Author: Amanda

The UK has some hidden gems, and some not-so-hidden gems, in terms of its technological hubs. From Manchester to Bath, Lilli Hender of OfficeGenie.co.uk explores the country’s finest offerings in the tech sector:

London

It’ll come as no surprise to find London is the leading the way in terms of tech development. Contributing a turnover in excess of £150 billion annually, it’s one of the most lucrative markets in the city, in the country, and even in Europe.

East London, and specifically the Silicon Roundabout is the place to be when it comes to the latest technological advancements. Financial technology, digital media and social networks are the primary presence, with the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook cohabiting the space. FinTech has taken centre stage in recent years: ayondo and TransferWise now call London home for example.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, cites “diversity and entrepreneurial spirit” as the driving forces behind the continued success of London’s tech evolutions.

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Bristol & Bath

Often grouped together due to their 12-mile proximity and similar technological focusses, Bristol and Bath are places to watch if you’re interested in educational and scientific tech. Sharing the Science Park, the two cities have everything from laboratories to coworking hubs to aid innovation and help businesses develop.

Another important part of the scene is gaming: Xmos, Tribal Group and Opposable Games have all chosen to take up residence in the South West of the country. There are plenty of incubators and investors to hand too: the Temple Meads station in Bristol is a prime location, and Eden Ventures (an early-stage investor in tech) can be found in Bath.

Reading, Bracknell & Wokingham

Another Bristol and Bath set up, Reading, Bracknell and Wokingham are quickly becoming known as prime technological locations. Data, software and security are the county’s emerging specialisms: Fantoo and Agilent Technologies are just two examples of the high-power companies committed to the area.

In 2015, 20% of the businesses in the area were technology based. It’s a thriving source of strength for the local economy, and the advancements made can be felt nationwide. With London a half-hour train journey away, technological companies here can also make the most of the capital.

Manchester

You’d be mistaken if you thought the home of technology is the South of England. Manchester is just one of several Northern cities making a name for itself on the tech scene. Digital media and marketing are the most prominent specialities: the BBC has called Manchester its home since 2011; and Autotrader and moneysupermarket.com have similarly pitched their tents.

In terms of employment numbers, the city only loses out to London for direct employment in tech.  When property prices and living costs are significantly lower than those in the capital, it’s easy to see why entrepreneurs have seized the great opportunity Manchester offers.

Cambridge

Silicon Fen might not sound as impressive as Silicon Roundabout (or Silicon Valley for that matter), but Cambridge has long made its mark on the tech sector. Silicon Fen has a focus on software and electronics: ARM, one of the world’s leading creators of microchips and mobile processors, has its HQ firmly located in the Cambridgeshire fenlands.

The company names Genestack and Novus Biologicals give a clue as to the other prime industry: medical and pharmaceutical tech. Housed in the Science Park and brimming with Cambridge University researchers, these companies are making important advancements every day.

Author bio:

Lilli Hender writes for Cambridge-based online marketplace OfficeGenie.co.uk: offering desk and office space solutions for companies nationwide.

Businesses across the world are under a continuous stream of cyber attacks – how are UK businesses faring in this environment? 

Hundreds of millions of cyber threats travel the internet every day and businesses of all sizes are at serious risk. For example, between 2010 and 2014, successful cyber attacks on businesses of all sizes increased by 144%.

On top of this, the National Cyber Security Alliance reports that approximately 60% of all businesses who experience a loss due to a security breach go out of business within six months.

This is quite staggering and clearly cyber-crime is big business—we’re talking large-scale organised crime and billions of dollars to be made from corporate and personal data.

And, the Web is the primary highway for these attacks. Sophisticated phishing emails, malware, and even spam target more than just servers and desktops; laptops, smartphones, and tablets can also be the focus of a cyber-attack, from any location around the globe.

Cyren recently conducted research to explore how smaller businesses are coping with the level of escalating cyber threats to look at whether it was just the larger organisations that are being attacked and how the small to medium sized enterprise and businesses are bearing up.

The research which was conducted by Osterman Research and sponsored by Cyren highlighted that security problems in small to medium sized businesses are rampant. It surveyed IT and security managers at 102 UK companies with anywhere from 100 to 5000 employees

The reason security problems are rampant is because 75% of organisations surveyed reported a security breach or infection in the last 12 months, rising to 85% for businesses with 1000 or fewer employees. 

In terms of frequency and the type of breaches causing organisations anguish, the average number of known breaches reported was 2.1. The threats that were rated of greatest concern were data breaches, ransomware, targeted attacks and zero-day exploits.

Interestingly, ransomware infections were reported at twice the rate among organisations with fewer than 1,000 employees, when compared to organisations with 2,500-5,000 employees, which came out as 6 percent versus 3%, respectively.

The greatest security gaps, where IT managers’ level of concern most outstrips their evaluation of their security capabilities, are in dealing with targeted and zero-day attacks. The threat of data breaches, botnet activity, and malicious activity from insiders were also cited.

Only 19% of the respondents said that their web security is inspecting SSL traffic for threats.

