In Depth

In Depth

• Three network technologies driven by cloud-native computing

  Networking technologies are being driven heavily by digitisation and cloud computing. Gartner picks three networking trends to watch  Continue Reading

• Cache vs tier: What’s the difference between cache and storage?

  We look at the key distinctions between cache and tiers of storage, and where the line has become blurred with fast flash, 3D Xpoint and storage class memory technologies  Continue Reading

• Flash storage tiers: Performance, cost and use cases

  We look at performance, cost and potential use cases for the key flash storage types available, such as Nand flash, 3D Xpoint and Intel Optane, plus SAS, SATA and NVMe connectivity  Continue Reading

• The future of open source licences is changing

  The Open Source Insider blog on Computer Weekly recently asked industry experts for their views on the future of open source licensing  Continue Reading

• Rook 101: Building software-defined containerised storage in Kubernetes

  Rook – think castles, not birds – uses the principles of containerisation and the methods used in Kubernetes to build storage that’s abstracted from the hardware it lives on  Continue Reading

• Datacentres operators must move away from diesel backup generators to give back to grid

  While the diesel backup generators used by datacentre operators have a limited environmental impact, using them for extended periods of time to power sites to feed energy back into the grid is not a sustainable solution to growing electricity demand  Continue Reading

• How to find the right zero trust strategy

  Large tech companies and the US Federal Government have adopted zero trust as their next-generation security model  Continue Reading

• Trusty methods to keep out intruders

  Today’s hyper-connected world means trust can no longer be taken for granted to keep networks secure – enter the zero-trust model  Continue Reading

• Kubernetes storage 101: Container storage basics

  We look at the basics of creating storage and specifying it for applications in container storage using Kubernetes Persistent Volumes and Persistent Volume Claims  Continue Reading

• How HR robotics can be good for people

  The automation of human resources processes, some of which uses robotic process automation, can benefit humans, as a clutch of Nordic and UK organisations show  Continue Reading

• How to build the perfect tech team despite talent shortages

  The technology skills gap is growing worldwide, despite digital skills being as important as ever. So how can IT leaders develop the perfect tech team in the current talent environment?  Continue Reading

• Is this Netflix-style thriller the future of security training?

  Cyber awareness specialists at KnowBe4 reckon that bringing Netflix-style production values to corporate videos heralds a new approach to security training  Continue Reading

• From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz

  After nearly a decade at Pixar, GovTech’s Chong Jiayi is leading a team of experts to solve hard problems in robotics and artificial intelligence  Continue Reading

• Zero trust: Taking back control of IT security

  Trust on the network is a crucial factor in security risk, and zero trust changes the traditional model of ‘trust but verify’  Continue Reading

• How IT can back up ESG efforts to do environmental and social good

  Organisations’ environmental, social and governance programmes depend on IT leaders for technological backup  Continue Reading

• How AI and data analytics are driving composable infrastructure adoption in datacentres

  As enterprises continue to grapple with how to make sense of their big data stores, organisations are having to rethink how they kit out their datacentres, with composable infrastructure leading the way  Continue Reading

• Inside the SOC: the nerve centre of security operations

  Security operations centres are the bedrock of any cyber defence strategy, but operating one is increasingly challenging, with mounting workloads and a shortage of skilled personnel  Continue Reading

• Alibaba versus Amazon, Microsoft and Google: Does the Chinese cloud challenger have what it takes?

  Chinese public cloud challenger Alibaba is undoubtedly making waves in the west, but does it have what it takes to seriously trouble the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in the infrastructure-as-a-service market?  Continue Reading

• The big retail tech themes from Retail’s Big Show

  The National Retail Federation’s Big Show signals the kick-off of the retail events calendar. We look over the themes promised for retail tech over the next year  Continue Reading

• Choosing the right disaster recovery for your business

  We look at the various options available when implementing disaster recovery, and how much they’re worth  Continue Reading

