Organizations in the US, UK, and Germany are unprepared for large-scale digital disruption, and it's not technology gaps that are causing the problems.

A new Economist Impact study supported by Telstra International has found that only one-in-four organisations respond effectively to real disruption events, with the main reasons being weak governance, limited coordination, and poor visibility beyond organizational boundaries.

"What stands out in this research is not a lack of intent, but a gap between ambition and execution," said Roary Stasko, CEO of Telstra International.

"Many organizations believe they are prepared, yet disruption continues to expose weaknesses in governance, coordination, and decision‑making, particularly beyond their own walls."

Just 25% of organizations said their responses to digital disruption largely go to plan, while only 21% have a dedicated team responsible for delivering digital resilience initiatives.

And while they said they're making progress in modernizing systems and strengthening cybersecurity policy, the research shows digital resilience breaking down once disruption spreads beyond enterprise suppliers, partners, and critical infrastructure.

Most organizations have formal risk management frameworks, but these are focused mainly on cyber and IT risks, with only limited attention to regulatory, supplier, geopolitical, and climate risks, and only sporadic monitoring.

Only around one-in-five executives in the US and the UK were confident about cross-sector collaboration with suppliers and partners during disruption events.

"In a highly connected digital economy, digital resilience can't be built in silos," said Stasko. "It has to be owned at the top, tested across ecosystems, and treated as a core business capability."

Organizations are a bit more positive when it comes to internal foundations such as cybersecurity planning and regulatory frameworks: Germany leads on policy confidence (70%), while the US (54%) and UK (51%) show solid but lower levels.

But while they may be hot on planning, execution often falls short. Just 27% said that their digital resilience plans and strategies are reviewed regularly by boards. And only 38% said those discussions led to follow-up action. Monitoring is also shaky, with more than half of organizations tracking digital risks infrequently or on an ad hoc basis. Just 8% track more frequently than once a quarter.

Meanwhile, legacy technology's also a problem: around 60% of US and UK organizations, and 54% in Germany, say it still forms a significant part of their operations, making it harder to design digital resilience into systems from the outset.

But there are differences across sectors, with 36% of both financial services and IT & technology organizations saying they've modernized most or all of their core systems. The figure's just 12% in the public sector and 19% among industrial organizations, where deeper legacy dependence and rigid investment models continue to slow progress.

The researchers also point to a growing blind spot around physical infrastructure and environmental risk, with recent large-scale outages caused by extreme weather events demonstrating the vulnerability of communications networks and digital services. However, just 14% of organisations integrate climate-related risks into digital resilience planning.

"One of the strongest signals from the research is that failed responses to disruption are most often driven by poor scenario planning. That insight highlights the need for ongoing planning, testing, and adaptation across connected ecosystems," said Stasko.

"When scenario planning is shared across the organization, it benefits from diverse expertise and informed human judgement, not just technical strength. While robust technology is critical, the report shows it delivers real value only when matched by cultural readiness – an area where many organizations still have work to do."

In July, we saw what was possibly the largest ever IT outage to date.

Despite early reports, this was not a cyber attack, but a failure of two separate technologies: CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor platform and parts of Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure.

It’s one of those unfortunate sets of random coincidences that can turn a mishap from an inconvenience to disaster.

As flights were cancelled and shoppers had to remember how to use cash, it showed just how dependent we are on technology and how much that technology depends on all its moving parts.

Clearly, the outages caused much inconvenience and confusion around the world, and no small amount of embarrassment in IT circles. There were certainly some long days and late nights – and undoubtedly some difficult conversations between CIOs, and their boards.

As yet, it is too early to say how much financial damage resulted from the incidents, and the need to reboot and recover systems, although estimates already run into the billions of dollars.

It’s equally hard to predict the full consequences of the outages.

In fact, it has proved quite hard to pin down exactly what happened, with claims and counterclaims from across the industry.

According to Paul Stringfellow, CTO at Gardner Systems and a contributing analyst at GigaOm, there were actually two issues that happened over a short period of time.

The first was that Microsoft made some updates to its central US region. These affected Azure and Microsoft 365 services. As Stringfellow points out, these were fixed quickly but still had a global impact.

Then, CrowdStrike issued a “Rapid Response” content update. This was a more minor update than a software patch or upgrade, and the type of thing that security vendors push out frequently – often several times a day.

The update was, apparently, not one that could be delayed. It caused the “blue screens of death” on Windows machines that were all over the news last Friday. The fix, although fairly simple at a technical level, was still disruptive. As the problem affected not just PCs and servers, but equipment such as digital signage, we saw plenty of scenes of chaos at transport hubs across the world.

It could have been worse…

Perhaps surprisingly, though, there are several positives to come out of what happened last week.

Firstly, both Microsoft and CrowdStrike moved quickly to limit the damage. Though the incident no doubt ruined the weekend for plenty of IT professionals, it might have been worse at the start of the working week.

We can also take some reassurance from the fact that this was not a cybersecurity breach. That is probably fortunate: If this much chaos can come from an accident, it’s frightening to think what could happen if someone – say a nation-state backed hacker – set out to cause deliberate disruption, or destruction.

As Forrester analyst Allie Mellen noted on X (formerly Twitter), “infosec doesn’t have a monopoly on the CIA (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) triad or on availability”.

The incident shows how much all organisations, in business and the public sector, depend on their IT. It shows how critical it is that technology is robust, and that organisations have solid recovery plans. This is not the first time a patch or update has caused IT systems to fail and it won’t be the last.

If nothing else, the outages should force CIOs, and boards, to look much harder at their software supply chains.

Lessons for all?

So what have we learned?

Firstly, IT is complex, with numerous interdependencies and it’s not possible to predict every failure, or test every part. There have been some over-simplistic lines coming from parts of the industry, such as “test every patch” or “don’t rely on one vendor”. But that does little to help the CIO on the front line.

“The principles of patch management are clear, in that a single patch can cause huge damage if it is faulty. Over the decades, we’ve seen examples of this so to that extent, nothing has changed,” says Jon Collins, VP of engagement at analysts GigaOm.

“In practice, the scale, breadth and complexity of the challenge is much greater. It would be easy, for example, to say ‘all patches (including security patches) should be tested on a subset of systems before wider rollout,’ but that assumes full understanding of what is installed where, across vast, virtualized estates.”

Sometimes, something will get through. CrowdStrike’s internal QA test, Content Validator, itself had a bug leading it to fail to spot a problem with the content update. It was pushed out widely, and quickly, with the results we have now seen.

Secondly, it’s never a good idea to jump to conclusions. This was not a cyber attack and no doubt some IT teams wasted time thinking that it was. Root cause analysis is never easy, especially under pressure – but it’s vital.

“Understanding the root cause of an incident like this is crucial to take appropriate action to make sure it does not happen again,” says Mellen. “Root cause analysis must be done on both the customer side and the vendor side and will help inform decisions for both parties in the future. For example, canary deployments, where the vendor staggers deployment of an update in batches, would have been very beneficial to identify the issue prior to the major impact of the incident.”

Then there is the fact that availability is the responsibility of the whole business, not just IT (or security). “IT has long held much of the responsibility for identifying and addressing problems related to availability of enterprise systems,” says Mellen.

But the way an organisation responds to a security incident, or an outage, are not the same. This brings us back to both root cause analysis, a solid – and tested -- incident response plan, and a need to stay calm when everything’s going wrong.

“In this debacle, there seems to be an unnecessary amount of rhetoric about, ‘Oh my goodness, we’ve found ourselves subject to unexpected disaster’,” says Collins.

“But talk to any security professional or indeed, operations leader, and they will have been completely unsurprised by what happened here. In other words, we’ve learned that we’re still in denial about the fallibility of technology, at the highest levels of some of our biggest organisations.”

Accepting that fallibility means we will be better prepared for the next time.

Inflationary pressures will affect small businesses differently depending on a wide range of factors, including their business focus and market position.

Small businesses form an important part of any functioning and vibrant economy. According to the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) account for three-fifths of employment and around half the turnover in the UK private sector. It’s a similar story in the US, with its 27 million small businesses also generating roughly 50% of the nation’s GDP, according to the University of Minnesota.

Some inflationary issues are universal, and tend to affect all SMBs to varying degrees. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of dealing with  inflationary woes, as the cost of living crisis continues to bite, but there are some common strategies to consider for all kinds of small business.

Resolving cash flow issues

Cash flow sits at the center of the problems most small businesses face due to inflationary pressures, and there are competing priorities for the amount of cash available. 

“Some smaller companies will consider reducing their inventory, freezing recruitment, or cutting marketing and advertising expenditure,” says Bobby Idogho, co-founder and CEO of Radically Digital, a digital transformation consultancy.

Simac Konkader, a customer experience officer coach and business advisor, however, urges businesses to “double down on marketing and sales” rather than cutting back. It’s a false economy, he says, because customers need to know you’re out there and functioning. 

Konkader suggests taking up options like restructuring loans and negotiating supplier discounts. Suppliers may, after all, be able to find extra flexibility.

Fighting the cost of energy

The cost of energy continues to be a major concern for small businesses. This has been an ongoing issue in the UK, for instance. Research by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) finding 28% of small businesses that signed up to fixed energy contracts in 2022 may have to downsize, rethink their business model or close following further cost rises in April. 

It may be that efficiencies can made that can reduce energy costs. Konkader suggests looking at co-working spaces or using more hybrid or remote working where that’s possible. 

Technology can also play a part in reducing energy costs. Smart plugs, more typically used in the home, may be useful in some small business situations. First, they can monitor energy usage on a granular level and then to help reduce usage where possible through manual switching or timers. Using renewables may also help – if the up-front costs can be managed.

Curbing salary inflation

Salaries are a big cost for many firms, but without your workforce you simply can’t exist. Firms that don’t have a formal salary structure might do well to put one in place, both to manage pay itself and to set out how rewards, such as bonuses or discounts on the firm’s products, are given. This can help staff understand how and where they fit into the structure, and see how their special skills are valued.

Many firm owners feel responsible to the people they employ and want to do all they can to help them through the cost of living crisis. One option that could help people get through an immediate problem might be early access pay apps. 

“These on-demand pay apps give employees instant access to pay they’ve already earned, but wouldn’t normally receive until the month-end,” Idogho explains. Strategies like this can help with staff retention and loyalty, but businesses should keep an eye on usage, in case an employee gets themselves into serious financial difficulty. If you spot issues, consider whether there's any additional help you can offer. 

Investing in technology

Investing in technology might sound counter-intuitive at a time when finances are severely challenged, but it can be a game-changer. Technology, for example, can be used to reduce energy costs, streamline processes, communicate more productively with customers, or manage inventory and suppliers. It’s necessary if a firm wants to shift to a more hybrid structure too. Careful research should provide an indication of the return on investment and when this might kick in – and there may be some quick wins. 

Konkader also highlights the need to focus on modeling and harnessing data, which he says “will be just as valuable as having your own oil field” because of the insights it can provide into what works, and what doesn’t. Getting it right fast can help cash come into the business.

Planning for the future

Even when times are tough, it’s important to envisge a future in which the business is thriving and try to make progress towards that future. Small firms are often thought of as more agile than bigger, more established firms, able to learn more quickly, experiment with ideas, and, in the jargon, fail fast and move on. This can be used to advantage, with the ability to react quickly to changing conditions a key factor. 

Konkader advises businesses to use an advisory board or business coach. But Idogho tells ITPro that smaller firms can get staff involved in envisaging that future and planning for it before creating a “collaborative culture also promotes accountability, as individuals feel responsible for their contributions to the team's success.” 

It’s unquestionable that small businesses face some very serious challenges right now, and that many have to dig deep and work extremely hard to overcome these. Organizations that think strategically are able to be agile, support their staff, and maintain cash flow, may find themselves in the best position to come through and flourish. 

Digital transformation projects can revolutionize a business. These projects improve an organization’s self-awareness and boost productivity while ensuring it can compete for years to come. Dealing with inflation, however, has become a major barrier to digital transformation efforts, and the economic conditions are putting IT budgets under pressure.

Chief financial officers (CFOs) are moving away from growth plans they put in place after the ravages of COVID-19, and are taking a much more defensive approach, according to Deloitte’s Autumn 2022 European CFO Survey. They’re primarily concerned about rising energy costs, inflation, and labor shortages. 

The research found that, across Europe, cost reduction was the key strategy for the next year for businesses in 12 of the 15 nations that took part in the research. Digitalization, however, was the second highest-ranking strategy in seven countries, meaning it’s still a strategy many businesses want to pursue.

Digital transformation has significant implied costs, and is seen as expensive to implement. But it offers to possibility of scaling beneficially in the long term, according to the report. The firms that can afford to pursue digital transformation projects may see them as worthy investments, in light of rocky macroeconomics. Inflation is, nonetheless, a concern that needs to be carefully managed while undergoing any new or existing IT projects.

The risks of fast-tracking digital transformation

Lured by the prospect of digital transformation benefits, a firm might be tempted to fast-track the process. This can be a good strategy, but there are plenty of pitfalls for the unwary. 

“Complex digital programmes often rely on the allocation of available internal resources well in advance, which – in the case of fast-tracking – might have to be replaced or enhanced by more expensive external resources,” says Alfred Obereder, director at the independent management and technology consultancy, BearingPoint. 

Another potential issue is that trying to implement a digital transformation project at a faster pace than originally intended might store up problems for later, simply because things move at a faster pace and so checks and balances can be curtailed. Problems might not become apparent till much later or even till it is too late. Cyber security might be weaker than it should be, future scalability might be compromised, and, in general, more expenses might be needed later to fix problems baked in through fast-tracking.

However, with care and attention, fast-tracking can be a smart move. For example, a digital transformation project which allows a firm to better support remote working might reduce costs and improve productivity, with those benefits coming onstream at pace. 

“A digital transformation project that removes the requirement for surplus energy use – like moving away from an on-premise data center – could help reduce the need for electricity, thereby reducing business costs,” Tim Powlson, principal consultant and digital transformation expert at the business change consultancy Entec Si, highlights as another example. 

Is pausing a digital transformation project viable?

An alternative (and more drastic) option that might be considered in light of soaring inflation might be to pause or even completely shelve a digital transformation program. 

While there’s no simple answer to this question, says Obereder, there might be alternative options on the table. “Instead of a full pause or disbanding [projects], companies might want to consider creative options to instead reprioritize their program’s roadmap and focus on elements which are easier to finance and have an increased impact on cost savings.”

Any engaged contractors might not take kindly to a pause, which would mean a loss of revenue for them, even if a temporary one. To be viable as a cost-saving strategy, a pause would likely need to last several months. 

During that time, business priorities might shift, the parameters of the project might flex, and external conditions might develop and lead to new opportunities. Rather than accommodating these through a standard iterative process that’s part of a project in progress, additional costs might be incurred in revisiting earlier work and earlier decisions.

Shelving a digital transformation project might end up being the only option for some businesses, and it might be a difficult decision to make in light of considerations like the sunk-cost fallacy. Approximately 60% of executives say digital transformation is the most critical growth driver, however, meaning canceling a project equates to swerving away from a potential source of future growth, according to PWC.

The cost of cutting corners

Powlson suggests an alternative approach: “It’s worth understanding what the minimum viable product (MVP) would be and highlighting where the most benefit can be made for the lowest cost.”

Indeed, another possible way to save costs on digital transformation projects is to do some trimming. But this is another approach that is fraught with challenges. Cutting corners at speed in order to manage what may well be serious short-term financial problems might end up being a false economy as a firm can finish up with an end product that’s far below the standard and capabilities originally planned. 

Rather than trim all over, Powlson advises hunting down “the smallest change that can be made for the most amount of good” as a way of getting more immediate value from digital transformation. Taking such measures might make it seem as if digital transformation projects are a runaway train, but that’s not really the case. 

High inflation is far from the help businesses need after a tumultuous few years of adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic, regardless of where around the world they’re based. Inflationary pressures are bad everywhere, but particularly biting in the UK, with the OECD predicting the UK economy will perform worse than all the other G20 nations, except Russia.

The pan-European Autumn 2022 European CFO Survey from Deloitte also found expansion and growth plans businesses devised as they emerged from the worst of COVID-19 have been swapped out for defensive strategies. These plans aim to combat rising energy costs, labor shortages, and the effects of inflation. 

Amid this doom and gloom, individual businesses, from the smallest to the very largest, can feel they have an uphill struggle to survive, and they’ll be exploring every avenue to help them stay afloat. Technology can’t provide all the answers, and just how it might help depends on the nature of the business using it as well as the bigger picture of technology use. Harnessed wisely, however, technology might be able to provide a helping hand. 

Stepping up digital transformation

COVID-19 forced organizations to undergo digital transformation faster than they might have planned. The need to support remote working, and a subsequent desire to capitalize on the benefits for employees, pushed digital transformation higher up the agenda. Today the same imperative exists for businesses, although largely framed by a cost-cutting agenda than a workforce-enabling push.

Pushing ahead with digital transformation – despite imperatives to cut back on IT projects – could be a great strategy, providing the funds to do so are still available. Depending on the nature of the organization, there are a number of projects that may help the organization be more productive in the medium or long term and therefore mitigate a potential revenue drop-off.  Such projects include migrating to the cloud, eliminating data siloes, streamlining processes, developing or switching to services that use automation or artificial intelligence (AI) as well as honing marketing, sales, and customer experience (CX) activity. 

Organizations might reap any one of these benefits be speeding up efforts: 

• Work can be done more quickly and easily – including remote and hybrid work
• Customers and suppliers can enjoy faster, higher-quality communications
• Inventory, sales, and purchasing processes can become more reliable and effective
• Compliance can be managed more easily. 

Meanwhile, from an operational perspective, moving to the cloud from on-premise systems can reduce space requirements, hardware costs, and the cost of energy required to run on-premise systems. Doing so can also pave the way for scalability and a development cycle that’s iterative and able to take advantage of new applications and services at speed. 

Overhaul supply chain management

Organizations reliant on supply chains for components used in manufacturing, inventory for sales, or, indeed, as a supplier into the chain, need not be told about recent volatility that’s led to the non-availability of items and vast price fluctuations.

Technology solutions can help organizations keep track of what they need to buy, when, and from whom. They can monitor pricing, keep up-to-date information about alternative suppliers and pricing fluctuations, and help build relationships with the widest possible network of suppliers. 

More complex supply chain management required by some manufacturing organizations can stand to benefit most from more advanced technologies. Applications, such as those using AI and machine learning can also optimize complex supply chains by alerting humans where issues might arise and by forecasting demand. Research by IBM found 53% of Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) say digital supply chain transformation initiatives could be their most significant competitive advantage over the next three years.

Offering a first-class web experience

Whether customers are members of the public, or other businesses, it’s important to give them the best website experience possible. Consumers often vote with their feet, ditching sellers whose web offer they find clunky and outdated, and the same is true for clients and partners. This is why the role of chief experience officer (CXO) is growing.

Those selling to other organizations aren’t exempt from the need to make sure they deliver a high-end experience via their websites.  Looking at business-to-business sales, McKinsey found customer loyalty is hard-won. For example, 72% will actively look for another supplier if there isn’t real-time, always-on customer service, or if there isn’t a consistent experience across the channel. Meanwhile, 74% will do this if product availability isn’t shown online.

What this shows is that price isn’t everything when it comes to making sales. Using technology to deliver a high-quality all-round experience matters more to customers than simply dropping prices. Even today, with inflation continuing to be problematic, customer loyalty isn’t won on price alone.

Implementing the tools to fight inflation

In these specific areas and others, the constantly evolving march of technology can provide organizations with some useful tools to fight the cost of living crisis and inflation. 

When cash is tight, it isn’t possible to invest in everything all at once, and, just as when the finances are flowing freely, it’s important to evaluate the options, select what seems to be the most appropriate, deliver the greatest reward for the least outlay, and make the move to implement.

For more than two decades, 3G has been an essential part of mobile connectivity. With the introduction of the networking standard in 2001, devices could download and upload data at faster speeds than ever before. It allowed organisations to hold proper mobile video conferencing for the first time, and empowered consumers and businesspeople alike to browse the internet on the go.

Predating the first smartphone by five years, the technology paved the way for what we have come to know as mobile broadband and continued to play an important role even as 4G and 5G entered the scene.

In recent years, however, countries have begun to shut down 3G networks in a process known as the 3G sunset, with those who haven’t done so yet urged to adopt 4G and 5G instead.

Why is 3G being shut down?

The primary reason that 3G is being sunsetted is to free up resources for 4G and 5G capacity.

The move will free up teams within telcos to focus on newer architectures, allowing for greater focus on testing and development, such as Vodafone and Ericsson’s network slicing trial.

Reduced network cost is also a considerable benefit of this process, as MNOs won’t have to spend time and money maintaining their 3G infrastructure. With newer networks boasting more efficient energy usage, it also provides a measurable saving on energy costs for telcos.

Also on the chopping block is 3G’s predecessor, 2G, even though it’s relied upon for basic services in a way that 3G never was and is still used by some internet of things (IoT) devices. From legacy smart meters to diagnostic equipment, there are a few more holdouts with 2G than one might expect, which has kept the now ageing networking protocol from being axed just yet.

“3G sunset is a done deal,” Ben Timmons, senior director business development at Qualcomm tells IT Pro. “2G is a bit harder, particularly in the UK because of smart meters and various other IoT devices that are still using general packet radio service (GPRS).”

What impact will it have on businesses?

If anyone is worried that crucial 3G systems could break when the 3G sunset occurs, they needn’t be as very few businesses still rely on older networks for their connectivity needs. For example, Vodafone states that less than 4% of its data traffic in 2021 came from 3G – a 26% drop since 2016.