The research also showed that IT managers are far more concerned about the costs of infection than the cost of protection. The initial cost of web or email security solutions or their total lifecycle cost were ranked much lower as decision criteria than features like ease of administration, visibility, and advanced security protection (the top three categories).

Therefore, it is safe to assume that IT managers are far more concerned with stopping malware than controlling employee web behaviour, with the exception of preventing access to pornography from business networks.

“Shadow IT” is a moderate concern for larger companies, but a low priority for those with 1,000 employees or less, with only 9% considering it of concern. The largest organisations surveyed, with 2,500 to 5,000 employees, are currently rating application control as the most important capability in evaluating new solutions, with 73% rating it extremely important. This compares to just 43 and 41 percent of organisations in the two smaller employee size categories.

Data loss prevention is highly utilised in the UK, ranking as the second-most-deployed capability for both web security (64%) and email security (62%), among the capabilities evaluated.

Less than 25% say they protect company-owned or BYOD mobile devices, and less than 30% of remote offices and Guest Wi-Fi networks have gateway security. The vast majority of organisations rely on endpoint protection for traveling employees’ laptops and to protect use of the web at remote offices.

Source: Information-Age.com

Schools, colleges and universities must look beyond what they are currently doing well and identify the idea that will reshape education

Education is the leading force that is accelerating development globally and is the only answer to providing sustainable growth in the coming centuries. 

There has been a change in paradigm of how students learn and teachers teach due to the exploitation of modern computer, network and learning infrastructure. 

A successful future educational initiative will require ongoing, long-term efforts that can lead to new goals, approaches and new ways of thinking. Researchers term this as ‘second-order change’: the type of substantive change that drives deep impact. 

A fundamental change in the education process is to take out the factory production approach to having a process that enables individual needs and opportunities that makes it relevant, and connect them to the global happenings. 

Modern-day students challenge their teachers to be innovative and to make the learning environments more exciting, flexible and rewarding.

This generation’s students inhabit a borderless world offering limitless connection, data and mobility. They can choose to access knowledge and collaborate on a global scale.  The expectation of education delivery is to match this aspiration through usage of technology. 

Connecting state schools to the internet has to be a key initiative in every part of the developing world, with an ambition bigger than improving education. Irrespective of the remoteness and parity of growth, students quickly adapt to the technology and learn with gusto.

This also provides an opportunity to involve life for families and communities through the way young people learn, because learning forums are so much more open, transparent and collaborative.

Technology can be used more creatively to move beyond classroom walls and can transform education with completely new ways to learn new skills.

A transformative education initiative should fundamentally change the way in which it is imparted and not try to use technology to just enable the old ways of learning. 

It should start from a vision that guarantees student success with full participation of teachers and parents. This will help schools drive change by improving student learning and bridging parity, to increase student engagement and skills development that will ultimately aid in global transformation.

There are a number of initiatives in education where a lot of infrastructure is provided with a hope that it will improve education. Infrastructure without content, without experimenting with new ways of teaching and without enabling collaboration will be a futile attempt. 

Infrastructure is important, but empowerment and transformational change management is paramount. Futuristic education transformation should bring the teachers to first shed the inhibition to change from being a teacher to a facilitator. And a sustained programme needs to be planned and sustained. 

Education’s new avatar will not be popular with everyone. The traditionalists will resist ideas that erode historic school structures. Teacher associations will not appreciate having their importance shrunk by technology. 

Others may even question the way in which students are evaluated through tests than can be replaced by a continuous monitoring of learning understanding. All this and more will be challenges.

But schools and teachers that are given an opportunity and empowerment will welcome such a change. Disrupting the school or education should start from a classroom – the way they arrange teaching and learning – and then build upwards. 

Successfully introducing innovative ways of teaching should sustain them and vitalise the school system to be successful, and more disruption will follow success.

The key focus must be on achievement of the education and development objective and not on promoting shiny gadgets. This can be achieved by the usage of interchangeable delivery of education through a multitude of gadgets and should not be dependent on one. 

There are two key questions to ask: how can education systems assimilate this into programme design and delivery in order to improve efficiency, control costs and expand the delivery of education to larger numbers of people; and how will the convergence of communications technologies affect the potential for providing improved learner support? 

We are in the era of vast numbers of open online courses which allow students globally to learn what they are interested in and at their own pace. This trend itself is a harbinger for things to come. 

Providing education in new and unconventional ways is only one of a number of solutions, but it is through innovation that challenges of improved efficiencies, lower costs, increased accessibility and greater success in achieving development goals through education can be met.

These disruptions in education provide an opportunity to revisit how to cultivate children’s learning and futures in a way that is based on what is known today. 

The transition won’t be easy, especially for complex government-run institutions like education, but with a huge looming deficit and only potential relief in sight, what choice is there? It is a risk worth taking.

Source: Information Age

Addressing the skills gap is often focused on coding and computer programming, software is being prioritised over hardware, and it shouldn't be

Rhetoric around skills and education has positioned the skills gap as a challenge facing the software coding and data analysis fields, with both areas expected to power the future startups of TechCity.

