The best-performing stocks over the last few years have consistently included technology businesses – from Microsoft and Apple to Amazon and Netflix. More recently, industry giants like Broadcom and Nvidia have enjoyed tremendous growth in their share price, with such industry giants representing a great opportunity to grow capital. 

There’s arguably an innovation slowdown underway, however, particularly among device manufacturers. The rising popularity of second-hand smartphones, for example, can be explained both by the cost of flagship devices as well as the fact older handsets are still functionally identical. 

As society’s appetite for the latest technologies slows, shareholders continue to place manufacturers under intense pressure to innovate in order to spark sales. Indeed, shareholders often have a significant influence on the direction of a company. They stand to gain – and lose – the most with every passing quarter, and businesses need to maintain a healthy and trusting relationship with their shareholders to see their ideas for new technologies through.  

Are shareholders a help or a hindrance?

Investors have a huge hand in the creation and maintenance of a profitable business, explains Jonathan Hunter, CEO of AIM-listed Eleco. “If you take the build tech sector, there's a huge amount of businesses entering the space that need capital, they need investors and shareholders to be able to enter the market and expand when they need to,” he tells ITPro.

“Having shareholders own part of the business means they can provide their views, vote if they agree or disagree with the direction of the business, or – as a last resort – sell their shares and move on. As a result, it’s important for executives in the business to be open and transparent with all stakeholders, communicate, and set those expectations so that investors can make sound investment decisions.”

A decision to withdraw money may be drastic and only occur in extreme circumstances, but it can seriously impact the business. As David Newns, Entrepreneur and Investor details, managing shareholder expectations has wide-ranging consequences throughout the business.

“Public companies have this real challenge of balancing the running of their business with what is essentially a promise to shareholders,” he says. “As someone running the business, if that promise looks like a challenge, you will do anything to deliver on that, because that is your job.

“If that means cutting short-term or long-term investments, that is definitely something you would consider. If a business decides to half the R&D team, they may not have a product to launch for five years, but at least some people can keep their jobs.”

Managing shareholder expectations

Job cuts are part of the process of managing a business. After all, the balancing of the books comes before uncomfortable calls with shareholders. 

Nevertheless, these are unsavory aspects of doing business, and don’t look good whatever way you spin it; all that spinning doesn’t change the fact shareholders can withdraw their money.

To negotiate this, Hunter advocates for an open policy of clear communication, adding “you have to treat all shareholders the same”.

“Fortunately, a lot of shareholders think long term so they know and understand companies better, and we find that new investors that are joining will meet a couple of times first before taking the holding,” he continues. “It's important to build trust which boils down to management. Communicating effectively as well as delivering on the things that have been committed to develops that trust.”

When ideas run out of road

Communication and building trust can only get so far though. There are several examples of shareholders in the tech industry losing faith in the direction the company is going.

From the moment Twitter became a publicly traded company to the moment Musk carried a sink into HQ, monetization has been a topic that has dogged the company. Similarly, Meta’s quest to build the metaverse has taken a backseat due to the investment this project demands, as well as the turmoil its advertising business was facing. 

Such moves from companies make shareholder value a dirty word, and headlines and opinion pieces criticizing tech giants for not staying the course only add to the discontent. As Newns explains, though, Meta’s metaverse u-turn demonstrates there has to be a cut-off point when it comes to investing in new technologies.

“When Mark Zuckerberg said the future is in the metaverse and then spent a lot of money trying to chase this opportunity, initially everyone was interested and gave him the space to pursue it,” he says. “A number of years, and a lot of billions later, the reality is nothing much was happening. But at the same time, the core business was under threat from lower consumer spending and ad revenue decreasing. 

“I think actually Zuckerberg got a lot of leeway when it came to the amount of money and the amount of time he spent on the metaverse and, at the end of the day, I think the decision to step back was more to do with the metaverse, rather than how they innovate as a company.”

How shareholders influence innovation

With shareholder value often prioritized above all else, many feel products the companies are developing begin to lose importance. This raises fundamental questions over whether this is affecting the overall health of the industry.

Although shareholders pulling their money can obviously halt innovative practices, Newns says the activity of investors is actually a reflection of the sentiment in the market. “The synthetic meats market is an example of the sentiment dropping out of the market and prime investors asking ‘If there are no requirements for this stuff, why would we invest?’

“I think that’s happening to the metaverse now, and that affects everyone in the ecosystem down to the startups. But, equally, if you're developing a ChatGPT solution, then everyone will want to invest. So it's a moving piece with lots of factors.”

Hunter adds being able to communicate the value of the company and the direction it’s going in is at the heart of reassuring shareholders. “It’s up to the investor as to whether they will stay or leave,” he says. “As a business, we have a responsibility to communicate the value that we're adding to the business and why we are making the decision we do.

“It’s about communicating across a broad audience. For example, we made a divestment this year because the business that we divested was not adding value and wasn't part of our strategic roadmap. 

“Because we communicated this with our investors, what could have been seen as a negative was well received by shareholders.

Striving to be more sustainable means becoming more efficient, and understanding how your company operates in order to reduce your carbon footprint, as well as operational costs. Ultimately, where before organisations have felt that being more sustainable would negatively impact their bottom line, the opposite is true.

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Change is happening – faster than ever. As the physical and virtual worlds merge ever closer, 3D design is the future of almost every industry.

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Data has become a competitive advantage, helping businesses anticipate and react to change. But with data in multiple formats and locations, costs quickly add up and expertise becomes a limiting factor, forcing businesses to fall back on spreadsheets and disconnected databases.

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• and What to look for in a cloud service provider

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By providing the broadest and most complete set of machine learning (ML) services, AWS is able to meet its customers wherever they’re at in their ML journeys and help them achieve specific objectives.

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To be successful, businesses must select a secure, scalable, and reliable computing platform. At the same time, they also demand openness so development teams can select the tools and technologies that they're skilled in using.

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Modern enterprises need hyper-automation to drive exceptional customer and employee experiences, let alone outperform the competition.

In today’s fast-moving and customer-driven world, hyper-automation empowers organisations to automate complex business processes and thrive in this digital-first economy. It’s no longer enough to simply automate tasks. Now you must automate entire business processes.

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As organisations seek to become more competitive, they are often moving to cloud data warehouses (CDWs) and cloud data lakes (CDLs) to help manage large volumes of diverse data and perform advanced analytics. In many cases they are using multiple cloud providers to fit their needs.

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Cloud adoption is growing exponentially, and it is a key enabler to every digital transformation. As organisations move to the cloud for agility, scalability and flexibility, they are adopting cloud-native, intelligent, automated solutions, and multi-cloud platforms.

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The global semiconductor supply chain may be unable to return to normal operation until at least 2025, one expert has claimed.

Since 2020, the semiconductor industry has faced lingering disruption, initially sparked by a slow down in manufacturing during the height of the pandemic.

At its nadir in January, the United States was said to have less than five days worth of semiconductors in its stockpile. In the two years since, semiconductor manufacturers have looked to ramp up production, but some in the field say this won’t help in the short term.

“So it still takes you a minimum of three years to ramp up a new semiconductor facility,” said Ondrej Burkacky, senior partner at McKinsey’s Semiconductor Practice, speaking on the IT Pro Podcast.

“And that's already a pretty short timeframe; in many geographies, it's more like five years that it takes you to get all the approvals to construct it, to bring in the tools to ramp up to a full yielded product.”

Given the length of time that it takes to get semiconductor sites planned, built, and put into operation, manufacturers are also faced with a great deal of uncertainty over the demand of the market they will be selling to down the line. The sudden impact of the pandemic took most of the world by surprise and didn’t fit into business projections, and similarly impactful crises such as the invasion of Ukraine or the increasing cost of living crisis make markets uncertain.

“When you have such timeframes, like three to five years to build out a product production facility, you need to be damn sure that you have the demand in place," said Burkacky.

This outlines the high risks for semiconductor manufacturers investing today, who need to accurately predict demand several years down the line to inform current decisions. Despite this, Burkacky states that businesses that correctly anticipate this demand and play into the right markets could come out on top come 2025.

“So this can take well into 2024 or even 2025 until this gets fully sorted out. But there are ways for players to optimise their sourcing, there are ways for them to commit to more longer term supply agreements," said Burkacky.

“I think going forward, while there still might be a certain shortage, there will be ways for players to excel here and be able to source the semiconductors they need, versus others who might still struggle.”

Automotive manufacturers responded to the unprecedented low demand for cars during the worst months of the pandemic by cancelling large orders of chips, and weathered huge losses in 2021 as a result. Only now is it re-establishing chains to return to pre-pandemic production levels, and is limited by the same turnaround as any other semiconductor production.

“One of the reasons why the automotive industry got struck so hard by the chips shortage is because they had basically no inventory along the entire value chain that they could survive from,” noted Burkacky.

Seeking to ease the supply strains experienced by the industry, a number of governments have looked to subsidy packages for semiconductor manufacturers. The US recently passed the CHIPS for America Act, which provided approximately $54 billion in subsidies for chip factories such as Intel’s proposed site in Ohio.

Just last week, Intel further announced $30 billion plans to expand its Arizona chip plant, citing the importance of robust supply.

The EU is also moving forward with its own Chips Act, which is expected to provide up to €43 billion to further safeguard semiconductor supply on the continent. Geopolitical tensions between the US and China have also led the latter to move towards consolidating its domestic semiconductor supply chain.

A recent US trip to Taiwan, to discuss the passage of the CHIPS act with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) resulted in a flurry of cyber attacks on Taiwanese government websites, originating from China and Russia.

In a final word of warning from Burkacky, he acknowledged that although government investment is clearly driving investment from some companies, it will not accelerate overall supply chain recovery.

"Just because you have a Chips Act in place doesn't mean that the day after there is no more shortage, right? As I said before, there is still the physics of three to five years to build a semiconductor plant.”

A full interview with Ondrej Burkacky can be heard on the IT Pro Podcast.

Semiconductor manufacturing specialists STMicroelectronics and GlobalFoundries have announced plans for a new chip factory in Crolles, southeastern France.

In a move that will greatly increase European chip manufacturing security and boost the French economy, the companies will develop the new plant next to the existing STM facility within the commune. Around 1,000 new jobs are expected to be created as a direct result of the investment, cementing the region as a cornerstone of French industry.

Current targets for the facility have it reaching full capacity by 2026, at which point 620,000 wafers will be produced per year. The plant will manufacture 18-nanometre wafers, to be used in automotive, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile contexts.

The project has been announced amidst a worldwide semiconductor shortage, with western nations particularly keen to use funds to establish local manufacturing and reduce reliance on chip imports from Asia. Action in this area has been fuelled largely by macroeconomic uncertainty and security concerns around the long-term viability of the current supply chain.

Investment from the state totalling an as-yet-unspecified figure has been proposed to support the project, though French President Emmanuel Macron’s office has indicated it is in excess of €5.7 billion. Reuters reports that both companies indicated the French government was of great assistance to the project.

It is expected that this will be drawn from the total €6.7 billion of support from major companies such as Raytheon and FedEx announced at this month’s Choose France summit. In all, the money will support 14 investment projects and is expected to create 4,000 jobs in France.

The final amount of backing for the semiconductor factory is expected to be greater, however, after prospective funding from the European Commission’s €43 billion Chips Act is taken into account.

"We will have more capacity to support our European and global customers as they transition to digitalisation and decarbonisation," STMicroelectronics CEO Jean-Marc Chery stated, with the decision set to push STM's revenue above their $20 billion target. IT Pro approached STMicroelectronics and GlobalFoundries for further comment.

The Indian government is currently working to expand and dominate semiconductor manufacturing with billions of dollars of support, and the EU is moving ahead with its Chips Act to sate increasing demand and consolidate localised supply.

But while Intel plans $80 billion of investment in European facilities with significant help from the EU Chips Act, its pending plans for an ambitious facility in Ohio grow increasingly fraught as the CHIPS For America continues to flounder in the US Congress. Both chambers have thus far failed to come to an agreement over the precise details of the $52 billion package, which could cost the America the crown jewels of future wafer production.

What exactly is “app modernisation”? In its simplest form, it’s the process of updating an app so that it can be maintained, extended, deployed and managed in a way that allows the app to meet your current and future needs.

Application modernisation opens the door to several business and technical benefits for your organisation.

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With the wide-ranging capabilities that Netsuite offers, Netsuite integration projects can involve many applications. This guide can support you in simplifying this process with a checklist of things to consider in your planning.

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The last few years have seen a number of changes in consumer behaviour and business practices, brought on by the disruptions of the pandemic. In response, organisations need to ensure they’re set up to make their data work for them and continue to deliver engaging customer experiences.

With data at the heart of innovation, leveraging it requires the right technology to get it where it’s needed, so companies are investing in integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to reach their DX goals in less time and streamline their workflows.

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Create unlimited potential for innovation and collaboration within your business - by breaking down the walls of the traditional workplace and empowering your employees to work from anywhere.

79% of respondents to the Dell Technologies Digital Transformation Index (DTI) said they’re reinventing their business model due to the pandemic’s disruption, and the digital workplace is a major part of this change. What do you need to consider as you enhance your digital offerings?

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This study by ESG looks into the adoption of modern device technologies within organisations and whether this has helped them to support their employees and improve their productivity, and if this has then contributed to their greater business success.

Surveying over 2000 IT decision makers, ESG asks them what has accelerated their digital transformation, what devices have shown the biggest ROI, and what’s driving their future innovation.

Download this whitepaper to learn the correlations between digital workplace acceleration and business success.

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If there have been any positives from the last couple of years of global turmoil, one has been that being on a business’s premises every day of the week isn’t essential for productivity. Although workers are now returning from their remote home offices to the corporate desk, many are also looking towards a hybrid work mode.

The downside to this from the perspective of IT departments is that they now have a much broader array of systems and services to administer, including in-office and remote, locally run and in the cloud. Keeping track of availability and performance across everything in the IT estate has gotten harder, but there is a solution to the problem – full-stack observability. The benefits of implementing this could go far beyond mere monitoring, too.

What is full-stack observability?

Traditional monitoring systems tend to focus on one area, or a class of areas. One tool might provide performance data for cloud apps, another for network bandwidth and another for storage servers. The issue is that business outcomes are not siloed in this way. Both employees and customers could be using services that depend on elements across all these domains, so that a performance issue in one area might have a root cause somewhere else. For example, sluggish apps might be due to slow storage. This means that an IT administrator trying to pinpoint a problem could well have to track back through multiple tools to discover what is really causing the issue.

This complexity of contemporary IT infrastructure is seen as the most important driver towards adopting full-stack observability, according to the latest Cisco AppDynamics report, The Journey to Observability. This complexity was the top-listed issue, with 51% of the 1,200 IT professionals surveyed citing it as their foremost factor. Full-stack observability brings the visibility of the entire modern technology stack into one place. Applications, software-defined compute, storage, services, networking and more can be monitored together. It can provide in-depth insights into behaviour, performance, and system health collected from the entire IT estate, formerly seen as a loosely connected array of disparate domains.

The benefits of full-stack observability

But full-stack observability is about much more than just reacting to the wider range of IT now in use. Both employees and customers are expecting exceptional digital experiences, and a major part of delivering this is maximum availability. Full-stack observability’s consolidation of all IT systems into one domain of visibility provides this benefit more consistently. This visibility extends beyond traditional IT infrastructure into network infrastructure and applications, both internal operational software and customer-facing, including cloud. A key part of this story is being able to monitor performance across microservices, containers and serverless environments.

