Top 10 CIO interviews of 2013

The top IT leaders in the UK talked to Computer Weekly throughout 2013 to share their opinions and experiences of modern technology leadership and transforming business and government through IT innovation. 

Their views are valuable not only for fellow chief information officers (CIOs), but also any aspiring IT professional looking to develop their career opportunities.

Here are Computer Weekly's top 10 CIO interviews of the year.

Government chief technology officer Liam Maxwell has driven Whitehall’s IT agenda for years, previously as deputy government CIO and director of ICT futures.

The role of technology is changing at Marks & Spencer (M&S) – and changing the company itself as a result.

Beginning as a bricks and mortar store in the 1950s, Ikea is now the world’s largest furniture retailer with a turnover of €27bn. The retailer’s priority today is to get closer to its customer through a multi-channel approach using digital and traditional methods.

Gatwick Airport is predicting huge savings as it stops providing employees with BlackBerry devices, and instead encourages staff to use their own smartphones and tablets.

James Thomas, director of ICT at UCLH, has been driving his organisation towards embracing mobile and, in the past four years, has seen some great results.

Migrating IT away from former parent company Royal Bank of Scotland is the main priority for Angela Morrison, CIO at Direct Line Insurance

The decisions taken by the financial and economic wizards whose jobs involve keeping the UK economy on track are underpinned by data and analytics from the Bank of England.

A new IT strategy is about to be implemented at Save the Children, one of the world’s largest children’s rights charities, focusing on mobile technologies, cloud and advanced data analytics.

Graeme Hackland, CIO of Lotus F1, has worked for the race car team for 16 years. He has seen major changes in IT both on and off the track.

Bob Harris, chief technology officer (CTO) at UK broadcaster Channel 4, is not sure how big his big data volumes will grow, but one thing he knows is: “Like most companies, when considering this we arrive at a number with lots of zeros.”

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Consumer Rights Bill needs more protection for digital consumers, says committee

The government’s draft Consumer Rights Bill must resolve inconsistencies from digital purchases before reaching its potential to consolidate, simplify and modernise consumer law.

The Business, Innovation and Skills Committee has published a report today looking into the draft Consumer Rights Bill. The Committee welcomed the inclusion of creating rights for the purchase of digital content, but noted the government must do more before the bill moves forward.

The proposed new law could implement customer protection for digital media purchases while identifying other rights within consumer law.

The government estimates reforms will bring a boost of ?4bn to the UK economy over the next 10 years.

But Adrian Bailey MP, chair of the committee, said there were some inconsistencies in the bill between purchasing digital and traditional media.

"Under the current proposals, somebody who buys a faulty CD would be able to return it and get a refund. If they purchase a faulty download of the same music, however, they won’t. This is a clear inconsistency in the draft bill that should be sorted out,” he said.

The committee said the draft bill risked creating a two-tiered approach to the rights surrounding digital content.

The committee called for the bill to allow consumers to have the right to reject and obtain a refund irrespective of whether the content was a physical CD or downloaded digital content.

“The consumer’s concern is getting a refund for their faulty product, not whether it counts as tangible or intangible content under consumer legislation," it said.

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RSA denies secret contract with NSA

Security firm RSA has strongly denied allegations of a secret contract with the US National Security Agency (NSA).

A report from Reuters claimed the NSA arranged a secret $10m contract with RSA. But in a recent blog post, RSA said it “categorically denies” the allegations.  

“We have worked with the NSA, both as a vendor and an active member of the security community. We have never kept this relationship a secret and in fact have openly publicised it. Our explicit goal has always been to strengthen commercial and government security,” stated RSA.  

Reuters claimed the NSA paid RSA to generate a random number formula to create a "back door" in encryption products.

The RSA said in its blog post that it has never entered into a contract with the “intention of weakening RSA’s products, or introducing potential ‘back doors’ into our products for anyone’s use”.

In September, RSA advised its developer customers to stop using an encryption algorithm that documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden indicated contained a backdoor.

