AI Skills for IT Pros: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload Podcast
Artificial intelligence is reshaping IT operations, prompting a wave of reskilling among professionals. In a Computer Weekly podcast, Matt Stava, CEO of Spinnaker Support, urges IT workers to retool with AI tools and pursue emerging AI certifications. He warns that traditional credentials like Cisco are losing relevance while expertise in legacy ERP platforms such as SAP and Oracle remains valuable for decades. Stava highlights the rapid integration of large language models into education and the need to become indispensable through AI proficiency.
How ‘Wikipedia of Cyber’ Helps SAP Make Sense of Threat Data
SAP, the world’s largest enterprise‑software provider, is tackling the massive scale of its security telemetry—over 150 TB per month—by partnering with Boston‑based Uptycs. The collaboration introduces Juno AI, an analyst platform that blends artificial intelligence with human expertise to deliver real‑time,...
UAE Advances Sovereign AI Ambitions with Launch of Falcon Perception
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute unveiled Falcon Perception, a 600‑million‑parameter multimodal model that can see, read and interpret visual data using natural‑language prompts. The system combines vision and language in a single dense transformer, cutting inference latency and hardware demands...
High Court Dismisses Judicial Review Against eVisa System
The High Court dismissed a judicial review challenging the Home Office’s eVisa system, ruling that the secretary of state acted lawfully by requiring digital‑only proof of immigration status. The judges recognised ongoing data‑quality issues but deemed the 12‑month stabilisation plan...
‘Hot’ Property: Azzurri Group’s Chicken Chain and the Greenfield Tech Opportunity
Azzurri Group secured the UK‑Ireland master franchise for US‑origin Dave’s Hot Chicken in 2024 and plans to roll out at least 180 European outlets, with about 14 in the UK and Ireland by the end of 2026. The restaurant chain...
Interview: Thierry Martin, Head of Enterprise Data and Analytics, Toyota Motor Europe
Toyota Motor Europe’s head of enterprise data and analytics, Thierry Martin, detailed how the company built a continent‑wide data mesh on Snowflake, launching over 100 data products in its internal marketplace. He described the broader tech stack—including Calibra, Dataiku, Qlik,...
UK Government Lacks Ambition to Fight Tax Fraud, Says PAC
The UK Public Accounts Committee warned that tax fraud and error cost the Treasury between £55 bn and £81 bn a year (roughly $68 bn‑$101 bn). It criticised the government’s reliance on legacy IT and the absence of a clear digital strategy, despite claims...
UAE Positions Cyber Security as Pillar of National Resilience and Digital Growth
The United Arab Emirates has formalized a nationally coordinated cyber‑security framework that links government, strategic industries and private partners. Continuous monitoring, AI‑enhanced threat detection and 24/7 response teams are embedded in a unified structure to protect critical infrastructure. The strategy...
Bank of England IT Project Offers Lessons for Wider Government
Britain’s central bank completed a nine‑year, £431 million (≈$540 million) overhaul of its Real‑Time Gross Settlement system, delivering a resilient, interoperable platform that processes about £800 billion (≈$1 trillion) of payments daily. The National Audit Office praised the project for value for money despite...
The UAE CIO: From Technology Operator to Digital Value Architect
The United Arab Emirates is redefining the CIO role from a traditional IT operator to a strategic digital value architect. Driven by ambitious national AI‑first policies and massive sovereign cloud investments, CIOs now sit at the nexus of technology, strategy,...
Cyber Pros Must Grasp the Vibe Coding Nettle, Says NCSC Chief
National Cyber Security Centre chief Richard Horne warned that AI‑enhanced software generation, dubbed “vibe coding,” must be secured before it becomes mainstream. He argued that while insecure AI‑generated code could spread vulnerabilities, well‑trained models could produce secure‑by‑design software, reshaping development....
Irish Government Launches CNI Resilience Plan
The Irish government unveiled a National Strategy on the Resilience of Critical Entities to meet the EU’s Critical Entities Resilience (CER) Directive, with implementation required by October 2026. The plan targets essential services such as digital infrastructure, water, energy, transport and...
HSS ProService ‘Uber-Ifies’ with Functional Programming and Agentic AI
HSS ProService has transformed from a physical rental operation with 130 depots into a pure‑play digital marketplace that connects construction managers with suppliers. The shift relies on a functional programming stack built in Scala and Cats, enabling a self‑healing finance...
Interview: Huy Dao, Director of Data and Machine Learning Platform, Booking.com
Booking.com’s data and machine‑learning platform, led by Huy Dao, has completed a seamless migration from on‑prem Hadoop to a Snowflake‑based cloud ecosystem. The new Booking Data Exchange serves over 1,500 practitioners, handling petabytes of data and billions of daily predictions...
Zopa Bank Continues Its Transformation with Further Growth
Zopa Bank added half a million new customers last year, bringing its total base to 1.7 million, and posted a 90% profit jump to £65 million. Sales rose 24% to £377 million and deposits grew 17% to £6.4 bn. The fintech‑turned‑bank leveraged its in‑house tech...
AI Tools Offer ‘Near-Real-Time’ Analysis of Data From Seized Mobile Phones and Computers
Israeli firm Cellebrite unveiled AI‑powered tools that let police interrogate call logs, texts, images and videos from seized devices at near‑real time speeds. The Guardian Investigate platform aggregates data in a cloud, maps phone locations, builds timelines and highlights anomalous...
Digital IDs Edge Closer to Practical Reality for UK Businesses
The Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) has moved its Digital Company ID blueprint from concept to a live, interoperable prototype, showcasing practical deployments for UK businesses. Over 18 months, a coalition of industry leaders—including UK Finance, Mastercard, Monzo...