• Caribbean island hospital rebuilds after hurricane with DataCore

  Hurricane Irma tore the roof off a server room and flooded IT hardware, but that was an opportunity to rebuild redundant IT using DataCore’s SANsymphony software-defined storage  Continue Reading

• Alan Bates: The ‘details man’ the Post Office paid the price for ignoring

  In 2003, subpostmaster Alan Bates had his contract terminated when he refused to comply with Post Office policy. A decade and a half later, against the odds, he took the Post Office to the High Court and won a multimillion-pound legal case  Continue Reading

• Top four compliance considerations for SMEs

  We look at the key data compliance regulations that affect smaller companies – such as GDPR, the Data Protection Act, PCI-DSS and PECR – and some key industry-specific frameworks  Continue Reading

• Six disaster recovery pitfalls and how to avoid them

  We look at some key pitfalls in disaster recovery, such as failing to plan, not testing the plan, not protecting backups, poor communication and neglecting the human element  Continue Reading

• Startup uses machine learning to support GDPR’s right to be forgotten

  Non-intrusive algorithms enable users to track which companies hold their data, so they can take it back  Continue Reading

• Spread of Kubernetes spurs backup and disaster recovery products

  Growth of containerised applications brings with it the need to back up and provide disaster recovery. But what do you need to protect, and who provides the products?  Continue Reading

• Driving adoption: Are high costs putting public cloud out of reach to non-profits?

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insights into the sky-high cloud bills faced by some non-profit organisations prompts questions about whether the public cloud giants should do more to make their services more accessible to the third sector  Continue Reading

• Mixing it up: Cloud and datacentre in the new world of IT

  Cloud computing has long been tipped as the technology that will displace enterprise datacentres in CIOs’ affections, but that is not quite how the story is playing out  Continue Reading

• Industrial edge requires a focus on machines

  After the office edge and the mobile edge comes the industrial edge. We look at a shift in computing paradigms  Continue Reading

• Do you use cloud storage for these use cases yet?

  We look at the use cases most suited to a quick transition to the cloud: backup, archiving, disaster recovery, file storage and cloud bursting – cloud storage’s low-hanging fruit  Continue Reading

• Big storage meets cloud in the datacentre 'as-a-service' revolution

  Cloud is mainstream but the datacentre’s here to stay. This has resulted in a trend towards as-a-service in the datacentre where big storage array makers and the cloud giants meet  Continue Reading

• DRaaS decisions: Key choices in disaster recovery as a service

  We examine the key decisions when considering DRaaS. Whether to go full self-service, assisted or managed will depend on what you need to protect and your in-house resources  Continue Reading

• Grilling the answers: How businesses need to show how AI decides

  As artificial intelligence becomes more widespread, so the need to render it explainable increases. How can companies navigate the technical and ethical challenges?  Continue Reading

• Whisper it… but could a cyber attack be good for your career?

  All too often it’s the CISO who carries the can for an enterprise security failure, but this might not be a bad thing. There’s lots of evidence to suggest that falling victim to a cyber attack may actually enhance your CV  Continue Reading

• Five ways that backup has changed since the days of tape

  Back in the day, all this was tape, but times have changed, with cloud-to-cloud backup, cloud storage, virtual and physical backup appliances and myriad endpoint hardware  Continue Reading

• Life on the edge: A new world for data

  Edge computing is regarded as the next frontier for data, with rapid growth expected in the market. We assess the prospects  Continue Reading

• The new reality of 5G

  5G’s development has been driven by a variety of use cases leading to a multi-service capability – a network of networks. But what is the reality of this, and how is it expected to change as we move forward?  Continue Reading

• Ericsson reveals plans for 5G, IoT – and self-driving buses

  World’s third biggest maker of telecommunication equipment reveals its plans for new technologies including 5G, the internet of things and automation  Continue Reading

• Processors re-imagined: Will cloud and AI lead mean all change in the datacentre?

