Month: December 2020

  • How to monitor remote workers humanely

    “For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium,” wrote the lawyer and politician Edward Coke in 1628, the Latin clause adding that home is also the safest refuge.

    Covid-19 has turned millions of homes into workplaces, but many remote workers feel uneasy letting their employers across the castle drawbridge. Research carried out by YouGov in September 2020 of 1,816 working Britons suggested that 66% of workers would feel uncomfortable if their employers monitored their keystrokes remotely, rising to 74% for tracking of wearable devices and 80% for camera monitoring.

    Mike Clancy, the general

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  • UK-EU Brexit deal passes Commons with six-month data adequacy bridge

    The House of Commons has voted by 521 votes to 73, a majority of 448, to approve legislation to pass the EU-UK post-Brexit deal that was announced on Christmas Eve into UK law.

    A bridging period of up to six months has also been agreed to ratify a data adequacy agreement to allow for the continued free flow of personal data between the UK and EU.

    Data adequacy is an EU process to certify that a country, or a sector within a country, meets equivalent standards to EU rules on data protection.

    According to Bloomberg, whose reporter Stephanie Bodoni

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  • Top 10 telecoms and mobile stories of 2020

    Looking back to December 2019, the following 12 months were really supposed to establish 5G as a permanent fixture in global communications markets and realising the potential in the many use cases that 5G was intended to make good on. Prime examples were autonomous vehicles and telehealth.

    But health issues of another kind have led to a year that, although not throwing a massive spanner in the works for 5G, have led development onto unintended path.

    Despite the fears of many that 5G roll-outs would be delayed or just not possible – due mainly to the adverse economic conditions caused

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  • Top 10 cloud stories of 2020

    The onset of the pandemic in early 2020 undoubtedly had a transformational impact on enterprise adoption rates of cloud technologies, as IT leaders grappled with how best to enable their teams to work remotely.

    At the same time, Covid-19 forced many enterprises to increase the scale and pace of their cloud migration plans to cut costs and bolster their business agility so they were better positioned to weather the economic fallout.

    These trends saw Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google all post a very favourable set of financial results in the months that followed, as users flocked to their

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  • Live streaming analytics important to post-Covid growth, but not without good data

    There are many reasons why data streaming, or real-time data analytics, is becoming important to the future of business, but one of the most obvious ones is speed.

    This would be music to the ears of someone like serial entrepreneur and author Gary Vaynerchuk, who talks a lot about the importance of speed in business, claiming it’s “four billion times more important than perfection”.

    As Gartner analyst Rita Sallam similarly said during a presentation at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo earlier this year, “in the face of unprecedented market shifts, data and analytics leaders require an ever-increasing velocity and

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  • It’s time to accept that disinformation is a cyber security issue

    The internet, as life-changing as it can be for digitising businesses, connecting communities and informing individuals, doesn’t come with a user guide to help us navigate it. And as people become more aware of the dark side of the web, they are looking for tools that help to defend them against campaigns designed to manipulate how they think or behave.

    Misinformation and disinformation are rife, but so far it’s been seen as a challenge for policy-makers and big tech, including social media platforms. However, because disinformation is by nature an online risk, it is a challenge for our

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