However, there are other areas of IT impacted by the skills gap, namely hardware support.

With cloud technology cementing its position as the future of IT, predicted to grow on average 19.4% each year until 2020, the speed of technology uptake has not been seen since the emergence of the internet.

Fewer SMEs have any system hardware, and the days of a data centre in the basement of every company building are slowly disappearing. The perception to the end user is that, on-premise IT and hardware investment is on the way out.

Cloud adoption trends

This perception and the wide availability of the cloud has itself developed a somewhat blasé attitude to technology.

Always-on cloud solutions are easily accessible, fuelling the idea that the cloud is independent of hardware. Despite most organisations having less hardware on-site than they did five years ago, physical hardware is actually still essential to maintaining system uptime.

The disconnect between cloud and hardware has developed as by nature, the cloud is seen as a connection to a network that is often wireless and without the need to connect to a physical platform in the same location.

In actual fact though, platforms are run via mass data centres, rooms full of server, networking and storage components, all of which require maintenance.

Just this month Microsoft launched three new data centres in London, Durham and Cardiff, with Amazon’s AWS expected to follow with its own locations in the coming months.

The emergence of AI and VR

It is in the startup space where technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are really starting to take off and are emerging in the latest business and consumer products and solutions.

However, again these often operate in the cloud and require masses of computer power that are so are heavily reliant on servers, networking and storage hardware and skills somewhere down the line.

Despite this, the focus of skills training, particularly from Government has been more on coding and computer programming, prioritising software over hardware.

The intention is to develop the UK into a future-proof high-tech economy. Although a positive move, the singularity of the approach fails to acknowledge necessary supporting technologies and the skills required to maintain them.

At the same time, groups of MPs have been particularly critical of the Government’s efforts to counter the gap.

A report by the Commons Science and Technology committee alleges that as little as 35% of computer science teachers have a relevant qualification, while just 70% of the required number of teachers have been recruited into UK schools.

Reducing the skills gap

Fostering high-quality technical skills is essential to supporting cloud and the new emerging technologies like AI and VR that the modern IT industry needs to develop to grow.

Interestingly our own independent research examining the opinions and future concerns of the IT reseller community revealed that despite the rise of the cloud, AI and VR, the vast majority (78%) believe that hiring and training more data centre technical skills will help to ease the skills gap by 2020.

The research suggests that hardware and technical skills should not be regarded as a challenger to the growth of the new digital age, but rather the enabler.

When a data centre goes offline today, it is unlikely to impact just one company, but hundreds storing information at one site. The stakes are higher than ever before.

To secure the future of our infrastructure and data, skills investment needs to be consistent across both hardware and software.

The latest technologies still require a data centre backend situated somewhere, even if it is hundreds of miles away.

The trend of decreasing on-premise hardware may have created an attitude of out of sight, out of mind, but the reality is that focus must still be given to maintaining a skilled engineering function to manage and maintain hardware infrastructure.

Only by broadening the focus on skills development within the IT sector as a whole will prevent significant and disruptive skills gaps occurring in the future.

Source:InformationAge

This means organisations that previously would not have required security clearance are now expecting at least Basic Checks (BC) as a minimum and a Counter Terrorist Check (CTC) or Security Check (SC) for those working on what are deemed to be more sensitive projects. 

For IT professionals, this means that obtaining security clearance can prove very useful, especially for contractors, as it can lead to a wealth of additional job opportunities. Having security clearance in advance of applying for jobs will greatly enhance your prospects and open up a wider variety of roles for you to choose from.

There are a range of security-cleared IT roles available in both the public and private sector, from developers to project managers and using skills such as  Java, Oracle, Cisco and J2EE. The increase in national security as a result of terrorist threats means that there is notable demand for security-cleared personnel in sectors such as defence and government.

However, while government departments may be the biggest employers of security cleared IT personnel in the UK, there are still a number of vacancies within the private sector particularly for financial institutions.

The NHS can become more efficient and save money by using IT. For instance, if the NHS integrated an electronic patient record system (EPR), savings can be made on the management and storage of patient notes and as an after effect improves efficiency with staff being able to access patient details remotely. With good record systems in place it becomes easier to analyse data on patients. Nevertheless, with everything else the start up cost is incredibly high.

Some hospitals have already gone the in direction of using IT to improve efficiency such as Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

ERP systems could potentially alert hospital staff of deteriorating patient conditions much earlier, which can also prevent patients going into intensive care.

IT usage does not have to be anchored Hospitals. For example, many doctors are allowing patients to access their records to log and maintain their own health using Bluetooth enabled monitors and devices linked to their mobile phones. When the patient checks their weight or blood pressure, the equipment will record the information which is automatically sent to doctor’s surgery. This makes it more accessible to both patients and doctors, which also can show visual progression towards health goals while doctors can intervene when it is most useful.

A huge aspect that IT in the NHS can help with is spotting problems with patients and treating any conditions earlier, avoiding patients being admitted to ICU in many cases and reducing also reducing patients’ hospital stays.