This is fundamentally important because data is increasingly shared across systems and flows between them. This interoperability means that an issue in one area can affect others, so being able to identify and address problems in one system before it proliferates is paramount. This can enable IT departments to fix these issues before they have a negative impact elsewhere, and before they affect customers’ experience with a company’s services.

Productivity benefits beyond troubleshooting

Fixing issues in this way should not just be seen as a reactive solution, however. This isn’t merely a matter of bringing productivity back to levels experienced before the IT proliferation of the last few years. In fact, 50% of the IT professionals surveyed by AppDynamics said productivity was improved by full-stack observability and they were able to spend less time “fire-fighting”. With improved visibility, it’s possible to detect problems earlier on so that they don’t cause so much upheaval.

Companies that don’t implement full-stack observability could even be risking an existential threat. Organisations that don’t at least take the first steps towards implementation will be at a competitive disadvantage over the next year as other organisations race ahead. Potential consequences include the reduced productivity and time wasted seeking the root cause of an IT performance issue just discussed, which full-stack observability makes much easier to track.

However, reluctant organisations can fall behind in other important ways, too, including innovation and digital transformation. Full-stack observability enables an organisation to pinpoint areas for improvement more directly, showing the best places to prioritise for development with the most potential for delivering impact. Perhaps an improvement in storage could enable the next leap forward in application delivery, or maybe software-defined compute will deliver the required infrastructural basis.

Time to make a start

The message is getting through, and according to the Journey to Observability report 91% said their organisation had a full-stack observability strategy in place, with 37% already executing the strategy, while a further 39% had taken their first steps. With so many IT professionals recognising the benefit and beginning their journey, every company should be considering full-stack observability and how it can help them both monitor their disparate IT estate and grow for the future.

Implementing effective full-stack observability entails choosing the right solutions provider. As a key component of Cisco’s solution for full-stack observability, AppDynamics is helping technologists see, understand and optimise what happens inside and beyond their IT architecture – all through the lens of business impact – by providing them with the tools, insight and expertise they need to build on their existing monitoring capabilities and generate real-time visibility into their entire IT stack. Technologists realise that 2022 is going to be a pivotal year for implementation, as economies emerge towards a “new normal”. Of the technologies surveyed for the Journey to Observability report, 90% cited it as a priority.

However, 93% also recognised that there was more work to be done to deploy full-stack observability within their organisation. The work is worth doing. In fact, it’s likely to be essential for any company that is now utilising a broad range of services in its IT stack.

The main thing to consider is that business outcomes should be correlated with technology performance across the full IT stack, because the reality is that they are inextricably connected. Once you make this correlation, full-stack observability becomes a completely obvious technology to implement, and companies that don’t take the step will be missing out not just on considerable productivity improvements, but also on having an invaluable tool to guide their innovation over the coming decade as IT systems become even more ubiquitous and disparate.

Read Cisco AppDynamics’ report, The Journey to Observability, to learn more

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) enables companies to embark more securely and efficiently on digital transformations, but the traditional infrastructure doesn’t always deliver a seamless experience.

Many businesses are pushing innovation to either recover from the pandemic’s disruption or to stay competitive in an uncertain economy. If you’re also looking to evolve to a more data-centric business model and leverage big data and analytics to drive innovation, then you’ll need to arm your IT teams with the most updated tools to support your transformation goals.

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Organisations are becoming increasingly used to the digital disruptions caused by cyber and IT incidents, and are adopting new methods to enhance their resiliency and ability to bounce back, including machine learning (ML) and Kubernetes-orchestrated containers.

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Containers are increasingly being used to improve security and speed up application development - with businesses noting better app performance as a result - and are becoming standard practice for implementing SecDevOps workflows.

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This week marks the 100th episode of the IT Pro Podcast, and to celebrate the occasion, we’ve got a special bumper episode where we’ll be looking back over the last 100 years of technological development. We examine the inventions that have led up to the present day, the impact that they’ve had, and how current innovations may impact the future. Join us as we discuss the birth of Silicon Valley, the world’s first internet service providers and the explosion of mobile technology, along with much more.

We’d also like to thank you for your continued support. We love bringing you these weekly podcasts, and we’re looking forward to the next hundred episodes.

Highlights

“When I think back to when I was in primary school, we had BBC Micros, and that kind of thing, which when you look at them aesthetically, they’re very similar to the IBM Personal Computer. So it is interesting how that filtered down. Now, at the same time as this was going on, the Xerox Star operating system was introduced, which is the birth of the graphical user interface, the GUI, and also the desktop metaphor. Lots of other things that we associate with modern computing: bitmap displays, networking, email capabilities, which is not bad in the 1980s considering there was no internet yet.”

“The big thing with the web was that it democratised information and access to information in a huge way. And without HTTP and HTML, in particular, making it comparatively easy to set up your own website with very minimal resources. Without that, the web as we know it would not exist, because it would only be for big companies and big organisations with the resources and the skills to create websites. And having this accessible open toolkit enabled anyone to start a website. And without that huge explosion in content, the web would not have been this all-consuming thing that everyone had to be on.”

“In the UK, in 2003, the first commercial 3G networks became available. This was the originator of the term mobile broadband. I'm sure that many of our listeners remember this as a big turning point in how we use mobile devices. Without it, we don't have smartphones, we don't have social media. We don't have what we're doing here now, speaking to each other virtually, because you don't have FaceTime, all these kinds of things. You can do whatever with it. And this 24 hour connectivity really is impossible without 3G, or would have been impossible without 3G.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• The IT Pro Podcast: IR35 - what happens now?
• The IT Pro Podcast: What makes a Silicon Valley CEO? (Part Two)
• The IT Pro Podcast: What makes a Silicon Valley CEO? (Part One)
• What can the rest of the world learn from Silicon Valley?
• London Underground to get full 4G coverage by 2024
• EE becomes first UK telco to confirm 3G retirement plans
• Eight tips for reducing screen fatigue while working from home
• The IT Pro Podcast: Can 5G close the digital divide?
• The IT Pro Podcast: The teenager who started a networking firm
• Apple concedes ground to developers with $100 million settlement
• Six key events that helped Microsoft dominate the PC platform
• ARPANET’s first transmission is 50, but its influence is still felt today
• Tim Berners-Lee wants us to build a better World Wide Web

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• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20

The global automotive sector will lose almost twice as much revenue this year from semiconductor shortage-induced production lapses than first predicted, according to analysts.

Global consulting firm AlixPartners increased the amount it expects the worldwide automotive industry to lose due to the chip shortage in its latest report released this week. It now predicts $210 billion in losses during 2021 - up from $110 billion in its May forecast.

It also expects the industry will under produce by 7.7 million vehicles this year — up from 3.9 million in its May forecast.

Mark Wakefield, global co-leader of the company's automotive and industrial practice, blamed the increased forecast on various problems, including pandemic lockdowns in Malaysia.

"Chips are just one of a multitude of extraordinary disruptions the industry is facing, including everything from resin and steel shortages to labor shortages," he warned. "There’s no room for error for automakers and suppliers right now; they need to calculate every alternative and make sure they’re undertaking only the best options."

Other executives at the firm warned that a multitude of shortages in components and materials is amplifying the impact on the automotive sector.

Auto manufacturers have been suffering component shortages for months, which forced Ford and General Motors to shut down plants in the US and elsewhere. The White House has pledged to address the shortage and has sought funding to support the Creating Helpful Incentives for the Production of Semiconductors (CHIPS) act proposed last June and subsequently passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.

In July, automotive business leaders and leaders from the semiconductor and telecommunications sectors wrote to Congress asking it to fund the legislation. They called the funding, which would introduce tax credits for domestic fabrication plants, a national priority.

The same month, chip giant TMSC said the global chip shortage would extend into 2022, but it mentioned the supply crunch may ease in the automotive sector during the fourth quarter.

In this week's exclusive feature for The Business Briefing readers, Bobby Hellard looks at the steps beyond pay rises that business leaders can take to make employees feel valued.

The Business Briefing is a new free weekly digest that highlights everything you should know about the business world around you.

Learn more about it and sign up here, or fill in your details below to read this sample feature.

Space exploration is currently in the midst of a renaissance, with more and more private companies and national governments launching test flights, satellites and probes. Just recently, scientists generated oxygen on Mars, and flew a remote helicopter over its surface.

But what will these advances in space exploration mean for those of us stuck here on earth? The space race of the 60s led to many innovations that we still use today – including LASIK, cordless vacuums and even OpenStack – so what technology could the race for Mars bring us? This week, we’re joined by Paul Kostek, advisory systems engineer with Base2 Solutions and IEEE senior member, to find out what developments the future of space travel could bring us.

Footnotes

• The IT Pro Podcast: The tech keeping your telly on
• UK Space Agency launches fund to develop hospitals of the future
• Microsoft and SpaceX collaborate to take the cloud into space
• Man on the Moon: Technology then and now
• AWS launches dedicated space business unit
• How Apollo 11 technology shaped the modern world
• HPE launches two servers into space
• NHS to boost X-ray scanning with space tech
• It’s time to give edge computing some space
• NASA picks Lockheed to build shuttle replacement
• European Space Agency could ‘print’ first moon base
• HPE space servers continue to work - for now
• Google Cloud and SpaceX partner on Starlink internet service
• Nokia and NASA join forces to bring 4G to the moon
• View from the Airport: Appian World 2021
• SpaceX to offer on-the-go internet service for vehicles
• Toilet paper, generator failures, and penguins: How IBM Maximo is being used for Antarctic research missions

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Silicon Valley’s community of leaders are frequently hailed as visionaries, and while it’s hard to argue with the fact that the innovation’s they’ve produced have changed the world, the qualities that make them so unique aren’t always positive ones.

In the first episode, we examined some of the better aspects of Silicon Valley CEOs, but this week, we take a look at the negative elements of the common Silicon Valley CEO mindset. We also discuss the key learnings that CEOs and business leaders can take away from their Silicon Valley counterparts.

Footnotes

• The IT Pro Podcast: What makes a Silicon Valley CEO? (Part One)
• What can Silicon Valley learn from the rest of the world?
• Silicon Valley’s scandal hunters
• Crab-erization! (Creature Feature)
• Leeds is building a tech hub to rival San Francisco
• Innovation in terrestrial transportation apparatus (AKA reinventing the wheel)
• Bill Gates: I've switched to Android
• The Surface Neo is a tantalising glimpse of what might have been
• RIP Windows Phone: Microsoft ends support for its dying OS
• Google and Alphabet workers agree to unionize
• Google warns hybrid working could hinder its 'corporate culture'

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20

Whatever your thoughts on the products that come out of Silicon Valley, it’s hard to argue with its impact. The region is frequently hailed as a cradle of innovation, and the companies based there regularly set the agenda for the rest of the world’s technological development. But it’s often said a company is nothing without a leader, so what is it that makes the CEOs of these organisations so successful?

In the first episode of this two-part special, we’ll be talking about the qualities that make a good Silicon Valley CEO, looking at some of the best-known figures within its history and digging into what made them unique.

If you want to hear more, tune in next week, where we’ll be examining some of the less positive aspects of Silicon Valley leadership, as well as discussing what the business community can learn from Silicon Valley’s examples – both good and bad.

Footnotes

• What can the rest of the world learn from Silicon Valley?
• The IT Pro Podcast: Is the sun setting on Silicon Valley?
• The softer skills CIOs will need to adopt for the future
• CIO hiring process to focus on emotional intelligence in 2021
• So you want to work for a tech startup? It’s not all ping-pong tables and yoga
• Finding the right co-founder for your tech startup
• The IT Pro Podcast: Going from startup to scale-up

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
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Hitch Works has announced the launch of Hitch, its all-new internal talent mobility platform that aims to transform the workplace into an inclusive, agile and adaptive enterprise.

Hitch uses proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to maximize an organization’s internal talent by matching the right skills to the right work. By enabling companies to visualize hidden skills within their organizations, they can better utilize their internal talent, increase enterprise agility and build more diverse teams.

According to Hitch Works, companies using Hitch have successfully built unbiased, cross-functional teams while keeping their workforce upskilled, reskilled and engaged.

The company claims Hitch already has a proven track record of transforming how organizations work while driving greater productivity at scale. To date, companies like Allianz Global Investors, Dolby Laboratories and HERE Technologies have started using Hitch.

“One of the many things I love about Hitch is the transparency - everybody can see every work opportunity, which was not visible before Hitch,” said George Hudgens, VP of people and work innovation at Dolby Laboratories.

“Workforce planning was a major initiative at Dolby, and Hitch successfully helped catalog our talent and increase career opportunity awareness, while improving project transparency across departments, divisions, and continents,” Hudgens continued.

Hitch founder and CEO, Kelley Steven-Waiss, added: “Hitch provides companies complete visibility into the skills and passions of their employees, and matches them to project-based or full-time roles.

"Our Dynamic Teaming capability enables companies to staff mission-critical projects with internal talent and adapt quickly to changing market forces, all while maintaining work continuity and speed.”

Steven-Waiss and HR industry analyst Josh Bersin will share an inside look at how Hitch is changing the way workplaces see their workforces in a webinar scheduled for September 16.

Innovation is a goal that many organisations strive for, but it's sometimes hard to focus on propelling the business forward whilst also making sure that the wheels don't fall off. In this panel discussion, we speak to IT leaders and experts about how to balance the insatiable appetite for IT innovations with the realities of keeping the lights on in a constantly-changing world.

Maggie Holland

Group Editor & Editorial Director, IT Pro

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999. In 2006, just weeks before IT Pro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of IT Pro, she was appointed group editor of Cloud Pro and IT Pro in April 2012 and then editorial director of all B2B sites (including Channel Pro) in May 2016. In February 2020, also assumed responsibility for the US launch of IT Pro and content across our demand gen business focused on the technology, finance and automotive pillars. Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, CRM and ERP, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.

Carlene Jackson

CEO, Cloud9 Insight

Carlene Jackson is CEO of Brighton-based tech company Cloud9Insight, a Microsoft Gold Partner which provides more than 700 UK businesses with cloud-based CRM software systems. Cloud9 saw an impressive 60% growth in 2019, and has now set up its apprenticeship sister-company, Vantage Academy. With an upbringing in far-flung places such as the Caribbean and a remote croft in Scotland, it’s safe to say that Dublin-born Carlene is used to doing things differently.

Lucas Gundry

Technology director, The Keyholding Company

Lucas is a passionate technology strategist with previous experience running technology programmes, growing agile teams and specialising in helping businesses to digitally transform. Lucas has a breadth of knowledge across several aspects of technology including bespoke product development, IT operations and data strategy. Digital transformation at The Keyholding Company has enabled the company to leverage its service partner network via CHASE to deliver over 2000 jobs a day with < 1% of delivery requiring any form of manual intervention.

Russ Shaw

Founder, Tech London Advocates

Russ Shaw is the founder of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates. He originally founded Tech London Advocates in 2013 to ensure an independent voice of the technology community was heard, but with a focus on the private sector. Since then he has been championing London as a global tech hub and campaigning to address some of the biggest challenges facing tech companies in the UK.

