Technology managed services provider ITEC has renewed its sponsorship of the Cornish Pirates’ Hospitality and Entertainment Marquee for the third consecutive year. This renewed three-year commitment will enable the club to welcome more guests in its hospitality suite in the upcoming season.

In addition to its sponsorship pledge and as the Cornish Pirates’ official Technology Partner, ITEC will be developing an interactive app for supporters on match days, initially designed to replace the matchday programme. There will be player bios for both the Pirates and the opposition players including the one to watch, directions, stadium information and a meet the sponsors page.

ITEC will also be sponsoring the new post-match interview and number 7 shirt, in addition to introducing an ITEC/HP Post of the Week prize on the club’s social media. ITEC is actively involved in partnering with teams and sporting facilities in the South West, with Bristol Sport and Somerset Cricket Club among its list of customers.

Nick Orme, CEO of ITEC said:

“The Cornish Pirates are coming back stronger than ever with an incredibly impressive team. We’re committed to helping them grow as a club and given there are plenty of avid fans based in our Cornwall office, it seemed a natural fit to sponsor them for another three years. We look forward to seeing what they can deliver this season.”

The 2019/20 season will be one of the last for the Pirates at Mennaye Field in Penzance, as development plans forge ahead for the Stadium of Cornwall which will house both the rugby union team and Truro City FC.

Robin James, COO of the Cornish Pirates commented:

‘’With our hospitality marquee being refreshed for the 2019/2020 season and increased to cater for 200 guests sitting down to a fantastic meal freshly prepared by Roseworthy Farms, we are delighted that ITEC have agreed to renew their sponsorship with us for another three seasons.

“In addition to sponsoring our hospitality marquee, which has been incredibly successful, they will develop an APP to enable us to provide our fans with an electronic match programme, they will sponsor our No7 shirt, an ITEC/HP prize to be given at each home game for ‘’social media post of the week’’, plus they will organise an interview after each home match hosted by John Martin and filmed by Alan Spurgeon and his team at Hedgehog.

“It is fantastic and exciting what ITEC are providing for the next three seasons. They have certainly upped their game and we look forward to matching that on the Mennaye Field for the next couple of seasons – with an eye to the future playing at the new Stadium for Cornwall.’’

The post Technology Partner ITEC Renews Sponsorship with the Cornish Pirates appeared first on UK Tech News.

The executive team behind the ‘Rainbird‘ platfom share their thoughts on the challenges for the Government as the use of AI becomes more mainstream

The use of Artificial Intelligence is already widespread across the public sector and even central government departments and this looks set to dramatically increase in coming years. It will bring some £17 billion in efficiency. Trust in public institutions could be jeopardized if the state begins to adopt forms of AI whose inner workings are not widely or easily understood. For example, revelations the Home Office has used an ‘algorithm’ to stream visa applicants has raised concerns over accountability and fairness in public institutions.

The key challenge

The issue is that as a society we may have inadvertently shunned so-called ‘symbolic’ AI which mirror human thought patterns in favour of complex neural networks that operate on the basis of obscure calculations understood only by data scientists. As AI increasingly assists tasks within the public sector, machines need to be publicly accountable for their decisions in the same way as other public servants. This means they need to be designed to be modifiable and auditable by the public service professionals they will work with. AI technologies can only be audited by ordinary human professionals if they emulate the thought processes of the humans who typically take those decisions; if an AI platform replicates the thought process of a Home Office worker then it’s easier for the Home Office to audit and justify its decisions.

AI could produce unequal access to services

Building public services around algorithms understood only by data scientists is like basing trading decisions around complex financial instruments that nobody but a genius can understand. The 2008 financial crash was partly caused by the fact that very few people understood the financial instruments banks were buying and selling; when trading was no longer based on differences in attitudes and preferences but on differences in understanding, then risk was concentrated not on those most able to afford it but on those least able to understand it. Similarly, if Government algorithms are understood only by a privileged few then access to vital services will be decided not by differences in need but by differences in public understanding.

Those able to understand AIs might be able to ‘game’ the system and write applications for everything from Government loans to visas that get approved ahead of more worthy recipients. Those least able to understand the workings of AI, including vulnerable groups such as the disabled, may lose out by inadvertently including or omitting details in their applications which the machines identify as ‘red flags.’