  We look at the changes cloud-native platforms and artificial intelligence could bring about in the datacentre.  Continue Reading

• Virtuous circles: Skilling up for an ethical web

  Tim Berners Lee’s Contract for the Web aims to drive the internet in a more ethical, open and human-centred direction. What does this mean for the future of IT skills and governance?  Continue Reading

• How to optimise remote workforces while tackling loneliness

  Remote working is very common in tech companies and IT departments. How can it be managed to optimise productivity and keep employees socially connected to their companies?  Continue Reading

• Can the UK government’s efforts solve the cyber skills gap?

  There has been an active effort by the UK government to tackle the lack of skills in the cyber security space – but is it enough?  Continue Reading

• Overcoming the infrastructure and connectivity challenges of cloud gaming

  The cloud gaming market has a number of infrastructure challenges to overcome to reach its potential, and the supplier community is intent on helping it address them  Continue Reading

• In it to win it: Should AWS consider building out its SaaS play?

  Amazon Web Services is the undisputed leader of the public cloud market, but could its relatively small software-as-a-service portfolio be its undoing in years to come?  Continue Reading

• Fly by data: How service models drive data collaboration in aerospace

  Rolls-Royce has added collaborative data sharing to its fundamental business model shift to servitisation  Continue Reading

• McLaren COO Jonathan Neale on finding racing margins in IoT sensor data

  Jonathan Neale, chief operating officer for the McLaren racing team, speaks about finding marginal advantages through sensor data analytics  Continue Reading

• How Halfords is using tech to rev up its customer service

  Live chat, virtual contact centres and a new unifying web platform are set to enhance Halfords’ customer service proposition in the year ahead  Continue Reading

• Top 10 storage deployment stories of 2019

  Here are ComputerWeekly’s top 10 storage deployment stories for 2019, which see quite a move away from traditional SAN and NAS to hyper-converged, software-defined storage and object storage  Continue Reading

• From consumer to prosumer: Reducing the datacentre industry’s reliance on the national grid

  With the government ramping up plans to go net zero on carbon emissions by 2050, where does the datacentre industry stand – and how can it become more sustainable over the coming years?  Continue Reading

• Human factors are critical to securing digital transformation

  Sourcing the latest cyber security technology to support digital transformation projects is all well and good, but it’s meaningless if you fail to address your organisational culture and the people within it  Continue Reading

• Amazon, AWS and antitrust: How tough could US lawmakers be on the tech titan?

  How Amazon conducts its business is coming under close scrutiny from US lawmakers, both from an online retail and cloud perspective, and this is why  Continue Reading

• What are the key issues facing healthcare CIOs?

  Six healthcare IT leaders give their views on the major challenges for digital transformation across the NHS  Continue Reading

• Accountability is the key to ethical artificial intelligence, experts say

  The inherent opacity of artificial neural networks means human accountability is needed to keep these systems in check, rather than increased transparency of its inner workings  Continue Reading

• How diversity spurs creativity in software development

  Diversity of all kinds – gender and ethnicity, but also intellectual diversity and neuro-diversity – can boost creativity in software development  Continue Reading

• Deliver quality software at speed with CI/CD

  Continuous integration and delivery promises a remarkable acceleration in software development, but some basics need to be in place to ensure success  Continue Reading

• Future fashion: does that dress come in digital?

  A visit to a technology-fuelled fashion pop-up paints a picture of a world where retailers and brands sell virtual clothes for usage solely in consumers’ digital lives  Continue Reading

• How software can support public involvement with democracy

  Iceland, Scotland and Sweden have experimented with using online software to involve citizens more deeply in democratic processes. The key seems to be encouraging enlightened debate  Continue Reading

• Reskilling the UK in the face of AI growth

  The government has introduced the National Retraining Scheme alongside funding to tackle the UK’s growing tech skills gap, but will it be enough in the wake of artificial intelligence adoption?  Continue Reading

• Building enterprise-grade AI: Sberbank and AI Telekom

  Machine learning and artificial intelligence are growing beyond adolescence to prove business value. Practical applications at Sberbank and AI Telekom suggest getting machine learning data in one place, where data scientists can experiment  Continue Reading