Jarod Greene

Vice president of marketing/general manager, Apptio/TBM Council

Jarod is the vice president of marketing for Apptio and general manager of the TBM Council, a non-profit organisation dedicated to fostering education, standardisation and collaboration around the discipline of TBM to help businesses get the most out of their technology spend. Having previously worked as a Gartner analyst, Jarod has extensive experience in working with businesses which are trying to balance everyday operations with supporting BUs to develop new revenue streams, often without any increase in budget.

Working from home shouldn't mean your business stops moving forward. In this panel discussion, we'll discuss some of the most impressive examples of companies who've pivoted to remote working while still keeping their focus on enterprise innovation. We'll explore the challenges of managing remote IT for a higher-education institution, the impact of remote working on training programmes, how Dell Technologies used its own tools to cope with a distributed workforce, and how an entire contact centre moved to remote operation.

Dale Walker

Deputy Editor, IT Pro

Having secured a masters degree in magazine journalism from the University of Sheffield in 2016, Dale has spent the past three years working on Dennis Publishing’s B2B technology websites, first as a staff writer, then acting features editor, and now deputy editor. A big fan of music and art, Dale often spends his weekends going to live events and exhibits across London. He's also an avid gamer and climber, and occasionally dabbles with cycling.

Peter O'Rourke

IT director, University of Suffolk

A long-time industry veteran with over 30 years’ experience, Peter leads the University of Suffolk’s IT team in supporting the University’s 5,000-plus students and teachers, as well as helping shape the education sector’s attitude to technology through his role on the executive committee of UCISA.

Rob Chapman

CEO, Firebrand Training

Robert Chapman is co-CEO and co-Founder of accelerated digital skills certification provider Firebrand Training. Rob started his career as a Systems Engineer for IBM back in the '80s before climbing through the ranks at numerous hardware and software companies and finally co-founding Firebrand in 2001 during the dot com burst. Going from delivering courses to 11 people when the business first started, today Firebrand is a £25M market leader, with leading customers such as the BBC, BT and Lloyds.

Laura Crow

Head of IT services, Newcastle Building Society

As head of IT services for Newcastle Building Society, Laura is responsible for helping secure and deliver the technology which underpins the bank's services, including contact centres, customer apps and internal tools. Not only that, but the company also operates high-street branches across the northeast, which require technical support to continue operating effectively.

Richard Rawcliffe

Vice president UK public sector, Dell Technologies

Richard has over 30 years’ experience in the UK Public Sector with over 25 of those spent working for organisations that provide technology solutions that enable Government departments and organisations to deliver outcomes that transform lives for citizens, patients, carers and students. At Dell Technologies Richard is responsible for the UK Public Sector sales teams. Segmented into Healthcare, Education and Government the sales teams have deep segment knowledge and are supported by a large virtual team that includes many ex CIO’s and senior managers from the Public Sector.

Tiny AI, also known as Tiny ML in reference to machine learning (ML), is currently a big focus for AI researchers. The aim is to reduce the size of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms; especially those that use large quantities of data and computational power, for example natural language processing (NLP) models like Google’s BERT. According to the MIT Technology Review, the larger version of BERT has 340 million data parameters and training it just once costs enough electricity to power a US household for 50 days.

“Over the past few years there’s been an arms race of sorts in AI and an effect of this competition is that we’ve seen some ML models become enormous in the race to achieve high performance,” says Nick McQuire, vice president of enterprise research at CCS Insight. “Microsoft, for instance, recently introduced the Turing Natural Language Generation model, the largest one ever published at 17 billion parameters.”

Why do we need Tiny AI?

Training sophisticated AI takes a huge amount of energy. Sumant Kumar, director of digital transformation at consultancy firm CGI UK, notes that the carbon footprint of training a single AI is as much as 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) – five times as much as the lifetime emissions of an average car. As AI adoption grows it’s become clear that the technology needs to become greener, which is one of the factors pushing Tiny AI forward.

Another factor is the need to run inference and sophisticated models on resource-limited devices at the edge, for use cases like robotics, automated video security and anomaly detection in manufacturing. “To get increasing intelligence out of the data centre and into better performing consumer electronics, cars and medical devices, AI needs to run on much smaller microprocessors, often powered by batteries,” says Tim Ensor, director of AI at consultancy business Cambridge Consultants.

“Tiny AI involves building algorithms into hardware at the periphery of a network, such as the sensors themselves,” explains Andrew White, a UK and European patent attorney at IP firm Mathys & Squire. “The idea is that they can be integrated into hardware to perform data analytics at low power, avoiding the need to send data back to the cloud for processing.” This improves latency as well as power consumption and enables Tiny AI to run on devices like our mobile phones, increasing their functionality but also improving our privacy as the data stays on the device.

What’s happening in this field?

Alongside academics, tech giants including Google, IBM, Amazon and Apple are also undertaking research in this field.

“We’ve seen commercial moves in this arena, notably by the cloud providers, the highest profile of which was AWS’ launch of Sagemaker Neo last year, which is one of the leaders in this space for developers,” says McQuire.

We’re also seeing collaborations between the two sectors. For example, TinyBERT, which is 7.5 times smaller and 9.4 times faster on inference than the original BERT, was developed by Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab.

The main benefit of reducing the size of machine learning is the reduction in computational power, which lowers cloud and power costs. “We’ve seen customers that for every dollar they spend on AI, spend $10-15 more on cloud computing to support the application,” notes McQuire.

But there are other benefits. The fact that Tiny AI leverages local computer resources rather than the cloud is a big benefit for highly regulated and privacy conscious industries, such as banking and healthcare, for example.

The challenges ahead

Research into Tiny AI is critical in enabling AI to realise its full potential. The challenge for both researchers and technology firms is managing the trade-off between reducing the size of a model, through distillation techniques for instance, and maintaining accuracy and high performance for inference.

As Tiny AI is closer to the human experience, the accuracy needs to be high. “There’s no room for error with things like autonomous vehicles,” notes Kumar. “It’s also vital to make Tiny AI algorithms at the edge secure, transparent and ethical, as they’ll be deployed in real-life environments.”

Tiny AI could fundamentally alter the way we interact with many devices and will be necessary to create the next wave of context-aware consumer devices. It looks set to improve a myriad services and technologies including, but not limited to, voice assistants, autocorrect, image processing in cameras, autonomous driving, precision farming, connected healthcare, Industry 4.0 and intelligent logistics. It will also make many new applications possible.

Kumar believes that Tiny AI will be essential in unlocking the business value of AI in industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare and logistics, while McQuire expects it to change how we work.

“Many of the devices we use for work supporting Tiny AI will get much smarter, especially in the areas of security, video and voice understanding,” he says. “Whilst office work has been fundamentally changed forever as a result of COVID-19, when people finally are able to go back into face-to-face meetings in offices, we will likely see Tiny AI and IoT converge in smart offices and facilities management applications.”

When will Tiny AI become commonplace?

While this is very much an emerging area, Tiny AI represents an expected evolution of the field of AI, says Ensor. However, it’s highly research driven at the moment and there are few companies leveraging Tiny AI in production today.

Issues like governance, management tools and security still need to be hashed out, but “in coming years we will see some experimental deployments in real-life starting with low risk applications, and implementations in more critical use cases will follow as technology matures,” Kumar concludes

More than possibly any other place on the planet, Silicon Valley has had a fundamental role in shaping the modern world. The companies of the San Francisco Bay Area have helped produce innovative technologies like the smartphone, social media and modern software, and are seen as leading lights of the technology and business worlds.

Despite this status, however, Silicon Valley is far from perfect. There are many areas in which it can and must improve, as well as systemic failings with its culture and system that are in dire need of addressing. These challenges are not insurmountable though, and valley companies can turn to tech hubs in other parts of the world for inspiration in how to do so.

Ending work-life imbalance

Work-life balance (or lack thereof) is a major problem in Silicon Valley. Employees are often expected to work long stints above and beyond their contracted hours, including evenings and weekends. This is particularly acute within the engineering organisations that power most of the Valley’s big companies, where punishing code sprints and crunch periods can lead to staff sleeping at their desks to maximise working time.

“It doesn't matter whether I'm on the train or a coffee shop, I just see people coding,” Box CIO Paul Chapman says of his experiences in Silicon Valley. “I see people with their laptops open, they're coding. They're constantly working. There's a work-life balance issue that Silicon Valley has, and I think that's one of the reasons why when people visit Silicon Valley, they realise just how intense it is.”

“I'm a big believer in the ‘wisdom of the community’, and just having people be available to learn from; it's kind of like boot camp every day. But in order to do that, it feels like you have to work in a ... situation that's not healthy over time.”

This contributes to high levels of stress, mental health problems and frequent cases of burnout. It also makes it hard for people with responsibilities outside of work, such as children or elderly relatives who require care, to advance in their career, as those who can’t or won’t match this intense pace are often seen as not being ‘team players’.

“If I'm the CEO of a company, I have to think ‘what is the experience my employees are having when they come to work every day’,” says LinkedIn’s vice president of talent acquisition, Brendan Browne “If it's not one where there's balance, where there's the ability for them to run and manage their lives in a flexible way and deliver what they have to deliver at work – if you can't bring those things to the table and make that a reality in the company, you're at a competitive disadvantage from a people point of view.”

“When we survey workers and job-seekers, we do find that work-life balance is almost as important to people as the salary,” says Indeed’s head of EMEA research, Pawel Adrjan. “So it's really a close number two in terms of what people care about in their job.”

The Netherlands offers an example of how to do this well; less than 1% of the Dutch population work very long hours, according to statistics from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). On top of that, full-time staff in the Netherlands devote more than 16 hours of their day on average to leisure and personal care activities like eating, sleeping and socialising – over an hour more than the OECD average.

Fixing the diversity problem

Diversity is another area where Silicon Valley has significant ground to cover. Major companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google are still far from equal; men make up more than 75% of the technical workforce there on average, according to their most recent diversity reports, while less than a quarter of US employees are from under-represented groups including African Americans and Latinx.

Improving diversity is important for more than box-ticking and avoiding public backlash. There have been a number of studies which demonstrate that more diverse companies perform better, such as this McKinsey study which found that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were 33% more likely to have better financial returns than their national averages.

The figures indicate that major tech companies still have a way to go in this area, and while Chapman acknowledges this, he also argues that Silicon Valley has taken the criticisms on board and begun to enact changes.

“The focus on diversity is like nowhere else like I've seen, and now it's making its way into the top. As an example, I sit on the board of directors for a nonprofit that is all about creating professional careers for underserved communities,” he says. “Now what we're starting to see is a significant focus on making sure that there's diversity in leadership, diversity on teams, diversity in the cultures that people bring into the culture of the company. And the results are clearly showing that the outcomes are better.”

Various methods have been trialled to help boost diversity in tech companies – Chapman cites Silicon Valley’s use of AI and data analysis tools to help minimise unconscious bias as an example – but one that has gained prominence in the UK is the practise of salary transparency. Traditionally a taboo subject, many adverts for UK jobs are directly specifying the salary on offer, rather than using candidates’ previous salary as a benchmark – a practice that often perpetuates pay disparities.

“I think it's a good thing that job adverts mention salary ranges,” Adrjan says. “I think it's just the first step towards using that to actually help promote diversity because one thing is getting people of different backgrounds into your company at a similar salary range that fits their skills, and then the next step is thinking, can you actually also promote people fairly based on their contribution, their skills, their work, et cetera.”

Living in a bubble

If Silicon Valley is underpaying certain groups of its workforce, then it’s not for want of cash. The amount of money being shovelled into Silicon Valley companies by venture capital firms – investors who fuel the early development and expansion of startups in the hopes of major payoffs later down the line – is astronomical.

In a trend referred to by analyst firm CB Insights as “foie gras’ing”, the number of Silicon Valley funding rounds that raise more than $100 million has tripled between 2016 and 2018, with major companies like Uber often attracting billions of dollars in pre-IPO investment.

This may seem like an ideal situation for the companies who receive that money – after all, $100 million buys a lot of development runway – but these huge early investments can massively inflate a company’s valuation when it eventually floats its IPO on the stock market. If the company’s stock fails to perform as well as the valuation suggested, it can be branded a failure, even if it’s commercially successful by other metrics.

“If you grow 25% year-over-year on a compound average growth, and then you grow 15%, you get royally punished,” Chapman explains. “And the interesting thing is that 15% on, let’s say a $500 million annual run rate, is significantly higher than it was when it was 25% on $100 million run rate. Yet somehow the perception is that ‘Okay, now you're no longer a growth story, things are slowing down’. People are quick to get in and quick to get out, which creates this whiplash.”

Over-funding can also lead to irresponsible spending on by the companies themselves. For instance, Uber’s IPO filing in 2019 revealed that between 2014 and 2018, the company lost a collective total of $6.8 billion – most of the $7.8 billion sum that Japanese investment firm SoftBank poured into it. WeWork, another company that SoftBank has invested heavily in and that has been widely accused of being over-funded, halted its IPO plans in October 2019 as losses hit $1.9 billion.

Nowhere to call home

While Silicon Valley’s reputation has a financial engine has grown, the physical area from which it takes its name has not. In actual fact, the explosive growth of the Bay Area’s tech sector has contributed to a massive housing crisis; the huge influx of new workers means there’s not enough accommodation to go around, and competition for apartments is fierce.

“It's somewhat chronic in the fact that literally people are doubling down, tripling down in rented accommodations,” Chapman explains. “Rent is going through the roof; the median house price in Silicon Valley right now, in San Jose, is just over a million dollars and you may get 1,200-1,500 square feet – if you're lucky. For a million dollars, on a plot of land, that's maybe 5,000 square feet.

“It drives up salaries, it drives up the cost. And so I am concerned about the cost of building a business – at any scale, at least – in Silicon Valley. You have to have a strategy that gets you out of Silicon Valley for your non-core competencies very, very quickly, otherwise it's just too expensive to grow.”

This situation isn’t ideal for tech workers, but it’s even worse for Bay Area locals, who are finding themselves priced out of their own neighbourhoods by wealthy tech company employees who are willing to pay more than pre-existing residents for a shorter commute. The obvious solution is to simply expand and build more property, but as Chapman points out, that’s not really an option in this case.

“It's very hard when you're up against the coast,” he says regretfully. “I've heard just recently Austin, Texas, is now almost joining fingertips with San Antonio, and at some point those two cities will merge together. Silicon Valley's very tight, because we're surrounded by the coast and the bay.”

Another potential solution proposed by Chapman is that having a strong public transportation network – such as in London and Tokyo – could greatly improve the situation by making commuting long distances easier. However, instead of trying to squeeze an ever-increasing workforce into the Bay Area, tech companies could change tactic altogether and look at expanding their presence in other cities and tech hubs around the country and around the world. Boston and Austin are popular destinations, but the more companies set up offices in a given place, the more people will pour into the area and the problem faced in the Bay Area could easily replicate.

“I think for job seekers, it's really helpful to know that there are actually a lot of tech jobs outside of the main hubs. And that's what our research shows – that even in places where maybe tech isn't a huge share of the local economy, there's still a lot of opportunities,” Adrjan notes.

As we covered in part one of this series, Silicon Valley has many positive characteristics, and it can’t be disputed that it has been the engine driving a substantial amount of the last several decades’ technical progress. It is far from infallible, however, and is plagued by many unique problems of its own.