Last week, the European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee into the surveillance of EU citizens by the NSA called for political and technology changes following the NSA revelations.

The draft conclusions call for an EU cloud and proper analysis of the use of open source software, as well as political signals from the US that it understands the difference between allies and adversaries.

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Snowden: 'A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy'

Future generations will not have any personal privacy, said whistleblower Edward Snowden during the Channel 4 Alternative Christmas Message.

Famous for leaking several classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents, Snowden told viewers on Christmas Day that governments have “created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do”.

NSA documents leaked by Snowden revealed practices such as sending spies into online games to recruit informants and tracking as many as five billion phone records per day.

In the video, Snowden warned that the average person’s privacy is compromised every day. 

"We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go,” he said. “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves – an unrecorded, unanalysed thought.

“And that’s a problem, because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”

Snowden also alluded to loss of privacy for the next generation being worse than George Orwell’s depiction of the future in his novel 1984.

“George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of [information] collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us – are nothing compared to what we have available today,” he said.

The video is thought to have been recorded in Moscow, where Snowden has been granted temporary asylum.

Snowden went on to urge the public to claim back their privacy: “Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.”

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Top 10 information management stories of 2013

Putting analytics to work emerged as the most popular theme of 2013. Tesco, McLaren, and Telefonica Ireland figured strongly in the ranks of companies and organisations gaining real business value from the intelligent application of analytics.

Figleaves.com founder Michael Ross, and Mark Madsen, president of consulting firm Third Nature, were among leading practitioner-thinkers whose ideas on how the data revolution is transforming business attracted strong reader interest.

Online gambling, as a sector, and HR, as a function, also figured markedly as arenas lit up by data analytics. But for financial services firms, the cold, hard discipline of data governance has to come first. And how can mainstream companies and organisations build or buy a data science capability?

In April, Tesco’s financial results made the headlines as the UK’s largest retailer declared its expensive excursion into the US market was coming to an end. But the documents also revealed a drop in returns from capital employed (ROCE), due to operational, regulatory and economic factors.

Capital employed may seem like accountancy jargon, but it is a term IT could tune into. Understanding its importance was one of the driving forces behind an analytics programme, which has saved Tesco ?100m in annual supply chain costs.

The McLaren Group uses high-speed data analytics as it seeks a competitive edge. The company is known for its Formula 1 cars, but it also supplies medical monitoring to Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

O2 Ireland, part of Telefonica, has been using Teradata’s data warehousing and Cognos BI to stop customers leaving, and entice them with new offers with location-based marketing.

Business professionals who combine an understanding of HR and information technology are helping to transform the way companies manage their workforce. HR departments have come relatively late to IT, but the development of sophisticated, cloud-based HR tools, social media and big data analytics is transforming the way HR departments work.

Online retailing requires a new type of action-oriented business intelligence, according to Michael Ross, eCommera chief scientist and founder of online lingerie retailer Figleaves. The former McKinsey consultant and Cambridge maths graduate contends that e-commerce will thrive to the extent that it industrialises the knowledge work performed by data scientists, or analysts.

A new breed of data visualisation tools can work with big data. But they need governance to avoid Excel on steroids, and require greater agility of IT, says Accenture.

Corporate IT’s new vocation will be data integration. Mark Madsen, president of consulting firm Third Nature, told delegates at the London TDWI Business Intelligence (BI) Symposium, in his keynote speech, that the business of big data will change the function of the IT department to be less about technology and more about information architecture. Madsen cast a few swipes in the direction of big data zealots who think their activities “unprecedented”. We need to put precedence back in again. “It is a pity they don’t teach the history of science in science programmes,” he said.

The online gambling and gaming industries crave a structured approach to business data. Volumes can be huge and business need to react quickly to changing customer behaviour.

European banks need to improve how they handle data if they are to recover from the financial crisis and comply with the demanding legislation resulting from it.

Business leaders confront thorny issues in the organisational design of data analytics. Buy or build vies with data science or data democracy as issues in play.