Alongside consumers shifting to 4G and 5G devices, this drop-off is driven by the fact businesses have been preparing for the 3G sunset by migrating equipment and services to newer networks.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in rural areas, however, are more likely to be impacted by the change in the short term, as many struggle to receive adequate data under current conditions. The sunset could exacerbate the ongoing crisis in rural connectivity, with services withdrawn before fibre broadband can fill the gap they leave. Satellite broadband could be key for these remote organisations, although greater expansion of 4G and 5G network coverage in these areas will be necessary to bridge the digital divide experienced.

Where – and when – will 3G shut down?

The soonest UK businesses can expect the 3G sunset to happen is by the end of 2023, the deadline that Vodafone is working towards, while those using the EE and Three 3G networks will lose access at different points in 2024. O2 is an outlier in that it has not indicated a specific deadline, but is supportive of government sunset targets.

The UK government has stated that 2G and 3G services will cease by 2033 at the latest. MNOs may shut down networks prior to this date, particularly as continued network costs are balanced against the ongoing expansion of 5G across the country.

Worldwide, efforts to retire 3G are continuing apace and as of September 2022, the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) has identified 142 operators that have either started or completed 2G and 3G shutdowns. Of the 142, 24 had completed 2G shutdowns across 15 countries, versus 28 that had shut down 3G networks across 17 countries.

In the APAC region, things are moving at a much more rapid pace. Japan entirely abandoned 2G as far back as 2012, the same year 4G services were first launched inthe country, making 3G the country’s oldest network protocol. MNOs across Singapore and South Korea, meanwhile, have all shut down their 2G networks.

In the US the 3G standard has been completely retired, as the final holdout, Verizon, ended 3G support at the start of 2023. The firm had intended to shut the network down in 2019, but twice extended the deadline to reduce disruption to its customers.

Network availability across the EU is a mixed picture, with some countries ahead of the UK on sunsetting. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have all discontinued 3G access, and MNOs in 22 EU countries have plans to switch off, or have already switched off, their legacy networks according to data regulatory intelligence provider Cullen International.

Throughout the EU, 3G is expected to have been retired by the end of 2025, a comfortable deadline which ensures that companies and consumers within the bloc can ditch older devices for newer 4G or 5G models.

The second-largest mobile network operator in India, Bharti Airtel, sunset its 3G services in mid-2022 despite the country’s 5G rollout being far from complete. It stated it was diverting focus to providing the best 4G network it can, while expanding its 5G presence, instead of maintaining legacy networks and expensive infrastructure. The company is attempting to

"We are now coming below 100 million – one of the smallest pool (sic) of 2G customers. But we can't leave them stranded,” Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal told Mint.

“I would love to switch off the network and save all the investments that go in 2G but there are a large amount (sic) of customers who need to upgrade to 4G, 5G phones but for that device prices are currently prohibitive.”

In the very near future, it may be hard to get a 3G signal anywhere in the world, but this loss will be far outweighed by the benefits of next-gen networking such as 5G, and eventually 6G.

The forthcoming adoption of USB-C as the connector of choice has been a frequently covered topic and, as you will have read, it’s been causing quite a heated discussion. Since 2009, there’s been a voluntary code in place between the EU and mobile manufacturers to reduce the variations of chargers from over 30 down to three. Last September, the EU Commission published an agreement, bringing this to one.

The rule change is being championed for both consumer convenience and to help fight e-waste. According to EU figures, consumers spend €2.4 billion on standalone chargers and over 11,000 tonnes of them end up in e-waste streams. The hope is that changing to a single socket will make it simpler to find something suitable to stick in it, but also control how rapidly your device will charge. Fast-charging technologies are also part of the rules.

Despite this genuinely positive news, what has been omitted from the legislation – in a cruelly deliberate oversight – is the effect fixing USB-C ports has on ageing Yorkshire-based PC technicians whose eyesight has lost the sharpness of its youth. A typical USB-C port has 24 internal pins, which obviously need to be connected to the machine. Comparatively, a USB-A port has up to five internal pins and when you consider the size differential between the two sockets, soldering up to 24 pins within a smaller area increases the difficulty level somewhat.

Remember, USB-C purely describes the shape of a port and not its functionality, but because it’s so versatile, USB-C is currently the obvious candidate for universality, irrespective of how much of a nightmare it is to fix. Looking ahead, the USB-C legislation won’t encapsulate laptops until 2026, but as the writing is on the wall, manufacturers could move early, triggering some radical redesigns inside the machines.

Traditionally, fixed ports such as USB, DisplayPort, Ethernet or HDMI are always soldered to a PCB, but most DC power barrels have broken free in recent years and are connected with a simple plug and socket. This makes repair much easier for anyone confident enough to open their laptop, or cheaper if professional help is required. Broken sockets remain the number one hardware fault I encounter on laptops, so when USB-C becomes the de facto method of power delivery, it’s critical that swapping a broken USB-DC is at least as simple as the plug and socket we have now. Keeping it on the board vastly increases the repair costs and the probability of the machine going in a skip.

It’s taken a long time to get this far, but now universality has become mandatory, it should be simpler to evolve the rules in the future. Jump forward five years when we’re talking about 'USB-D', the established rules can be tweaked. It’s not perfect but it draws a line in the sand and is far better than an office full of workers using 30 different chargers.

The pandemic forced many people out of the office and into their homes literally overnight. Organisations had to adapt – fast – and so did people. Those already ahead on the hybrid working path started with an advantage but, even for them, there was work to do. People who were working remotely a few days a week or month suddenly became people who were working from home all the time. The technology had to be just right, but success relied just as much on supporting people.

As some organisations continue with some form of hybrid working – the nature of which varies wildly between businesses – all organisations are assessing what the key lessons are from the pandemic. The takeaways will vary on so many factors, though, including attitudes to remote working in principle and the overall experience during COVID-19.

Looking at these areas will give any organisations, large or small, including those which struggled the first time around, a perfect set of tools to refine and improve their hybrid working strategy. This isn't just about what technology might be available, but rather how to adapt that technology for use across the workforce, and how people are expecting to be treated in a post-pandemic landscape.

Top technology for hybrid working

The tools that have worked best since the pandemic are the ones that have been best at supporting hybrid working. This statement seems obvious, but the devil is in the detail. “Mapping out the requirements for your business is one thing, but pre-empting how that will work and impact users in their everyday roles is quite another,” Cate Kalson, chief people officer at Opencast, tells IT Pro.

When it comes to implementing hybrid working technologies, this means thinking very practically not only about the technologies themselves, but the impact they have on your people who may be working in the office, at home, in other locations, or any mixture of these. “To solve new problems, you need new solutions. That’s why trying to address hybrid working with old operational processes won’t drive meaningful change,” Kalson adds. “Businesses that understand this have been the most successful at implementing hybrid working policies that stand the test of time.”

What that means is it’s no good jumping onto a cloud platform and thinking the job’s done. There are basics like email that can be standardised across any organisation. But when it comes to collaborative working, co-creation of documents, or any other kind of media and self-managed meeting scheduling, it’s important to think carefully about what tools best suit. It’s easy, too, to overlook the importance of the casual conversation in the office that sparks off a whole new train of thought for a team. From such conversations can come great things – but how can you cater for that in a technology-led environment?

Addressing this in a very practical sense, Kalson tells IT Pro: “One way to achieve this is to carve out a space for it in your organisational structure. For example, a role that might have once been called a ‘facilities manager’ could now be a ‘hybrid experience manager’.”

Flattening your business hierarchy

When the pandemic changed work patterns, companies with flat structures or previous experience with home-working policies had a big advantage, says Jan Hauser, CEO of software developer Applifting. He adds these businesses tended to give their employees both freedom and trust.

“In companies with a flat structure, there are usually different types of people than in companies with a classic hierarchical structure,” Huaser explains. “People are driven to be autonomous, independent, and responsible in the former case. They are encouraged to manage their own time and make important decisions.”

Meanwhile, in more hierarchical settings, decision-making is less autonomous, and a more senior-level thing. For more hierarchical teams or businesses, the move to hybrid working may have been jarring even symbolically through videoconferencing. In the past, senior management may have expressed their authority by occupying lavish offices with perks that allowed them to, say, travel to work in comfort. Once COVID-19 hit, everybody occupied the exact same digital square on the likes of Zoom and Google Meet, regardless of position.

Logically, then, adopting a hybrid model has already gone some way to flattening the structure, and requires businesses to cultivate a more autonomous working environment to at least promote that sense of trust and freedom. Hauser adds that building on a hybrid working model is a choice that “fundamentally changes” how people work, both individually and collectively. “If the change doesn't go hand in hand with a genuine effort to adapt to and iterate on the new dynamic, it can spell trouble.”

Don’t fall into the trap of focusing on tech

When thinking about hybrid working in the longer term, arguably the people management side of things takes precedence over technology. Once your hybrid working tech is in place, people need to use it and must feel that it’s supporting their work, not controlling their work or surveilling them. Employees need to really appreciate the work/life balance that hybrid working can foster, rather than feel themselves as slaves to the machine who struggle to clock off. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) offers advice on hybrid meetings that, for example, focuses more on people than technology, with its top ten tips including just two focussing on technology choices. The remaining eight are firmly focused on areas like people management, meeting etiquette, inclusion and training.

Similarly, echoing Kalson’s suggestion of replacing the ‘facilities manager’ with a ‘hybrid experience manager’, CIPD offers a planner employers can use to assess the suitability of specific roles for hybrid working.

It would seem the pandemic has taught us it’s entirely possible for some sectors to maintain a hybrid workforce – and to do so successfully. The acceleration of digital transformation and growth in the use of cloud technologies has played its part in facilitating the willingness of many organisations to allow workers to continue to be productive remotely for at least some of the time. While an organisation’s technology is what allows work to happen, it is an organisation’s people who make work happen, and supporting them is an ongoing process. Perhaps the most successful organisations in 2023 and beyond will be those who undertake continuous, unrelenting focus on their people for the long term.

‘Quiet hiring’, the latest buzzword permeating the global technology industry, might be more than just a flash-in-the-pan trend for businesses.

This broad term, which refers to organisational approaches to reskilling and retaining critical talent, has emerged in the wake of the pandemic-fuelled ‘quiet quitting’ phase, which saw workers at firms across a range of industries ‘quietly’ refusing to go above and beyond their contractual duties.

Quiet hiring was identified as Gartner’s number one Future of Work trend for 2023, suggesting it’s a practice or approach that businesses will focus on sharply throughout the year. It’s not without justification; amidst a period of acute economic disruption, tightening budgets and talent shortages spanning a host of key industries, Gartner suggests quiet hiring could prove vital for business decision-makers.

What is quiet hiring?

Emily Rose McRae, senior director of research at Gartner tells IT Pro quiet hiring is an approach for organisations to “get skills and capabilities without adding headcount”.

“That’s to contrast it with quiet quitting,” she says, “which would ultimately be an organisation losing skills or capabilities, but not losing headcount.”

Fundamentally, quiet hiring as a concept involves placing a stronger focus on maximising the potential of current staff by offering them the chance to upskill, retrain, or move to other areas of the business. The aim is meeting the demand of certain critical functions that may be short-staffed or otherwise left lacking.

“It’s a way to get the skills and capabilities where you need them and redistribute what you have to where it’s going to have the most strategic value,” McRae adds.

“It’s recognising a reality that we’re all facing right now, which is that the talent shortage is materially impacting our businesses. We are not able to do things that are part of our strategic plan because we don’t have enough talent, or the right talent.”

How does quiet hiring work in practice?

A prime example, McRae says, would be an organisation with a ten-strong data science team seeking to fill five new positions, but not being able to fill these roles within a realistic timeframe.

“You could suddenly offer way more money in the market to try and attract people faster, but that’s expensive, and with current economic uncertainty, it’s not necessarily an option for a lot of businesses,” she says.

To compensate, the hypothetical organisation could source talented analysts within the HR or marketing team, for example, and reassign them to work within the data science function to plug the gaps.

However, while this appears to be a straightforward decision, there are pitfalls, McRae notes. Not least of all in terms of cross-functional skills capabilities.

“The problem here is they aren’t data scientists, they’re analysts, and there might be some skills missing there. So how do you deal with that? Well, one option would be to upskill them; send them to a bootcamp or do an apprenticeship.”

“Another option would be to actually redesign the role, so the data scientists focus on compensating for the skills the analysts don’t have and they can do the things that they’re familiar with.

“You could also hire contractors to do the complex statistical programming that’s not normally in the analysts’ wheelhouse.”

Is quiet hiring right for your business?

All too often, organisations and business leaders have a tendency to get caught up in the latest buzzword trend and buy into the hype and hyperbole surrounding new technologies, leadership approaches, or management styles.

With quiet hiring, this is no different, and McRae emphasises it isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. There are nuanced considerations businesses and senior teams must take into account when pursuing this approach – whether it’s right for their individual circumstances.

This is particularly relevant for smaller businesses, McRae adds, who simply might not have the headcount or capacity to redirect talent and resources to other areas of the business.

“For some companies this isn’t going to fly,” she says. “For some companies, they’re going to look at quiet hiring and say ‘no, HR people are HR people, marketing people are marketing people” and they’re not open to that idea. Culturally this doesn’t work for some.”

What are the business benefits of quiet hiring?

Amidst a period of tightening budgets, hiring freezes and growing economic uncertainty, McRae says quiet hiring offers businesses a range of benefits, including creating a more cross-functional workforce that understands the acute challenges faced by the organisation.

“It can absolutely create a more agile workforce as a whole, who have some background knowledge to start with that allows them to adapt to a lot of different circumstances and move more easily across the business,” she explains.

Similarly, in terms of alternative benefits for the organisation, McRae notes this approach can prove highly beneficial in creating future leaders who understand the acute challenges facing the organisation.

These employees could be vital in terms of long-term success due to their understanding of strategic goals and considerations.

“It also, frankly, helps build your leadership pipeline, because the more cross-functional experience people have, the better leaders at an organisation they’ll be,” she adds. “They won’t be so siloed into a part of the business. So that’s a benefit for the employee and the organisation to have people who understand the business better.”

Are there employee benefits to quiet hiring?

While there are tangible business benefits to quiet hiring, McRae says that in terms of individual employee benefits, there is a “tricky” element at play here.

She notes that while a key benefit for employees is the potential for increased internal mobility, and the opportunity to upskill or retrain, employees are still ultimately beholden to senior leadership.

Therefore, employees making proactive moves to capitalise on the opportunities of quiet hiring may encounter difficulty. There are, however, some things individuals within an organisation can do.

“It is an opportunity to increase your skills and value within an organisation,” she says. “But the thing that makes this different from your standard internal mobility, so applying for a new role within the organisation, is that that is coming from the employee.

“Quiet hiring, as an approach, is coming from senior leadership. The direction is different. You can make suggestions, you can actively reach out to parts of the business that you know are hiring, or struggling, and suggest you rotate in.

“Those are just some of the things you can do to jump start this on an individual basis. But this really does come from senior leadership.”

What are the downsides to quiet hiring?

Some employees within an organisation pursuing a quiet hiring policy or approach may view this with hesitancy, McRae notes.

In recent years, workforces across a range of industries have become increasingly burnt out and taken on heavier workloads, which has been exacerbated by talent shortages. The key difference with quiet hiring, however, is that it isn’t a case of employees being lumbered with additional work, it’s a redistribution of those individuals to other areas of the business.

“There is 100% a risk [of burnout],” she says. “What keeps it from coming to that is really whether you’re doing quiet hiring right. You’re not doing quiet hiring right if you ask someone to take on responsibilities on top of their normal job.

“The reality is that if this is not a good fit for you, you’re able to say no. Because, your company still values your work. And that might sound counterintuitive, telling your company no, but in this circumstance you 100% can.

“Now, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have a bad manager that wouldn’t respond poorly to it, or senior leadership that would respond poorly to it. But the reality is that your skills are so valued that they want to move them over into another part of the business. Trust that if you needed to, you could look somewhere else, but also that they want to keep you.”

UK startup founders tell IT Pro they have lingering concerns about the future of industry support as Tech Nation’s closure date approaches. The industry champion confirmed last month it will close its doors on 31 March after a vital government funding package was awarded to Barclays Eagle Labs.

The decision to award the £12 million Digital Growth grant to Eagle Labs sparked consternation across the UK startup scene, with some voicing concerns over the future of the tech visa scheme and the organisation’s range of growth programmes.

The Financial Times (FT) reported in February that Tech Nation had been forced into a ‘fire sale’ of intellectual property. This included programmes led by the organisation, with around 30 organisations believed to have placed bids, including Founders Forum, a networking group established by British entrepreneur, Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com

Tech Nation runs a number of growth schemes aimed at supporting founders and startups spanning several areas. To date, hundreds of startups have passed through the Future Fifty, Applied AI, Cyber, FinTech, Rising Stars, and Upscale programmes, for instance.

A key factor in the popularity of these schemes, founders tell IT Pro, was they offered valuable support for startups and founders to fine tune their product offerings, broaden horizons, and enable them to engage with a broad pool of like-minded founders and startups operating across the country.

A sad day for UK startup support

Jim Wilkinson, CEO of Zuto, a North West-based startup which participated in the Future Fifty 11.0 cohort describes Tech Nation as having been a “key part” of the UK technology ecosystem for nearly a decade, and one that’s provided vital support for startups and scale-ups.

“Tech Nation over the years has supported a huge number of innovative tech businesses across the UK and helped contribute to the thriving ecosystem we now have,” he says. “The UK is full of SMBs and, particularly in the North West, we have a strong culture of supporting startups, which Tech Nation was a key champion of.”

The Future Fifty 11.0 cohort, unveiled in September last year, features 13 high-growth potential businesses. Zuto was one of two firms from the North West selected to take part in the scheme.

Wilkinson (pictured) says Tech Nation was a key champion of sustaining a strong culture of support for startups in the North West

“I, and Zuto, feel a personal loss too, as our experience and opportunity is sadly going to be cut short. Tech Nation provided support, training and networking among many other things to bring together like-minded businesses to help make things happen," he adds.

Rob Straathof, CEO and co-founder of Liberis, an embedded finance company that was part of the Future Fifty 9.0 cohort, also tells IT Pro that Tech Nation’s loss will be felt across the UK industry due to the crucial role it played in championing UK tech.

“As a member of Tech Nation’s Future Fifty 9.0 cohort, we have benefited greatly from its network, their insights into helping startups growing into scale-ups, and the connections with other founders and CEOs who can provide information mentorship and guidance, as well as their continuous battle to put FinTech on the radar of the government,” he says.

“Tech Nation previously had the ability to push for simple but effective solutions such as the Visa for tech workers, helping to expand companies abroad with advice and practical guides, as well as support with local PR, marketing, and legal and compliance.”

Regional startups could suffer

Damian Fairbrother Jones, COO at AeroCloud, another North West-based startup that took part in the Rising Stars 3.0 programme, believes the closure of Tech Nation will hamper startups operating outside of London and the South East.

“For us, Tech Nation plays an important role in championing and recognising tech ecosystems outside of London,” he says.

Fairbrother Jones (pictured) feels Tach Nation's loss will hamper startups and SMBs outside of London

“Pulling the plug on Tech Nation will leave a significant gap in the venture capital ecosystem. As a big corporate, it will be hard for Barclays to replicate the ‘insider’ feel that Tech Nation created and the way in which it provides practical resources and approaches.”

Rich Arundel, co-founder and chief evangelist at Currencycloud, echoes Fairbrother Jones’ comments, suggesting the government’s decision to overlook Tech Nation sends a poor message and appears to contradict recent government posturing around support for the tech industry and turning Britain into the ‘next Silicon Valley’.

“Tech Nation was a signal that the government was committed to supporting the ambition and idealism of UK startups in the early 2010s. Questions around the impartiality of Barclays Eagle Labs aside, I think pulling the plug on Tech Nation has gone down so badly because it sends the opposite signal. Tech Nation’s effectiveness, its London-centricity, and its suitability for a now mature UK tech ecosystem were all debatable,” he says.

“But many entrepreneurs feel we need more startup networks, more support, and more investment – not less. Was there not a case for visionary reform? The Chancellor has recently been making overtures to the UK’s entrepreneurial community, pledging to turn the country into the next Silicon Valley. Now, he’ll face an uphill battle to win back their trust.”

It’s unfair to write off Eagle Labs

Although Tech Nation’s closure has justifiably raised concerns among UK startup founders, the situation might not be as dire as some suggest.

Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, said at the time of Tech Nation’s announcement that the shift to Eagle Labs could mark a positive change for how startups are supported across the UK, noting businesses will still be able to access tailored advice and support.

“That’s a shift in model which I think will make a big difference and can only be perceived as positive,” she said. “Their existing programmes and mentoring opportunities will be expanded to a broader group and also will add further services including an accelerator and scale-up programme. This should really support startups at scale and contribute to the overall ecosystem where a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Eagle Labs represented better value for money, according to the government

Brock added that the new model will “build on the services” Tech Nation has traditionally provided and likely create a more localised framework for regional business support.

“I believe that this will be a step forward, with a free offering to startups which has been missing,” she continued. “Barclays offers a breadth of access across the Regions due to its existing growth programmes across the UK in 50 locations and these span Scotland, Cardiff and Belfast as well as a strong Regional presence. I understand that this will double and that their goal is for 80% of the startups being supported to be outside London.”

Despite concerns over the future of UK startup support, a pervasive mood of optimism still remains among founders. In recent weeks, Eagle Labs has been vocal about future plans and is engaging closely with industry stakeholders to ensure the hand-over benefits businesses.

Last month, David Hamilton, head of implementation at Barclays Eagle Labs, told UKTN the incubator has been portrayed as ‘bogeyman’ following the Digital Growth Grant funding announcement. Hamilton insists Eagle Labs was committed to continuing support for UK startups. The organisation also recently announced it will match the £12 million grant with £24 million of its own funding, and plans to launch additional programmes in the year ahead.