Putting the human back into AI

The only solution is to transform the algorithms behind our public services from a black box into a glass house. We need AI technologies to become more human-centric so that they both make and justify their decisions in human terms. This not only means they can be audited and improved by ordinary professionals but that their decisions can also be explained to the general public, restoring trust in public services.

Leading organisations across the private sector, from credit card companies to law firms, are now working with their best experts in key department and mind-mapping their thought processes so that they can be reproduced by machines. Crucially, these rules-based AI systems produce a ‘human-readable’ audit trail showing how their decision-making criteria is weighted so any prejudice can be exposed and cleansed from the system.

This process of mind-mapping human decisions for machines also enables ethical and compliant decision-making processes to be visualized and taught across the public sector. In this way, increasing algorithmic accountability helps ensure more fair and ethical decisions among all public sector employees. A civil service AI trained with a ‘mind map’ to reproduce typical civil service recruitment processes might expose unconscious biases; for example, an office policy of ‘hot-desking’ that may unwittingly discriminate against people with autism who prefer set routines. Since machines inherit their prejudices from humans, surfacing prejudice in machines can also surface prejudice in the human workforce.

Explainable AIs produce audit trails that can be used not only to correct ‘bad bias’ but to introduce ‘good bias’; an AI government loan-assessment tool could be trained to give less weight to risk factors like marital status but give greater weight to risk factors such as length of employment.

In this way, not only can government institutions ensure that AI makes unbiased decisions but they could also use AI to expose and challenge unconscious biases within the human public sector workforce.

The post Why Government must turn AI from a ‘black box’ into a glass house appeared first on UK Tech News.

GTT Communications, Inc. (NYSE: GTT), the leading global cloud networking provider to multinational clients, has this month announced it has expanded its SD-WAN service by adding the capability to run multiple network applications on a single universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) device. uCPE enables more cost-effective and efficient delivery of network services, including centralised management of software updates and more flexible service customisation.

GTT leverages virtualised network function (VNF) technology to deliver multiple services, such as SD-WAN, firewall and WAN optimisation, on the same uCPE device, eliminating the requirement to deploy multiple hardware devices at a single client site.

“GTT is advancing its portfolio of cloud networking services with new functionality. We will continue to expand our SD-WAN offer with additional features on uCPE to connect our enterprise clients to any location in the world and every application in the cloud,” stated Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO.

GTT SD-WAN provides direct connectivity to leading cloud service providers across its Tier 1 global IP network with 600 points of presence on six continents and established relationships with thousands of network suppliers that enable GTT to deliver redundant last-mile connectivity options around the globe.

“Consolidating network functions such as routing, firewall and WAN optimisation on a single device lowers hardware costs and improves agility by making it easier to manage remote offices and roll out new networking services,” commented Cliff Grossner, executive director of research and analysis at IHS

“Our research findings indicate that interest in uCPE is growing strongly from enterprises that want to automate management of their edge connectivity and is an increasingly important element used by service providers to deliver SD-WAN.”

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UK cybersecurity specialist Barac today unveiled details of how, in May 2019, it identified a sophisticated cyberattack targeting a major African-headquartered financial institution. At the time the attack was identified, hackers had infiltrated the bank’s infrastructure and had begun to make a small number of low-value transactions to other banks located in Bulgaria. Elements of the attack were encrypted in an attempt to evade detection; the encrypted certificates used were signed in North Korea.

How the compromise was spotted

The compromise was identified when Barac spotted suspicious, reoccurring patterns in the metadata of a small proportion of the encrypted traffic leaving the bank’s head office network.

On inspection, this traffic was all destined for the same Domain Name Server (DNS) in Bulgaria, and always made use of the same cipher suite. Each session was open for exactly the same duration and contained unusually high volumes of data.

In addition, while the DNS was registered in Bulgaria, its certificates were signed in North Korea.

Thwarting the attack during its test phase

Having flagged this encrypted traffic as suspicious, is was isolated in a sandbox and decrypted. It was then identified as command and control (C+C) traffic between malware, which had already compromised the bank’s network, and the Bulgarian-based server.

The bank then undertook a full security audit of its infrastructure. It discovered that malware had infected a number of endpoints at its headquarters, and that a small number of identical, low-value transactions had been made to other banks – again, located in Bulgaria – via the SWIFT Payments infrastructure. It is believed that these small payments were made to test the exfiltration mechanism of the attack, with the hackers fully expected to attempt the extraction of larger amounts at some future date.