If it wants to solve these challenges, Silicon Valley needs to start looking outside its own borders and taking lessons from some of the world’s other industries and tech hubs. If it doesn’t, it could well find itself consumed by problems that are, at least in part, of its own making

Silicon Valley: it’s the undisputed heartland of modern technological innovation, churning out companies, products and technologies that change the world with almost mechanical regularity. Some of the most famous and profitable companies in the world have their roots in the Valley and it’s the dream of many tech professionals to someday make a career there.

Of course, Silicon Valley is not without its problems – which we’ll look at in more detail in part two of this series – but it’s nevertheless cemented itself as the centre of the tech revolution. But why has the area seen such success, and what can other regions and budding tech hubs learn from it?

People power

There are many factors that have contributed to Silicon Valley’s huge density of successful tech companies, but none is more vital than its proximity to Stanford University. The history of Silicon Valley is deeply intertwined with the elite educational institution; Stanford Research Park, a joint development between the university and the Palo Alto local government, helped incubate companies like Facebook and HP. Even today, Stanford provides a huge number of talented workers who go on to work in the Valley.

“The relationship of Stanford to Silicon Valley goes back nearly a hundred years,” explains Stanford professor of sociology Mark Granovetter. “[It] was solidified in the 1940s when then-engineering dean Frederick Terman decided to lease large tracts of Stanford land to companies like Hewlett-Packard, so it would be easy for scientists and engineers to go back and forth.”

Indeed, HP co-founder William Hewlett wrote in 1991 that “the presence of Stanford University was a key factor in the development of the technology enterprise now known as Silicon Valley. More than anything, it was Terman, his students, and the encouragements and opportunities that he gave them that enabled this great enterprise to flourish”.

Tech companies also pour grant money and donations into the university’s coffers at tremendous rates. The result is a symbiotic relationship whereby Stanford provides tech companies with a constant supply of eager and talented new candidates, and the university gets to offer students the high possibility of getting scooped up for a lucrative job. It’s not just students, either; former Stanford president John Hennessy is currently chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet.

The relationship between Stanford and Silicon Valley is unique, complex and almost impossible to replicate, but it still offers an example of how tech hubs can leverage the advantages offered by their own surroundings to accelerate their development.

“The background for this is that Stanford owns huge tracts of land – about 13 square miles – and can create institutions like this Stanford Industrial Park, which other universities would not be able to emulate,” Granovetter explains. “I think that rather than replicate the relationship between Stanford and Silicon Valley, other hubs should think through what their own distinctive strengths are, and build on those.”

Aside from Stanford graduates, the Valley attracts a huge influx of job seekers looking to join the tech industry. At first glance, the appeal of working at these companies seems obvious; on top of six-figure salaries, Silicon Valley staff can expect perks like outstanding onsite catering, dry cleaning services, free parties and events, and offices that are kitted out with amenities including ping pong tables, arcade cabinets and even nap rooms.

However, while these trappings are undeniably appealing, according to LinkedIn’s vice-president of global talent acquisition Brendan Browne, they’re not what really draws workers in.

“I don't think someone's going to come here because we have the best snacks or the best perks,” he says. “The learning opportunities for new employees is humongous. I think that's sort of on the other side why people like to be here.”

He also highlights the intensely collaborative nature of the Valley’s professional culture, explaining that the high density of expertise combined with a strong culture of networking provides a perfect environment to foster innovation and growth.

“When I came out [to Silicon Valley], people were so collaborative, it almost took me by surprise. How, for me people were [happy] to go look at ideas or say 'why don't you go talk to so-and-so, they're doing something similar', or 'so-and-so might be able to give you some feedback on on that idea', whereas I think in other work cultures or geographies, people are more like 'I'm going to keep every secret to myself, I don't want your idea and I'm certainly not going to give you my idea’. So that's a huge part of it.”

This is a view shared by Box CIO Paul Chapman, who notes that the tech community in Silicon Valley often acts as a “support network” for smaller companies and entrepreneurs.

“When you're very small and starting up, it's almost like Silicon Valley becomes an extension of your organisation,” he says. “The ability to tap into that network, both from a talent perspective and investor perspective, and then a guidance perspective, it's so much greater when you have this concentration here like we do.”

The engine of innovation

Another attractive aspect of Silicon Valley’s culture is that it has firmly and wholeheartedly embraced agile and flexible working, enabled by cutting-edge software tools. Companies deploy modern collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams to keep employees connected, and the prevalence of SaaS applications and cloud storage enables staff to be capable and productive from anywhere they choose.

This flexibility is something that many organisations could benefit from. Not only has working from home been shown to reduce staff attrition and improve productivity equivalent to an extra full day’s work, according to a Stanford study, it also opens up the possibility of hiring top-quality talent that isn’t necessarily local to your office. What’s more, the adoption of the technology tools and processes that enable remote working – such as the collaboration software highlighted above – will improve the efficiency of your in-office employees as well, laying the bedrock for future digital transformation efforts.

In fact, the concept of digital transformation is another export from Silicon Valley that’s having a big impact on businesses around the world. Bay Area tech companies are among the best in the world when it comes to embracing new ideas and taking chances on new and untested strategies. This applies to the adoption of business methodologies like DevOps and Agile, but also extends to functions like R&D, marketing and HR. While many businesses tend to be risk-averse, Silicon Valley firms are usually open to taking bigger chances for greater potential rewards.

“I think there's some history that even predates Silicon Valley as we know it today,” Browne says, “that contributes to sort of the spirit of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking, that comes with why people even today still seemingly flock towards the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley to chase ideas. And some of that is before there was any technology, a lot of people seemed to go in this country from the east coast to the west coast, specifically to California, because they wanted something new they want to create and create a new life or go chase something.”

Browne posits that Silicon Valley companies are perhaps inherently more open to risk taking and speed, with a tendency to try something and find out whether or not it works quickly – and if it doesn’t, move on equally quickly.

“I think cultures that support that well have an advantage versus an attitude of 'we need to put this through a longer process’. But I think a long-standing history of risk taking, and then the payoffs of those risks and the impact it had on people's lives that are positive, I think is probably the headline for me,” he adds.

The result is an environment in which creativity and innovation flourishes. New products and technologies are developed at a rapid pace without fear that overly conservative leadership will shut them down, and companies are constantly experimenting with how they run their organisations internally in order to drive the most efficiency and value. By emulating Silicon Valley’s more adventurous and trailblazing attitudes, companies and industries across the world can reinvent themselves, building a greater atmosphere of innovation within their own ranks.

However, while these cultural elements are an important factor in Silicon Valley’s success, the financial elements of the Valley’s ecosystem should not be taken for granted. In particular, the area houses a vast number of venture capital firms, which between them control a staggering amount of potential investment for new companies. Part of the Valley’s attraction for startup founders is the ability it affords them to shop their ideas around to potential investors in person.

These VC firms are more than purse-string holders though; in many ways, they are the glue that holds Silicon Valley together. When a VC firm invests in a company, it often also assists it with various vital business tasks such as recruiting new talent, planning out growth strategies, bringing in subject matter experts and connecting it with relevant partners.

“The exploration of the complex networks of Silicon Valley points out the specific functions of VC firms and their contribution to the robustness of the system,” Granovetter and fellow economist Michel Ferrary wrote in a 2009 paper on the role of VCs in the Valley’s ecosystem. “Beyond the funding of start-ups, the VC firms select the most promising projects of the region, signal the best start-ups to the business community, accumulate and spread entrepreneurial knowledge in the cluster and embed the interdependent agents of the network.”

The lesson to be learned from Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, therefore, is not that tech companies should simply follow the money. Instead, the real lesson is that they should be making full use of all the resources and expertise of the partners that they do work with, forming strong bonds within their own wider corporate networks to ensure they’re obtaining the maximum value from them.

In addition to VC firms, Chapman also points out the value of personal networks in obtaining seed funding. Series A and Series B funding rounds are often made up of many smaller investments from founders’ personal contacts rather than VCs, he explains, in a tactic which he likens to crowdfunding on a grand scale. This allows companies to obtain early funding without ceding too much control to an individual investor, while also allowing successful founders to put their wealth back into the local startup community.

Silicon Valley is far from perfect. It has many problems, and has attracted a significant amount of justified criticism over the years. It’s hard to argue, however, with the fact that the companies of the San Francisco Bay area are almost unparalleled powerhouses of technological success, and there are many important lessons that organisations around the world can take away from their example.

The common thread that runs through all of the Valley’s best qualities is a fearless pursuit of improvement and innovation. Companies enlist the brightest minds available and then set them loose on problems, unconstrained by the boundaries of conventional thinking or traditional business dogma. That, fundamentally, is the key to Silicon Valley’s success – and it’s a lesson all of us can learn from.

CES – the Consumer Electronics Show to give it its full, somewhat dated name – is no longer just about ridiculous TVs, smart home gadgets and ball-shaped robots. The Las Vegas tech expo, which boasts more than 175,000 attendees annually, is now as much as showcase for business technology as it is consumer electronics.

Just a few years ago CES was little more than a platform for the biggest names in tech to trot out their latest gadgetry, but in 2020, the show is targeting CIOs as much as it is gadget-loving tech enthusiasts. This is reflected in this year’s bumper schedule, which featured talks on ‘how artificial intelligence is significantly changing business operations’, ‘how XR is reshaping enterprise’s approach to workplace training’ and ‘how robotics, edge computing and other technologies can transform the enterprise.’

Blurred lines

Beyond the CIO-attracting talks on offer at CES, this year’s product announcements are also just as important for IT admins as they are consumers. Thanks to the breakneck acceleration in the consumerisation of IT, OEMs are now rolling out do-it-all devices that aim to impress business decision-makers as much as everyday users.

While there were many business-first announcements at 2020’s conference - from Dell’s 86-inch 4K Interactive Touch Monitor that’s aimed squarely at workplace collaboration to Lenovo’s security-driven ThinkCentre M90a All-in-One desktop PC - the majority of devices on show demonstrate a blurring of lines between consumer and business IT hardware.

HP, for example, showed off the Spectre x360 15, a powerful laptop that features all the bells and whistles of a high-spec consumer PC, while also appealing to business users with its 17-hours of battery life, built-in fingerprint scanner and webcam cover, and support for WiFi 6.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad line, a brand synonymous with business laptops, was also given a CES makeover as the firm prepares its IT-first lineup for the next-generation. The firm unveiled the ThinkPad Plus, a dual-screen laptop with integrated E-Ink display and the ThinkPad X1 Fold, a unique ‘foldable’ PC that boasts a unique flexible 13.3-inch 4:3 OLED panel.

This gradual fusion of consumer and business tech is just as evident in other areas of this year’s show. VR demos are focused on how to train employees for a range of real-world scenarios, new wearables target roles that require always-on glanceable information, and 5G companies are showcasing how they can enable the next-generation mobile workforce through real-time collaboration and smarter artificial intelligence.

Nick McQuire, SVP and Head of Enterprise Research at CCS Insights, says: “There is a real convergence happening at once between several big ticket technologies that are impacting both consumers and businesses.

“These technologies are helping to create new classes of products at the show, which are breaking down the traditional silos between consumer and business technology being relevant to both audiences. Foldable displays, robotics, wearables and a new generation of 5G connected laptops are standing out this year as attention grabbers to consumers but also IT departments as well.”

The transformation generation

This shift has been undoubtedly been fuelled by digital transformation (DX) and the growing number of mobile workers, as companies move to support their employees’ need to be able to work from anywhere at any time.

“The first thing to consider is the proliferation of mobile workers, supported by DX,” says Liam Hall, senior research analyst at IDC. “As a result, the same ultraportable, thin and light form factors that attract the consumers eye are ideal for a range of commercial use cases.

“From a form factor perspective, the consumer and commercial brands are becoming increasingly aesthetically similar.”

Dave Crew, commercial director EMEA at Targus, adds: “Having technology with all the important bells and whistles helps remedy the productivity problem. For instance, many on-the-go business travellers use the latest wireless headphones from Apple or Jabra to complete a business call. So many of the smart consumer devices we see at CES are in fact office-ready.

“Devices that appeal to consumers and IT buyers alike are a real incentive for brands to market inclusively.”

Millennial bug

Another trend fuelling CES’ newfound IT focus is the changing face of the modern workforce, with the so-called ‘millennial’ and ‘Gen Z’ generations starting to account for more leadership and decision-making positions. With this comes a fresh perspective on business IT, and an expectation of technology that’s performance as the devices they use at home.

What’s more, during their careers, this younger generation of workers have likely experienced how bad, ageing technology can negatively affect productivity and be keen to fuel change within their organisation.

“Gen Z, being the new working generation, will make decisions based on what technology their employers provide and what policies they implement,” says Crew.

“Being connected and agile will be key for employers looking to attract the right talent. Setting up a workspace with connected functionality will be a must. Businesses need hardware that has cloud capabilities, matching the pace of the evolving work ecosystem.”

Hall adds: “As a more technologically literate generation, the option for CYOD is a strong driver for end-user satisfaction and enhanced employee experience.”

The circle of lifecycles

The emergence of shorter lifecycles due to the rapid pace of innovation in the technology industry is another growing trend that’s exacerbating workers’ thirst for new, up-to-date hardware. While this puts pressure on businesses that have to contend with the fact that equipment will become outdated faster, many are also starting to realise it is far more beneficial to stay ahead of the curve.

Not only does equipping workers with the latest kit increase their job satisfaction, but it also means that productivity will improve and ensures that employees are working with secure devices that can enable new types of working across their company.

Hall comments: “Shorter lifecycles mean that employees will consistently be working with more up to date hardware, with more up to date security patches, that can take advantage of innovative hardware designs and newer form factors and ultimately allow the employees to experiment with new use cases for the devices.”

This shift, Hall adds, is also seeing the DaaS (device as a service) leasing model, which supports shorter lifecycles of devices and, in many cases, device agnosticism, gain traction, though he notes it’s still “early days”.

The CIO Electronics Show

Though it has “consumer” in its name, this year’s CES has proven itself as worthy of IT professionals’ attention and showed that the consumerisation of IT is accelerating rapidly, be it through do-it-all devices that enable more productive on-the-go working, or through growing trends such as foldable displays and artificial intelligence that are relevant to both consumers and business audiences.

It’s now more important than ever that decision-makers take heed of the latest innovations that will soon begin to infiltrate the workplace – whether they are ready or not.

The fact that data has immense value in the modern age is no secret and while the phrase “data is the new oil” has been rinsed for all its worth, the fact of the matter is that it's an accurate comparison.

Data is incredibly valuable to businesses especially and, as such, methods to protect said data should be supremely sophisticated and reliable. Whether it's protecting your customers' personal data or sending messages between friends, encryption deserves a place in everyone's daily lives, regardless of how tech-savvy one may be.

People have always found methods to protect what they value the most, whether locking it away in a safe or keeping it with a trusted partner, everyone has their favorite method of securing valuables. But when it comes to protecting data there's no room for preference. Here, encryption is king and it's expected to have a long and powerful rule. When used correctly, it's the digital equivalent of Las Vegas casino's vault; it'll take something truly special and extraordinary to break in a steal it.

Data encryption has a long and fascinating history; it's a complex field of research that's by no means perfect even today. Encryption technology is one of the most resilient defences deployed to protect data and naturally, attackers are consistently devising ways to break the most prized standards.