According to KPMG, recruitment activity slowed to a 19-month low in September last year, with vacancies expanding at the lowest level since February 2021. These findings are supported by the Office for National Statics (ONS), which showed online job advertisements down by a fifth in early January 2023.

Amid the cost of living crisis, and an emphasis on cost-saving measures, weathering the economic storm is fast becoming a mantra for all businesses, regardless of size. It’s an alarming time, and a flurry of layoffs across the tech sector, for example, shows even large corporations are seemingly not immune to the effects of an economic downturn. Research from the recruitment platform Employ, too, suggests fewer job offers are being accepted, with 61% of HR professionals stating 2023 will continue to be challenging when hiring new staff.

With a hiring freeze seen as a go-to tactic for many businesses, executives will question what pausing recruitment might achieve in terms of cost savings, and whether a hiring freeze is right for them in light of the ongoing economic pain. Experts, however, feel that issuing a hiring freeze, if not managed correctly, can lead to staff demoralisation and attrition.

Why do businesses issue a hiring freeze?

Many businesses see a hiring freeze as a way to avoid expenditure – or defer spending until the economic picture improves. "Some employers, even those who anticipate that the recession may be short, are taking steps now to contain costs, including hiring freezes,” explains Claire Warnes, head of education, skills and productivity at KPMG UK.

Chon Tang, a founding partner of Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, tells IT Pro the approach to hiring has certainly changed, and a key driver might be that businesses have stockpiled staff already.

"Not just major enterprises, even well-funded early-stage start-ups at Berkeley SkyDeck have also dramatically adjusted their hiring plans as the macroeconomy begins to slow down,” Tang says. “On a practical basis, the arms race for talent has slowed down. When every skilled engineer is bombarded with multiple offers, start-ups can't wait – when someone qualified walks through the door, they have to hoard talent or risk not being able to find the right person for many months to come.”

The protection of talent within a business, at present, is clearly a driver behind the slowing of new hires. Companies can see the value of protecting their human assets to insulate them from future events that could hurt their enterprises. However, how long can a structured hiring programme remain on pause before innovation and agility are affected? Smaller businesses are by their nature more agile than larger competitors, but even corporates can only wait for a while before talent shortage begins to erode their profitability.

Businesses are trying to do more with less

Businesses assessing the trading landscape across 2023 are considering how staffing levels will impact their ability to remain profitable. Even tech giants like Apple describe their approach to current recruitment as 'deliberate.' Enterprises are rationalising every aspect of their processes and operations to identify cost centres that can be reduced.

Investments in new talent moving forward are a critical component of all businesses' strategic development roadmaps. As they see their markets, customers, and the economic climate they are trading within changing almost daily, the prioritise business leaders are focusing on do including talent and recruitment, but this isn't their only concern. For example, the layoffs already seen across the tech sector are a symptom of a broader concern about whether enterprises can continue to offer their services and products to an audience with different drivers than just a few years ago.

“Clever internal mobility is often much more effective than large programmes of recruitment,” says Lu Hayward-Graham, global client services director, Cielo. “The objective is to move talent around the business to get through the tricky period, for example redeploying and mobilising existing talent.

“Proactive and reactive internal mobility is about reaching out to those individuals that are around 60% fit to their role and asking, “have you thought about applying to this other, more suitable role?” If you need to fulfil a role during this downturn period, you must advertise this internally. Employees need sight of every scenario, so they know it doesn’t always have to end in an exit. That’s legally defensible too.”

However, bucking the current trend is Arctic Wolf – a network security company that has continued to hire staff. "Leaders will need to keep a close eye on the culture,” CEO Nick Schneider tells IT Pro. “A hiring freeze could likely impact open backfill roles and ultimately create additional work for a team member that is spread thin. Pay attention to the signs from leaders within your organisation if their teams are struggling, as there may be opportunities to get creative and fill workforce gaps amidst a necessary freeze.”

Can a hiring freeze be counterintuitive?

The so-called great resignation is clearly a factor influencing the current labour market. Post-pandemic, the recruitment landscape has changed with a shift in emphasis towards workers who want to take more control of their working lives. The rise of hybrid working has also influenced not just how work is structured but also how workers define their jobs.

Layoffs across the tech sector have grabbed all the headlines, with many questioning what global workforce reductions say about the health of the tech industry in general. Each sector, however, will react differently to the factors influencing customers and commercial partners. It's important to put recruitment freezes into the context of a shifting post-pandemic job market, the uncertainty across all major industries, and how businesses have evolved their strategic planning.

The skills gap is still a clear and present danger to future growth and prosperity, and recruitment freezes tend to be a reaction to significant events such as the pandemic and the financial crash of 2008. However, any downturn can present an opportunity for many businesses to recruit against the tide, Ishveen Jolly, founder and CEO of OpenSponsorship, explains.

"To be honest, we haven't frozen anything,” she says. “In fact, while there has been a freeze and, indeed layoffs in the tech market, we see this as an opportunity not only to look for new talent but also to remind our existing staff that we have their backs, and OpenSponsorship is a good place to be right now. We aren't, however, just hiring for the sake of it; we are filling gaps and investing in people to grow the business.”

KPMG’s Warnes agrees in principle, saying seeing recruitment through the prism of cost-cutting might not be beneficial in the long term. “Those employers who continue to invest in their workforce, particularly upskilling, may find they weather the recession better and will be in a stronger position to benefit from the upturn as and when it comes.”

A recruitment freeze may have a short-term positive impact on a company's financial health. If a recruitment freeze is in place over a prolonged period, though, it could see key staff leaving, which could snowball into a haemorrhaging of staff that can’t be replaced. In this scenario, a business can quickly become unstable, with resignations chronic. Therefore, a clear message must be communicated to the workforce about why a recruitment freeze has been put in place to avoid eroding trust.

On September 26 last year, without most of us noticing, humanity’s long-term odds of survival became ever so slightly better. Some 11,000,000 km away, a NASA spacecraft was deliberately smashed into the minor planet-moon, Dimorphos, and successfully changed its direction of travel. It was an important proof of concept that showed that if we’re ever in danger of being wiped out by an asteroid, we might be able to stop it from hitting the Earth.

But what if the existential threat we need to worry about isn’t Deep Impact but Terminator? Despite years of efforts from professionals and researchers to quash any and all comparisons with apocalyptic science fiction and real-world artificial intelligence (AI), the threat of this technology going rogue and posing a serious threat to survival isn’t just for Hollywood movies. As crazy as it sounds, this is increasingly a threat that serious thinkers worry about.

AI development is akin to survival of the fittest

“AI could pose a threat to humanity's future if it has certain ingredients, which would be superhuman intelligence, extensive autonomy, some resources and novel technology,” says Ryan Carey, a research fellow in AI safety at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. “If you placed a handful of modern humans, with some resources and some modern technology into a world with eight billion members of some non-human primate species, that could pose a threat to the future of that species.”

The idea of treating AI as its own species, potentially replacing another, is consistent with evolution by natural selection. “There's no reason why AI couldn't be smarter than us and generally more capable and more fit in an evolutionary sense,” adds David Krueger, an assistant professor in Cambridge University’s Computational and Biological Learning Lab.

“Look at how humans have reshaped the Earth and changed the environment leading to the extinction of many other species,” he explains. “If [AI] becomes the more significant re-shaper of the environment than humans have been, then it could make the environment of the world something that's very difficult or impossible for humans to survive on.”

Today’s AI might not be ready to take on its human masters – it’s too busy identifying faces in our photos or transcribing our Alexa commands. But what makes the existential risk hypothesis scary is there is a compelling logic to it.

The three ingredients to AI dominance

1. The logic of AI

The first ingredient is to do with how machine learning systems “optimise” for specific objectives, but lack the “common sense” that (most) humans possess. “No matter how you specify what you want from the system, there's always loopholes in the specification,” says Krueger. “And when you just create a system that optimises for that specification as hard as it can, without any common sense interpretation, then you're going to get usually really weird and undesirable behaviour.”

In other words, an AI tasked with something seemingly simple could have unintended consequences that we can’t predict, because of the way AI ‘thinks’ about solving problems. If, for example, it was told that the number of books in a child’s home correlates with university admissions, it wouldn’t read to the child more – it would start piling up boxes of books instead. Even if we think we’re designing AI that operates only within very strict rules, unusual behaviour can still occur.

2. Over-optimisation

The second ingredient is how an AI with one specific task will naturally engage in “power seeking” behaviour in order to achieve it. “Let's say you have an algorithm where you can, by hand, compute the next digit of Pi, and that takes you a few seconds for every digit,” says Krueger. “It would probably be better to do this with a computer, and probably be better to do this with the most powerful computer that you can find. So, then you might say, ‘actually, maybe what I need to do is make a ton of money, so that I can build a custom computer that can do this more quickly, efficiently and reliably’.”

An AI might think the same way if it has such a singular goal. An AI optimised for a specific task will use every tool at its disposal to achieve that goal. “There's no natural end to that cycle of reasoning,” says Krueger. “If you're doing that kind of goal-directed reasoning, you naturally end up seeking more and more power and resources, especially when you have a long-term goal.”

3. Handing over power

Krueger’s third ingredient answers the obvious question: why would we humans ever give an AI system the ability to engage in this maniacal ‘power seeking’ behaviour? Ultimately, even if we have a clever AI, won’t it be stuck inside a computer?

“The reason why you might expect people to build these kinds of systems is because there will be some sort of trade-off between how safe the system is and how effective it is,” says Krueger. “If you give the system more autonomy, more power, or the ability to reshape the world in more ways, then it'll be more capable.”

It’s not like this isn’t already happening – we let AI software trade stocks or navigate traffic without any human intervention, because AI is much more useful when it is directly in charge of things.

“You can build a really safe system if it basically doesn't do anything,” Krueger continues. “But if you give it more and more ability to directly affect the world… if you let it directly take actions that affect the real world or that affect the digital world, that gives it more power and will make it more able to accomplish your goals more effectively.”

Cooking up an AI-powered disaster

Putting these ingredients together leads to one possible outcome: that your goals may not be the same as the AI’s goals. Because when we give an AI a goal, it may not be our actual goal. Theorists call this the “alignment” problem.

This was memorably captured in a thought experiment by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who imagined an AI tasked with creating paperclips. With sufficient control of real-world systems, it might engage in power-seeking behaviour to maximise the number of paperclips it can manufacture.

The problem is, we don’t want to turn everything into paperclips – even though we told the machine to make paperclips, what we really wanted was merely to organise our papers. The machine isn’t blessed with that sort of common sense, though. It remains maniacally focused on one goal, and works to make itself more powerful to achieve it. Now substitute something benign such as paperclips for something scarier, such as designing drugs or weapons systems, and it becomes easier to imagine nightmare scenarios.

How worried should we be?

The risk of a paperclip-hungry AI wiping out human existence might seem fantastically low, but it does paint a picture of how a threatening AI could emerge by following the remorseless logic that underpins AI technologies today.

“If you have a very intelligent system, it could be used for social engineering of anyone using the internet, or you could develop extraordinary technologies like bioweapons, nanotechnology or smarter AI,” says Carey.

If we’re lucky, though, we might see the problem coming. “It could be more of a gradual escalation of resources, as you're giving an AI the keys to more and more important corporate or military institutions as it gets more capable,” he continues, perhaps thinking of how over the past several decades we’ve put more of our trust in AI and computer systems, because it makes things more useful.

But, of course, we might not be so lucky. Other theorists argue that if you have an AI that is capable of redesigning and improving itself, then the sophistication of AI could scale up very quickly indeed. “If that's the case, then we're in some trouble,” Carey adds.

So just how worried should we be? Scarily, Carey points to the work of philosopher Toby Ord, who wrote The Precipice in 2020, attempting to weigh the risks of various existential risks, such as asteroids, pandemics and nuclear war. In the book, he estimates a 10% chance of an AI-linked catastrophe in the next century, compared to only a 6% chance of all of the other risks combined.

“The logic for that is that these natural catastrophes would have gotten us over the past million years already, if it was going to be a volcano or something,” says Carey. “He thinks AI, if anything, is most likely to be the big one.”

It can be easy to feel like tech workers are dropping like flies, in the midst of economic turmoil and surging inflation. At the start of the year, Amazon and Salesforce announced 26,000 job losses between them, with layoffs at Alphabet and Microsoft pushing this number ever higher. Twitter, too, has seen mass redundancies and resignations, but that’s something of a special case. There’s something of a contagion effect underway, and the once impenetrable sector is showing the dents in its armour. This is especially apparent now the effects of surging inflation and the cost of living crisis have taken hold.

As a result, in the UK, more than half of tech workers are applying for new roles in anticipation of being let go. The sentiment is highest in London, with a stagging 63% of employees pre-emptively applying for new jobs. Given the success of big tech companies in recent years, particularly during the pandemic, certainly at the sight of other sectors in the economy, it might seem bizarre that profitable giants in the field like Amazon and Google feel the need to cut staff. Despite the negativity, though, these layoffs might pose an opportunity for workers being let go, as well as other businesses hoping to plug skills gaps.

Why are big tech companies shedding staff?

There are three key arguments for shedding staff, industry insiders tell IT Pro. Firstly, businesses are undergoing a course correction after a period of over-hiring and endless optimism about market conditions. Secondly, the prospect of an economic downturn provides cover for companies to reorganise without denting their reputations catastrophically. Finally, the direction of innovation and the emergence of tools – such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) – have sparked companies into questioning the skill sets of some workers.

For Chris Federspiel, CEO and co-founder at Blackthorn.io, a company that develops Salesforce-native apps, it’s a question of the bottom line, with venture capital investors tightening purse strings. Larger companies are also looking to drastically cut payroll – their biggest expense. “Because all of this debt is now expensive, you can't raise, you can't get access to capital, you have to be forced to reduce your costs,” he says. “So, because all these things are shaping up in the industry, it's now an excuse to drop your much higher-paid individuals.”

Michael Gibbs, CEO of tech training platform Go Cloud Careers and a longtime employee of Cisco before, says he’s noticed that companies are heavily leveraged, staff-wise, towards roles focused on making money when layoffs like these happen. “In tough economic times, organisations fight for revenue,” he says, adding salespeople alongside cloud architects and sales engineers are the last to go. “But the back-end people, HR, even if they're great, they get laid off,” he continues. “Software developers get laid off because it doesn't matter if you're coding in Cameroon, Cambodia, China, or California, the only difference is the salary that people get paid.”

Tim Rowley, CTO and COO of PeopleCaddie, has a different take. He argues these layoffs, particularly at massive companies, have more to do with C-suite executives capitalising on an opportunity for a reshuffle than it does any real or perceived economic uncertainty. For him, these layoffs are in large part the result of business leaders who know they won’t be judged as harshly for making such sweeping cuts now.

“If you look at the balance sheets of these big tech companies, and you see that, in some cases, they have billions of dollars in cash stacked up, they clearly have the financial resources to weather the storm,” he tells IT Pro. “I would posit that the CEOs, in particular, and the leadership teams at these big tech companies are being opportunistic. What I mean by that is, occasionally the markets present you with an opportunity to both right size expenses and realign expenses with your current priorities.”

Losing your job isn’t a moral failing

Identity is so often conflated with employment in modern society, especially in the US where the majority of the job losses are being sustained, co-founder and partner in investment firm Zelkova Ventures, Jay Levy, says. It’s important, therefore, that workers who’ve been recently let go don’t see their exit as the result of some sort of moral failing.

“Most of these layoffs, not all, but most of these layoffs are not a reflection on your ability,” he advises former employees. “These are corporate layoffs to impact the bottom line, as companies may have gotten too bloated. And the marketplace realises that.” Levy adds, unlike 18 months ago at the height of the sector’s upward trend, other tech companies are unlikely to see a layoff as a red flag related to performance.

Gibbs, meanwhile, says that while the collective sadness of this shakeup can be disheartening, it’s important for tech workers to focus on what they can do – like update their CVs and invest in new training and skills. “A layoff is not a death sentence,” he says. “It's just a small setback and a chance to get something even better.”

People who have been laid off from roles they needed to maintain their US immigration status are in a particularly difficult spot. Dr Kyle Elliot, a California-based career coach, says people who need to quickly regain employment should focus on what they can control, like how often they apply and to which companies, but that it’s okay to sit with the fact that the experience can be deeply alienating. “Find your community and connect with people because then it feels less lonely,” Elliot says. “The job search is lonely for anyone. It can be particularly lonely if you're facing possible deportation.”

What can employees do if they’re let go?

Elliot, who holds a graduate degree in education and is a member of Forbes’ Coaches Council, a career coach with expertise with tech sector clients, says that these layoffs are “a wake-up call”. He adds: “This allowed a lot of employees to recognise that really, no company is safe, and they really need to keep thinking about their backup plan and their backup to their backup plan.”

Elliot says the key for employees looking for new work is to broaden their horizons outside of certain technology hotspots like Silicon Valley and to identify what they want out of their next role, what they need, what they don’t want, and what they don’t need. For instance, many roles across the industry are compatible with remote or hybrid work, with some companies also really pushing the boat on hybrid work.

“Then, use those parameters as guardrails or GPS directions, as I like to call them,” he continues, “so that when an industry or a specific company comes up – and when you receive a job offer – you can then compare it to those four quadrants.” In his experience, he’s found that to be really helpful for people who feel lost.

There’s another opportunity at play here, too. Levy says employees being laid off from big companies, especially those with a little bit of capital, are in a really good spot to try to build their own companies, even if valuations of startups are trending lower and lower.

“These layoffs are freeing up resources – people mostly – for startups,” Levy says. “I think we're going to see better startups, And I think we're also going to see more startups because a lot of these people will look at this as an opportunity to take risks. I think, ultimately, this will help fuel innovation.”

Can SMBs exploit the wave of job losses to plug skills shortages?

Levy says with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) being priced out of talent, these layoffs will even out the market. With that, though, will come a baseline compensation drop for those switching companies. It’s a shift that Blackthorn.io’s Chris Federspiel says will be difficult for those used to the level of resources and company culture at an enterprise.

“It sucks, but it's not the worst thing because they can still get a job,” says Federspiel. “It's not like they're farmers and we're facing a ten-year drought and there's nothing to do. If you have a skill where you can still land a job pretty quickly, just get something a bit lesser paid for a year or two and see what happens.”

For small businesses and startups, who’ve traditionally lost out on top talent because they haven’t been able to boast the lure of huge benefits or salaries, they can lean on the situation to attract the talent they’re seeking. The company culture at smaller companies, for example, tends to be warmer and more favourable and, now more than ever, employees might value the feeling of being valued, rather than a higher salary. Some of the biggest companies, too, are turning back the clock on hybrid work, with SMBs and startups more inclined to be forward-thinking on reimagining the structure of work.

Gibbs adds that while the industry may be aflutter with the tech that could conceivably replace workers across various roles, it’s important to focus on what these tools just can’t do. “[Generative AI] can't be human; it can't lead a team, it can't connect with others with other areas of expertise, it can't bring out the best in others, it can't build a business case,” he points out. “That's what I think organisations should look for. People that have extremely good tech skills, people that are wanting to work very hard to solve a problem, people that are bought into the mission, and people that are not just techs, they're well rounded.”

Three years after the pandemic began, some companies are already looking to turn back the clock on hybrid work. Many employers, including a surprising number in Silicon Valley, have been keen to get workers back into the office, even while COVID-19 continued to range.

Google, for example, warned in early 2021 that hybrid work could harm its corporate culture, before performing a u-turn and approving the majority of requests to work remotely. Netflix boss Reed Hastings, similarly, once claimed he saw no positives in remote working.

Most recently, Elon Musk scrapped Twitter’s ‘work from anywhere’ policy and went so far as to install beds in its headquarters. Harking back to the past in this way and reneging on the promises of freedom and flexibility that came with remote work would be a mistake, with workers more empowered than ever to vote with their feet and seek the flexibility they crave elsewhere.

Losing out on remote working gains

Despite productivity climbing as much as 40% during the pandemic, when remote work was rife, these benefits might have gone over the heads of many. For some, any gains would have been simply absorbed by the economic hardship inflicted by COVID-19, while in more recent times these gains will have gone on to plug the financial woes caused by the cost of living crisis and surging inflation.

As anxieties grow, more traditionalist business leaders might even associate weakening financial performance within their companies with the rise of flexible working. This would, of course, be a false conclusion to draw. It might also be further exacerbated by leaders who find it hard to adapt and want to reflexively return to an age when things were far more straightforward.

Now, however, workers have had a taste of the golden apple, and forcing them to work from the office isn’t going to help anybody. Times have changed and it’s become part of the evolving fabric of work, much like upgrading from an ageing operating system to Windows 11.

The key difference is it’s a cultural change that’s still being worked through – with benefits less clear and harder to measure. Nevertheless, some businesses continue to push for more office-based work, using reasons like “collaboration”, despite a rampant expansion of digital collaboration tools during COVID-19.

Why turning back the clock is a mistake

When the nine-to-five was the norm, employees will have accepted this given the lack of choice. Although employers might not have felt the productivity gains, employees certainly have, in addition to more flexibility and added benefits. By mandating a return to the office, you are asking workers to return to:

• Commuting, which will cost time and money
• Spending less time with their families
• Living in high-rent areas (presumably closer to the business)
• Foraging for overpriced sandwiches at lunch rather than having access to a full kitchen

Workers will be more empowered than ever now to vote with their feet, should their organisation withdraw the benefit. Indeed, 27% of male and 35% of female workers would search for a new role if their employer asked them to return to the office. This might particularly sting in the context of labour shortages.

With desperation in the air, could rowing back on remote work also be some kind of show of strength for investors? Shares in Google, for example, went up by 4% in the wake of news it took the tough decision to let go 12,000 workers. Executives who wander into the territory of tweaking working arrangements should take heed of how much employees – including highly skilled workers – value their newfound flexibility. This trend, if left unchecked, could weaken the foundations of a company.