Further investigations also detected similar encrypted C+C traffic hidden inside encrypted traffic flows leaving the bank’s operations in one of its Southern African subsidiaries.

“This was an extremely sophisticated, multi-faceted, and diligently-planned attack on a high-value target, which contained some very clear indications of North Korean involvement,” said Omar Yaacoubi, founder and CEO of Barac.

“The hackers were using encryption is a particularly clever way. Knowing that the bank would, quite rightly, decrypt all of the data leaving its organisation, they buried their ‘command and control’ calls home in these traffic flows, in the hope that they would evade detection. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t work, and by identifying this suspicious traffic, the whole plot was blown wide open before any major harm could be done to the bank or its customers.”

More details of this compromise are available on Barac’s blog.​

The challenge of scanning encrypted traffic for cyberthreats

Organisations are increasingly turning to encryption to improve their security posture and to comply with industry regulations. However, this does present a new problem: how to scan this traffic to identify and block threats.

The most commonly-used method requires organisations to decrypt all the traffic entering and leaving their networks, before scanning and re-encrypting it. However, this approach raises concerns around compliance, scalability, certificate management and latency. Hackers understand the challenges organisations face with this approach, so are increasingly turning to encrypted traffic flows as a vector of attack.

An alternative method – as adopted by this bank in this instance – is to scan the metadata of the encrypted traffic, using behavioural analytics and artificial intelligence to understand normal traffic patterns, and to alert on any anomalies. By looking at hundreds of different metrics in combination, Barac is able to risk score each encrypted traffic session, all in real-time without the need for decryption. This incident was considered ‘high-risk.’

“For many organisations, it simply isn’t feasible to decrypt all of the encrypted traffic traversing their networks in order to check for threats; it has too big a hit on network performance and could put them in breach of compliance regulations,” continued Yaacoubi.

“However, by using behavioural analytics to assess traffic metadata, it’s possible to scan all encrypted traffic for malware without embarking on the cumbersome process of decryption. This means every data packet can be scrutinised for malware before it enters or leaves the network. It was this very granular approach that caught out the hackers on this occasion.”

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Rackspace, the technology services company, has supported the migration of leading data-led FinTech business GoCo Group – which includes GoCompare, weflip, Look After My Bills, MyVoucherCode and Energylinx – to Microsoft Azure, delivering a scalable, forward looking, foundation for growth.

Founded in 2006 as the UK’s first comparison website to focus on product features as well as price, GoCompare is evolving its customer offering as well as the energy auto-switching service weflip and Look After My Bills, that finds the best energy deals and automatically moves consumers onto them.

Technology has always been at the heart of GoCompare’s offering as it sought growth in a competitive market and needed infrastructure that would support its ambitious plans to deliver a consistent user experience, particularly when handling spikes in traffic.

These spikes are often less predictable than those encountered by retail businesses. For example, unexpected peaks in traffic can be driven by the news, such as an investigation into how much consumers are paying for utilities. With traffic fluctuations much harder to anticipate, if the site struggled to perform GoCompare could lose out on a major revenue opportunity.

Trusting a longstanding partner with its future growth

With a relationship dating back 12 years, GoCompare selected Rackspace for its migration to a new infrastructure platform. The migration was managed by the Rackspace Professional Services team, supporting GoCompare from consulting around cloud architecture through to delivery. Using its depth of Microsoft Azure experience and expertise, Rackspace helped GoCompare accelerate its cloud journey.

Kieron Nolan, Group Director of Technology at GoCo Group, said:

“We trust Rackspace to guide us through the challenges ahead, be transparent and work with us to come up with solutions. Using the team’s insights from other projects they managed for us, as well as current and upcoming IT trends that might affect us means we are fully equipped with the right expertise to succeed. It’s a true partnership in every sense of the term.

“Choosing Microsoft Azure was not just about being able to meet our current requirements but also to unlock new abilities. Having that footprint in place means we can tap into services such as data science, analytics and predictive modelling as we need them.”

Working with Rackspace, GoCompare began a staged migration to Microsoft Azure. This staged approach helped mitigate the risk of downtime: the first phase involved moving disaster recovery systems onto Microsoft Azure, with the next step to open the platform up to its customer traffic. The approach also ensured the migration wouldn’t clash with other internal initiatives and allowed each workload to be tested and trialed separately before all IT operations were moved over.