A brief history of data encryption

The wider concept of cryptography dates back as far as early mathematics but became a pivotal focus for research in large part during the Second World War to break encrypted axis messages. However, pioneering information theorist Claude E. Shannon is usually cited as the founder of modern, mathematically-based cryptography and helped to shepherd it from a government pet project to a more widely accessible field being created by the 1970s. It was this decade that saw the creation of the data encryption standard (DES), and the arrival of public-key encryption.

DES works by dividing a 64-bit block of data into two 32-bit halves, which are processed alternately through 16 stages. A 56-bit portion of a 64-bit numerical key is selected, and this is used in different permutations at each stage to encrypt the data according to a set schedule and series of functions. Decryption involves running this process in reverse, so requires the original 56-bit key that was used during encryption.

Public-key encryption works slightly differently. This uses two mathematically linked but numerically different keys for encryption and decryption, one of which is public, and the other private. The public key is used for encryption, while the private key is used for decryption. Because different keys are used in the two stages, this process is called asymmetric, in contrast to the symmetric system used by DES.

The original DES was soon under concerted threat of breakage, with academics proposing methods to crack it as soon as it had arrived in 1977. However, it wasn't until 1998 that DES was officially broken when the Electronic Frontier Foundation used a $250,000 system to find a key in just over two days. With the help of distributed.net, this was reduced to under a day in 1999. These efforts used a "brute force" attack, where every key is tried until the correct one is found. Systems able to perform this kind of attack have become increasingly cheap.

By 2001, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) had been chosen as the successor to DES. This uses symmetric keys of 128-bit, 192-bit, or 256-bit length, with ten, 12, and 14 rounds of encryption respectively. It remains a popular choice for data security, still in use by parties such as the US and UK governments.

Different types of encryption

Today, the most common encryption methods are either symmetric or asymmetric in nature. But how do they work, and what are they used for?

Symmetric encryption, also known as shared key encryption, uses a single key for both ciphering and deciphering data. The sender uses this key to turn plaintext into ciphertext, which the recipient then decrypts with an identical key. Although only authorized parties can access this shared key, it can easily fall into the wrong hands if improperly stored.

As both the sender and recipient access one key, symmetric encryption is typically cheaper, faster, and less complicated than other types of encryption. Therefore, it’s a good choice for sending large volumes of data.

This encryption method is an “essential” component of IT systems that need to secure data at rest and transit stages, such as databases and private network communications, explains ESET global cyber security advisor Jake Moore. But he admits that symmetric encryption is most effective in systems requiring “very little user participation”, like phone locks.

Moore says symmetric encryption can also benefit systems that require high-performance and secure encryption key sharing between the sender and recipient. These include file and server systems. He adds: “It is vital for sensitive data on hard drives and vital to help keep adversaries out.”

On the other hand, asymmetric encryption—which is also called private key encryption—uses a distinct key for encrypting sensitive information and another for decrypting it. The sender’s key is typically a public one that can be shared with an authorized group of people or accessed widely by any internet user.

The recipient uses a private key to access information encrypted by the sender’s public key. If they lose it, deciphering the received information will be impossible, so careful management of private keys is paramount.

The biggest benefit of asymmetric encryption is arguably the extra security it provides, as senders and recipients don’t share the same decryption key. But it’s usually expensive and slower compared to more affordable and agile symmetric encryption techniques.

Asymmetric encryption “plays a key role in cyber security” as it enables “secure key exchange” and “digital authentication”, according to Moore. He points out that this encryption method is commonly used as part of email logins, web communications, as well as digital signatures and certificates. It provides greater data integrity and identity verification, which he argues are “growing in importance” in today’s interconnected and highly digitized world.

While both symmetric and asymmetric encryption are crucial in protecting sensitive information and communications, Moore warns that cyber criminals can “successfully attack or manipulate” either method. With this in mind, he urges people to secure their data “to the highest level” and improve their understanding of cyber security risks.

What about hashing?

Even though hashing isn’t technically a form of encryption, it’s a fundamental concept in cryptography and worth understanding. This term describes the creation of fixed-length hash values that replace the contents or summaries of sensitive data. Unlike encryption, hashes aren’t designed to be deciphered; rather, they serve as a way to verify confidential information, such as passwords stored on a server. Hashing makes it harder for hackers to gain unauthorized access to confidential data.

What are encryption algorithms?

Encryption algorithms encrypt plaintext by turning it into ciphertext, which is then deciphered using a shared or private key, depending on whether symmetric or asymmetric encryption is being deployed.

Many different encryption algorithms are available, with some existing for decades and others being more recent. Here are some of the best examples:

• DES: The data encryption standard is a symmetric encryption algorithm invented in the 1970s, making it one of the oldest methods on this list. With a key length of 56 bits, it has become outdated over the past years. And cybersecurity experts view it as insecure.
• TDES: The triple data encryption standard, also known as 3DES, is another type of symmetric encryption that ciphers data in three different 56-bit blocks. It’s traditionally the encryption of choice for banks and other financial institutions, encrypting sensitive information like ATM pin numbers. However, as with DES, many experts view it as a legacy form of encryption.
• AES: The advanced encryption standard is a symmetric encryption method that uses 128-, 192- and 256-bit key lengths. Governments and organizations typically use it to encrypt classified data in a single block.
• Blowfish: This is a publicly accessible, free-to-use symmetric encryption algorithm that encrypts data in separate 64-bit blocks. It’s used in products ranging from e-commerce websites to virtual private networks (VPNs)
• Twofish: It’s essentially a new version of Blowfish, encrypting data in 128-bit blocks and 16 rounds. Like its predecessor, Twofish doesn’t require a paid licence and uses symmetric encryption principles. It can be used in software and hardware environments.
• RSA: The Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (named after its creators) standard is a widespread asymmetric encryption algorithm that has existed since the 1970s. Organizations and individuals typically use it to encrypt online data, which is ciphered with a public key and deciphered with a private one. RSA encryption keys are formed on the product of large prime numbers.
• ECC: The elliptic curve cryptography is one of the most sophisticated forms of asymmetric encryption. It encrypts data based on the mathematical theory of elliptic curves, with use cases ranging from authentication to digital signatures.

Encrypting the network

Whatever encryption system you use, there is always the issue of how you exchange the necessary keys between sender and recipient in the first place. This is particularly important in this era of ubiquitous wireless communications.

The original Wi-Fi security, WEP, provides a 64-bit option using a 40-bit key, or a 128-bit option using a 104-bit key. But the handshaking process in a Shared Key WEP system means that initialisation frames can be captured and used to deduce the key - the infamous packet sniffing performed by "war chalkers" looking to reveal WLAN security credentials so passers-by can use them. The more secure Open Key option is still relatively easy to crack, too.

As a result, WEP was replaced by WPA2 and subsequently WPA3. WPA uses a temporal key integrity protocol (TKIP), which creates a new 128-bit key for each packet of information, of which there will be so many every second that snooping becomes very hard indeed. However, WPA2 improves this still further with an AES-based 256-bit key, and WPA3 uses a 192-bit key in place of the 128-bit in previous versions.

WPA3 also handles encryption on a device-by-device basis, to keep each device separately secure rather than sharing keys.

Encryption is essential for many other everyday activities. You wouldn't want login information or financial details to be passed in plain text form over the internet, or even a private network. So secure sockets layer (SSL) and then transport layer security (TLS) were developed to enable devices to securely communicate with one another.

A remote connection can be made securely over a public network such as the internet using encrypted tunneling protocols, such as SSH Secure Shell. This uses public key encryption, with the remote system holding a public key and the local system a private key. These must be from a matching pair to allow connection. A VPN is a similar tunneling system for running a private network over a public one.

Various encryption methods can be employed, including TLS, SSH, and IPsec. The latter works at a lower level of the network protocol stack, so can protect any application traffic across the network. In contrast, with TLS and SSH, the applications need to support these encryption systems themselves to communicate securely.

The future of encryption

Encryption is a great way of securing and verifying sensitive data and communications, but it’s not entirely impenetrable to cyber criminals. Whether it’s stealing security keys, breaking ciphers, or hijacking data in transit, there are various ways hackers get past encryption.

But in the foreseeable future, this could change thanks to advancements in quantum computing and cryptography. Moore argues that, when combined, encryption will become “bulletproof”.

“It could potentially promise enhanced security by leveraging the behavior of quantum particles, making it theoretically impossible for data interception without detection,” he tells ITPro.

“Given its potential to address vulnerabilities in standard encryption methods, it could therefore play a crucial role in the future of cybersecurity.”

On the flip side, hackers empowered with quantum cryptography represent a potential threat to businesses, which must be anticipated and guarded against.

Moore points out, however, that quantum computing must overcome “technical and practical challenges” to become widely adopted and deliver benefits for encryption. This will take “a minimum of 10 years”.

Away from technology advancements, the political climate is pressuring tech firms to break end-to-end encryption within messaging apps on the basis of preserving national security. Messenger and WhatsApp are the more commonly used communication platforms with end-to-end encryption baked, in while Telegram and Signal are two other popular options for those who want to keep their communications away from prying eyes.

Despite living in the age of the paperless office, inkjet and laser printers are still the centre of a big office debate that has no easy answer.

Which one you use in the office is dependent on a number of factors, such as the initial cost, price per page, speed, longevity, and so on. There's a lot to get wrong, so it needs to be thoroughly considered before making the final call.

Back in the day, inkjet was often recommended for home use, while laser printers were more popular in enterprises and offices, but this isn't necessarily the case anymore. Laser printers used to be known for being faster and more durable, but inkjet technology has slowly narrowed that gap. However, laser printers are still known for being much quieter and with a smoother finish, with no warm-up time required before printing.

Are laser printers better?

If your decision is based on speed, there isn't much of a difference between inkjet printers and laser printers. The former used to max out at around 30ppm in black and white, and 10ppm for colour, while most laser printers could hit 40ppm in both colour or black and white.

Even now, with modern laser printers capable of 60ppm or even 70ppm, there isn't a significant gulf. A newer generation of office-ready inkjet printers, with A4-spanning print heads that can reach speeds of up to 75ppm. The only real advantage for lasers, in this area, is speed of the first printed page, which is around 7.5 seconds. Although inkjets are not much slower, printing the first page in around 9.5 seconds.

Where laser printers do have an edge is the finished product - the print quality. Lasers tend to produce clean, crisp black text and colour graphics, making them good for external uses such as marketing. Inkjets have improved dramatically when it comes to text, to the point where they're almost a match for laser printers. They certainly produce more natural results, particularly when it comes to photos, hence why the majority of inkjets are professional photo printers. An office inkjet probably won't offer the same photo quality, but it should be more than enough for everything else.

The workload is also an area that laser printers have an advantage over inkjets. Lasers are capable of anywhere between 2,000 and 20,000 pages in a monthly duty cycle. Inkjet users can only dream of such efficiency, typically churning out between 1,500 and 5,000 pages within the same time. That will be adequate for most small businesses, but if you are heavy printers and have a much larger organisation, then it's likely that a laser printer is better suited.

When it comes to the best printers for businesses, you can find both inkjets and lasers making the cut, but the lower asking price for inkjets makes them an attractive option for most deployments.

Laser printers vs inkjet cost per page

Again, conventional wisdom states that lasers are expensive to buy but cheap to run, while inkjets are cheap upfront but cost you more long-term. What's more, where a laser toner cartridge will see you through thousands of prints, an inkjet will need its cartridges replaced far more frequently.

Of course, conventional wisdom is no longer reliable. Look at real laser vs inkjet costs, and you may be surprised. On the one hand, lasers are getting cheaper, and the budget models are coming with smaller starter cartridges that run out fairly quickly, though the standard or super-sized cartridges will still have impressive lifespans. In toner alone, expect the cost per page to come in at around 2p for a black-and-white page and 5p to 10p for a colour page. On the other hand, business inkjets are getting their own costs per page right down, to the extent that some models can now produce prints for around 1p per page for black-and-white to 5p per page for colour. Meanwhile, the extra-large cartridges are able to print over 9000 pages (black) or 6,500 pages (colour).

There are other costs to consider, though. Laser printers deliver excellent results even on plain paper, so there's no need to splash out on speciality media. On the inkjet's side, inkjet-ready office paper is no longer much more expensive, and inkjets usually consume less power in operation than their laser brethren. As a result, running costs can be lower for some inkjets than for comparable lasers. Combine that with a lower purchase cost, and there's definite scope to save your business money.

Is a laser printer better than an inkjet?

Historically, lasers have been the mainstay of workgroup printing, and you'll still find that enterprise-grade laser printers offer more management tools plus support for more high-end technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet and IPSec, not to mention upgrade options like expandable memory or a secure, plug-in hard disk.

All the same, an increasing number of office inkjet printers have the same embedded management features as their laser cousins, plus features like secure pull-printing, where jobs are held in a queue until released at the printer with a PIN code, or wireless, touch-to-print and cloud-printing features that enable the printer to work with a wider range of devices or take print jobs from remote locations. While a laser might offer more management and security features, a business inkjet can still give you all the tools you need.

Today, there is no catch-all answer to the question of inkjet vs laser for the office. It's more a question of scale, workloads and the kind of tasks you need your printer to handle.

Lasers definitely win through when it comes to heavy workloads, networking and management features, professional quality prints and the ability to scale up to serve large teams, but office-focused inkjets aren't far behind in many of these areas and can beat lasers on purchase cost, running costs and everyday performance. Be realistic about your needs, and you should be able to make the right choice.

Poor leadership, a lack of structure and focus, and ultimately an unwillingness to cultural change, is preventing businesses from truly enjoying the benefits of innovation.

So claims research commissioned by Oracle, which surveyed more than 5,000 businesses with revenue ranging from 1 million to 500 million+, across a variety of sectors.

The research, which is detailed in a report entitled Having a successful innovation agenda, found that one-third of firms feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of innovation-led projects going on in their organisation.

Meanwhile, roughly one-fifth of research participants blamed a lack of business commitment, shoddy or non-existent processes, lack of vision, and underinvestment in the right technologies for hampering their ability to join the dots between innovating and business success.

As a result, these organisations are seriously missing out on business growth opportunities, as proven by the fact that 85% of firms who are growing significantly attribute their expansion to investment in innovation.

The real crux of the issue, however, is the fact that all of the hampering elements combined boil down to cultural change or the lack thereof, according to John Abel, vice president of cloud and innovation at Oracle in the UK, Ireland and Israel.

"There's the cultural challenge of innovation Are we culturally fit for where we need to go? If you look at the experience you create with innovation, that's also important. Cultural challenges and customer challenges around experience are critical. The only way to control it is to innovate at a pace and prove very quickly whether you have something that's worth investing in," he said.

"When you start with innovation you're hitting a headwind. When you're trying to pivot, it's like going up a river with a full torrent of waves coming towards you. It's hard going and you're going to get very wet.

"So you've got to have exec buy-in. You need the commitment if the org wants to pivot. The minute you lose that it's a bit like getting hit by a superwave. You get knocked over or lose the power to keep going up the river."

Organisations must ask themselves whether they're culturally ready for the changes that are required, Abel said, adding that the political elements of how the business runs must then be addressed.

"If you keep innovation on the edge, it becomes an isolated function. If you embed it across every single team, then the things that you've been famous for in the past that fuel the revenue engine, you might lose focus on. Different models mean different outcomes. So you need to have the politics in mind," he said.

It also takes brave leadership to convince other business stakeholders they need to innovate and change when they are already a leader in a specific market, according to Abel.