Collaborating to define the future of hybrid work

This return to the past, particularly in the tech industry, also coincides with mass layoffs, including at Amazon and Salesforce alongside Microsoft and other major names. For executives who favour the previous status quo, what's stopping them from exploiting the leverage they’ve gained given the recent wave of redundancies – and an increasingly competitive job market – to enforce unpopular policies around hybrid work? For that reason, and others, it’s incidentally never been a better time for tech workers to unionise.

Instead of slashing remote work policies, businesses should be refining them – alongside workers and trade unions – to make sure they work for everyone. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), for example, recently found remote working helps prevent job losses and works to maintain employment levels. Flexible working also need regulating to mitigate any negative effects, as well as give workers a “right to disconnect”. There’s a higher danger of burnout and reduced productivity if employees don’t exercise this right. Plus, not all hybrid work policies are equal, with some organisations creating two or more tiers of workers who could be treated differently, be expected to perform different duties, or might even be paid differently.

This could also be a great time for companies to downsize their offices and make sizeable savings. Should more businesses embrace this cultural shift, it could transform the way cities and business hubs are structured. Some floors of office buildings will be retained, for instance, but others might be converted into retail space, or even much-needed housing. Businesses could grasp this opportunity to be a part of a reimagination of cities and office spaces – or they could risk being left behind.

Innovations have helped businesses enormously, and it's giving workers more freedom to work from anywhere. This isn’t a bad thing, and just because we used to work a certain way – and things seemed to work just fine on a surface level – that doesn’t mean we need to revert to those norms when times get tough. Perhaps, once we’ve come to appreciate the impact technology has made on our professional lives, employers might begin seriously entertaining even more radical ideas like the four-day week.

For many firms, disaster recovery and business continuity mainly involve how to continue functioning after, say, a data centre has flooded, or a JCB digger has accidentally cut all the phone and data cables to an office. It could even involve something as disastrous as a terrorist incident in a city – meaning workers have to work elsewhere for a while until normality returns. But how does a company, with people and offices scattered throughout a country, carry on when it's been invaded by a belligerent neighbour?

This is exactly the challenge IT services and consultancy firm Intellias faced last year. Based in Lviv, western Ukraine, the company has 3,000 employees scattered in its home country. It was founded in 2002 by Michael Puzrakov, the company’s managing director, and Vitaliy Sedler, its CEO, and has evolved into a global firm that provides software engineering services in industries such as transportation, financial services, telecommunications, retail, and energy.

On 24 February last year, Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine after Russia had built up a large military presence on the border. When the war began, like many other Ukrainian companies, Intellias couldn’t just stop everything and wait for the war to finish; it had to keep going, and continue serving its customers – many of which formed vital layers of Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure (CNI).

When the first rockets struck

Sedler admits that, prior to 2014, business continuity and disaster recovery plans with regards to any war were far more theoretical for the company. There were plans in place, he tells IT Pro, but no expectation the worst would actually happen. Then, Russia annexed Crimea and the Donbas, and what was once a formality began to turn into something frighteningly realistic.

“For that reason, we came up with detailed plans of what we would do in different scenarios,” says Sedler. “At that point in time we didn’t have to execute any plans. It was closer to a ‘business as usual’ situation. But, in 2020, there was a moment of truth in the nation. Russian soldiers gathered at the borders. The plans we had, we needed to take them and make them much more detailed – make it really well planned.”

Sedler says they worked on a couple of scenarios from minor military activity in the east of Ukraine all the way to an invasion. Although they were “prepared for all scenarios”, neither Sedler nor Puzrakov thought a full-scale war as we have witnessed it was on the cards.

When the first rockets struck at roughly 5am on 24 February, Sedler took a call from one of his directors in charge of the response team. It was clear the war had started. At 5:30am, Sedler said “we need to do something”. It took three to four hours to begin executing their plans. By 9am, the right people and processes were in place.

Vitaly Sedler (pictured) founded the company with Michael Puzrakov in 2002

Within a couple of weeks, they moved roughly 1,300 people from southern and eastern Ukraine, where the majority of the early violence was felt, to western Ukraine. The company, at this point, had two priorities: the first was the safety of staff and their family members, and the second was continuous delivery. It was important to deliver to clients because the firm understood if they stopped everything, the trust they’d built over years would be severely strained. Impressively, the plan to continue business processes and restore operations took two weeks to get back to almost 100%.

Migrating to the cloud, and far away from Ukraine

Intellias had since 2014 to draw up detailed plans of what to do should Russia invade the country, as suggested previously. One of the key actions the company took to mitigate the effects of any future war, Sedler reveals, was to move as much of its IT infrastructure into the cloud, and as much of it outside Ukraine, as possible.

The second part of this strategy revolved around the location of hardware. Many of Intellias' clients are in the automotive industry, meaning the company handled car parts and units for which they developed software. These had to be relocated away from potential war zones.

The plans also involved setting up emergency teams in different locations with different responsibilities, such as teams that would put people onto buses to get away from the conflict. Other employees would work in communications teams to maintain contact with other employees and clients during any war. Sedler says it was crucial to develop the management team so they could organise the plan very quickly in the event of any conflict.

It was also important to open several channels of communication, and not rely on just one. In the first few days of the war, for instance, colleagues used both email and Microsoft Teams to post updates and check for news from other colleagues.

Over recent weeks, communication has become critical again due to Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. “Just to give you an example, every morning at 8am I receive an SMS about what is happening in our offices, whether things are up and running,” says Sedler, “so all people understand if anything happens, they can come to the office and have guaranteed power supply and internet connection.”

Putting people first in the face of conflict

Even in the worst possible circumstances, there are lessons to be learnt from the experience of trying to keep a company online during a war.

Sedler says Intellias managed to continue because it was more of a people-centric company than one solely focused on profit. Rather than solely caring about growth metrics, the people-first mindset framed its disaster recovery plans.

Intellias prides itself on being a people-centric company, and factored employee wellbeing into any disaster recovery plans as a priority

In practice, this meant the company helped people to get away from the most dangerous areas highly efficiently. Intellias even helped moved employees’ cats, dogs and other pets. In turn, it meant there was, and continues to be, extremely high employee commitment.

For Ukrainian businesses such as his to carry on, Sedler continues, the wider commitment across the population to support Ukraine and its business ecosystem must not falter. “It’s important to work with Ukrainian businesses so the money can come in to pay taxes and pay salaries. This is very helpful.”

Before the dolphins left Earth ahead of its destruction by the Vogons in sci-fi classic the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they sent a final message to humanity: “So long, and thanks for all the fish”. It was all over, and the dolphins were signing off. Many IT companies are arguably in a similar position.

The comparison is not absurd, with the cost of living crisis truly taking hold and shockwaves set to roll through economies worldwide over the next year or two. Geopolitical issues and post-pandemic trade constraints leading to supply-and-demand mismatches mean individual UK businesses, including many IT providers, are set to take a huge hit, to the extent their world could be over soon. This is the reality of what it means to be in recession.

Indeed, 42% of UK manufacturers have already seen energy bills double in 12 months, according to industry body MakeUK, and if government support ends in April, energy costs could double again for some. This is despite best efforts to slash energy bills.

Analysis from the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) forecasts a deep, five-quarter recession lasting until the end of 2023. Business investment, exports and household consumption will all remain subdued, and inflation will still be pegged at 5%, down from 11% at the time of writing, but far off the Bank of England's 2% target. And then there's Brexit, which is still shackling UK trade.

The typically bullish Confederation of British Industry (CBI) warns, overall, of a potential decade of lost growth. At the least, more belt-tightening can be expected, with demands falling out of scope as a 'great reset' of tech adoption roadmaps follows.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide, the dolphins tried to communicate the impending threat to the people of Earth, only to have their attempts misinterpreted. In the end, only two humans managed to escape, more or less by accident. But tech companies shouldn't leave adaptation to chance.

Cost-cutting and collaborating to fight recession in 2023

What can be done when the digital transformation that’s become so essential for many businesses is held back by a shortage of of knowledge, skills, budgets and hardware? Mapping capability onto areas of opportunity will mean investing to drive savings and efficiencies, including office running costs.

Matt Eustace, solution engineering head at data management company Aiimi, notes this might prove a bright spot for IT in areas like robotic process automation (RPA), especially where benefits can be achieved with existing talent and technology.

"A crucial part of this will involve balancing the need to protect information in an increasingly hostile environment against the need to exploit that same information more efficiently to improve productivity," he suggests.

Increased macroeconomic challenges and ongoing supply chain issues could partly be counteracted by fostering collaborative efforts, even across industries, to produce data-driven insights that increase forecasting capabilities and reduce risk.

Sam Attias, product marketer at process mining company Celonis, confirms data sharing has traditionally been seen as inaccessible for businesses, although tribulations over the last two years have pushed more companies to share and benchmark data internally. "This leads to lack of visibility when companies can least afford it," Attias points out.

Criminals too will take advantage of technological advances, including artificial intelligence (AI). Ransomware isn't going anywhere, either, and the risk is higher when more organisations outsource so much of their infrastructure.

Some industries must return to the drawing board

Of course, it's potentially costly if you get it wrong. Many providers may not themselves have deep enough pockets to keep up with evolving demands. Even top cloud vendors, after all, missed revenue targets in Q3, according to Canalys, after all. The organisation notes that while demand remains strong, customers will be hoping to get better bang for every pound of spending.

With companies wary of overspending on cloud transformation, it will be incumbent on providers to justify the business case to satisfy increasingly thrifty customers, some of whom may be more cynical about the promise of any given solution than they might have been several years ago.

Prashant Ketkar, CTO at software firm Alludo, suggests this should result in even more focus on hybrid cloud, including full-fledged cloud services and legacy infrastructure integrations.

"Skill shortages will continue to be a challenge,” Ketkar points out, however. “Employees who have the needed skillsets to build serverless and cloud-native infrastructures are rare. And if they are lucky enough to find them, they’ll have to pay a lot to convince them to leave their company.”

Other essential and traditional growth areas in IT, including cyber security, may also be in line for – as CompTIA puts it – a 'return to strategy'. "Many technology businesses will have to leave their comfort zone to thrive,” says Carolyn April, senior director for industry analysis at CompTIA. “That means thoroughly examining and adjusting their current operations, sales and marketing, human resources and strategic innovation efforts."

While customers can be "as enthusiastic as ever about the role technology plays in their success", they will be much more demanding and scrutinising of any claims or promises made, she warns.

Adapting your business strategy

Some technologies might be deemphasised, with spending redeployed. Knowing how to budget in a financial squeeze will be crucial. Typical candidates for shelving might include new hardware implementations and software upgrades that don't deliver a cost advantage in the near term, relative to customer core objectives.

No vendor wants a demand for 'their' tech to be shelved, even temporarily, but even the most inept, unsympathetic businessperson must concede customers may need to sacrifice to survive. Providers that can't adapt to customer needs in such times may themselves be swept off the board.

Despite continued hype about metaverses and AI coming of age in the form of ChatGPT, it's clear B2B IT has bigger fish to fry. It's likely we'll see more consolidation across the B2B IT space in coming years – and not only in hardware or cloud.

Brian Knudtson, director of product market intelligence at cloud, connectivity and security company 11:11 Systems, says, for example, that despite demand based on rising cyber risk and attack rates, even cyber security providers are suffering.

"Acquisitions and layoffs have been high,” Knudtson confirms. “In 2023 and onward, the looming recession will contain the ambition of these innovators and their investors.”

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘The trends we’re watching in 2023'. We apologise for any errors.

Jane McCallion

Hi, I'm Jane McCallion.

Rory Bathgate

And I'm Rory Bathgate.

Jane

And you are listening to another festive edition of the IT Pro Podcast.

Rory

It's the time of year where people like to make predictions, experts in the tech sector will be pointing to the top trends for 2023, as well as the technologies that they think could take root or really take off in the new year.

Jane

And indeed, in the past, this is something that we have done on the IT Pro Podcast and on the website. But this year, we're taking a slightly different tack. Rather than making predictions and perhaps looking back on ourselves a little bit foolish in a couple of months time, such as me in 2020 predicting that COVID was going to be nothing, we've decided to take a look at the continuing trends that are happening now that we feel will influence the coming year.

Rory

Absolutely. And to start off with we're looking at a story that hasn't dominated headlines for the whole year. But throughout November and December has dominated headlines. That is the situation at Twitter, and what this means for the balance of social media.

Jane

Yes, so this is one that rumbled from about May onwards, when Tesla CEO and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was forced, frankly, to buy Twitter after some shenanigans earlier on in the year. On again, off again on again off again. Finally, he has and he is — I was gonna say reshaping it in his own image but he's, he's reshaping it in the shape of something, something.

Rory

A crater. A crater in the ground. Yes I think if you've been regularly listening to the podcast, for the last couple of episodes, it has come up briefly. We discussed the problem with verification, in our episode on identity. And I think this is the initial crux of the issue was Musk coming in on a mantra of free speech, free speech absolutism. And the verification system such as it was at time of acquisition was was really in his sights.

Jane

It's probably worth talking about what the verification system was doing at the time. So it's something that Twitter has had a problem with, it's been a bit up and down for a while. Now, I personally am a 'blue tick' at a point where you could basically just submit a form saying I'm a worthy person. Yeah, I'm, I'm journalist with a well known B2B technology publication. IT Pro in case that wasn't clear, and I was able to get verification like that. Prior to that it seemed to be, more or less, a bit random. And then they put the verification, or at least verification requests, on hold for a bit. Now Musk took a bit of a different tack to how this verification system should work, and a very libertarian tack.

Rory

Absolutely. After weeks of rumours surrounding a paid verification tier, and a very public spat with Stephen King, in which he appeared to be haggling the price down they eventually unveiled the $8 Twitter Blue verification system. Which would let anyone who was willing to pay $8 a month be verified on Twitter. Now, it's worth noting that all of these changes in the initial weeks following the acquisition were happening against a backdrop of a very, very public redundancies of Twitter employees. Within a few days of taking control of the company, Musk fired the entire executive board, and shortly afterwards 50% of Twitter's entire workforce were fired overnight. Some of them found out by losing control of their Slack. Others had their laptops remotely wiped, or lost control of their or lost access to their company Gmail accounts. It was a very widely reported upending of the workforce. A lot of employees ironically took to Twitter to register their grievance at having been fired, and it also heralded a massive change in the internal company strategy. In the same time period. Musk demanded that employees should subscribe to 'hard core' is how he described it, hard core work ethic. There was an email that was circulated to employees that gave them a deadline by which they had to agree to the new working conditions, or accept severance pay and leave their roles which led to another wave of resignations and redundancies of people who hadn't exactly quit but weren't agreeing to the new terms, leaving the Twitter workforce really a shadow of its former self by the end of November.

Jane

So there are lots of things packaged up in this. One of them that struck me, actually, is this email about the hardcore workers, you know, "you've got to work 80 hours a day", and all that kind of stuff. The manner of doing it, I think, is possibly against a lot of EU and definitely British working regulations. Now, this may not sound like a particularly techy topic. But it's something that American companies and often American sort of social media companies, tech companies, startup companies rub up against; they don't have the same protections as we do over here. You can't just say to somebody, "agree to these unreasonable conditions, or you're out". That's, that's not a way to, it's not a way to run anything. And it's not a legal way to run anything over here. So I do wonder how much of the workforce affected was over here, versus how many were in the US. That said it's by the by because the big fallout of this was, like you said, it an identity issue.

Rory

Exactly. We've got some very interesting legal comment in our coverage of these original changes in the workforce, which will be in the show notes. But the flaws in the changes to the verification system became very quickly apparent. One of the most notable examples in the immediate aftermath of the change was with the company Eli Lilly, which is a pharmaceutical giant in America, and also Lockheed Martin, which is an aerospace and weapons manufacturer. Both had their official accounts impersonated by a random user who who paid $8.

Jane

Somebody with a spare $8, yeah.

Rory

Exactly. In the case of Eli Lilly, I'm paraphrasing here, but the tweet was along the lines of "insulin is now free". And a similarly damaging tweet for Lockheed Martin was put out to change the company brand image. And in both cases, both companies had billions knocked off their share value, which is a kind of a...

Jane

It's a big deal.

Rory

Yeah, a very vivid illustration of the kind of problems that these these changes can cause. There's a lot of concern registered by advertisers. A bunch of notable household names, at the time of the change, had put their Twitter advertising budgets on pause, were holding off on advertising on Twitter until the situation could be stabilised or remedied. And indeed, there was a kind of a screeching U turn within a week or two of the change coming into effect in which they stepped back.

Jane

So I think it's worth kind of actually looking at the history of this a little bit. This isn't the first time it's happened. I'm not one of those people who is to throw myself in front of valid criticism of Elon Musk. But those of us who are old enough to remember the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, may remember that a certain Wendi Deng who was at the time the wife of Rupert Murdoch suddenly had a verified Twitter account. And it wasn't it wasn't her, it was quite manifestly not her. But that was at the time when Twitter was just like, "yeah sure, seems legit, blue tick". So while this particular instance of sort of raking in $8, from people who actually care to be verified leading to chaos, it's not the first time that Twitter has had a verification issue at all, at all.

Rory

Exactly. It follows a long history of changes at the platform, but it does illustrate, at least for me, how unstable the platform is. Because it's become such a noteworthy social media platform, a channel for official communication, government communication, and a real key channel for advertising for companies. You kind of come to think of Twitter as a kind of immutable entity that that can't be brought down by a couple of simple changes to its moderation, or to its verification policies. But of course, that's what we've seen happen.

Jane

I would challenge you. We haven't seen Twitter disappear.

Rory

No.

Jane

Oh, no, it's gone now. Rory, no Rory's living in the future and 2023 we're predicting the downfall of Twitter.

Rory

So it's interesting. I think what I mean is that the image of Twitter, as with some other social media platforms it’s okay, there's an outage now and again, but the platform is more or less unkillable. I think that's been shaken up in a lot of people's minds. I think it's reminded people that these platforms do rely on a workforce. Again, it'll be in the show notes but we put out a story on one of the systems engineers who is behind Twitter's automation system, and the systems that keep the platform at its most basic levels running. He's behind most of those, he put up a blog post to explain why it's more or less good no matter how many people they fire up within that department to keep going barring natural disaster that takes out the data centre or something along those lines. But in other departments like, for example, the comms department, I know that a lot of journalists were shocked to discover in the immediate weeks following the acquisition, that they couldn't get comments from Twitter, because, as the Verge put it, "there is no longer a communications department at Twitter". Now at time of recording, I'm not sure if people have been hired again in that in those roles. But it does upend your image of this kind of monolithic social media entity and force you to take a step back and remember that, you know, if it was continued to be managed in the way that it was, in the first few weeks, Twitter very well might have lost a good chunk of its advertisers. And while it might not have gone up in flames, for a minute there it was really suffering in terms of ad revenue. And, you know, it's course corrected a bit now. But I think it's been potentially quite damaging for the company image.

Jane

Yeah. And there were a lot of users who to say that they jumped ship isn't right, because a lot of them are still there. But they have also joined alternative services, such as notably Mastodon.

Rory

Exactly. So the reason we bring all this up is because it's this upending of the social media ecosystem, and forcing people to consider alternatives, we think is likely to continue on in 2023. And Mastodon is really chief among these alternatives. Although it functions a bit differently to Twitter, it runs using servers, which are a bit more siloed than the kind of homogenous experience you'd expect from from a lot of modern social media. And as a result has been compared to more of a forum experience by some users, Mastodon has seen massive interest and massive growth in user base in the last two months. Its traffic has risen from 1.4 to 9.5 million in the past month.

Jane

I wonder how sticky and sustainable that is?

Rory

Yeah, I think something that Mastodon has immediately run into is the problem with onboarding that many people. I know that when the Twitter changes first came into effect, Mastodon didn't exactly present itself as a as an alternative, people found it and said, "this is good enough" and moved there. And I think the system admins were struggling to keep up with the server load for a sec. But also, there are questions that remain around the viability of the platform. Now, it completely depends on on your, what you want out of your social media. I think people who already have quite an established following, and maybe they communicate with their following in a way akin to say a blog. So I've seen a few legal commentators on Twitter have really taken to Mastodon, like a duck to water. That's beneficial for them. If you're trying to grow a following on Mastodon, it is harder. As I've said before, the kind of siloed nature prevents people from maybe accidentally stumbling across your across your account in the same way that you can on Twitter. And I know that some people, alternatively, who have spent years growing a following on Twitter are quite reluctant to kind of up and move to another platform, especially people who who feel they've really just made it. They can't now afford to say, "everyone who follows me on here, you know, you should all enrol in this site as well". And there's a whole there's a whole extended process involved in that which logistically can be quite difficult. And I think companies also, a big thing about Mastodon is it has no verification process in the same way that Twitter does.

Jane

We're back to Wendi Deng and all that from the beginning again.

Rory

Exactly. We've seen the problems that that can cause so I think advertisers, companies might be reluctant.