Making an immediate impact

The disaster recovery workload migration to Microsoft Azure was completed and with zero data loss. GoCompare has also already seen an improvement in the site’s sustainability and availability, with response times improved. Through testing, the ability to automatically scale as needed is also expected to allow the platform to manage 10 times its normal load.

Adam Evans, Director of Professional Services, EMEA at Rackspace said:

“GoCompare has worked with Rackspace for 12 years, and acknowledged that our unbiased expertise would support its critical migration project.

“The team demonstrated their understanding of GoCompare’s mission to save its customers time and money through innovative and intuitive services, and delivered a cloud services plan that will help it achieve a more resilient, scalable site.”

For more information on the migration project visit https://www.rackspace.com/customer-stories/gocompare

The post Rackspace secures future growth for GoCompare Group with Microsoft Azure appeared first on UK Tech News.

Exabeam and the Ponemon Institute have this week revealed results of new joint research, which reveals that on average, security personnel in U.S. enterprises waste approximately 25 percent of their time chasing false positives because security alerts or indicators of compromise (IOCs) are erroneous.

The report also highlighted the need for security operations centre (SOC) productivity improvements, citing that security teams must evaluate and respond to nearly 4,000 security alerts per week.

The persistent struggle to improve productivity revealed the need for newer security information and event management (SIEM) technologies such as user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR).

While the study found that chasing false positives is the most time-consuming task for security teams, it also showed that:

1) investigating actionable intelligence and building incident timelines and

2) cleaning, fixing and/or patching networks, applications and devices resulting from an incident each take over 15 percent of a security team’s time.

These inefficiencies can stymie response times to cyberattacks, leaving organisations vulnerable to data and financial losses for longer periods.

However, the report found that modern SIEM technologies such as UEBA and SOAR can significantly improve productivity. Exabeam was able to reduce total time spent by enterprises on security tasks by 51 percent. Other SIEM solutions were only able to reduce the total time by less than a third (31 percent).

SIEMs are central to SOC cybersecurity for collecting logs and data from multiple network sources for the evaluation, analysis and correlation of network events used for threat detection. However, modern SIEMs are most effective because they leverage machine learning and behaviour analytics to identify increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and highly targeted hack techniques.

When used in conjunction with a full arsenal of tools like intelligent incident timeline construction and automated response, modern SIEMs provide significantly more context for how attackers think, work or what they are after.

“Our research determined that SIEMs, Exabeam’s in particular, save time, increase productivity and improve security effectiveness for security teams,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

“Exabeam provides enterprise security teams with the gift of time through a compelling user-based pricing model and modern features like behavioural analytics, machine-built timelines, automated incident response playbooks, and use case-specific content such as parsers, rules, models, playbooks and reports.”

The report further highlights that security operations teams are under water.

In approximately 80 percent of companies, SIEM solutions do not help reduce their headcount costs. Instead, improved productivity allows security leadership to better deliver on their existing mandates. This is especially important considering that one-third of respondents to the Exabeam 2019 State of the SOC Report reported being understaffed, with the most common shortage being 6-10 employees.

The post Research: cybersecurity teams waste 25% of their time chasing false positives appeared first on UK Tech News.

HVR and WhereScape have today announced their partnership. Together, WhereScape and HVR bring automation and rapid data integration to data infrastructure efforts, accelerating the delivery of real-time data to businesses.

“In today’s world, businesses need fast access to insightful data to inform business decisions, and for that, automation and access to real-time data is key,” said Neil Barton, CTO at WhereScape. “Through our partnership with HVR, we can offer customers an easier way to fast-track the delivery of real-time data into an organisation’s data infrastructure. Pairing WhereScape automation and HVR data replication software together can provide customers with the ability to deliver new analytics solutions to their business users in a fraction of the time it has taken in the past using outdated, traditional methods to deliver data warehousing projects.”

HVR’s data replication technology optimises the extraction of data from on-premise and cloud source databases to target data platforms, while WhereScape automates the design, development, deployment, documentation, and operation of the data warehouse infrastructure itself. Together, HVR and WhereScape offer customers proven, best-in-class capabilities, backed by use in hundreds of organisations worldwide. WhereScape’s automation and HVR’s data replication software offer teams the capabilities to address today’s data warehouse modernisation needs. Given each company’s ongoing focus and investment, customers can be assured that the solutions they adopt today will continue to advance in the future.