Beyond Integration Theatre: Building Stronger Cyber Platforms
Chief information security officers are confronting a threat landscape where the integration layer—APIs, OAuth tokens, and automation workflows—has become the new enterprise perimeter. While unified platforms promise simplicity, attackers exploit weakly governed connections, turning integrations into single points of failure....
NetApp Targets E-Series at AI and Neoclouds with EF50 and EF80
NetApp has refreshed its E‑Series portfolio with two all‑flash models, the EF50 and EF80, aimed at AI training, inferencing and high‑performance computing workloads. The new arrays claim a 2.5× performance increase, delivering over 100 GB/s read and 57 GB/s write throughput while...
Nuclear Fusion HPC: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload Podcast
UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has installed Sunrise, a new supercomputer built on AMD EPYC CPUs and MI 355X GPUs, delivering roughly 6 exaflops at 8‑bit precision and 50 petaflops at 64‑bit. Designed specifically for nuclear‑fusion research, Sunrise merges AI and high‑performance computing...
UK Government ‘Flying Blind’ with Poor Data in Charting Regional Growth
The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee released a report warning that the UK government lacks reliable data to track regional innovation and growth. It highlights severe gaps in metrics for innovation clusters, spin‑outs, and R&D spending, especially...
Welsh Government Boosts Funding for Cyber Education
The Welsh Government’s Tech Valleys programme is injecting £740,000 into the National Digital Exploitation Centre (NDEC), a partnership between the University of South Wales and Thales. The funding will enable NDEC to reach an additional 10,000 primary‑school pupils in southeast...
‘Work Is Broken’: Can Agentic AI Fix It?
Enterprise workflows remain fragmented, prompting CIOs to label "work is broken." Agentic AI is touted as a cure, yet Gartner warns up to 40% of projects may be cancelled by 2027 due to governance, cost and execution hurdles. Early pilots...
Platformisation without Illusion: Separating Integration From Theatre
Enterprises are racing toward platformisation, promising fewer tools and clearer security outcomes. In reality many CISOs encounter "integration theatre," where platforms appear unified but only share superficial data, leaving true cross‑domain enforcement absent. The article argues for a "modular monolith"...
Lloyds Bank to Sell More Customer Data and Cut Costs by 35%
Lloyds Banking Group announced its Technology Strategy 3.0, targeting hundreds of millions of pounds in technology cost reductions by 2028. The plan calls for retiring legacy applications, automating compliance checks, expanding in‑house data capabilities and selling more anonymised customer data to...
Stack Overflow on AI: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload Podcast
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says AI agents can write functional code faster, though often less elegant than expert developers. He frames agentic AI as a platform shift that will fundamentally reshape roles for designers, product managers and engineers. The...
AI Workloads Force a Fundamental Redesign of Middle East Datacentres
AI workloads are prompting a fundamental redesign of Middle East data centres, shifting from legacy digital architectures to AI‑centric designs. Huawei’s SuperPoD solution, announced at MWC 2026, delivers up to 96.6% UPS efficiency and a 25% smaller footprint to meet soaring...
Microsoft CEO Opens London AI Tour with Copilot Push
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opened the London AI Tour by showcasing the company’s push into agentic AI across its productivity suite. He highlighted how Excel and PowerPoint now feature an Agent Mode that can generate code and insights from a single...
Where MENA CIOs Draw the Line on AI Sovereignty
MENA CIOs are drawing firm lines around AI sovereignty, keeping regulated workloads—such as patient data, identity systems, and core financial transactions—on sovereign or on‑premise infrastructure while leveraging hyperscalers for development, testing, and non‑sensitive analytics. The hybrid approach reflects regional regulatory...
Pure Storage Rebrands to Everpure as Storage Maker’s Business Expands Focus to Data Management
Pure Storage announced it will rebrand as Everpure, signaling a strategic shift from pure flash storage hardware to broader data management services. The change aligns with the rollout of its Enterprise Data Cloud platform, which bundles storage, monitoring, and governance...
Gartner: Why Neoclouds Are the Future of GPU-as-a-Service
Gartner predicts neoclouds—purpose‑built providers for GPU‑intensive AI—will capture about 20% of the $267 bn AI cloud market by 2030. These specialists deliver bare‑metal GPU performance, rapid provisioning and consumption‑based pricing that can cut costs 60‑70% versus hyperscaler instances. Rather than replacing...
Interview: Ankur Anand, Group CIO, Nash Squared
Ankur Anand, group CIO of Nash Squared, is reshaping the recruiter’s technology agenda to turn data and AI into competitive advantages. He merged day‑to‑day IT operations with a growth‑focused digital strategy, integrating disparate systems to create a single candidate view. Anand...
ICO Wins Appeal over Data Protection Obligations in Currys Cyber Attack
The UK Court of Appeal upheld the Information Commissioner’s Office decision to fine Currys Group Ltd (formerly DSG Retail) £500,000 for failing to protect personal data after a 2017‑18 cyber‑attack. The ruling confirms that organisations must safeguard all personal data,...
Bank of Ireland UK Fined for Late Security System Implementation
The UK arm of Bank of Ireland was fined £3.78 million by the Payments Systems Regulator for a 14‑month delay in deploying the Confirmation of Payee (CoP) system. The lapse left 1.14 million new payees and roughly £7 million in payments without fraud‑prevention...
Neom Partners with DataVolt on $5bn Hyperscale Datacentre Project for Digital Infrastructure
Neom has signed a landmark $5 billion agreement with Saudi‑based DataVolt to build the Kingdom’s first green‑AI hyperscale data centre in Oxagon. The facility will operate at net‑zero, powered entirely by renewable energy and equipped with advanced cooling to support generative...