He concluded: "Then you have the religious debate about technology selection. So it's culture, politics, religion that are some of the challenges which mean people struggle with that innovation pivot."

Mobile computing technology has promised a new style of working ever since the Osborne 1 laptop arrived in 1981. But whilst the devices themselves have become a lot lighter since the near-11kg Osborne 1, just having greater portability wasn't enough on its own for the office revolution that has been taking place over the last few years. This has come alongside a convergence of technologies that together make taking your office with you a seamless reality, with the mobile computing device centre stage.

Business systems have taken advantage of networking for decades. But for most of this time these networks were primarily used for communications and sharing important data internally within a company premises. The primary business software was still installed locally, alongside most working documents. If you wanted to take your work with you somewhere outside the office, you would need to make a conscious effort to copy it onto a removable storage device and hope that the machine you were planning to use elsewhere had the right software to open it.

More recently, however, the boundaries between what is local and what comes from the network have become blurred, so that mobile devices can essentially become windows on a persistent working environment from any location. This situation has arisen thanks to a convergence of multiple technologies.

There are still speed benefits to having the main bulk of application code loading from local storage. But storing your data on or synchronising it with a cloud-based service means you can access it anywhere, potentially even when you just have a borrowed system and a Web browser to hand. Services such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive provide a cloud-based repository and local clients that can keep local folders on all your devices synchronised with your cloud storage, whilst SugarSync will back up any local folder to the cloud, so it can be accessed by any device with the client software or a Web browser, even a smartphone.

There are pros and cons to having your application software itself delivered in this way, in the style of Google Docs, however. Network administrators have long dreamed of all software being provided from a central repository to a relatively dumb "thin client". But this has never quite materialised. The Network Computer drive of the late 1990s proved too limiting and not enough of a monetary saving to be worth the shift in corporate culture. Even though Google Chromebooks have proven more successful, most end users are still insufficiently confident in the reliability of networking to put their trust in having their entire computing experience delivered from a remote location via the internet.

Nevertheless, when Wi-Fi went mainstream with Intel's Centrino platform in 2003, a big step was taken towards ubiquitous network connectivity. Mobile data became viable with 3G in the late 1990s, but 4G's arrival a decade ago made useful speeds possible, and now 5G is trialling in selected parts of the UK. The new 5G standard promises an achievable 1Gbit mobile data throughput, with extremely low 1ms latency, for an experience that should be similar to current corporate Ethernet networks. So, in theory, everything that is currently possible over an internal business LAN will be available anywhere with 5G coverage. This will herald yet another revolution in how we can perform our business activities away from the office.

Even with this level of mobile data performance, however, in reality most users are likely to stick with devices that have significant abilities on their own. The cloud services can then provide access to shared resources, going beyond data and communications to shared calendars and project management, videoconferencing and augmented reality. Of course, having the right "window" onto these services is essential. The device needs to provide as many forms of working as possible, which explains the popularity of convertible notebooks such as HP's EliteBook x360.

This is a powerful fully-fledged laptop able to run any Windows business productivity software, but its 13in touch screen can also flip round into a tablet format, so you could even access your apps and services whilst standing up. It has 4G Mobile Broadband built in, too, so Internet connectivity will still be available when there's no Wi-Fi in range. A portable that offers multiple modes in this way allows the worker to access and browse data in a tablet style when this is most convenient. But a full keyboard is also available when more active interaction and production are necessary. It's the best of both worlds.

The combination of portable computing, ubiquitous networking and cloud services has led to a radical change in the way we view work and the office. You used to go into a place of work, but now thanks to these technologies you can take your office with you wherever you go, so that work becomes something you do rather than a place you go. What was dead time before now becomes productive, and employees can shape their work around their lifestyles rather than vice versa.

According to a survey by web conferencing company PowWowNow, 30% of people would choose flexible working over a pay rise if they could only have one of these, and 70% said this would make a job more attractive. This isn't just a matter of work-life balance for employee satisfaction alone, either; it actually pays dividends for employers. Research by Canada Life Group Insurance found that 77% of employees felt flexible working aided productivity.

There are potential issues with this revolution, because now the onus is on you as a worker to define when you're working and when you're not, which can lead to a pressure to be "always on". But so long as you manage this aspect, the benefit of flexibility and freedom available from the developments we have talked about in this feature can be huge. With extortionate metropolitan house prices and increasingly pricey train fares, being able to work from home or elsewhere rather than a city-centre premises could become a necessity. Technology has allowed a reinvention of the office, and perhaps it came just in the nick of time.

Learn more about HP's Elitebook x360 and how it can help reinvent the office.

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The biggest revolution in the last decade has been how powerful portable computing devices, ubiquitous internet connectivity and cloud services have radically increased our freedom to work where and when we please. Now, instead of having to stay late or go in at weekends to meet that looming deadline, we can work wherever we find ourselves to be. We are no longer umbilically tied to the office.

But there has been an aspect to this improvement in work-life balance that often goes overlooked: security. When employees and their computers are physically concentrated inside a fixed space, the IT department can bring all its skills to bear to keep business data secure. The internal network can be protected from the external internet by a potent firewall; client computers can have a known software image installed and admin access restricted so nothing else can be installed; antivirus and antimalware can be mandatory; even printers can have firmware hardened against external attack, so they can't become beachheads into the internal network.

Although almost no day goes by without a new corporate data breach being revealed, most companies have a good handle on keeping their traditional on-premise business IT provision secure. But the same can not be said about those times when employees escape the office to work at home, in transit, or in a public place like a co-working space or coffee shop. The IT manager has far less control over employee behaviour and device usage in these situations.

A lot of the focus on security revolves around the vulnerability of the software used itself. But some of the most effective methods for circumnavigating this security are much less technical than breaking encryption, guessing a password by brute force or finding a weakness in the underlying code. If you're using a notebook in a public place, a data thief can simply look over your shoulder as you type in a password, reading the login text as it appears on your screen, and taking note of the keys you press for your password. This is a process called "shoulder surfing, and if they then manage to steal your device they can gain access, or they could get into your online accounts.

There are other ways where data thieves can take advantage of human nature and habits. For example, there is hotspot cloning. This is where a second, illicit Wi-Fi hotspot is positioned near a genuine one, for example at a coffee shop, and given the same SSID but no password. Unsuspecting users of the genuine hotspot may accidentally join the illicit Wi-Fi without realising, and then all their internet traffic will be passing through this instead. Any unencrypted data traffic can then be snooped for useful titbits such as logins and passwords. This kind of problem can be alleviated by training your employees to recognise specific attacks like this, and ensuring an encrypted Virtual Private Network is used for all communications back to the internal corporate network.

But providing your employees with a device that includes special provisions to help prevent these kinds of compromise can go a long way towards combatting many of the key dangers. HP's EliteBook x360, for example, has the option of HP's Sure View Integrated Privacy Screen. During normal activities, the x360's screen is a regular IPS panel with pin-sharp detail and great viewing angles. But enable Sure View and the angle of view will suddenly be cut down to about ten degrees in either direction essentially just the person sitting directly in front of the screen.

The great thing about Sure View compared to the third-party add-ons that are available is that you don't need to attach anything to your screen, and you can easily turn it off and on at the touch of a button. This means you can have a bright screen with wide angle of view when you want one for presentations or sharing data at a meeting, but quickly restrict the angle when you need privacy in a public place.

The HP EliteBook x360 has another (literally) handy security feature for public usage a built-in fingerprint reader. A shoulder surfer is not going to be able to snoop on your fingerprint if you use this as your primary login via Windows Hello. This can also be harnessed so that your fingerprint unlocks passwords for other services, encrypted documents and websites. If the main storage of your notebook is protected by encryption, a thief will not be able to get access without your fingerprint. HP's EliteBook x360 also incorporates a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip so encryption keys are kept on dedicated hardware rather than the main storage drive, providing a much more secure platform overall.

Losing a mobile device isn't just a disaster when a thief can get into it; there is also the value of the data itself. If the only copy of your data is on the mobile device that has just been taken, even when the device remains inaccessible you have lost potentially irreplaceable information, costing time and money. This is another aspect of mobile working that can be partially combatted by staff training, so that they regularly keep backups of their important data. However, if you make it company policy to keep data on a cloud storage system such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox, with the contents merely synchronised with a local drive for use, losing the copy of data on that device is not a mission critical failure. A new device with access to the same cloud storage account will get you back up and running again with scarcely a hiccup, apart from the time taken to transfer data back to the local device.

Of course, a whole further can of worms is opened by the continuing trend towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), where employees can use portable computing devices such as smartphones and laptops they have purchased themselves for work activities. But that's another story, and if you give them company-supplied devices that they enjoy using, they are far less likely to feel the need to supplement these with their own hardware. By providing a powerful and flexible mobile computing device with plenty of built-in security, you can make sure their work outside the office is as safe as when they're on premises.

Learn more about HP's Elitebook x360 and how it can help you stay secure outside the office.

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Modern business has changed fundamentally compared to what it was ten or twenty years ago. Looking at any company will tell you that. Flexible working isn't just an emerging trend - for an increasing number of organisations, it's the accepted norm.

Flexible working is an essential enabler of digital transformation. It allows your workforce to be more mobile, more agile and more productive, not to mention helping to improve your employees' mood and morale. In order to successfully adopt flexible working, however, you need hardware that will support and facilitate your goals.

Enter the HP EliteBook x360.

This premium business hybrid is the perfect fit for the modern, flexible-first organisation, allowing staff to be maximally productive from any location and in any situation thanks to clever features, powerful hardware and a versatile design. The HP EliteBook x360 is the ideal device to meet your workforce's myriad needs, adapting to suit a range of different use-cases.

Scenario 1 - Client roadshows

Perhaps you have a full day of off-site meetings, visiting multiple clients, partners or suppliers. An entire day of back-to-back meetings without going back to base can prove to be a tricky prospect if you don't have the right tech, but luckily the HP EliteBook x360 has you covered.

For your first meeting of the day - an informal sit-down over coffee - you can flip the device over into tent mode to smoothly and quickly run through your slide deck, then quickly switch to tablet mode so you can take notes in the taxi on the way to your next meeting.

Your next meeting's a larger and more formal boardroom-based presentation, but don't worry: the HP EliteBook X360 includes HDMI and USB-C ports, as well as Miracast support, so you'll be fully equipped to present no matter what your client's IT setup is.

You won't need to worry about finding time to recharge, either, as the HP EliteBook X360's all-day battery life can power you through a full working day away from your desk with juice to spare for catching up on your emails on the way home.

Scenario 2 - Multi-site remote working

For many workers, flexibility doesn't necessarily mean that they're constantly on the go. Instead, they need the ability to switch between a few different working environments without sacrificing productivity.

On the train into town or in the coffee shop in the morning, you can use laptop mode with its full-sized keyboard for working on documents and emails, before dropping into a client's office or a co-working space to take advantage of a proper desk.

The HP EliteBook x360's USB-C ports - including support for the Thunderbolt 3 standard - mean that one cable is all you need to plug in to have access to a wired internet connection, external devices like a mouse, keyboard and monitor and even power, so your laptop will be charged up for when it's time to head home again.

When you do leave, the HP EliteBook x360's stand mode combined with its high-definition screen (available with either a 1080p or 4K resolution) make it perfect for catching up on TV during the train ride home.

Scenario 3 - Creative campaigns

Of course, flexible working doesn't just mean being flexible about where we work, but also how we work. Modern professionals often have to wear many different hats and juggle a number of different roles, and the technology they're using should be able to keep up with them no matter what task they're performing.

When working on creative campaigns and projects, you need to be ready whenever inspiration strikes, and the HP EliteBook x360's tablet mode and Active Stylus support means that you can quickly draft ideas and create mocks wherever you are.

Tent mode is great for easily presenting your ideas to your colleagues in an informal scrum or huddle, and when you need to flesh them out into something that's a bit more polished, you can use the powerful processing hardware to drive professional creative software and work up a finished proof.

The HP EliteBook x360 also takes the hassle out of the often-tedious process of client feedback and amends - high-speed networking support and fast SSD storage means no more waiting ages for large media files to finish uploading and downloading, so you can get approval and sign-off more quickly.

Scenario 4 - The traditional' office

Amidst all this excitement for remote working and the increased flexibility that devices like the HP EliteBook X360 can bring, it's easy to overlook the fact that many employees may prefer the traditional way of working - coming into the office every day, sitting down at their desk and just getting on with their tasks.

If you're one of these employees, don't worry - the HP EliteBook x360 has your back as well. Unlike other ultraportables, it features a full-sized USB 3.1 port (with power delivery) meaning that you won't have to mess about with dongles to connect external drives or other devices, and the one-cable USB-C connection means that you can connect to all the peripherals on your desk and be productive straight away.

You'll be able to conduct remote client meetings from the comfort of your desk, too. The HP EliteBook x360's 1080p webcam and Bang and Olufsen speakers mean that videoconferencing looks and sounds great, and integrated hotkeys for controlling calls.

All your data will be kept secure, too, whether you're in the office, at home or travelling in between. The HP EliteBook x360 includes a fingerprint reader and an Intel RealSense camera for facial recognition, integrating with Windows Hello to offer swift, seamless login. It's also got heaps of security and manageability features under the bonnet to ensure that both yours and your organisation's information remains protected.

No matter how or where you work, the HP EliteBook x360 can keep you productive, creative, connected and secure.

Learn more about HP's Elitebook x360 and why it's the perfect convertible laptop.

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Whether you're a thriving small business or a corporate behemoth, printer security needs to be on your agenda. The Internet security landscape is changing and enterprise printers are no longer the simple devices they once were. In fact, with their processors, memory, storage, software and firmware, not to mention network connectivity, they face a growing number of Internet threats.

Printer manufacturers particularly HP have recognised this, adding major security features to mitigate Internet security threats. Yet when you're managing a fleet of printers, device-level security is only half the story.

A recent report on print security from Quocirca saw 61% of large enterprises surveyed admitting suffering at least one security breach because of insecure printing. Yet many organisations don't feel confident in tackling printer security, with just a quarter of respondents sure that their print infrastructure is protected from threats. Is this because the security features aren't there, or because implementing an effective fleet-wide security strategy is so demanding?

Only 30% of IT professionals recognise the printer as a security threat. Download this whitepaper for tips and tricks to keeping your organisation's network-connected printers secure.

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Threats and countermeasures

Either way, the threats are very real. Unprotected printers are vulnerable devices on the enterprise network. They have a BIOS and firmware that can be exploited, leaving the device or network open to attack. They have on-board storage, which may hold or cache sensitive documents or data. Many now have built-in scanners, used to capture and send documents across the network. How can you guarantee these will only end up in the right hands?

HP has led the way in terms of countermeasures, implementing a series of technologies designed to protect enterprise printers from attack. HP SureStart checks the printer's BIOS, preventing execution of malicious code during startup and enabling the printer to fix itself if a threat is discovered. Whitelisting features ensure that only known, good, HP firmware can be loaded into memory and executed. Run-time intrusion detection monitors the in-device memory for malicious attacks, stopping them in their tracks.

Meanwhile, HP turns on drive encryption for built-in storage by default, while HP's Universal Print Driver supports 256-bit AES print job encryption. Combine that with pull-print features, where print jobs only execute when authenticated at the printer, not to mention physical security policies, and securing your printers doesn't have to be a challenge.