Jane

I mean I think, when it comes to Twitter, we're not gonna see it topple over in my opinion. I appreciate that I'm making a prediction here. But I think what we are going to see is just basically a continuation, for now, for the next couple of months, which I think is as far into the future that we can really predict, continued sort of like fumbling, you know, a few users getting freaked out again. But actually, in the end, it just kind of fumbles along. Maybe sort of Musk takes a step back, but I really think it's hard to predict what any individual is going to do. But yeah, definitely for the first say quarter of 2023 Twitter is gonna, it's still gonna be there as a service. It will still face the same problems as it ever has, which is monetization and verification. You know, depending on how things go, it looks like yeah, they're really pushing Twitter Blue. That's certainly something that I'm seeing on the sidebar of my account right now. But, yeah, I think the stories of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Rory

And of course, as we mentioned, last episode Meta faces financial difficulties going into 2023. They've already locked in a lot of Metaverse tech R&D, which is going to be difficult to get out of which exacerbates an existing issue they're having which is that it's not making a lot of money right now. And there's not a lot of investor confidence in it. Other trends in 2023, that I have already been signalled are the UK Government, as has been for the last few years, is opposed to end to end encryption without a backdoor for government services, which puts them on a crash course with WhatsApp —

Jane

With reality. With reality, is what it puts it on a crash course with. "Oh yeah a backdoor, but only for the government. Uh huh, that's not how technology works".

Rory

Exactly. So that's gonna that's likely a fight that will continue to play itself out throughout 2023 and probably 2024. And then in the US, there is a bill that has been proposed in Congress to limit or ban Tiktok in the country. Now, TikTok has already faced criticism by US officials. Earlier this year, TikTok made moves to divest operations in America. Oracle now handles all of the US users information —

Jane

Why do they care? Can you just update us on why Congress cares about what, as far as I can tell, is an app where people post dances, yoga and then being the main characters. Why do they care?

Rory

So Tik Tok has repeatedly been called a national security concern. TikTok obviously denies this. And there's a lot of talk and back and forth around the potential for information to be shared, harvested, and because of ByteDance's links to the to the Chinese government, there's always been a back and forth between America and indeed other nation states, such as India, which put a TikTok ban in place in 2020. But this is similar to the end to end encryption fight. This is unlikely to resolve itself in 2023.

Jane

I mean, I'll be honest with you, if Congress people would stop using TikTok to film themselves twerking, then it wouldn't be it wouldn't be a national security issue, you wouldn't have to worry about the government getting access to your highly encrypted and secure Wi-Fi. This is the solution.

Rory

Well, we'll see how that relates to 2023.

Jane

Okay.

Moving on, from dancing everybody, onto something else that's also a big trend for kind of silly. People cannot stop talking about AI, generative AI. Can you quickly explain for us what generative AI is?

Rory

Absolutely. So generative AI has been in the works for quite a few years. There's a couple of different companies doing it. OpenAI is the one that's really been dominating conversation on Twitter in the past few weeks. So OpenAI's, natural language processing model, and generative model GPT is now in its fourth iteration. And this is essentially an AI model where you can input a prompt and it will spit out either an image or a text output. We've seen this throughout the year with with DALL·E and DALL·E Mini. People are having a lot of fun typing in any prompt, and a kind of illustrated image comes out as a result. And there are a bunch of different companies doing this as well, different models in the market for this, like Stable Diffusion, and Craiyon, which is a free version.

Jane

You of course, have some experience with DALL·E and ChatGPT that our listeners can have a look at as part of our recent content.

Rory

Absolutely. So I was set the enviable task of creating some Christmas cards from IT Pro, using Chat GPT, and DALL·E. And I have to say that the outputs were, almost without exception, pretty much nonsense. I think generative AI is is doubtlessly becoming more powerful by the month. These are models that are trained by their user base, and are now operating with hundreds of millions of images worth of training. That having been said, there is a knack to getting it to output something that is usable in any in any real world setting. You can see in the show notes, the article on Christmas cards. And I mean, see for yourself, how many of these you'd be willing to give to a co-worker?

Jane

Depends how much your co-worker really.

Rory

True. I think we were discussing this just before we started recording the podcast. But I think the problem with a lot of AI images. One of the problems right now is that because they work on something called a diffusion model, which is essentially generating images that start out as just noise, random pixels, and then changed pixel by pixel, based on a statistical model to resemble the prompts that you've given it, they almost always just look very wobbly and strange when you when you look at them in any kind of fine detail. If you squint, and you stand back, first glance, they look alright.

Jane

Yes, and this is you're almost in an uncanny valley situation. So this is something that we've seen with the Christmas cards that you've very kindly created for us. But also, some of the other things that I've seen people playing around with. There was somebody who put in that they wanted the machine to generate some text from Shakespeare. And it's interesting to look at, like, at first glance, it's like, "oh, yeah this is, wow, that's really good". And then you're like, actually it's not, because it's kind of, it's not about anything. It's all just like, "but forsooth, sir. I dost see that thou art the most powerful king in the land. Yes, you are correct". This is not Shakespeare. But it's written in the style of Shakespeare. But, you know, like I say, it's that kind of first glance that surface level thing that it really looks like it could be right. Apart from some of them, especially DALL·E. But yeah, that first glimpse, you're like, Oh, yeah. And they're like well, "happy storage".

Rory

Yeah. What I've discovered also tinkering for the Christmas cards, is that it doesn't currently have any real understanding of form, or of metre. I tried to get it to generate some haikus. It cannot do haikus, it cannot do poetry. I asked for a haiku that had the word 'Kubernetes' in it. And the first line of the haiku was 'Kubernetes'. Which is a great start.

Jane

Now that we've got that out of the way...

Rory

Let's, let's give you something that still isn't a haiku. So there's a long way to go in terms of the text generation. Because a lot of these tools are free to use, they run often on a credit system where you get, you know, X number of goes a month or something and you can pay for more. These are just at the moment, they seem quite a fun toy, people are going to continue to talk about them because they're very easy to use. They're very easy to access. And for that they're quite powerful. So it's very easy to see that, you know, these are going to continue to dominate conversation in 2023.

Jane

Recently, though, there have been some problems that are perhaps slightly less entertaining than chortling at Christmas cards. The notable one would be Stack Overflow. They are a knowledge repository for technologists. So if you're listening to this, you probably know that, and they've banned, temporarily so they say, Chat GPT from the platform because very much like we were just saying it's coming up with things that superficially look like answers to the questions that people are asking. But they're not like, the form is kind of right, but the actual answers are not helpful or are nonsense. And it's overwhelming the mod team there. So this is a kind of now that people are starting to use it a bit more seriously, I guess, it's starting to throw up real world problems. And these have just started, so are very likely to continue into the new year. This is one of these continuing trends.

Rory

Absolutely. You know, something that comes to mind is a few years ago, this is terrible that I can't remember the exact example. But quite a well known website was down. And there was a Twitter thread by a programmer who said, I know, I know what exact error has caused this website to go down. And I know why. And it's because a few years ago, I gave this code as an answer on Stack Overflow. And I was wrong, there's a logic error in it. But unfortunately, because I was up-voted, or however voting works in StackOverflow, because so many people said "this is it, this is the correct answer". And because there's only a very specific circumstance in which it would cause the code to crash, people still think it's the correct answer. And there's nothing I can do to, you know, un-post that, it's now been shared so many times as as the correct solution. And I think this is something that the moderators have expressed concern over currently with with Stack Overflow is Chat GPT, like we're saying, is very good at giving answers that at first glance appear perfectly right. But in some cases, moderators have had to go over, and bearing in mind they're experts in programming, have had to go over an answer several times before they figured out exactly what error the AI has introduced into the code. And therefore lock the post, remove it as an answer. So the problem is, this isn't obviously isolated to just one account, anyone can go to Chat GPT, to Open AI, and ask for these answers. And then post them as if this is something they've written. And because it's written with the correct authorial voice as well, it can come across as as if it's been written by an expert programmer, when in fact, it could have quite damaging errors and in the code.

Jane

I do want to kind of, you know, what is, what is the motivation behind this? If you're not an expert, you're not even confidently incorrect. You know, this isn't your own thoughts. Are you hoping that Chat GPT, misunderstanding what it is, hoping that it's going to come out with the right answer, because it's AI and you don't really know that? Are you doing it for fake internet points? Are you just doing it to to mess with people? I really struggle to see what the motivation is there, and whatever that motivation is is going to continue to be a problem in the situation and others as well, that we probably haven't come across yet.

Rory

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a mix. It's a mix of all of the above. I mean, I've never been one to really understand that the desire to accrue made up internet points, but it's certainly a big driving factor for people. And I think there's also unfortunately, you know, a sizable user base who were just trying to share what they think is a good answer. I think, Twitter, a lot of Twitter posts were made in the weeks following this model becoming publicly available, where people were really proposing it as an alternative to Google to find answers saying "oh, it's so much more detailed in the answers that it gives".

Jane

You're consulting the oracle at this point, honestly, or throwing down some some bones and some chicken entrails and hoping to get divine an answer. This is God forgive, I can feel my blood pressure rising. Listeners, I'm sure you've missed me being extremely angry about this technology in general. But it is like the modern day equivalent of yeah, consulting the oracle, consulting the spirits, and you've seen this over and over again in tech that people just take it to be some kind of new all powerful all knowing being, whereas actually, it's got the reasoning of a six month old.

Rory

Yeah, it's very capable of sounding like an expert. It's not an expert, and it's not peer reviewed. And it's not — Or maybe peer reviewed isn't the right term. Because obviously there are there's a lot of research that goes into generating the model. But once the model is out there, there's no real oversight of each individual response that it's going to give.

Jane

They are the self-published novels of answers to technical questions.

Rory

Exactly. And I mean, I had a muck around with the the text model in generating some simple Python code. And I, you know, I have a basic understanding of Python and the code it gave me was sound, it would work. But the point is, I didn't have to consult anyone, no one saw the code that it gave me apart from me. So if I copied and pasted this into something more critical... alarm bells maybe are are ringing at that point for systems administrators. And I think with Stack Overflow as well, because it's become such a trusted resource, it makes sense that they would want to put the brakes on this one until we can actually figure out maybe a better moderation or oversight process.

Jane

Yeah or indeed, if you let it back on the platform at all. Maybe the answer is to make this ban permanent.

Rory

Yeah. Yeah, it very well could be. I'd be remiss, while we're talking about the AI models, not to mention something that's already very, very dominant in conversation around them. And that is copyright and artistic licence.

Jane

Oh, yeah.

Rory

This is I mean, this could this could be a whole podcast in and of itself. And I'm certainly I'm not a copyright legal expert. But I know that a lot of artists are, shall we say, very displeased already, at the way that the models are trained, which is essentially scraping images off the internet. There has been a growing trend recently, where you'll see someone posts, if you follow artists on Twitter, or Instagram or anywhere, really. There's been a growing trend, where in the comments, if you look out for them, you'll see people saying, "what kind of art style would you describe your art as?" And it looks like you know, it's an innocent enough question. But very quickly artists have figured out that actually, what these people mean is "what prompt can I can I put into something like DALL·E to reproduce art that looks like yours?" Or indeed, reproduce art that has been trained on your art to produce something, something for myself? This is I mean, we're not making predictions, but this is already kind of causing a lot of headaches. Doubtless, legal experts are gearing up for several protracted battles over this. Again, I'm not under a legal expert. I'm not this doesn't apply to any specific company or any company's model currently. But it's definitely an ethical and legal discussion that's gonna continue to grow in momentum throughout 2023. And I imagine for as long as AI models are trained on publicly available art, including text.

Jane

Yeah, yeah. And something else that, you know, I've seen come up within this is these artists, if you like, who have used some kind of generative AI to create whatever it is they're coming up with. Somebody then uses that as a prompt to create their own stuff, and then they start getting upset. So yeah, I think there's a lot of plagiarism. Am I being a little bit slanderous myself? But yeah, to be honest with you, plagiarism and then plagiarism of plagiarism going on. It's a tricky one.

Rory

Yeah, it's kind of an ethical minefield right now. And it's the difference between a fun tool that you can use and, as you pointed out, when you start to infringe on other people's work. And I wouldn't be surprised if companies are also looking at this. I think any company that has very, very visually distinct IP right now is likely having these conversations internally. And you know, as models are trained, this doesn't just apply to visual imagery either. That same goes for things like source code, as you as you said, you can you can generate code quite easily using it. And I think, if it has access to public repositories, that's a whole separate minefield, that maybe could rear its head or continue to in 2023.

Jane

So the final topic that we're going to touch on, it's a classic, it's come back, we are dipping into recession again. This is not a prediction, once again it is happening right now. And economists believe that it's going to last until 2024. The words are being used is "long but shallow", which I'm not, I'm not sure whether I prefer long, shallow recessions to short, sharp recessions. Or if I indeed have a favourite, but this is going to affect everything, and everyone it always does. The tech industry quite often proves to be fairly resilient to this or tech positions. But it's very hard to say whether or not that is going to be the case again this time.

Rory

Yeah, so we've heard the phrase "economic headwinds" passed around a lot. In the last year, as we came out of government spending on the pandemic, and also around the invasion of Ukraine. There's a lot to costs and a lot to inflation. Obviously, your mileage may vary by country, individual government decisions have impacted this in different regions as well.

Jane

We also had in this country, the mini budget, and Liz Truss' brief but impactful premiership that other countries have not had to deal with. So, you know, even if this is a global recession, we are perhaps on the backfoot a little bit. There's also another thing to take into consideration, which was not the case during the previous most recent recession, which is which I think was 2012. It's been many in my lifetime. And we are now far more in a sort of hybrid working, remote working world, which may or may not have some impact as well.

Rory

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something a lot of companies are now contending with this is kind of happening as a double whammy alongside the energy crisis. There's a lot of calculations going on about whether it's better to have your workforce at home or have them in a kind of a centralised office —

Jane

Where they can huddle together for warmth —

Rory

Exactly. And also, frankly, a lot of cuts, a lot of cost-saving measures already being implemented. We saw Meta following, their recent financials to bring that back up again, fired 11,000 people, and they were quite frank in saying "we just made the wrong predictions with our investments, they didn't they play out as we were expecting". And that's kind of on them. But it's emblematic of wider measures that are being made in the tech sector. Microsoft has similarly made moves to slow hiring. I mean, we've seen Google earlier in the year allegedly cut an entire Pixelbook range. Smaller, and larger decisions like this are all adding up to a kind of an overall picture of — spending is being reduced in the tech sector.

Jane

And within IT departments as well, this is going to have a knock on effect. Even if hopefully, you don't have to make many or any redundancies, the problem is going to be if there's no money to go around it's an awful lot harder to make your case for investment in IT. Whether that is anything from upgrading your users laptops, to a new server for your data centre, or even you know a new cloud contract. In general, procurement is going to be a big issue for the next year or two. And we actually have plenty of written content coming up on the website about that kind of thing. So do keep an eye out for all that.

Rory

There's just going to be a lot more of this coming out. This isn't again, this is not so much a prediction. It's just the reality of the situation. We're already seeing companies, I mean halfway through the year, we were seeing companies starting to make these decisions. It was quite clear that the direction that the wind shifted in, to extend that headwind metaphor, and it's just understandably going to be something that continues to kind of dominate strategy going forward in 2023 and 2024.

Jane

And on that, particularly cheerful note, I think that it is time for the two of us to say goodbye.

Rory

Absolutely. As always, everything we've discussed in this episode will be in the show notes, and you can find even more on our website at itpro.co.uk.

Jane

If you're enjoying the show, don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast and if you can leave us a rating and review.

Rory

We'll be back in the new year next week with more from the world of IT but until then, goodbye.

Jane

Goodbye

In today's festive edition of the podcast, Jane and Rory discuss a few key trends happening right now that could influence 2023.

With Twitter undergoing constant change, and other firms such as Meta and TikTok facing regulatory battles, current conversations around the upheaval of social media could play a major role in the coming year.

Together with the recession into which the UK has fallen, and the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, these emerging trends from 2022 will continue to dominate headlines and drive discussion among IT professionals in the new year and beyond.

Highlights

“But it does upend your image of this kind of monolithic social media entity and force you to take a step back and remember that, you know, if it was continued to be managed in the way that it was, in the first few weeks, Twitter very well might have lost a good chunk of its advertisers. And while it might not have gone up in flames, for a minute there it was really suffering in terms of ad revenue.”

“The notable one would be Stack Overflow. They are a knowledge repository for technologists. So if you're listening to this, you probably know that, and they've banned, temporarily so they say, Chat GPT from the platform because very much like we were just saying it's coming up with things that superficially look like answers to the questions that people are asking. But they're not like, the form is kind of right, but the actual answers are not helpful or are nonsense. And it's overwhelming the mod team there. So this is a kind of now that people are starting to use it a bit more seriously, I guess, it's starting to throw up real world problems. And these have just started, so are very likely to continue into the new year. This is one of these continuing trends.”

“Even if hopefully, you don't have to make many or any redundancies, the problem is going to be if there's no money to go around it's an awful lot harder to make your case for investment in IT. Whether that is anything from upgrading your users laptops, to a new server for your data centre, or even you know a new cloud contract. In general, procurement is going to be a big issue for the next year or two. And we actually have plenty of written content coming up on the website about that kind of thing.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Twitter executes orders to fire around 3,700 employees, locks offices shut
• Twitter's employee 'revolt' sparks survival concerns for a platform crumbling from within
• Ex-Twitter tech lead says platform's infrastructure can sustain engineering layoffs
• Best Twitter alternatives for businesses and IT professionals
• ‘Hardcore’ Musk decimates Twitter staff benefits, mandates weekly code reviews
• FCC commissioner urges Apple and Google to remove TikTok from app stores
• Oracle to act as US data auditor for TikTok
• What is GPT-4 and what does it mean for businesses?
• We asked ChatGPT to write our Christmas cards. It didn't go well
• Stack Overflow temporarily bans ChatGPT from platform
• Meta cuts 11,000 staff, citing wrong call on investment
• Meta's earnings are 'cause for concern' and 2023 looks even bleaker
• Can startups succeed in a recession?
• Global economic downturn presents small businesses a ‘once in a generation’ hiring opportunity
• How to grow a small business during a recession

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The rude awakening of a "once in a century" pandemic caused us to re-evaluate how we do business. The acceleration in home working – “telecommuting” as it used to be known – allowed businesses to continue to function, more or less, in a way simply not possible if COVID-19 had hit 20 years earlier.

Indeed, in today's age, platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zoom were elevated to essential business tools. As we emerge into a new reality, organisations have re-evaluated the 40-hour, office-bound work paradigm in favour of flexible hybrid work arrangements. Some organisations are also pushing this new reality to new limits, breathing life and energy into the idea of hybrid work.

Let's work from the pub

With home working now fully embedded in the psyche of employees and many reluctant employers, we’re currently in a period of flux. Although some stricter organisations have called time on remote working altogether, others are embracing change and allowing their staff to roam free.

One burgeoning alternative created by the pandemic is the 'Work from Pub' model. The idea of booking a table at your local for the day, with an all-in price for Wi-Fi, tea and coffee and sometimes a pint at the end was spotted in enterprising pubs and bars as early as 2015, but as we emerge from lockdown, licensees have seized on it as a way to lure people back, offering a tempting alternative to working in an empty flat.

Brewery and pub chain Youngs first adopted the idea at a corporate level and now offers “work from pub” at selected branches. “For those working remotely, Young’s first introduced its ‘Work from Pub’ bookings across select pubs back in October 2020, which, at the start, was launched to accommodate guests who needed a space away from the four walls of home," a spokesperson explains. "The initiative was a great way for our pubs to host guests throughout the day, especially during the uncertainty of the pandemic, and it proved successful among customers, with many pubs still offering this option"

Dumping the office for good

But what about the companies that have gone above and beyond the simple hybrid working model? One graphic design agency in London, for example, decided during the course of lockdown that offices weren’t a necessity at all. Many businesses have followed similar thinking, reducing the size of the office spaces they used to occupy or ditching physical workspaces altogether to cut costs.

In the case of our graphic design agency, they cancelled their lease and switched to a complete remote model. They used the savings to fit out a houseboat that acts as a meeting room and a perk for staff to borrow at the weekend – with the added bonus that it can be dragged to where it’s needed.

Making the office more tempting

On the flip side, education tech firm Epignosis created a cleaner, greener working environment to entice staff to come in – as well as to show off to their clients. Their “jungle meeting rooms” are now covered in wall-to-wall plants, which not only look cool, but actually improve the quality of the air.

If you’ve ever felt drowsy during meetings, there’s a good chance that it’s because you and your colleagues are expelling so much carbon dioxide as you breathe that the air is becoming stale. Perhaps “jungles” may seem extreme, but plants can be a powerful weapon in keeping employees productive.

Après work?

Flexible working has also meant that boundaries between work life and personal life have blurred. Often, this is seen as a disadvantage, but it does have its upsides.

During the course of researching this piece, IT Pro heard from one employee who has managed to hold down a full-time job while travelling the world. She regularly remotes in from internet cafés at the tops of mountains and then when the work is done, skis home. The change in the way we work can actually facilitate a better work-life balance. The challenge for both companies and employees is to set boundaries, to ensure that freedom doesn’t blur with a culture of being always available.

Work and see the world

Of course, many freelancers are used to working from everywhere and anywhere – often catching up with work from the beach. When it comes to the dreaded business trip or overseas conference, though, companies are increasingly giving their employees the opportunity to actually see the place they’re visiting.

The Fox Agency allows workers to extend their stay in exotic climates. "Ultimately the team can work from anywhere with an internet connection," a spokesperson explains. "We’ve had and continue to have colleagues working from Sicily, Egypt, Brazil, Portugal, Miami, et cetera – using annual leave to enjoy the sights but also extending their time in these countries knowing that they can work from anywhere – and why wouldn’t you want to work in the sun with your feet in the sand?"

Lockdown drills as training

In some cases, the experience of lockdown has been turned into a learning experience, not to be forgotten, but actually repeated to improve how companies function together. Zengenti, a CMS provider, tells IT Pro how it simulates lockdowns as training exercises to practise, perfect and enhance the experience of remote working.

Although nobody hopes to a return to lockdowns for real, it’s an interesting reminder that the events of the last two years can be turned into a positive. This, as Zengenti explains, encourages the business to “think outside of the box, work as a team, work with others outside of your department and to build relationships in a 'controlled'/focused lockdown-type environment”.

