%). Account takeover was the hardest to detect, with respondents needing days (46%) or weeks (5%) to flag the issue. UK decision-makers questioned for the 2021 Netwrix Cloud Data Security Report complained that a lack of IT staff (63%), lack of budget (51%) and complexity of cloud workloads (50%) were preventing their security teams from properly securing data in the cloud. www.netwrix.com Lack of testing puts disaster recovery at risk Fewer than two-thirds (65%) of UK enterprises employing more than 500 people have a documented company- wide disaster recovery plan in place, even though 85% have experienced a failure or outage at some point. Nor are they testing DR systems often enough, claims secure application and data protection cloud services provider iland. According to its new report, When Plan B Goes Wrong: Avoiding the Pitfalls of DRaaS , 57% of organisations test at best once a year, with 6% not testing at all. The research also reveals that a comparatively small number of enterprises rely on the cloud for replication. When asked where they replicated on-premises apps and data, 59% said in a separate on-premise data centre, 30% said in Azure, 23% in AWS and 17% with a VMWare cloud service provider. www.iland.com HDDs lead failure list More than three quarters (78%) of the data recovery requests Ontrack received last year were for ageing or physically damaged hard disk drives (HDDs), compared to 3% for solid-state drives (SSD), 3% for RAID servers, 3% for other servers, 2% for flash recovery and 1% for USB sticks. The remaining 10% of data recovery requests related to mobile devices. CONSUMER TRENDS Consumers more cautious about sharing data British consumers are three times more likely to give their email address to a bank (68%) than to a company manufacturing smart IoT devices (19%). When given a choice between a more personalised, data-driven service or a free, generic service with non-targeted advertising, 16% would choose the former and 50% the latter. Evidence, says data-to-everything platform provider Splunk, that UK consumers are becoming more cautious about sharing data, just as 77% of UK businesses seek to accelerate their use of data to improve decision-making and power innovation. www.splunk.com Have video, will chat More than one in four consumers would switch brands if offered the option of video chat. So says customer experience and business solutions provider Webhelp. Its poll of 6,000 consumers in the UK, France and Germany shows that since March the proportion of British consumers using video calling to communicate with brands has increased from 19% to 36%. One third (34%) expect to increase or maintain current video calling levels after the pandemic. shaping tomorrow with you Fragile to agile Withstanding uncertainty as an adaptive organization Part 1 RESEARCH PAPER When Plan B GoesWrong: Avoiding the Pitfalls of DRaaS January 2021 Sponsored by