Protecting the Fleet

Securing a fleet of printers, however, is a whole other story. Some organisations may have dozens or even hundreds of printers to secure, often across multiple sites. Implementing and configuring these printers for a new security policy can be daunting prospect, adding heavily to the workload of a stretched IT security team. And while there are many well-established solutions for securing fleets of servers and PCs, the same can't be said of printers. Perhaps that's why some enterprises are effectively crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

Yet HP can help, offering ways to enhance fleet security both through device-level security features, JetAdvantage management tools and the option of Managed Printing Services (MPS).

Needless to say, the security features baked into HP's LaserJet and PageWide Pro and Enterprise printers work brilliantly on a device-by-device level, but they can also ease the burden when you're managing a fleet. The key thing is that these security features are both automatic and self-fixing, detecting, protecting and repairing security holes with the minimum of user-intervention. These printers are designed to recognise tampering or intrusion, close the vulnerability down, send out alerts and, where possible, replace or repair the affected firmware. The end result? Your printers stay secure without the need for physical support or downtime. For IT or security teams handling large printer fleets, that's a definite plus.

Meanwhile, JetAdvantage Security Manager makes the business of monitoring and managing all those printers so much easier. Working across your entire fleet of HP printers, it enables IT teams to establish a security policy and apply it rapidly to every printer, controlling security settings, closing ports, disabling access protocols, switching on encryption and auto-erase settings and a whole lot more. There are ready-made policies based on recognised industry standards to work with, and the tool will even install and monitor security certificates across the fleet, updating and renewing them as necessary. Set your policy, and JetAdvantage Security Manager implements it, automatically, on all compliant HP printers. It makes securing even the largest fleets painless.

The great thing about JetAdvantage Security Manager is that it's also proactive. On the one hand you can schedule automatic assessments, telling the tool to identify and report on any printers not complying with the policy during each assessment, then automatically applying the policy to fix security holes. If you're using a wide range of HP printers this can help you identify potentially less secure devices and pinpoint those that don't support HP SureStart, Run Time Intrusion Detection or firmware whitelisting.

What's more, it's designed for auto-discovery. Add a new HP printer to the network and JetAdvantage Security Manager should spot it and configure it immediately, so that it complies with your policy and settings. When you're adding printers to the network that's one less task on your list. In some cases, simply implementing JetAdvantage Security Manager can mean a shift from 25% of the printer fleet being compliant to 97% and more. Making the job easier means it's more likely to get done.

Print security should be a priority for every business, but all too often it's ignored. Learn how to avoid printer security breaches in this whitepaper.

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The Managed Approach

Another approach is to move from self-managed printers to a Managed Printer Service, and preferably one that makes security a priority. Not only will you see all the usual benefits of MPS printer consolidation, supplier consolidation, a reduction of the workload for IT services, lower and more predictable printing costs but the MPS provider can use its skills, tools and expertise to define and implement improved security.

For example, with HP Secure Managed Print Services, HP's security consultants can assess your company's requirements and security vulnerabilities and define a print security policy that fits your business needs. They can bring in pull-printing features and workflow solutions that tackle risky user behaviours while helping you become more efficient, and identifying, managing and monitoring approaches that protect your data, documents and devices. Best of all, you may be able to consolidate fleets of printers and copiers while getting the benefits of HP's leading edge security; in terms of productivity, efficiency and security, that's a big win-win.

What's crucial is that Managed Print Services should mean more than leasing printers and ensuring ink and toner is always close to hand. It means managing your printers for you, with pro-active monitoring, maintenance and support, including security support, with firmware kept up to date and any new vulnerabilities patched. When most organisations have enough to do securing their PCs and network infrastructure, it's great to have one less thing to worry about.

In short, securing a fleet of printers doesn't have to be difficult, providing you have the right devices, tools and services in place. Printer security is too important to ignore. With HP's LaserJet and PageWide printers, there's no reason why you should want to.

GDPR came into force on 25 May, giving individuals new rights and businesses new obligations when it comes to personal data. GDPR affects all personal data that companies handle, setting out new rules about what can be stored and processed and for how long, plus the responsibilities they have in terms of managing and safeguarding it. By now, most businesses will be aware of the headlines the new rights individuals have to have a copy of their data, or to have that data erased; the controls over retention and future exploitation; the new penalties that can kick in in the event of a breach. Yet there's one aspect of GDPR that's often overlooked; that it doesn't just affect information stored within digital systems, but also data stored or shared on paper.

It's understandable that companies are focusing on digital data, yet there's a real danger that, by ignoring paper-based files, photocopies and print-outs, businesses could still fail to comply or put themselves at risk of penalties. Of 598 data security incidents recorded by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office between July 2016 and September 2016, 40% involved paperwork, including loss or theft, posting or faxing to the wrong recipient, poor disposal or paperwork abandoned in an insecure location.

Breaking down the problem

GDPR doesn't apply to all paper-based documents. Specifically, it applies to files stored electronically within a system or files stored in a paper-based filing system that's structured and accessible according to specific criteria. In other words, some notes or a memo left on a printer probably wouldn't be covered by the new regulations, but if filed away in a customer's file or printed from an existing database, then GDPR would still apply. Files in a filing cabinet or archive, employee expense records, medical notes, filed documents and a company's HR records are all covered, whether or not they exist in a digital format.

What's more, paper is a key on- and off-ramp for digital systems. Forms and paper documents may be scanned and the data processed or archived, or photocopied and the copies distributed or stored. Printed documents, query results and reports can be printed or removed from the building, meaning printers and scanners need just as much protection as any laptop or PC. In fact, they've become a tempting and viable target for hackers, partly because so many sensitive documents pass through them.

The first problem for businesses is that GDPR includes strict policies around data retention: companies need to manage their paper-based documents and ensure that information stored is only retained for an appropriate period and used in an appropriate way. Problem two is that the rights that apply to digital data also apply to paper-based documents; individuals have the right to get a copy of the information and take it elsewhere, and also the right to have the information a company holds on them erased. Problem three is that any information held on paper is still subject to the implementation of appropriate safeguards it needs to be protected.

This opens up some pretty big challenges for businesses. Simply keeping track of the information stored on paper is a big ask, particularly when we're talking about being able to find all data relating to an individual and copying or delete it. Safeguarding and managing access to that information isn't any easier, and few companies even think about how they secure their printers and scanners, so that paper-based documents can't cause a breach.

Taking control

What, then, can businesses do to ensure that paper doesn't become part of a GDPR nightmare? For a start, they need to get to grips with their paper-based data, auditing what's stored or processed, where this happens, and how printing and scanning works as part of the general flow of information through the company. The ideal is a comprehensive map of where this information is stored, how it's used, archived and deleted, and who has access and responsibility for managing it.

Secondly, companies need a way to index and search through their paper-based documents, so that they can live up to their GDPR obligations. This might be tied in with a digitisation project using document-management solution and multi-function printers; digitising and archiving paper files is a good way to make them more searchable and manageable not to mention find new ways to use the information held within.

Thirdly, GDPR is a great opportunity to review who has access rights to your paper-based documents, and whether and how these documents are copied. As a general rule, it makes sense to restrict access and scanning/copying capabilities to those who need them, and to ensure you have systems in place to track activities. What's more, it's an opportunity to rethink retention. While there are legal obligations within some industries, it makes sense to store only what you have to and shred it securely when no longer needed.

Guarding the gateways

Perhaps the most important step is to take control of printers, copiers, multi-function devices and overall print security, so that these devices are no longer the weak point in your information security strategy. This might involve the following:

• Defining clear policies for printer and scanner security, then ensuring that all teams know what these are and why they're important. Once they understand why printed document security is crucial, staff are less likely to abandon print jobs at the printer or leave a sensitive document in an insecure location.
• Using modern, enterprise-grade devices that support features like pull printing. With pull printing, users can set a document to print from their laptop or desktop PC, but the document won't print until authenticated with a token or PIN code at the printer. This helps ensure that print jobs aren't left sitting in the out-tray or taken by someone who shouldn't have access to them. These features are standard in HP's LaserJet and PageWide office printers.
• Deploying printer management software and ensuring that printers tie into a Security Information and Event Management solution, covering the entire business infrastructure. This gives you an audit trail of what's being scanned or printed and by whom, and makes it easier to track issues, speed-up remediation and support compliance.
• Using devices that are themselves hardened against attack, with features like secure, self-healing BIOS, firmware whitelisting, intrusion detection and file encryption plus built-in support for security management and compliance tools. With mature security features built-in, HP's latest LaserJet and PageWide office printers form a key part of a more robust approach to printed document security.

Technology alone won't fix a company's GDPR paper problem, but with the right hardware and the right software tools, it becomes much easier to monitor, audit and manage the flow of paper-based data. While GDPR might already be in effect, it's not too late for businesses to recognise the issue and remediate.

Find out more about securing your business printer fleet by downloading IT Pro's free report.

What's the biggest problem with most existing approaches to internet security? Many would say that it only guards effectively against known, easily-identified threats, and takes too long to respond to new ones. Hackers are nothing if not inventive when it comes to finding and exploiting new zero day' threats, whether in applications, operating systems or the software infrastructure that underpins websites and services. They're attacking vulnerable endpoints and using them to move laterally across to other systems. They're attacking third-party suppliers or exploiting the weaknesses of employees to find a way into the network. They're finding modes of attack that don't get caught by traditional anti-malware tools.

That's why the focus on protection and protection alone is not enough to protect enterprises and their data. Instead, businesses need to adopt a more balanced strategy; one that backs up protection with resilience. This isn't about lowering your perimeter walls and opening the gates, but accepting that, eventually, some attempts will make it over or through, and having systems in place to deal quickly with any threats and minimise their impact.

Leading security researchers have understood this for some time. As Simon Schiu and Boris Balacheff of HP's Security Labs wrote at the end of 2016: "The security profession is finally accepting this axiom: given enough resources, an attacker will eventually be successful. This means designing not only security protections, but also mechanisms that detect when protections fail and help recover devices or infrastructure to a good state, at both machine speed and at scale."

Coping with a new threat landscape

Why is the conventional approach, based on strong perimeter security and anti-malware detection, blocking and remediation, no longer effective? Partly, it's a question of how the nature of cybercrime has changed. While there are still hackers operating alone for personal profit, the real danger comes from organised collectives, some state-sponsored, some affiliated with other forms of organised crime. These form part of a criminal software ecosystem where well-funded teams develop both zero-day exploits and simple, effective toolkits to make use of them. What's worse, exploits and toolkits developed for cyberwarfare and espionage have a nasty habit of making it into the criminal underground only last year it was widely reported that the CIA had lost control over an arsenal of hacking tools which are now being used for cybercrime.

Secondly, hackers are no longer relying on straightforward malware attacks or assaults on servers and network infrastructure. According to figures from McAfee Labs, the use of so-called fileless malware' based on PowerShell scripts rose by 432% during 2017. Kaspersky's annual Threat Predictions bulletin for 2018 highlighted the rise in supply chain attacks, where hackers infect updates for common utilities or third-party software libraries at source, so that companies that use them on their business systems install them unsuspectingly. Last year's infected CCleaner update is a great example. Perhaps the biggest danger with such attacks is that they're not always designed to have an impact there and then, instead sitting quietly and working later as part of an advanced persistent threat (APT attack).

Phishing attacks continue to be successful. Verizon's 2018 Data Breach Investigation Report noted that while 78% of employees in the companies they surveyed weren't taken in by a single phishing email all year long, some 4% of employees will still click on a link or button in any given phishing campaign, and the more phishing emails someone has clicked on, the more likely they are to click again. The survey found that the interval between a phishing email arriving and the first click was, on average, 16 minutes. The first report from a savvy user didn't arrive until 12 minutes later.

Meanwhile, hackers are attacking routers, webcams, security video systems, smartphones and printers in order to gain a foothold on the network, or to form botnets that can launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that act as a smokescreen for a more targeted assault. Commercial-grade UEFI malware, which infects a device's firmware, has been known to exist since at least 2015, and it's only a matter of time before it's used in a focused attack.

And the really worrying thing is that existing perimeter protection strategies can't always ward off such attacks, and that many signature-based anti-malware tools can't either. After all, you can't spot a signature on fileless malware or detect a threat that no-one's seen before. A recent Endpoint Protection Response survey by the SANS Institute found that while antivirus tools were the most commonly used to detect an initial attack, only 47% of attacks were actually detected in this way. Plus, while companies were investing in tools that detected attacks through behaviour modelling or predictive analytics, many weren't implementing them or using them effectively day-to-day.

The resilience requirement

Nobody would suggest that this means protective measures don't work at all, or that it was time to discard them altogether. Instead, the solution is to continue with these measures to guard against attacks, but to back these up with additional measures that enable your enterprise to detect a successful attack, minimise its spread and impact and take remedial action quickly.

You can see this in HP's more holistic approach to security, and in the mechanisms and tools at work in HP desktops, laptops, printers and multi-function devices (MFDs). On the one hand, HP offers protective tools that guard against intrusion. HP Sure Click is a secure browsing technology that puts each browser tab in its own hardware-isolated browsing session, preventing a foolish click on an infected website installing code that might infect other tabs or the system. HP has secure, multi-factor authentication technologies built in to prevent stolen credentials giving hackers a foothold inside the network, plus tools to prevent intrusions through storage plugged into a USB port. HP also has management tools for both PCs and printers that make it easier for companies to manage updates and enforce strong security policies across the fleet.

Yet HP has also invested heavily in technology that makes devices more resilient. Now in its fourth generation, HP Sure Start combines runtime intrusion capabilities with a hardware security controller to detect unauthorised changes to the firmware, prevent a PC booting with infected firmware and roll back to a last known good firmware should this happen. BIOS setting protection features look for any attempts to modify firmware settings, then logs these events and notifies admins and users. All security settings used within the firmware are backed up and run against an integrity check on every boot. Meanwhile, HP's whitelisting checks any new firmware against a secure whitelist and allows only authorised firmware to be installed.

This stops such an attack having any real impact and prevents any firmware infection spreading laterally to other systems. Nor is Sure Start technology restricted to PCs and laptops; it also works across HP's business LaserJet and PageWide printers and MFDs, preventing them from being infected and used to launch a wider attack.

These are features that make devices more resilient, and when combined with drive encryption, robust disaster recovery and an effective Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution, can go a long way to doing the same for the organisation as a whole. Protection isn't enough anymore, but put it together with resilience and you have enterprise security ready for the modern world.

Find out more about securing your business printer fleet by downloading IT Pro's free report.

Too many businesses approach security by countering yesterday's threats today. True, the network, the server and the data centre will always be targets for attack, but hackers have learnt that there are better ways to get to them than the direct approach ways that make use of more vulnerable points of entry. And while many organisations continue to focus their defences on the perimeter, cyber-criminals increasingly look to bypass it entirely, attacking endpoint devices and then using them as an entry point to spread across the network.

Some of these attacks focus on well-established, well-protected targets, particularly business-owned laptops and desktop PCs. However, the most dangerous are aimed at devices that many businesses might not even consider to be a target, and where there isn't the same level of protection. In the words of G.W. Davidson in a recent SANS Institute White Paper, Even as the network becomes more complex and varied, security and IT professionals have recognized that widely used devices, such as printers, physical security systems, HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] control systems and point-of-sale devices, represent vulnerable potential attack surfaces.' In the war between business and cyber-criminal gangs, these devices are the new frontline.