“We’ve seen some awesome ‘lockdown’ events at the Zengenti office; from renovating the office’s basement into a games and film room and building a barbecue, to working on software-based projects like integrating third-party applications," a spokesperson says.

“In the build-up to the two-day event, people start thinking about project ideas. After we announce the date, we organise a company-wide meeting for people to brainstorm together. Agreed ideas are published via Slack, budgets are then finalised and any pre-event spending takes place. The event starts with a briefing – the team is fed throughout the two days - and the event ends with team presentations and an award ceremony."

This is a timely reminder that humans learn and evolve. If we forget everything COVID-19 taught us, then it can feel begin to like two wasted years when, in fact, it's kickstarted a workplace revolution.

If you run a business of any shape or size, an economic downturn is possibly the last thing you need. A recession usually means that businesses contract, or, worse, go bankrupt as the economy recedes.

In the UK, business insolvencies already hit a 13-year high in 2022, with 5,629 insolvencies in the second quarter of the year, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics. Many might rightly wonder how it’s possible to either grow a small business in a recession, or expand a small business in times of crisis, but these tumultuous conditions might give rise to a numer of unique opportunities.

The challenges in running a business during a recession

Perhaps the most significant challenge for businesses during a cost of living crisis is the decreased demand for their products or services. Maintaining a steady flow of business is important but managing declining revenue for the products you need and the goods or services you sell is the biggest pain point for businesses of all sizes during tough economic times. Indeed, a business’ customers are likely trying to manage just the same, according to Michelle DeBella, chief financial officer at JumpCloud.

“At the same time, you have to support your staff and help them to be effective and productive in their jobs – and that may need investment,” DeBella says. “Providing a great working environment is an essential requirement here, as it helps to let your employees know how much you value them and their work.”

There’s often a catch-22 situation facing small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) during a downturn, adds Anastasios Papadopoulos, co-founder and CEO at IMS Digital Ventures. This is the need to invest to stay afloat, given the limited budget for investment. Decision makers will be looking at their profit and loss (P&L) statements to see where they can cut costs or where they need to reallocate the budget. All the while, they’ll be under pressure to continue investing in digital transformation efforts that are crucial for long-term growth and survival.

“Many SMBs recognise that investing in tech is a form of future-proofing, and will need to think carefully about how they audit their systems and consider streamlining their tech investments to maximise their return on investment (ROI) and optimise their ecosystem,” he says.

Talent and skills are at the heart of business growth

One of the biggest opportunities during a recession is investing in fresh talent for your business. “There are often shining lights in companies that struggle in a downturn,” says James Welch, chief Innovation officer at Embryo Digital. “Without being predatory, when they do make themselves available, it is an optimal strategy to pounce. Without a downturn, they may never have thought of leaving their company, so it becomes an opportunity not to miss.”

He adds the other main opportunity is when 80% of businesses in a sector will 'batten down the hatches' your business can be part of the 20% that pushes on through with lots of guile and effort. “You can be in a much different place when a downturn is over. I am seeing this already happening in a few sectors that I monitor,” says Welch.

Indeed, on the flip side, hanging onto staff can be a challenge that needs to be overcome. Dominic Bourquin, partner and head of Tax Consultancy and Corporate Finance at accountancy and business advisory firm Monahans, says that grappling with talent and skills shortages is a problematic pain point for so many businesses in the current market.

“While it may sound obvious, it’s integral that employers work hard to retain staff,” he says. “Not just because replacing a key senior member of staff can cost up to 200% of that person’s salary, but because your people will be the reason your business gets through the next phase of recovery.”

Bourquin adds that businesses need to listen to staff concerns and find compromises. “While salary will always be the obvious solution to recession worries, practical benefits, a meaningful culture, and an employer that cares also make a huge difference.”

Strategies for growing a small business during a recession

Sanjay Aggarwal, the founder of Liverpool-based food company Spice Kitchen, says as a business owner in the food sector, his approach during economic turbulence has been to focus on the growth of the company rather than contracting it. “I’ve been told on many occasions it might not always be the wisest move, but, for me, the best way to be resilient against an economic downturn is to get out there and sell,” he says.

“While everyone in the market is focusing on fear and contraction, it can be a real challenge to swim against the tide and invest, but it’s a strategy that has worked for me in the past. Because even though there's a recession, there’s still plenty of people spending and plenty of opportunities to be had.”

Growth during a recession can also come from making your business the most memorable in its category, advises Jason Ball, founder of B2B marketing agency Considered Content. “There are a couple of really good reasons for this,” he says. “Firstly, when buyers start buying again, they tend to shortlist the brands that are best-known. We call this 'mental availability’ and it ties to a basic fact that, as buyers, we tend to over-value companies we can remember easily.”

Another strategy is to pay attention to ‘weak signals’ – an early warning sign of a low intensity that indicates an important trend or event – defined by the American economist Igor Ansoff. “Identifying and recognising signals is a window into the future, to see what’s coming moments before anyone else does,” says serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Alexandre Mars.

Michael Schrezenmaier, CEO Europe at SumUp, meanwhile, says that one thing to keep in mind is that that other small businesses are struggling, too, and a recession can offer an opportunity for these companies to band together and offer support. “Whether this is advertising your small business through a business operating in another sector – or working together on new deals for customers – collaboration between SMBs can offer a key support network in the challenging conditions of recession.”

With the UK in the midst of an energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine, businesses face the real prospect of winter blackouts.

It isn’t just the struggle to keep energy bills down that businesses should be concerned with. As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, the National Grid recently warned households could face three-hour outages if demand for power outstrips supply.

While the government insists it will do all it can to keep the lights on, it has reportedly war-gamed what emergency measures might be needed during seven-day power cuts. It has also held talks with data centre operators.

No firm decisions have been made to date, but CEOs, the c suite, and IT departments are being urged to establish how they would ensure business continuity and employee wellbeing if the lights go out.

Prepare for the worst

Companies must immediately check disaster recovery (DR) plans, advises Mark Molyneux, EMEA CTO for IT firm Cohesity. This should be a priority, especially for those dependent on a data centre.

“Operational resiliency has a key part to play when looking at power outages,” he says. “Many companies will have solid DR plans for their data centres, but these cater for major outage scenarios. Random blackouts over a prolonged period offer a very different requirement for operational resiliency, and to the planned approach to cater for such events.

“Organisations might decide to move copies of their critical data to an alternative location to create more resiliency against potential blackouts.”

Molyneux also warns of other risks including cyber criminals exploiting confusion when the power goes out, as staff will be preoccupied. This needs a fresh approach to both cyber security and physical security, including checking daily logs, while also building an updated map of digital assets and the interdependencies between computing and storage and the delivery of a service.

“The IT and leadership teams in an organisation should share the same understanding of the potential risk of downtime. Both should also have the same understanding of the level of maturity their organisation has with their visibility of data,” he adds. “This will enable them to better understand the potential risk of downtime and data loss. The organisation should run regular drills and simulations as tabletop exercises.”

The remote worker problem

Today’s power issues stem from the UK’s dependency on burning gas – which is in shorter supply – to create electricity. Given the unprecedented nature of the events that caused this crisis, many businesses may have previously marked blackouts as “low risk” or even seen the prospect fall off their continuity plans altogether, laments Robert Rutherford, CEO at IT consultancy QuoStar.

“Not having plans for likely events is extremely negligent; if issues occur and a board hasn't been in control of its risks then regulatory bodies are going to be extremely unhappy,” he warns.

Rutherford adds that given remote working is now the norm, plans must include what to do when home workers lose power. This includes outlining who they let know and where they then go. In offices, processes must factor in how home workers interact with systems based on-premise, such as phone services, and the effect on simple actions like access to buildings from digital entry systems.

“Due to the pandemic, many businesses have changed their working completely,” he adds. “Many need to ensure they have the office space to accommodate staff in a disaster power outage scenario. It's no good thinking staff can just go to a coffee shop or to a hotel – chances are they will be full, or also without power if local.

“Larger businesses should already have diverse power feeds, from different grids. If they don’t then they may want to look at those options. In the past, this would have been extremely common, along with large battery backup – uninterrupted power supply – and generators. Some larger businesses may need to revisit the cost versus the impact of this.”

Additionally, Rutherford advises caution with electronics, as switching power on and off can blow devices such as switches, routers, servers, storage devices, and firewalls. All those must be on UPS to protect against spikes, he explains, adding: “With that in mind, it's important to ensure all UPS devices have current warranties and have been load tested to ensure they have enough run time to shut down equipment gracefully.”

Employee safety and legal redress

It’s not just IT uptime that companies need to prepare for. Decisions such as adjusting working hours to accommodate the power cuts may go against employee contracts, explains employment law associate at Paris Smith, Charlotte Farrell. This risks discrimination claims by those with childcare responsibilities or disabilities who may find it harder to adapt.

Farrell adds imposing short-term working – sending employees home early because of power cuts – without the contractual right could also give rise to claims for unlawful deduction from wages or constructive unfair dismissal.

“It is vital to carry out risk assessments to ensure a safe working environment," she advises. "Employees who reasonably believe they are in serious and imminent danger due to a dangerous workplace can legally refuse to work and are protected against dismissal without needing the usual two-year qualifying service for unfair dismissal claims.

“It is likely that requiring employees to work as normal without electricity could trigger this right for some employees and workers, particularly those in factories or where sudden stoppages of equipment could be dangerous. Employers should not penalise employees for any performance issues caused by the blackouts.”

Gavin Scarr Hall, Peninsula’s director of health and safety, raises further practical issues that must be considered, such as the carbon monoxide (CO) arising from generators. He says CO detectors must be working in a building, with generators and fuel kept outdoors and at least 20 feet away from windows and doors.

“Slips and trips are a major hazard in low light, as it gets harder to see obstructions and obstacles,” he continues. “Keep pedestrian routes clear and check your emergency lighting regularly for faults. If your workplace doesn’t have much natural light or your staff work outside of daylight hours, provide torches and battery-powered lamps for extra light.”

Scarr Hall also points to health hazards businesses might overlook. These include checking water is safe for employees to drink, ensuring the right temperature of fridges during and after blackouts, and throwing out any food that may have been exposed to unsafe temperatures.

"Make sure you involve your employees when planning for power outages," he adds. "Knowing an employer is prepared will help avoid any unnecessary panic or distress.”

With only a short window of time left to ensure resiliency, however, Ian Wood, UKI CTO at Veritas, cautions there’ll be little to no excuse for organisations that don’t make reasonable efforts to prepare. “The potential for power cuts have been widely publicised so, if they come, no one will be able to say that it’s a surprise,” he says. “Customers are unlikely to forgive a lack of preparation.”

Twitter is reportedly switching to a paid model for verification, requiring users to pay $20 per month in order to retain their 'Blue Tick' status.

Internal Twitter sources and correspondence allegedly indicate that the company will increase the cost of its Twitter Blue premium subscription to $19.99 per month, as first reported by The Verge. Verification will then become conditional on subscription to this service, with existing verified users given a 90 day grace period in which to purchase a Twitter Blue plan, or lose their blue tick.

The same report claimed that developers within Twitter have been told that they will be fired unless the relevant changes are implemented in time for a 7 November launch.

Twitter verification was introduced in 2009, as a means of distinguishing real accounts of notable people and companies from imposters. Today, the feature is used to denote accounts including brands and companies, news sources, activists, celebrities, sports or entertainment personalities, and content creators. There is a long list of requirements in order to become verified, but accounts as a minimum must be “authentic, notable, and active”.

It's a favoured feature for many businesses, as it not only ensures consumers can tell real brands apart from fake accounts, but also allows firms to stand apart from competitors or be seen as more ‘trusted’ by virtue of the blue tick.

Verification has also been widely relied upon to curb disinformation on the website, which notably surges whenever national elections are held or during geopolitical events, such as the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Technology newsletter Platformer had claimed that verification would only be available to Twitter Blue subscribers on Sunday, citing individuals with knowledge of Twitter’s plans. However, this report indicated this would happen while Twitter Blue remained at its current price of $4.99 per month. The same day, Musk tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now”.

The claims come just days after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media giant for $44 billion, after months of negotiations sparked by his initial offer of $41.39 billion in April 2022. In July, Musk had attempted to pull out of the deal, asserting that Twitter had failed to provide accurate information on the number of spam accounts and bots on the website. The move prompted legal action from Twitter itself, which sought to hold Musk to his original offer, and led to a public and protracted period of negotiations culminating in Musk’s eventual commitment to buy the company.

On Thursday, 27 October Musk tweeted “the bird is freed”, indicating that the purchase had gone through. Shortly afterwards, several C-suite executives were fired by Musk, including CEO Parag Agrawal and chief financial officer (CFO) Ned Segal.

In addition to promises that his takeover of the company will lead to increased free speech across the platform, Musk also tweeted an open letter to companies who advertise on Twitter, in which he addressed their potential concerns over his goal of increased “dialogue” on the platform:

“I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you. For this to be true, it is essential to show Twitter users advertising that is as relevant as possible to their needs. Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!

“Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise. To everyone who has partnered with us, thank you. Let us build something extraordinary together.”

IT Pro has approached Twitter for comment.

Meta has announced that PyTorch, its open source framework for machine learning, will become part of the Linux Foundation and reorganise under a new PyTorch Foundation.

The move, which comes after six years of Meta (formerly Facebook) control over PyTorch, comes as part of a move to emphasise the neutrality of PyTorch, which has become a key tool for use in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the acceleration of deep learning.

Since its launch in 2016, over 18,000 organisations have utilised Pytorch for machine learning (ML) in production environments, as well as to lead research throughout academia. Notable examples of PyTorch in real-world use include Tesla’s autopilot system, as well as the popular Python library Hugging Face Transformers, which provides users with pre-trained models for speech, text, and image recognition.

“The creation of the PyTorch Foundation ensures that decisions will be made in a transparent and open manner by a diverse group of board members for many years to come,” Meta stated in a blog post.

The Linux Foundation is a worldwide non-profit consortium for the tech sector, aiming to foster the development and curation of open source software. On its website, the foundation states that its goal is to “democratize code and scale adoption, for all projects equally,” and “strive to create new technology categories by identifying new trends and accelerating the growth of nascent technologies by removing barriers to adoption.”

Dr Ibrahim Haddad, vice president of strategic programs at the Linux Foundation, will serve as the PyTorch Foundation’s executive director, and the PyTorch Foundation’s governing board is expected to include a range of representatives from the tech sector. Founding members AMD, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA were named in the announcement.

In May, the Linux Foundation announced its ‘World of Open Source’ research series, with the intention of furthering understanding of the scale of open source on the international, public sector stage, as well as surveying the overall state of open source within Europe. The results of the survey are expected to be announced at the Open Source Summit Europe, currently being held in Dublin.

Meta announced a partnership with AWS last year with the aim of expanding its AI offerings, and improving the ML models used to train Pytorch. Together, the companies aim to provide firms with the training and deployment of deep learning models at scale, such as large language models and automatic handwriting recognition.

“Growth around AI/ML and Deep Learning has been nothing short of extraordinary—and the community embrace of PyTorch has led to it becoming one of the five-fastest growing open source software projects in the world,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation.

“Bringing PyTorch to the Linux Foundation where its global community will continue to thrive is a true honor. We are grateful to the team at Meta—where PyTorch was incubated and grown into a massive ecosystem—for trusting the Linux Foundation with this crucial effort.”

For many businesses times are tricky right now. Surging energy prices, difficulties accessing raw materials and – when they are available – rising costs, are all sparking economic anxieties.

The stresses and strains of deciding how much rising cost can be passed on to the customer, too, alongside how much the business has to bear are, too, on the forefront of concerns. Indeed, very few sectors are immune to ‘cost of living’ pressures like these.

But an economic downturn can be an opportunity as well as a threat. Those businesses which have the finances available would do well to consider their options for growth and change, in order to come out of the hard times stronger. There are lots of options, and a savvy approach and clear strategy now can reap rewards later.

Hunker down or look to the future?

It can be tricky to work out whether to hunker down or invest at a time when the economic situation is gloomy and the outlook no better. But, as Carlo Maria Capè, CEO at BIP, tells IT Pro: “History has shown us time and time again that following a crisis there is often a period of growth, therefore a downturn is a perfect time to increase market share.”

James Berry, Director of the UCL MBA, expands further on this point, explaining there are three key factors that’ll help a business make the right decision, broadly termed ‘timing’, ‘market’ and ‘business’. He says the business wants to maximise short term profit might be maximising this at the expense of longer term growth. He gives an example: “If there’s a company sale or IPO intended for the medium or long term, investing now to achieve a good growth trajectory rather than immediate profit will be more important.”

Meanwhile, the market strand is all about understanding whether the market is stable, growing or shrinking. Know this, and a business can decide where it might look to make investments. He told us, for example, “If the market is rapidly growing then using resources to grab market share now may be the right choice.”

Finally, the business strand. An honest assessment of the business’s unique selling points will be vitally useful. “If you have critical assets that enable you to make moves into expanding markets then investing in that growth makes more sense,” James Berry says.

Where should the money go?

If it’s a “yes” to investment, how does a business decide where and how to use the money to best effect? Digital transformation is often an early choice – using the quiet periods to focus on back-end processes or finding better ways to gather and analyse data are popular investment ideas. Automating back-office functions, for example, is one area that’s gaining traction, as is the ongoing shift to cloud computing.

Darren Ling, director of partnering practice at change consultancy Proteus offers some words of caution, telling IT Pro: “Digital transformation has to start with a clarity on the business outcome. Too often it starts or quickly becomes a technical adventure. Linking the agreed business outcomes to needs to change across the operation of the business is critical, understanding not simply what has to change but how and by how much.”

There’s a word of caution from Berry, too, who says that investment in digital transformation can “often disrupt productivity and cost money to implement”. It’s often best to invest in these projects when you’re making another transition, he adds.

Ling also cautions about overthinking, urging businesses to “understand your starting point ‘enough’ without wasting precious time on too much detail about today”. Move quickly to focus on ‘tomorrow’, he says.

Return on investment is key

“Where to invest is different for every business and depends entirely on your long-term ambitions,” says Capè. “It’s easy to be pulled into investing in new tech or what you see your competitors doing.”

The bottom line advice is not to go for digital investments unless there are clearly defined reasons for doing so – based on desired outcomes or return on investment (ROI). It might be that developing new product lines, merging with other businesses, or focussing on potential client acquisition or networking could be fruitful when the hard times have ended.

Ling suggests businesses should, indeed, focus on desired outcomes. “For many investments, the answer is to have a clear end objective achieved through rapid experimentation to test the market, continuous iterative development, and ‘adaptive’ short-cycle planning,” he says. He also advocates a “fail fast” approach which can give learning to the business even if an idea does fail.

Capè was also clear about the focus on outcomes, telling IT Pro: “When looking to invest for growth, it’s important that companies look at long-term results, not just tactically for short-term gains.”

In the end, a downturn can be as good a time as any to invest and grow, and, for some, it might be a better time than one in which the business is swimming along in clear waters. This is especially true when it’s focusing on doing its core work well. The key lies in knowing your business; know your markets; analyse your future; plan; execute; and keep an eye on the desired outcome.

Cisco has announced that it will withdraw from Russia and Belarus permanently, after suspending business activities and services in the countries in March following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Many major tech companies have done the same, with Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, IBM, and Intel just some companies from a long list that have protested the war by suspending their services. As the war has raged on, any idea of resuming services has become increasingly unlikely.

The multinational tech conglomerate has now joined IBM in fully exiting the region, while Microsoft is scaling down operations, as reported by Bloomberg.

The decision comes as Russia advances a new law, allowing it to seize companies owned by “unfriendly” countries. There are concerns that unless western companies remove themselves from Russia before the law is enforced, the task could become much more difficult and expensive to undertake later.

At the outbreak of the war, Cisco expressed support for the people of Ukraine, stating that the Cisco Talos Intelligence Group would assist in the collection of public intelligence and to protect critical systems throughout the country.

“We have now made the decision to begin an orderly wind-down of our business in Russia and Belarus,” the company said on their website.

“We will communicate directly with customers, partners, and vendors to settle our financial matters, including refunding prepaid service and software arrangements, to the extent permissible under applicable laws and regulations.”

Reuters reported that Cisco employees within these countries have been offered relocation options, although it's currently unclear where staff will be moved to. IT Pro has contacted Cisco for clarification.

IMB will start an "orderly" wind-down of its business in Russia, according to a publicly-released memo from CEO Arvind Krishna.

The tech giant suspended its operations in the country in March following the invasion of Ukraine but has continued to keep Russian-based employees on the payroll.

Now, however, with the conflict closing in on almost half a year, and Western governments increasing pressure on Russian leaders through more sanctions, IBM has decided to pull out of the country completely. US sanctions on Russian banks may well have been a key element in its decision, though Krishna said it was a "natural next step" following its business suspension.

As such, from 8 June 2022, IBM will begin terminating the employment of its Russian-based workforce.

"This process will commence today and result in the separation of our local workforce," Krishna wrote in the memo. "Our colleagues in Russia have, through no fault of their own, endured months of stress and uncertainty. We recognise that this news is difficult, and I want to assure them that IBM will continue to stand by them and take all reasonable steps to provide support and make their transition as orderly as possible."

IBM's Russian operation brought in business from a variety of the country's biggest industries, such as federal banks, energy firms and also its railways. IBM had also held its Think Summit in Moscow back in 2019. However, along with a wave of other Western companies, IBM stopped selling and providing its services in March.

Financially the decision to cut ties with Russia will have very little impact on IBM's bottom line, according to its head of finance, Jim Kavanaugh. During an earnings call in April, he told investors that "Russia is a very de minimis part of IBM" and that it only accounted for roughly 0.5% of IBM's total revenue in 2021 - around $300 million out of its total revenue of $57.4 billion.