Set-up and deployment of the WhereScape/HVR joint solution is fast, easy, and cost-effective, giving customers the power to fast-track and maintain agile Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. Teams are able to quickly see the impact of WhereScape and HVR within their data warehousing processes – reducing the time it takes to deliver new data infrastructure projects and provide real-time data to end-users.

“In an HVR survey conducted to the PASS Data Architecture Virtual Group, respondents identified data warehouses as their primary focus for data integration projects,” said Mark Van de Wiel, CTO at HVR. “Together, WhereScape and HVR simplify the adoption of data warehouse solutions, accelerating the delivery of informed business decisions on the freshest data possible.”

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The post HVR and WhereScape Partner to Accelerate Data Warehouse Development, Operation, and Delivery of Real-Time Data to Businesses appeared first on UK Tech News.

CM.com’s Jan-Willem van Vugt, Strategic Partner Manager, explores how businesses can get in conversations with their customers to improve the customer experience using conversational messaging.

In 2008, most of our mobile time was spent in offline mode. Slow 2G connections and limited access to Wi-Fi led meant consumers would rely on a multitude of locally installed native mobile apps to get utility value from their smartphones. Today, Europe has the highest level of mobile user engagement. In a world of ubiquitous 4G and limitless Wi-Fi, mobile connectivity is ‘always on’ — utility value is delivered in real time over the internet because we’re always connected. Therefore, it’s no surprise that when it comes to communication between companies and customers this primarily takes place via the smartphone.

As many as 85% of all customers spend the majority of their time in the top 5 chat apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and WeChat. By using these communication channels for conversational messaging, in theory businesses can turn any conversation into a successful purchase from a satisfied customer.

What is conversational messaging and why should businesses be using it?

Conversational messaging starts with companies using existing communication channels. The advantage of these channels is that companies can be more personal and interactive with their customers. Nowadays, 65% of customers expect a response to customer service, marketing or sales questions within just 30 seconds. To be successful it is imperative that companies provide a fast service that fits seamlessly and manages this expectation.

The role of machine learning

If all communication is two-way, this puts a huge amount of pressure on IT and human resources departments. The solution to this problem is chatbots. The simpler bots can handle “if this, then what” scenarios, whilst the more advanced bots will be powered by machine learning. This technology has been decades in the making and we are now coming into an era in which tools and computing power are available to get it implemented. Machine learning and artificial intelligence includes speech to text solutions, sentiment analysis, contextual formatting, facial recognition and more. In turn this can make the transition to conversational messaging smooth and convenient for companies.

Conversational messaging: How to guide

When conversational messaging is used correctly, a company can go beyond the expectations of their customer. These are the main ingredients required for successful conversational messaging:

1. Multi-channel: support all channels so that the recipient can use his or her favourite way of communication.

2. Conversational: communication is two-way. With conversational messaging, you can immediately act, react and interact. When doing this right, you will exceed the expectations of your customer.

3. Relevant communication: the customer reaches you where and when they want it and in the right context for a seamless conversation.

4. Scalability: ultimately you want chat bots supporting you based on internal and external data.

With the evolving messaging capabilities and changing customer behaviours a total new way of communicating with customers is beginning to evolve. Customers will no longer install apps to order a cinema ticket, they will just ask, get the options in the conversation and purchase the tickets in one go. For this reason, companies should be rethinking their investment in app development and make the move to conversational messaging. If you’re ready to kill your app and start communicating? Start a conversation with CM.com and let us guide you through this process!

Conversational messaging: How to guide

When conversational messaging is used correctly, a company can go beyond the expectations of their customer. These are the main ingredients required for successful conversational messaging:

1. Multi-channel: support all channels so that the recipient can use his or her favourite way of communication.

2. Conversational: communication is two-way. With conversational messaging, you can immediately act, react and interact. When doing this right, you will exceed the expectations of your customer.

3. Relevant communication: the customer reaches you where and when they want it and in the right context for a seamless conversation.

4. Scalability: ultimately you want chat bots supporting you based on internal and external data.

With the evolving messaging capabilities and changing customer behaviours a total new way of communicating with customers is beginning to evolve. Customers will no longer install apps to order a cinema ticket, they will just ask, get the options in the conversation and purchase the tickets in one go. For this reason, companies should be rethinking their investment in app development and make the move to conversational messaging. If you’re ready to kill your app and start communicating? Start a conversation with CM.com and let us guide you through this process!

The post Apps are dead: invest in Business Messaging appeared first on UK Tech News.