Endpoints under threat

There's no doubt that IoT devices can pose real opportunities for businesses, helping them improve their processes and reduce operating costs, but they also open up new vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. In March 2018 Symantec noted that attacks on IoT devices had increased by 600% between 2016 and 2017. Many such attacks have targeted consumer devices, including webcams, home routers, digital video recorders and baby monitors, but as use of IoT devices spreads into business, more and more companies could be affected. A recent report by the Ponemon Institute suggests that while the number of IoT devices in the workplace is increasing significantly, practices for securing and managing those devices aren't maturing at the same rate. In fact, 56% of those surveyed didn't even keep an inventory, mostly due to a lack of centralised control.

And IoT devices aren't the only vulnerable endpoints that companies routinely ignore. As Davidson explains in the SANS Institute White Paper, in the 2016 report, a common networked device the printer was the least likely to be covered under an organization's security management program, and the results did not change significantly in the 2017 report. Considering the ubiquity of printers, this can represent a large vulnerability for an organization and deserves attention.'

The growth of BYOD devices in the workplace is another cause for concern. A May 2018 study by the SME card payment services company, Paymentsense, found that companies that introduced a BYOD policy were more likely to have experienced a security incident since introduction, and that the likelihood increased with the size of the company, from just 14% in businesses with 1-10 employees to 70% for businesses with 11 to 50 workers and 94% for businesses with 100 to 250 staff. The 2018 Cyber Security Breaches Survey from the UK government's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport came to similar conclusions. Left improperly or totally unmanaged, user-owned laptops, tablets and smartphones are giving hackers a new way inside.

The issue with all these endpoints isn't just that they give cyber-criminals access to the information held within, but a secret gateway into the company network they can use for additional attacks. As another SANS Institute report, Endpoint Protection Response: A SANS survey, puts it, in a discussion of the most frequently compromised endpoints, in most cases more than one endpoint is involved, indicating that once an attacker gains a foothold, compromise of other assets is likely to follow due to lateral movement.'

The problem with the old approach

This ties into a wider problem: that many of the existing security provisions are no longer effective. A bigger, stronger wall at the perimeter will no longer fend off attacks that target the endpoints themselves and then move laterally. In fact, phishing attacks and other forms of targeted attacks are designed to do exactly this. Anti-virus products, meanwhile, are struggling to keep up with the rapid development of malware, not to mention the growth of fileless attacks; malware that resides in memory without ever appearing on a drive.

The SANS survey explains that only 47% of the attacks detailed by respondents were detected through anti-virus, with 32% detected through automated SIEM alerts and network analysis, and another 26% detected through EDR (endpoint detection and response) platforms. For too many companies, the time between spotting an attack and remediation is still measured in hours or even days and with infections spreading across endpoints in minutes, this is a lengthy window for attackers.'

Solving the endpoint equation

What can organisations do? Part of the answer lies in developing and making effective use of automated EDR platforms and attack behaviour modelling, using AI and Machine Learning to accelerate detection and remediation. Companies need both the budget to procure new security technology and the resources to implement them, but this is a long-term play. Businesses need solutions right now.

Simple, practical measures would include a stronger upgrade and patching policy that addresses the full range of devices, including IoT devices and printers. Here robust printer management and security tools, like HP JetAdmin and HP JetAdvantage Security Manager can help, enabling companies to establish a single security policy and apply it across the entire printer fleet.

Training is another effective option. The more informed workers are about malicious apps, malicious websites, phishing and other risks, the less chance there is of attacks creeping through. In fact, workers trained to spot and report strange device behaviour can provide crucial early warning signs. End-users may need help to secure their BYOD devices, and information on why they shouldn't disable security on business devices, even when it seems an inconvenience. But with the right training and policies in place, you can turn end-users from a major vulnerability into the first line of defence.

Most importantly, though, companies can choose and purchase devices where security comes built-in. These devices are designed to be resilient, so that attacks are shrugged off and those responsible denied their foothold. For example, HP PCs and printers incorporate SureStart technologies, that ensure the device's BIOS hasn't been tampered with by malware, and enable it to self-heal if a compromise is detected. They also have intrusion detection, to monitor the device and warn of any attacks, plus built-in encryption to protect any data at rest on the device. HP PCs also add secure browsing technology, SureClick, designed to prevent workers from clicking on a link in an email and being sent to a malicious website or downloading malicious software. Meanwhile, hardened, multi-factor authentication makes it substantially more difficult for hackers to steal credentials and take over endpoints that way.

A more secure PC and printer fleet won't fix vulnerabilities affecting IoT devices or applications, but it gives IT teams more time and space to monitor, manage and update these more vulnerable endpoints. In today's hostile threat landscape, they need all the help they can get.

Find out more about securing your business printer fleet by downloading IT Pro's free report.

Mobile World Congress is usually an exciting occasion, full of impressive tech and shiny devices.While this year's show played host to a fair number of smartphone launches, some of the most interesting things came from the enterprise side of the conference, with advances in 5G and other areas of innovation.

With another year gone, we've rounded up our picks of the best bits of the show, from new flagship smartphones to technical achievements. Read on to learn more about our favouriteproducts and technologies at MWC 2018.

Asus Zenfone 5Z

The first thing that jumps out about Asus's latest smartphone is how visually similar it is to Apple's iPhone X - it's even got 'The Notch' at the top of the screen. Dislike for The Notch aside, it's a very attractive device, and offers iPhone X-style looks for half the price.

That's not why it's worthy of claiming an award, though. No, it wins one of our Best In Show awards because it gives you a cutting-edge Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and an edge-to-edge display for an asking price of just 500. That's a good deal by any measure.

Samsung Galaxy S9

After the Galaxy S8 was such a runaway success last year, all eyes were on Samsung to see whether the Galaxy S9 could continue the company's winning streak. The Korean giant took the lid off its new device on the Sunday before the show, and sure enough, it looks set to be the best phone of 2018.

There's very little that's especially new about the Galaxy S9, but that's a good thing. Samsung has listened to feedback from customers, taken it on board and tweaked the S9's design to reflect the changes they want. It's more of a minor revision than a full-blown successor, but the S9 promises to have sanded off what few rough edges the Galaxy S8 had.

Samsung DeX Pad

One of the most surprising features of the Galaxy S8 was its ability to transform into a full-on thin client solution through Samsung's DeX Station. The company has now releasedthe DeX Pad, which improves upon the best bits of the original DeX and adds some nifty new features.

Among them is support for multiple resolutions, the ability to apply corporate branding to DeX, and - best of all - the ability to use the S9 itself as a touchpad when it's connected without a mouse. You lose a port or two, admittedly, but throw in the fact that it's smaller, lighter and cheaper than the original, and you've got a real winner.

Qualcomm X50 5G modem

Qualcomm has been talking about its 5G efforts for a while, which includes the X50 5G modem. It's only recently, however, that we've actually seen its performance in proper tests. The chip managed 5G download speeds of 4.5Gbits/sec in tests conducted a few weeks prior to MWC, and it managed to maintain those speeds when we saw it tested at the show.

Although we're not hugely confident in the ability of network operators to roll out timely support for 5G technology, Qualcomm is painfully close to making 5G-compatible hardware a reality on the manufacturer side.

HP Envy X2

The HP Envy X2, first unveiled at this year's CES, is part of the first crop of Microsoft's OEM partnerships to create ultraportables powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors.

Reminiscent of HP's Elite X2, the Envy X2 is a razor-thin detachable that promises a 20-hour battery life and 4G connectivity, twinned with the productivity features of a standard Windows laptop. If it can strike the right balance, it could be a real game-changer.

HTC Vive Wireless Adaptor

While VR is being touted as the future by many, others are sceptical about how useful it's going to be, given that high-end VR headsets require you to be lashed to a PC in order to drive smooth, high-fidelity visuals. Thanks to HTC's Wireless Adaptor (originally announced at CES 2018), this concern is no longer an issue.

Based on Intel's WiGig technology, this accessory allows you to use the HTC Vive with no wires, other than a single battery pack. Performance is smooth and seamless, and the technology could genuinely make VR practical enough to reach widespread adoption.

Western Digital PC SN720

Western Digital is up there with some of the best in the business when it comes to storage technologies, and the company is pushing forwards with a new SSD built to take advantage of 3D NAND storage architecture. The drives aren't currently being made available for consumers, but are instead being offered to selected OEM clients.

The Western Digital PC SN720 is the first drive to be built on the company's new NVMe SSD controller architecture, which is designed to harness the performance and scalability boosts offered by 3D NAND. Performance looks to be very impressive indeed, and if this is an indication of what the company's new firmware and architecture can do, we're expecting big updates to WD's data centre portfolio.

Nesta has opened up applications for the next Open Up Challenge, which will award the most innovative ideas in financial technology with a 2.5 million prize fund.

It invites applicants with a focus in three areas: Business Current Account (BCA), Credit, and New Frontiers, the latter being an open category encouraging those with ideas for next-generation technologies which benefit small businesses to come forward.

"Open banking is becoming a reality and we have already started to see fintechs build tools and services that will impact the way small businesses discover, access and use core financial products and services," Chris Gorst, challenge prize lead at Nesta said.

"The next phase of the Challenge builds on this by encouraging these innovators to develop solutions that will enable small businesses to better navigate the market and compare the products and services now available to them."

Those who impress the independent judging panel will be awarded with grants of up to 100,000 each to develop their ideas and from those, an additional six will be selected to will the overall prize values of "at least 200,000" when the competition comes to an end in November.

The first phase of the challenge has already been completed, with twenty teams receiving a 50,000 development grant each. From those twenty teams, ten teams received a further 100,000. These participants can now apply for the second phase of the Open Up Challenge.

"It was evident from the first phase of the Challenge that there is an abundance of pent-up innovation ready to come to market and open banking has the potential to radically reduce the barriers for these new products to emerge. This is good news for small businesses," Gorst added.

"The Challenge is open to everyone, not just previous winners, and we are genuinely excited to see what other solutions the prize unearths."

Applications for the second stage will close on 4th May, with the final prizes being awarded in November.

Amazon has announced the next round of the Alexa Fund, with three companies chosen from Techstars' London location to take part.

This is the latest accelerator created by Amazon and Techstars and is designed to encourage more innovation focused on voice technologies.

In total, 13 startups will take part in the scheme and will work alongside Techstars, Amazon, and the Alexa Fund to develop their products and develop their business models.

Businesses selected by Amazon will receive an undisclosed sum from Amazon to develop their ideas, with additional investment from the Alexa Fund, which is prepared to invest $100 million into voice startups.

Companies will be selected by the Alexa Accelerator team, led by TechStar's Aviel Ginzburg, at promotional events around the world, including San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Amazon is inviting startups to apply by April and the accelerator itself will run for two months, between July and September. It will end with a demo day in October, where those taking part will present their innovations to everyone.

"We believe voice will fundamentally improve the way people interact with technology and this program aims to empower the next wave of entrepreneurs who are innovating with voice," the Alexa Fund's senior portfolio manager said in a blog post.

"We are excited to uncover Alexa innovation in categories such as smart home, entertainment, finance, enterprise, communications, automobile and transportation, health and wellness, connected learning, connected devices, hardware components, and other enabling technologies."

The scheme is an extension of Amazon's 2017 Alexa Accelerator, a 13-week mentoring programme that closed last October. It attracted applications from more than 50 countries and nine businesses were chosen to take part.

The increase in agile and flexible working hasn't lessened our need to directly collaborate with colleagues and clients; but with the right tools and technology, you can collaborate and communicate effectively in every situation.

With the latest mobile devices you can share, discuss and amend documents in the most natural manner, whether that be using a keyboard, a touchscreen or a digital pen. One-to-one collaboration has never been easier, turning anywhere into an effective meeting room.

But the meeting room itself is far from dead, it has just evolved into something altogether more effective and efficient. The HP Slice PC is the perfect partner for the modern meeting room. Not only is it a fully equipped Windows PC, but thanks to its modular design it can be turned into a fully featured conference call system, killing the proverbial two birds with one stone.

Integrated Skype for Business support isn't the only trick that the HP Slice has up its sleeve for meetings, though. The Slice also supports Intel's Unite technology, which allows up to four attendees in a meeting to share the screen from their laptop with the Slice simultaneously.

With the HP Slice and Intel Unite, there's no need to be plugging cables into laptops, or swapping presentations between devices; everyone can simply connect directly to the Slice and throw their own desktop onto the main screen in the meeting room.

Meetings will never be a thing of the past, but with the right technology, unproductive meetings should be.

Find out if your business IT is ready for the future.

Agile and flexible working take many forms, whether that be working from home, in a coffee shop or in an airport. But the office itself can also be agile and flexible, as long as you have the right tools and infrastructure in place to allow it.

It's very easy to implement a hot desking policy, but implementing one that's effective and efficient takes a bit more thought. Hot desking will never work if users are left searching for power supplies and cables every time they sit down to do some work. But with a bit of planning you can ensure that users can sit down at any desk in the office and get to work in seconds.

The latest mobile devices, like the HP EliteBook X360, combine thin and light portability, with modern, ubiquitous connectivity. With USB-C, just one cable can get your laptop connected to an external monitor, while also charging its battery. With a keyboard and mouse plugged into the monitor, those will also instantly connect to your laptop via that single cable.

The latest HP EliteDisplay monitors will even wirelessly charge your phone just drop a wireless charging equipped handset on the monitor base and it'll start charging while you get on with your work.

With the right equipment on the desks, and in the hands of your workers, hot desking can work seamlessly, and one potential barrier to agile working can be lifted. The office of the future can be everywhere and anywhere, including your actual office.

Find out if your IT is ready for the future

The office has changed. We don't come to the same building and sit at the same desk each day anymore. The office can be wherever you are, as long as you have the right tools at your disposal.

As more and more businesses adopt flexible and agile working policies, users need to be equipped with mobile devices that allow them to do their job effectively from anywhere. And it's not just about having all the features; if you're expecting your workers to carry their laptop with them at all times, you'll need to make sure it's thin and light enough for them to do so happily.

Security is another key factor to consider when equipping your agile workforce, and devices like the HP EliteBook X360 can provide robust, multifactor security solutions that don't frustrate users. With an Intel RealSense camera built into the lid of the X360, users can unlock the device using Windows Hello facial recognition simply open the lid and the camera will recognise you and log you in.

For enhanced security ITDMs can also implement a smartcard policy that works in tandem with biometric protection, and with real-time data encryption built into the X360 even a brute force attack on the machine itself won't result in your data falling into the wrong hands.

Even prying eyes can be kept at bay when viewing sensitive documents out in the wild, thanks to HP Sure View at the touch of a button a dynamic privacy screen can be applied, ensuring that only someone viewing the screen face on can see what it's displaying.

A flexible worker needs to stay connected wherever he may be, and rather than relying on public Wi-Fi hotspots when in coffee shops or on the move, the HP EliteBook X360 can keep him connected via an in-built 4G LTE connection.

If you want your workforce to keep going all day, wherever they might be, they'll also need laptops that can go the distance in terms of battery life. With the EliteBook X360 you can leave the power supply at home, use the device all day, and still have juice left over by the time you turn in at night.

The office may have changed, but the need to keep your workforce productive hasn't. With modern, business focused mobile devices like the HP EliteBook X360, you can do just that, wherever your workers may be.

Find out if your office IT is ready for the future