There has been a 450% increase in the number of people looking to learn skills around decentralised blockchain applications, according to a new report.

The Q1 2022 Workplace Learning Index, carried out by online learning portal Udemy, found that in 2022, lessons on decentralised blockchain applications were the leading courses among global learners in technology and power skills.

Technology skills in decentralised apps (dApps) and platforms such as Binance, in particular, saw more than a 450% increase in usage compared to Q4 of 2021.

Globally, interest in learning skills in Openstack Cloud grew by 444%, while FastAPI skills increased by 304%.

The report also found that people taking courses in learning skills in work efficiency and personal success also saw increases of 98% and 92% respectively, as people looked to enhance their leadership capabilities.

Courses for AWS Certified DevOps Engineer and Laravel were the top two skills surging in popularity in the UK (202% and 168% respectively). The next three were Cucumber Software (118%), GitHub (108%), Apache Maven (107%).

Bill O’Shea, Udemy EMEA vice president, said that ensuring workforces have access to learning materials and opportunities to upskill has “never been more relevant than in this ever-changing corporate landscape”.

“For British employees, we’re seeing a rapid rise in blockchain upskilling, which demonstrates that this continues to be one of the fastest-growing areas within the employment market. Learners are being savvy in preparing themselves for further developments and understanding of this area as it continues to dominate,” he added.

The latest index is based on data from the learning behaviour of thousands of companies across the globe using the Udemy Business platform. Skills data compares the consumption of courses in the Udemy Business collection from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022.

The firm said that the report highlights skills corporate leaders and employees see as must-haves tools to “accelerate their growth and maintain a competitive edge”.

The Open University (OU) is to partner with local education institutes to provide higher technical courses in a bid to combat the skills gap.

The scheme is to be backed by £10 million of government funding with the aim of supporting more varied college courses for students to find highly skilled, high wage jobs.

Under the scheme, which has been announced by the Higher and Further Education minister, Michelle Donelan, OU will specifically work with colleges to offer courses that are not currently available in their region.

These will be much shorter courses than traditional three-year degrees and offer a mix of face-to-face and online learning. The aim is to boost access to higher education and technical training and increase the number of students earning level 4 and 5 qualifications.

Levels 4 and 5 refer to specific technical qualifications, such as apprenticeships, NVQs, and foundation degrees. There is a low take-up of these types of skills in the UK, according to the government's own research, with an "acute" shortage of technician-level STEM skills attributed to an "undersupply of people" with levels 3-5 vocational qualifications over the last two decades.

Only 10% of all adults aged 18- 65 hold a level 4-5 qualification as their highest, compared to around 20% of adults in Germany or 34% in Canada. And, based on current patterns, England's position within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) rankings is likely to worsen, according to the government.

"For too long, people have had to look beyond their hometown for higher education courses," the minister for Higher and Further Education, Michelle Donelan said. "The government is backing The Open University with the funding and support to partner up with local colleges to offer high-quality higher education and training, targeting cold spots across the country, so everyone can up-skill wherever they live."

How much do you know about your own in-house knowledge base? How do you stop that knowledge draining away when people leave? What about the areas in which you have expertise that you didn't know existed in the first place?

Twitter University founder Marko Gargenta tells IT Pro exposing those "unknown knowns" – as late US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld might have said – can be critical. “There's tacit knowledge and there are documented nuggets of wisdom, like policies, procedures, things that are stable," says Gargenta, currently chief executive of provider PlusPlus.

Within tech companies, especially those which continually innovate and reinvent themselves, a lot of knowledge falls into the less explicit category, Gargenta points out. Often firms rely on the ad hoc tap on the shoulder in situ to transfer tacit information, but this isn't efficient.

Instead, teams should discover tacit knowledge – for example by interviewing both up and down the hierarchy, asking lots of questions, then triangulating to expose knowledge gaps. They should also find challenges and develop multiple perspectives. Once made explicit, that knowledge can be documented and taught.

"It's usually like some common tool or library that a lot of people need to use and it's poorly understood," Gargenta says. "Then we can come up with a solution. Is it a workshop? A tech talk? A document or mentorship?"

Keeping knowledge alive

Live learning through hands-on workshops that generate interactivity and engagement can be cost-effective in many cases – not only transferring knowledge but ensuring people can adapt and use that knowledge in future. A regular hour or two, requiring relatively little preparation on the participants' parts, can often do the job.

Annee Bayeux, chief learning strategist at Degreed, suggests looking at staff retention too – it can't all be about offboarding. Also, when people leave, it can be partly because knowledge isn't being fully used and transferred across the company; growth potentials aren't being fulfilled.

Government figures suggest 46% of UK businesses struggled through 2019-2021 to recruit for roles that require data skills, defined broadly.

"From day one, make sure you're developing them – and their managers, including how to coach, mentor, and give feedback," Bayeux says. "Even once they reach peak performance, people want to be learning new skills to stay relevant, or go deeper or wider."

Have you got people in accounts that could move into data science, or vice versa? If staff have 50% of a needed skillset, why not upskill them on the other 50% to give them more professional mobility? Overlooked opportunities can lead to staff becoming stale or disgruntled and leaving – taking their knowledge with them.

Capture knowledge from day one, and also look to knowledge development and delivery according to individual desire and requirement, Bayeux emphasises.

Caroline Carruthers, chief executive officer at global data consultancy Carruthers and Jackson, warns data isn't synonymous with information or knowledge either, so don't simply rely on a digital solution. Organisations must first clearly understand what's important to them. This can even mean discussing the nuance of key concepts, right down to defining the customer. Agreement on these things is "a lot less common than people think" yet can be the "crown jewel" of business success.

"Ask questions, be curious – that's how you get to the key assets," Carruthers says. "Look at purpose, people, methods and tools."

Focus on what matters most

Cristina Querzè, HR director – sales and Western Europe at Vertiv, says her company created three different academies to develop and retain technical knowledge in identified key competencies. Although organisational culture is also crucial, Vertiv's key asset is its technical expertise. "We ask what our teams need to know, and start with that," Querzè says. "Then there are processes to codify that."

Every six months, lists of critical knowledge for, say, sales engineers will be reviewed. Technical committees also work to identify subject matter experts and authors who can contribute to digestible lessons or content packages.

Mentoring and reverse-mentoring is useful. Learning in the flow of work is critical; it's not about creating an encyclopaedia of Vertiv knowledge, she emphasises.

"Industry has changed, customers have changed, knowledge needs to be continuously updated," Querzè says. "70% of the knowledge comes from experience and practice; 20% usually comes from serving others or the like; only 10% will be about formal training courses."

Jaco Vermeulen, chief technology officer at BML Digital, says many companies see it as about transferring knowledge from one brain to another and just don't do enough systematisation. Organisations need to move beyond simply avoiding, for instance, "reverse engineering a massive Excel spreadsheet" when someone leaves.

"Fragmented or very federated organisations need to be brought together to start to operate in harmony across the board," Vermeulen adds.

When systemisation is tied to a specific business outcome, do also communicate that it's not about removing people from the equation. "People are mostly eager to share what they know – but that's been a failing of business leadership and focus, so do that work today," Vermeulen warns. "Then IP becomes configurable rather than static."

Teresa Dietrich, chief product and technology officer at Stack Overflow, adds that it's crucial to get on top of this requirement, with knowledge soon becoming outdated and tech seeing high staff turnover. “Knowledge must be shared openly throughout their tenure and long before a departure," Dietrich advises.

Nvidia has enacted a hiring pause as part of a way to deal with the rising threat of inflation.

The company reportedly communicated with hiring managers that it’s implementing a hiring pause, although job offers in process will continue, as reported by The New Indian Express.

An internal Slack message stated that the company’s leadership wants to take a pause to onboard the thousands of new hires it has recently made. It underlined this is not a hiring freeze, but a pause.

The message added that bars will be raised for the ongoing interviews so that only 10% of those being interviewed will be given offers to work for Nvidia.

“Offers in process – continue. There will be no counters to the offers unless Jensen approves, none,” read the message.

It also said that diversity hiring will continue and there will be no slowdown in this area. “We need to determine if any of your candidates are considered a diversity candidate. If so, proceed as usual,” it said.

"We’ve been extremely successful in hiring this year. We’re slowing for now to integrate these new employees and to focus our budget on taking care of existing employees as inflation persists,” a spokesperson told IT Pro.

Earlier this month, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, underlined the link between higher wages contributing to inflation.

“Chair Powell keeps mentioning the relationship between the high level of job openings and wage/price inflation,” said Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek, as reported by Yahoo Finance. “He’s not talking to investors. He’s talking to corporate America, and his goal is to have companies essentially institute a hiring freeze and end the cycle of paying up for new hires.”

Powell has centred on the ratio between job openings versus unemployed workers and the core personal consumption expenditures price index, which measures inflation. Colas said he mentioned this ratio several times at a press conference, and added that job postings need to drop from 11.5 million to 8 million to get back to normal.

The hiring pause comes after Nvidia agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle the long-standing civil charges accusing the chip giant of attempting to conceal the impact of cryptomining on its gaming business. The company’s chips had been used to mine cryptocurrency, such as Ethereum, since at least 2018.

The company was found to have “failed to disclose that cryptomining was a significant element of its material revenue growth from the sale of its graphics processing units (GPUs) designed and marketed for gaming” in its back-to-back quarterly financial results in fiscal 2018. This violated part of the Securities Act of 1933, said the SEC.

Cisco has announced that it has developed new technology that will help IT teams predict network issues before they happen.

The technology that was developed over the last two years will be slowly rolled out across the networking giant’s portfolio of products, but exact dates have been withheld.

Cisco is calling it a “first-of-its-kind predictive analytics engine” and will sit under the company’s Cisco Predictive Networks branding, alongside existing visibility and intelligence tools.

The technology will use machine learning (ML) to gather network data over time, using “myriad telemetry sources”.

It will then use that data to train models and learn each network’s patterns to help predict issues before they can impact a business, leading to a reduction in disruptions and downtime.

Cisco said customers will be given control of how far the engine reaches across their network, and early adopters have said it may help solve a range of issues, from downtime to the skills shortage.

“We are more reactive at the moment, to be honest," said Nicolas Gachet, global head of network special projects at The Adecco Group. “With a predictive engine, we will really fix the issue before it happens, which is really a game-changer.”

“I believe the Cisco Predictive Engine can help companies resolve the tech shortage as well,” said Zach Nimboorkar, SVP of global infrastructure and operations at Schneider Electric.

Cisco said customers and IT teams in general struggle to be proactive participants in their network due to time spent managing different responsibilities across areas such as cyber security, hybrid work, and hybrid cloud.

“The future of connectivity will rely on self-healing networks that can learn, predict and plan,” said Chuck Robbins, chair and CEO at Cisco. “Our research for predictive networks has been tested and developed with customers, and early adopters are seeing major benefits saving them time and money. The industry has been waiting for secure, proactive networking and only Cisco can do it right.”

According to Cisco’s figures, 45% of IT leaders said network disruptions were the most important challenge facing their department in 2021, and application uptime is crucial to securing and retaining new business.

Intel is officially suspending all business operations on the Russian market after almost three decades in the country.

The decision is “effective immediately”, the company announced on Wednesday.

In a statement on its website, Intel condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called for “a swift return to peace”.

“Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, particularly the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends and loved ones in the region.”

The company is “working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation”.

This includes Intel’s 1,200 employees that are based in Russia, with the majority stationed at its offices in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod.

Business continuity measures are being implemented to “minimise disruption to [Intel’s] global operations”.

According to Gartner VP analyst Gaurav Gupta, the Russian invasion can significantly impact the semiconductor industry due to the shortage of various raw materials sourced from Ukraine:

“As one example, Ukraine is a major source of inert gases, such as neon required for the semiconductor lithography process, and any disruption in the supply of neon and other noble gases from the country could trigger shortages and associated cost inflation,” Gupta said last month.

The move comes 34 days after Intel joined AMD in halting chip sales to Russia. Despite being an important producer of aluminium, a metal commonly used in all types of electronic equipment, Russia lacks a strong semiconductor industry and is known to heavily rely on imports from the US and Taiwan.

Russia is also heavily dependent on Western software for its business operations, and the country might find it challenging to meet its 2025 target of achieving “technological independence and security of the critical information infrastructure”, as ordered by President Vladimir Putin on 31 March.

Questions remain as to whether Intel, as well as other foreign corporations such as Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG, will be able to debrand its remaining operations into local partners in the Russian market, ahead of a fresh round of intensified sanctions expected later today.

Russia is also facing a mass exodus of IT professionals, with as many as 170,000 Russian tech specialists estimated to have left the country since late February, according to the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC).

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Business communications and collaboration platform Slack is currently experiencing outages for “some users” across the globe.

Some businesses are currently unable to load their workspaces, sign out of accounts, or use any features on the platform including messaging and calling colleagues.

“Some customers may be experiencing issues with loading Slack,” the company said in a tweet from its status-checking account. “We'll provide a status update once we have more information. We're sorry for the disruption.”

Slack first started investigating the issue at 14:25 PM (GMT), according to its status page, and provided an update at 14:44 PM (GMT) saying “we’re still working towards a full resolution. We’ll be back with another update soon. Thank you for your patience.”

Its most recent update, at the time of writing, came at 15:23, an hour after the first acknowledgement of issues. Slack said it is continuing to investigate the issues but did not add any insights into what was causing it or how many users are affected.

According to affected users, the platform appears to be inaccessible through its desktop and web apps, and the platform is failing to load for smartphone users too.

Users have attempted to sign out and sign back into Slack, but users on computers are met with ‘sign out’ links that do not work, while mobile users receive an error saying they must be connected to a network in order to sign out.

Other Slack users seem to be less affected by the service issues, only reporting faults with threads and direct messages.

Service outages are common with collaboration platforms and are usually resolved expeditiously.

The outage will be impacting a large number of organisations worldwide. Slack last reported its daily active user (DAU) figures in 2019, saying it had more than 10 million at the time.

Microsoft has announced plans to fully open its headquarters in Washington State on 28 February.

The company is giving employees 30 days from that date to make "adjustments to their routines and adopt any working preferences" they have agreed with their managers. Employees can choose to work remotely on a permanent basis, to return to the office full-time, or to embrace a hybrid routine that sees that split their time between the two.

"Several factors" were taken into consideration for determining whether the site is ready to be fully open, according to Microsoft, including COVID-19's impact on the region, such as hospitalisations and the community's vaccination rates.

As of 8 February, 83.8% of King County residents - where the majority of the company's Washington employees live - have been fully vaccinated. In addition, 91.6% have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccination.

"These high vaccination rates, along with declining hospitalisations and deaths in the state, are part of what enables us to move to this stage of our hybrid work journey," Microsoft said in a blog post.

The company added that it is also helping to establish local testing solutions as well as aligning its business policies and guidelines with the government's recommendations.

Beyond Washington, the tech giant is also opening its Bay Area sites in California, which includes its new Silicon Valley Campus. Vaccination rates in the Santa Clara area are slightly higher, with 93.6% of those over 18-years of age having received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine.

Compared to Washington, the state of California is also home to more vaccinated adults, according to statistics from Our World in Data. As of 14 February, 81.3% have had at least one jab and only 69.8% are fully vaccinated in the region. For the entire state of Washington, only 70.5% were fully vaccinated.

Daily cases in California are still more than 23,000 while average death rates from COVID-19 were 163, according to California's official dashboard. Microsoft said it "anticipates" that many of its other US locations will follow suit as "conditions allow".

Microsoft hasn't said whether employees will need to be vaccinated in order to return to the office. Google and Facebook, on the other hand, recently announced that staff based in the US will need to be fully vaccinated before they return to the workplace.

Facebook's parent company Meta has issued a mandate that all employees need to have had a COVID-19 booster jab before returning to the office.

The social media giant has also delayed its plans to reopen offices until March 28, Reuters reports, as the virus continues to cause chaos across the US.

However, not all Meta staff will be required to return to the office, as the company previously announced that employees can request to work remotely full time.

In December the company also offered staff the option to defer their return to the workplace by three to five months. The situation now is that employees have until 14 March to decide if they want to return to the office, defer their return, or request permanent remote work.

Those that do return will need to present proof of a booster jab; staff already have to prove they've had at least one vaccine to be eligible for office work. Employees that are not vaccinated for medical or religious reasons can request remote work, but those that choose not to be vaccinated can "face disciplinary measures". That includes "termination of employment", according to a Facebook spokesperson, though that is a "last resort".

With the Omicron variant surging throughout the country, US firms have started to take a firm stance on employee vaccinations. Meta's announcement appears to be vague when it comes to terminations - exactly how long employees have until they reach that point is unclear.

In December Google also declared that employees will be fired if they decide not to have a COVID vaccine.

The tech giant said that staff members who fail to report their vaccination status or apply for a medical or religious exemption by 18 January 2022 will be placed on "paid administrative leave" for 30 days. If still unvaccinated after that period they would then be placed on "unpaid personal leave" for up to six months. If an employee is still without a jab once the six months is up, the company will then terminate their contract.

After almost two lost years, international travel is gradually getting back to something approaching normal, but travelling abroad is still not easy. There’s complex demands for tests, long queues at the airport and mountains of paperwork. Surely, there must be an app for that?

This is why, since the early days of the pandemic, governments, the travel industry and airlines have all talked about digital COVID-19 health passes. So why aren’t we there yet? And how long until proving our vaccination status at the airport is as easy as scanning a passport?

“The airport is too late”

“By the time we get to the airport, that's far too late,” says Dr Edgar Whitley, who specialises in digital identity at the London School of Economics (LSE). “Airports don't want to have to pay people to stand at desks checking documents, and the more of that you can do in advance, the better.”

That’s why streamlining the process is something everyone wants to do. “Data could be shared up and down the line in exactly the same way as your passport details, your visa details, your name and address, the first hotel you're going to stay at. That's the grand vision,” says Whitley.

The problem is getting there. “I think the optimal solution would be that you would have an internationally agreed set of standards for what vaccination or testing and or recovery status is acceptable,” suggests Kirsty Innes, head of digital government at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

“If you have that then the data that you share and prove at the border doesn't need to be much at all. You can just have an app that is connected to your domestic health authority data, which generates a QR code and a result to say, ‘yes, good to go, this person meets the standard’.”

The Blair Institute is part of an alliance of companies called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which is working to develop such a system. In August, the group published a “blueprint”, arguing that there are several crucial principles that should underpin any health pass system: that the exchange of data should be private between the traveller and the organisation receiving it, that it cannot be tracked by third parties, that data sharing is minimised, and that there is transparency over how the data is used.

Gotta keep it federated

One point of consensus across the various proposals and working groups looking at health passes is that any future COVID-19 credentials system should be decentralised, with no central database containing the health details of travellers.

“There's no one saying centralise – it doesn't make any sense to centralise it,” says Clive Bourke, president of EMEA for Daon. His company is behind an app called Verifly, which is already being used by airlines such as BA and Virgin to speed up the COVID-19 credentials process when travelling to a limited number of destinations.

Under Verifly’s plan, the actual certificate detailing any jabs and tests should remain on the passenger’s phone. In theory, this will protect their privacy and, as per the Good Health Pass principles, minimise the amount of data stored by health authorities. Crucially, it puts control over who personal health data is shared with in the hands of the individual.

To make it work securely, it would use the same public key cryptography techniques that are widely used in computing. The health authority can ‘sign’ a passengers’ health data using their private key – and airlines, border control and so on can use the authority’s public key to verify the digital signature is real, without revealing the underlying data. In fact, without the private key – which health authorities would keep, well, private – it would be mathematically impossible to reverse engineer someone’s health data.

It also means that the system will work offline, without the need to ping health system servers every time a passenger is scanned. For a ‘federated’ system such as this to work, however, countries will have to agree on standards for storing data, and agree to mutually recognise each others’ digital signatures.

Following the rules

Even if a mutually interoperable, decentralised system is built, there are still technical challenges. One example is with the “rules engine” that health credentials will be fed into, which determines whether a passenger is allowed to enter a country or not, and the rules they must follow on arrival.

For example, depending on an individual’s combination of jabs, tests and the countries they have passed through en route, there may be differing requirements to conduct further tests, quarantine and so on.

“Logically, it can be done,” says Whitley, but how quickly the rules engine can be updated could be crucial. “It gets really complicated because the rules about what you actually need to demonstrate keep changing.”

In some cases, the computational logic when making decisions could get incredibly knotty. Whitley thinks a particularly interesting example of this could be when our first round of vaccines expire and countries begin to introduce booster shots.

“You come from Israel, you've had two jabs, but not your booster. It's now seven months since your second jab. Is the business logic you've been double jabbed, so we let you in? Or is the business logic that your country says until you've had the booster you are no longer being safe domestically, so perhaps not being safe internationally?”

There’s also the issue of ensuring the health credentials are really those of the person carrying them. One proposed solution is that health passes should include a biometric ‘hash’ of the owner’s face so that facial recognition technology can verify it.

Then there’s the private and public keys. If the system is built with expiry dates, it would be good for digital security, but could mean that travellers who have printed their QR code out find themselves stuck on arrival at the border.

Waiting for departure

Despite the complexities, there is optimism – and arguably necessity – that a system will eventually be built. The reason such a system is not yet in place around the world is, of course, politics.

“I think that the technology exists to enable us to do this,” says Innes. “There's quite a lot of hard work to do to align countries on the technical details of whose system they will recognise and what solutions they're prepared to use to guarantee that validity of the information being provided by another country's health certificate.”

“I would say it's probably a year away,” Bourke adds, who argues it isn’t standards that are slowing the development of a system down. Rather, he says, airlines are having to deal with other challenges, not least the debt burden they’ve taken on, and other IT complexities.