• How to buy hyper-converged infrastructure

  Simplicity, high availability, scalability and reduced cost are among the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure. We survey the benefits, pitfalls and the key suppliers  Continue Reading

• Using CI/CD to turn ideas into software – quickly

  Computer Weekly looks at the tooling and cultural changes needed to make CI/CD work  Continue Reading

• Changes in the CI/CD pipeline

  Continuous integration/continuous delivery is responsible for pushing out a set of “isolated changes” to an existing application. We look at how big these changes can be  Continue Reading

• Computer Weekly Buyer's Guide features list 2020

  Here is our 2020 schedule of up-and-coming in-depth articles that will cover carefully selected topics to help IT leaders select the right technology for their organisation  Continue Reading

• Outsourcing PKI to the cloud: What enterprises need to know

  Moving public key infrastructure deployments to the cloud can bring a lot of benefits to IT leaders and their wider organisations, but first they need to make sure doing so is right for them  Continue Reading

• Taking business transformation and disruption to the Extreme

  Supporting business transformation and disruption seem to be on every supplier’s lips these days, but not many can say they are where they are today precisely because of their own business transformation and disruption. Extreme Networks can  Continue Reading

• Five essential steps to a sound disaster recovery plan

  We walk through the key steps to develop a disaster recovery plan – from risk assessment and setting recovery objectives, to the plan itself and a testing regime to keep it fresh  Continue Reading

• Get ready for CCPA: Implications for UK businesses

  The California Consumer Privacy Act, a wide-ranging data privacy and consumer protection law, comes into effect on 1 January 2020. How does CCPA differ from the EU GDPR regulations and what are the responsibilities for UK businesses operating in the...  Continue Reading

• Content management systems play role in digital transformation efforts

  Companies can stoke their digital growth by the use of content management systems, making digital transformation more than just a boring cliché  Continue Reading

• Gartner: What to consider before adopting low-code development

  Low-code tooling offers many benefits but cost, security, product selection and application should be carefully considered  Continue Reading

• Figeac Aero manages growth with DataCore software-defined storage

  Global roll-out sees DataCore software-defined storage deployed on Huawei hardware to HQ and 14 worldwide sites as aero parts maker copes with acquisition and expansion  Continue Reading

• Beyond the database: Digging deeper into Oracle’s cloud strategy and its bid to conquer AWS

  Oracle has plenty of ground to catch up on in the cloud infrastructure space if it is serious about going toe-to-toe with Amazon, so how does it plan to close the gap?  Continue Reading

• SME disaster recovery made easy with cloud, hybrid and HCI

  Disaster recovery is a lot easier for small businesses than it used to be, with use of the cloud, hybrid cloud, physical and virtual appliances, and hyper-converged infrastructure all among the choices on offer  Continue Reading

• Low-code maturity boosts efficiency and helps user acceptance

  Low-code development is finding new maturity in enterprise application development, and organisations of all kinds are taking advantage of the trends  Continue Reading

• NVMe-over-TCP brings super-fast flash over standard IP networks

  TCP is the latest transport protocol that can be used to connect NVMe flash storage. We explain how NVMe-over-TCP works and the key advantages for datacentre customers  Continue Reading

• What the EU’s decision on Facebook means for social media

  Recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union will have global implications for social media companies and any organisations that host online content  Continue Reading

• Taking responsibility for security in the cloud

  From accidental leaks to full-on data breaches, maintaining security across cloud services is becoming a headache for enterprises. What questions should organisations be asking of their cloud service provider and, ultimately, whose responsibility is...  Continue Reading

• Low-code and no-code development platforms

  We get the lowdown on the latest low-code development tools and find out how they can help business people and traditional developers alike  Continue Reading

• Continuous Performance Management begins to gain ground

  Continuous Performance Management software is inching into companies as the annual appraisal continues to show its age and lack of business value  Continue Reading

• What is QLC flash and what workloads it is good for?

  QLC flash offers low per-gigabyte costs and lots of capacity, but can be limited by endurance and I/O performance. It can be a good disk replacement for several workloads, however  Continue Reading

• What’s new in UK retail’s online-to-offline movement?

  US menswear retailer Untuckit used to be an online pureplay, but by the end of 2019 it will have 80-plus stores, including its two new UK shops, as the online-to-offline trend continues  Continue Reading

• Satellite firm SES saves millions with cloud project management tools

  Discover how satellite firm SES modernised project management with a cloud-based system from Precursive, based on live data and tailored in its reporting to different managerial roles  Continue Reading

• How companies can do the right thing with online reviews

  TripAdvisor and Amazon have had to learn how to manage online reviews in ways that other companies can learn from  Continue Reading

• Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?

  The rise of non-relational databases has been a feature of the data management landscape in the wake of big data – but to complement or replace relational?  Continue Reading

• Is NVMe flash the right choice for you?

  NVMe flash storage boosts performance for I/O-hungry operations, but how does it work, where can organisations best deploy it, and what are the key uses cases where it can make a difference?  Continue Reading

• Making the case for integrated risk management

  Security experts discuss how an integrated approach to risk and governance can be effectively managed  Continue Reading

• How Sporting Group tackles the Rugby World Cup

  Sporting Group has readied its system monitoring to ensure the technology is able to cope with the huge demand for bets during the Rugby World Cup final  Continue Reading

• ICO says UK police must ‘slow down’ use of facial recognition

  The Information Commissioner’s Office is calling for a statutory code of practice to govern how police in the UK deploy live facial recognition technology while controversy surrounding its use continues  Continue Reading

• Are AI applications failing to live up to hype in enterprise adoption?

  Artificial intelligence has been baked into enterprise applications in recent years and often given special names, such as Einstein, Leonardo and Coleman. But has the hype delivered?  Continue Reading

• Overcoming the container security conundrum: What enterprises need to know

  Container technologies continue to shake up enterprise IT, but security concerns abound  Continue Reading

• Search beyond search engines

  All-purpose search engines can have drawbacks for professional searchers. Technologies are emerging to take consultants, journalists, academics and others beyond search engines  Continue Reading

• Security puzzle calls for some joined-up thinking

  The age of digitisation brings new risks to organisations, so security needs to be more integrated  Continue Reading

• Key storage choices: Cloud vs tape for archive storage?

  Tape still has benefits, such as an ‘air gap’ that can insulate archives from threats to data integrity. But what are the opportunities for cloud in tape’s traditional use cases?  Continue Reading

• How retailers are using social to reach Gen Z and beyond

  The younger generation of shoppers are all using social media, so how are retailers using influencers to reach these potential customers and their spending power?  Continue Reading

• Do non-compete clauses risk stifling cloud innovation?

  Non-compete clauses in tech employment contracts are commonplace – and understandably so – but could they be limiting innovation in the public cloud?  Continue Reading

• Key differences between cloud storage offerings

  Cloud storage offerings are often largely similar. We run through the key areas where they can differ, such as location, range of services and data protection  Continue Reading

• McAfee’s push for secure cloud adoption

  Organisations must do more to secure their cloud environments as malicious actors increasingly focus their attention on exploiting cloud vulnerabilities, says McAfee  Continue Reading

• DevOps and storage: APIs and flexibility key

  The details of back-end storage are irrelevant to DevOps engineers, but they need enough of it, when they want it, and the ability to manage it programmatically is key  Continue Reading

• Data management strategies are evolving – so must enterprises

  A growing number of data-driven initiatives, alongside heightened demand for security in governance, data management and compliance, has led to the rise of a more holistic approach – integrated risk management  Continue Reading

• Integrating security with robotic process automation

  RPA’s power is that it can mimic human behaviour. Enterprises must secure robotic automation with this principle in mind to avoid security failures  Continue Reading

• What is UK plc doing to address the tech skills gap in the face of Brexit?

  The growing technology skills gap in the UK is widely known, with firms complaining of a lack of skilled workers – but what are they doing fill their empty roles?  Continue Reading