“If there was political will there, I don't see why you couldn't set this up in a matter of months,” Innes says. “I don't think it's a technological problem. It's a political governance problem.”

The global demand for PC monitors is “cooling” following five consecutive quarters of year-over-year shipment growth.

This is according to market researcher IDC, which found that the global PC monitor market has declined by 7.2% compared to the same quarter in 2020 – from 37.5 million to 34,8 million units.

This marks the first year-over-year drop in shipments since the start of the pandemic in the first quarter of 2020.

IDC has attributed the decline to “softening in consumer demand” in North American and Western European markets, as well as supply constraints and changing spending priorities.

In October, supply chain issues were also blamed for leading the “US PC market into its first quarter of annual shipment decline since the beginning of the pandemic,” according to IDC senior research analyst Neha Mahajan.

In comparison, the market research company today stated that countries in the APAC region are continuing to show solid demand and fulfil backorders for PC monitors.

Commenting on the findings, Jay Chou, research manager for IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Monitor Tracker, said that the analyst house expects the PC monitor market to “achieved peak volume as we end 2021 with the highest shipment levels since 2012”.

"Even as things settle back down, we still see areas of opportunity in the years ahead. Commercial segments will once again be the main driver of this space, but consumers will also refresh upon a much bigger installed base, which expanded during these challenging times," he said.

"We believe the changes wrought by the permanency of hybrid work and flexible learning will enable faster refresh rates across all user segments,” he added.

The news comes after IDC observed a 29.8% year-on-year decline in Chromebook shipments and a 9.4% drop in tablet shipments in the third quarter of 2021, after a record growth period during the pandemic. The fall in demand had been credited to decreasing restrictions in many regions and reopening offices.

However, offices in many parts of the world, including the UK, have since been closed due to the new Omicron variant, meaning that hybrid and remote working could lead to renewed demand in 2022.

Alphabet has said it will fold its smart city project, Sidewalk Labs, into Google to bolster sustainability efforts and also consolidate its loss-making businesses.

The announcement was revealed in a Medium post from Sidewalk founder and CEO Dan Doctoroff, who is stepping down for medical reasons.

Doctoroff said he has been diagnosed with what is thought to be a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and has made the decision to spend more time with family.

"One unfortunate result of this is that I've decided I have to step down from my role as CEO of Sidewalk Labs," Doctoroff wrote in a blog post.

It's believed the decision to bring Sidewalk Labs back under the Google umbrella has simply coincided with Doctoroff's departure, as he said the company has spent most of the year exploring ways to scale sustainability products at a faster rate.

Sidewalk Labs is described as an 'urban planing and infrastructure' company that aims to improve residential areas with technology. Its main products - Pebble, Mesa, Delve and Affordable Electrification - are being incorporated into Google as "core" products under its urban sustainability efforts.

A number of the Sidewalk Labs leadership team will stay in place, such as Prem Ramaswami, the president of urban products, and chief technology officer Craig Nevill-Manning, but they will no longer fall under the leadership of Doctoroff. It's currently unclear who will replace Doctoroff as CEO.

"I leave Sidewalk having complete confidence that our impact will increase exponentially," Doctoroff said. "While I will dearly miss working with the incomparable Sidewalk Labs team, I couldn't be more excited to see Google accelerate the development of our products and technology to achieve their sustainability mission - not a moment too soon for the world."

Google has become very vocal about its efforts to reduce its carbon footprint and support environmental protection. However it has also seen a number of so-called Moonshots and "other bets", like Loon and Waymo, struggle to generate money.

Loon, a project that used balloons to provide internet to remote regions, was shut down last year due to a lack of use cases, whereas Waymo appears to need further outside investment.

Sidewalk Labs appears to be the latest venture to move under Google due to disappointing performance. The firm's flagship project was a "smart district" in Toronto, Canada that was somewhat marred in controversy over the privacy of residents. The Canadian government were even threatened with legal action by a civil liberties group over plans to redevelop the Toronto Waterfront site as a 'Smart Neighbourhood'.

The organisation was concerned that residents would be subject to increased surveillance, due to the technology being used, and that the information would be shared with a non-governmental entity - in this case, Google. The project was eventually withdrawn in 2020 due to economic uncertainty brought on by the pandemic.

Kronos, a provider of human resources (HR) products, has confirmed its Kronos Private Cloud has been hit with ransomware that has knocked some of its services offline.

The global supplier of business software for tasks such as timekeeping said Kronos UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, and Banking Scheduling Solutions services - products relating to employee management, emergency services scheduling, and staff scheduling for banks and credit unions respectively - are all said to be affected.

Communicating to customers through the company's online community and help centre platform, Kronos officials said on-premise environments are unaffected and there is no impact to UKG Pro, UKG Dimensions, or UKG Ready.

Bob Hughes, executive vice president at Kronos addressed customers on Monday confirming the incident was indeed ransomware-related.

Hughes also said "it may take up to several weeks to restore system availability" and that customers should take additional measures to ensure the smooth running of their business while the outage persists.

"We are working with leading cyber security experts to assess and resolve the situation, and have notified the authorities," said Hughes. "The investigation remains ongoing, as we work to determine the nature and scope of the incident.

"We deeply regret the impact this is having on you, and we are continuing to take all appropriate actions to remediate the situation. We recognise the seriousness of this issue and will provide another update within the next 24 hours."

IT Pro contacted Kronos for further details, including if the company still has access to emails, but it did not reply at the time of publication. It's also unclear at this time if the ransomware attack was launched via the recently discovered and widely feared Log4Shell Java vulnerability.

According to a Kronos customer success manager replying to a customer in the company's online help centre, there is currently no indication that any customer data has been compromised in the attack and it has "all available resources deployed to mitigate any loss or access to companies personal data".

Kronos customers have been contacting the company in droves seeking help on business continuity issues. Common issues involve customers not being able to export employee timesheet data, manually pulling employee timekeeping information, and seeking help to get set up on-premises.

Experts have said the incident should serve as a reminder to all business owners and decision-makers that ransomware attacks such as the one sustained by Kronos must be accounted for when devising a business continuity strategy.

"Whether your workforce management solution is hosted in-house, or externally delivered from the cloud, if you have determined that solution is mission-critical for your day-to-day operations, you need to include scenarios just like this ransomware attack as part of your broader business continuity planning," said Ben Smith, field CTO at NetWitness, to IT Pro.

"What’s your backup plan if that platform is suddenly unavailable? Do you have alternate processes in place you can spin up temporarily while your vendor gets back on its feet? Even if this means some possibly painful manual work for you and your team, it’s better to have those processes and procedures ready to go, versus not having that backup plan at all."

Nicola Sturgeon has asked for people in Scotland to work from home until the middle of January to prevent the "potentially rapid rise" of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

A similar announcement is expected to be made by the UK's prime minister, Boris Johnson, with wide reports of "Plan B" restrictions to be implemented on Thursday, according to Reuters.

Cases of the Omicron variant have increased in Scotland, shooting up from 28 to 99 in a matter of days, according to the leader of the Scottish National Party. There is also a belief that around 4% of COVID-19 cases north of the border are likely to be the new strain of the virus.

"If you had staff working from home at the start of the pandemic, please now do so again," said Sturgeon according to the Independent. "We're asking you to do this from now until the middle of January when we will review this advice."

"I know how difficult this is, but I cannot stress enough how much difference we think this could make in helping step transmission and avoiding the need for even more onerous measures."

The UK government had previously ruled out working from home, suggesting it wasn't necessary, but the greater transmissibility of Omicron might have forced another U-turn. Sage professor Neil Ferguson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the new variant appears to be doubling every two to three days.

"It's likely to overtake Delta before Christmas at this rate, precisely when is hard to say," Ferguson said. "We'll start seeing an impact on overall case numbers - it's still probably only 2%, 3% of all cases so it's kind of swamped, but within a week or two we'll start seeing overall case numbers accelerate quite markedly as well."

The decision to go back to remote working comes as the government faces intense scrutiny over a Christmas party held at Number 10 during last year's lockdown. Some Tory MPs are reportedly concerned that the public may be unwilling to follow new restrictions after a video emerged of Downing Street aides laughing about a social gathering in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Reported cases of the Omicron variant in both England and Scotland have led to calls for tough restrictions to be re-implemented across the UK.

Specifically, experts, including Sage, have called for a return to remote working to curb the rise in cases.

Little is known about the Omicron variant as yet, though health officials suggest it is more transmissible than the dominant Delta strain that was discovered at the end of 2020. However, new COVID cases have been steadily rising since October, according to the latest government figures. As of 2 December, there were 53,945 daily positive tests reported and 848 deaths over the previous seven days.

So far, ministers in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have all advised people to work from home if they can. England is the only nation in the UK to not follow suit, with Boris Johnson commenting that working from home was "not currently necessary" when asked during a press conference on 30 November.

That was backed by the UK's health secretary, Sajid Javid, who told BBC's Andrew Marr: "I don't think [WFH] is necessary, because this is about taking proportionate action against the risks that we face."

Returning to the office has been a dominant topic of discussion throughout 2021, but the year is in danger of ending as it began, with the public forced back in doors. The first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, recently said that remote working would give Scotland "the best possible chance of enjoying not just a more normal Christmas, but a safer Christmas".

Hybrid offices

Whether or not organisations are advised to work remotely, Andrew Mawson, co-founder and director of global consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates, believes it's crucial to acknowledge that the UK is in a completely different place to where it was last year.

"There is no comparison between being told to work remotely in March 2020 and being told to do so now," Mawson said. "Based on our research and the conversations we are having with clients, most organisations have already embraced a hybrid way of working where employees split their time between working remotely and being physically in the office, and they are utilising that model rather effectively and productively.

"So as they are working remotely anyway, and in today's tech and virtually-led workplace, I'm more than confident that employees can adapt and it will be 'business as usual' if the government reintroduces a remote working directive," he added.

Despite many businesses being more ready than ever to make the switch back, Jitesh Patel, the CEO of office design company Peldon Rose, suggests a complete remote working mandate should still be a last resort, ultimately decided by individuals and businesses.

"If staff feel safe, and companies are responsible in the way they are operating, I expect employees will assess how they feel and make a decision based on their individual situation," Patel said. "It is therefore up to companies to ensure their employees have a safe environment to work from, whilst helping to reduce the spread of the new variant."

The issue is far more complicated than simply deciding to usher in new policies, as each business also has a duty to keep its employees happy and, most importantly, remain open to their concerns, according to Astrid Beekhuis, director of HR at US chemical firm Momentive.

"It is crucial that businesses are listening to their employees at this time," Beekhuis said. "Feedback has never been more important in shaping office policies as staff may be more apprehensive about travelling into the office to work."

Asam Akhtar, the UK channel manager for workplace platform Envoy suggests the most effective way the government and businesses can protect the health and safety of employees is by implementing COVID testing requirements that call for weekly tests.

"Unfortunately, it looks like we may be living with Covid and its variants for the foreseeable future, so we have to learn how to create safe workplaces where people can continue to connect in-person, collaborate and thrive," Akhtar said. "The first step is being vigilant about safety precautions. The next step is helping employers implement the right technology to make real-time, data-informed decisions that make work spaces safer."

The "great resignation"

UK employees have been reporting anxiety around the return to work long before the discovery of the Omicron variant. According to research from RingCentral, around 66% would rather continue working from home and 65% suggested they would rather clean the toilet than go back to commuting. What's more, around 25% said they would look for a new job if they were forced back into the office.

Over 700,000 Brits moved jobs from April to June 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). That roughly equates to 2.6% of the UK's workforce, which is the highest in a decade. RingCentral's research suggests that this apparent "great resignation" is actually being driven by younger people, with almost a third (32%) of those aged 21-24 suggesting they plan to leave their place of employment, with a further 27% planning to leave in the next six months. What's more, a third (33%) of those aged between 25-34, suggested they would look for a new job if their employer changes their work model to a more in-person approach.

"The last 18 months have proven that with the right collaboration tools, it is possible not only to build highly productive teams, but also meaningful human connections with colleagues to generate positive working relationships," Steve Rafferty, country manager, UK and Ireland, RingCentral, said. "One way or another, the data is clear: if businesses want to retain their staff they need to offer an environment that caters to modern needs."

Apple has announced that its employees will return to the office at the start of February as part of a hybrid work pilot.

Staff learned of the decision on Thursday, according to The Information, via an internal memo from CEO Tim Cook.

The pilot will start with workers in the office two days a week before moving up to three (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) in March. The pilot appears to be rigid on which days are taken for remote work as it just lists Wednesday and Fridays and some employees will be asked to work in the office for either four or five days if their roles require it.

The tech giant had previously offered its employees two weeks of remote work per year but added two more to give more opportunities for travel, family time, or to simply "shake up routines", according to Cook's memo. Cook first announced the hybrid work model in June, with the company aiming for a September return to the office.

The return has been moved back multiple times, with the spread of COVID in the US stopping plans for October and January returns. Apple's version of the hybrid model also received some strong push back from employees who called for more flexibility in an internal letter addressed to Cook.

Despite many of the tools and services used for remote working being developed by the tech giants, the firms themselves have struggled to define their own working from home policies. Microsoft and Google have also offered up cautious ideas about remote working, with the former concerned about video call fatigue.

Google's plans have mirrored Apple's in that its plans to return have been hampered by the COVID situation in America. Currently, the company plans to re-evaluate its decision in the new year.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has announced that the decision to return to office will be left to the directors of individual teams.

The tech giant had previously said it wanted staff in the office three days a week, a policy that was announced shortly before Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos in July.

Those plans were pushed back to 2022 due to the spread of COVID across the US. However, in a message to employees, Jassy said he acknowledged that due to uncertainty and different circumstances, decisions on whether to return to the office would now be made on a team-by-team basis at a director level.

"​​First, none of us know the definitive answers to these questions, especially long term," Jassy said in a statement. "Second, at a company of our size, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for how every team works best. And third, we're going to be in a stage of experimenting, learning, and adjusting for a while as we emerge from this pandemic. All of this led us to change course a bit."

Last week, the new CEO told a crowd at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle that the company could do more to treat employees better, specifically calling out the company's approach to the pandemic as something where it "fell short".

Instead of specifying the number of days in office, corporate roles will have their working from home allowance decided by a team director. As such, Jassy said that Amazon expects teams to still continue working "mostly" remotely, while others will form some combination of home and in office. He also suggested that there will be those that chose to come into the office every day.

"We're intentionally not prescribing how many days or which days - this is for directors to determine with their senior leaders and teams," Jassy added. "The decisions should be guided by what will be most effective for our customers; and not surprisingly, we will all continue to be evaluated by how we deliver for customers, regardless of where the work is performed."

Similarly, Google also recently extended its remote working plans into 2022, saying it would wait for a clearer picture of the pandemic in the US before it made a final decision.

UK fintech Monzo has withdrawn its application for a US banking license following talks with regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

The regulators told the company that it was unlikely the banking license would be approved, according to the Financial Times.

Monzo currently operates a pilot programme in the US and has a few thousand customers through a partnership with Ohio-based Sutton Bank, but was aiming to establish a fully licensed bank to expand its operations. A source close to the bank said that there had been an "active debate" internally on whether forming a fully licensed bank was the best way to expand.

“Following recent engagement with the OCC, we’ve decided to withdraw our banking license application for our US start-up,” a Monzo spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

“While this isn’t the outcome we initially set out to achieve, this allows us to build and scale our early-stage product offer in the US through existing partners and invest further in the UK. We have big ambitions for Monzo US. There are many routes to market we’re exploring that have been successful for other market entrants who are now major players.”

In July last year, Monzo’s future was in jeopardy after the firm reported its annual losses had more than doubled during the pandemic. In its 2020 earnings report, the company announced post-tax losses of £113.8 million, up from £47.1 million in 2019. The firm had launched paid and business accounts to try and find new ways to monetise its customer base, but also scrapped plans to hire 500 new workers and cut its workforce by 8% instead.

Despite this, in December it raised £60 million during a funding round, after receiving £65 million in July, taking the total investment for 2020 to £125 million. This helped the bank finish 2020 in good health, despite the pandemic. The firm revealed it had almost five million customers and around 60,000 business users after adding 35,000 since June 2020.

Google has announced plans to buy the St John's Terminus building in New York's Manhattan borough for $2.1 billion (£1.5 billion).

The purchase is the most expensive for a single US office building since the pandemic began and will form part of the tech giant's sweeping campus development in the area.

St John's Terminal was built in 1934, originally as a terminus for the New York Central Railroad, but it underwent an extensive redevelopment in 2018. Around the site, Google has been building its "Google Hudson Square" campus, with a plan to add St John's as an 'anchor' for the entire campus.

New York is now Google's second-largest hub of office employees with only the Mountain View site in California housing more. The tech giant had begun to lease out completed parts of the New York campus, but no one has moved in as yet due to the ongoing spread of COVID.

"Google has been fortunate to call New York City home for more than 20 years, during which time we have grown to 12,000 employees," Google CFO Ruth Porat wrote in a blog post. "New York's vitality, creativity and world-class talent are what keep us rooted here. It is why we're announcing today that we are deepening our commitment to New York and intend to purchase the St. John's Terminal in Manhattan for $2.1 billion, which will serve as the anchor of our new Hudson Square campus.

"As Google moves toward a more flexible hybrid approach to work, coming together in person to collaborate and build community will remain an important part of our future. It is why we continue investing in our offices around the world. Our decision to exercise our option to purchase St. John's Terminal further builds upon our existing plans to invest more than $250 million this year in our New York campus presence. It is also an important part of meeting our previously announced racial equity commitments, which include continuing to grow our workforce in diverse communities like New York."

The move is very much in line with other Google projects, such as the so-called 'landscaper' office building currently under development in London's King's Cross, but it doesn't necessarily fit in with the rest of the tech industry.

Companies like Salesforce and Dropbox, for instance, have made changes to their existing office space to accommodate hybrid work, such as reducing desks and creating 'collaborative' areas.

Demand for tech professionals in the UK increased by 10% over the first six months of 2021, according to new research from Accenture.

The organisation's UK Tech Talent Tracker claims that this is the first time the job market for tech has grown since the pandemic, with over 93,000 tech job openings by July 2021.

The number was only around 85,000 in January, according to the report, and the overall availability of tech jobs is still well below pre-pandemic levels at 76% lower than in 2019.

However, there is "significant" demand for skills in emerging technologies driving growth across the tech sector, with jobs in quantum computing seeing triple-digit growth (157%), while blockchain-related job listings have increased by 72%. A recent report from Gartner suggested IT executives are concerned that there will not be enough 'talent' to fill such roles.

"While the UK economy continues to bear the brunt of the pandemic, these figures are a ray of hope as technology helps to fuel the recovery," said Shaheen Sayed, technology lead for Accenture in the UK & Ireland.

"Investment in new software and machinery, particularly with the UK's roadmap in electric vehicle production, as well as more hybrid working, will likely kickstart greater demand for more technology skills. As businesses fast track their transformations and industries become permanently digitised, we expect to see the war for tech talent to grow even more intense."

Job recovery in England is a little uneven, according to the report, with open tech roles increasing in Manchester (18%) and Leeds (15%), but declining in key hubs such as Liverpool (-20%) and Newcastle (-5%). Despite a stark rise in remote working since the pandemic, London has maintained its dominance as the UK's main hub for tech jobs, with the capital accounting for nearly half of all advertised tech vacancies in the country with more than 44,000 available positions.

"The North-South tech divide persists, but burgeoning hubs in Scotland and the North West of England are offering more opportunities for tech professionals at a time when more people are moving jobs and making lifestyle changes," Sayed said. "We expect the dust to settle on flexible working practices - as companies expand regionally - which should help to broaden the spread of tech talent."

The number of tech jobs in 2020 was said to have helped the overall market through the pandemic, according to Tech Nation data. After healthcare, the technology sector posted the highest number of vacancies.

Microsoft has cancelled its plans to bring employees back into the office indefinitely due to the increased spread of COVID-19 across the US.

The firm was set to welcome staff back on 4 October, but will now wait for new public health advice regarding the Delta variant before setting a new date.

The decision shows more caution compared to announcements from Apple and Google, which have both rescheduled returns for January 2022, with the latter having changed its return date three times due to the spread of the Delta variant.

This note of caution is also apparent in Microsoft's approach to hybrid work; unlike Salesforce, which has fully embraced hybrid and remote work, Microsoft is concerned about maintaining team building and corporate culture with a dispersed workforce. The new normal, according to Satya Nadella, will impact the company's ability to constantly come together because it will "ebb and flow".

"Our new data shows there is no one-size-fits-all approach to hybrid work, as employee expectations continue to change," Nadella said in a blog post. "The only way for organisations to solve this complexity is to embrace flexibility across their entire operating model, including the ways people work, the places they inhabit and how they approach business process."

Microsoft has seen a positive impact on employees over the course of the pandemic; the company's own figures state that 160,000 people worked from home and 25,000 new employees remotely on-boarded during 2020, but the share of people who reported feeling included at Microsoft was at an all-time high of 90%.

But the tech giant doesn't see any guarantee that these positive trends will continue, and it expects more challenges around work-life balance and team connection. At LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in 2016, this hybrid work paradox is being referred to as "the great reshuffle".

"While we hope hybrid work will help us improve in these areas, finding the balance will be complex," Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate VP for modern work, wrote in a blog post. "Our ongoing research shows employees crave more in-person time with their team but wish to keep the flexibility of remote work. And every person is different - 58% of employees who plan to spend the most and least time in-office are doing it for the same reason: more focused work.

"And there are gaps to fill - managers plan to spend a higher share of their time in-office than non-managerial employees (45% vs 39%)," added Spataro. "Moreover, employees surveyed plan to go into the office more than managers expect. This complexity is what Satya [Nadella] calls the hybrid work paradox."

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