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This was first published in December 2013

Top 10 networking stories of 2013

The past year has been full of ups and downs in the networking industry. From high investments in software-defined networking (SDN) to low expectations for broadband roll-outs, it has been a hot topic and one the eyes of the IT industry are increasingly turning to.

Computer Weekly takes a look back at networking throughout 2013 to give you a round-up of the biggest stories to hit the headlines.

Undoubtedly the biggest story to come out of 2013 was the ongoing saga of Broadband Delivery UK and the government’s project to bring superfast internet to 95% of the population by the end of 2017.

From the beginning of the year when Fujitsu pulled out of the bidding process, leaving BT as the sole provider, through the middle of the year when everyone involved promised the government transparency when it came to locations, and to the end of the year where the big gun changed its position and information began to be released slower than desired, it has been a roller coaster of a ride to an almost mythical goal of superfast broadband for all.

Computer Weekly continues to push for postcode data giving exact locations of the roll-out – read our most recent progress here.

In February, Cable company Liberty Global announced it was to buy Virgin Media for $23.3bn (?15bn) to move aggressively into the European telecoms market.  

The deal was to lead to the creation of a powerful global communications company, covering 47 million homes and serving 25 million customers across 14 countries.

As part of its acquisition, Liberty Global relocated from Delaware to the UK and became a UK Plc.

In 2013, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) released its report into Huawei’s involvement in government networks after it was discovered its equipment had been present in highly sensitive projects since 2003.

The report highlighted a huge number of errors in the process of choosing a provider for government networks and ensuring its security.

“This is far too haphazard an approach, given what is at stake,” the report said. “It means that the government may not be made aware of contracts involving foreign companies from potentially hostile states until they have already been awarded,” as indeed was the case with BT and Huawei.

There has still yet to be proof of any wrongdoing or state involvement when it comes to Huawei, but this debate is sure to rage on well into 2014.

In June, BT chief executive Ian Livingston announced he was leaving the telecoms giant in September to become a government minister.

Livingston was in the job for five years, during which he oversaw the expansion of BT’s fibre broadband network, as well as dealing with the huge losses made by the firm’s Global Services outsourcing arm in 2009 that forced BT to write off ?340m.

On leaving BT, he will join the House of Lords before becoming minister for trade and investment. He will be replaced by Gavin Patterson, currently the CEO of BT Retail.

In October, Alcatel-Lucent confirmed it was ditching 10,000 staff as part of its “shift plan” for cost savings.

The firm’s recently appointed CEO, Michel Combes, first announced the strategy back in June, two months after taking the reins of the networking manufacturer. By refocusing its efforts on burgeoning areas of the market, such as cloud, 4G and broadband, he claimed the company could return to profitability and secure a financially stable future.

Specific moves included redirecting R&D budget so 85% would focus on the aforementioned technologies, reducing R&D spend in legacy technologies by 60%, and cutting administrative, sales and support functions, which Combes believed would save €1bn or more by 2015.

This year saw the relaunch of the Janet network, which connects research institutions and educational facilities for collaboration, renamed Janet6, with the hope the new solution will “address future demands for high-capacity connectivity”.

In its previous incarnation, the network was run by Verizon as its managed service provider, but the company in charge, Jisc, will now operate the network itself, offering more flexibility to increasingly demanding users.

In early December, one London council was just hours away from being disconnected from the public sector communications network in an escalating row between central and local government over security compliance.

The unnamed council is just one of many across the country that has been threatened with disconnection from the Public Services Network (PSN) for failing to comply with “highly prescriptive” new security rules issued by the Cabinet Office.

Being disconnected from the PSN could mean a local authority is unable to fully carry out its public duties. Connection to the PSN is required for public services that are centrally and locally managed or delivered, such as housing benefits. If a council lost connection to the PSN, it would be unable to exchange benefits data with the Department for Work and Pensions, for example.

At the beginning of August, Birmingham City Council announced that it planned to roll out a Wi-Fi network throughout the centre of the Midlands hub, providing access to free and speedy internet connections in its most popular public spaces.

The council teamed up with Virgin Media Business for the project and planned to use its small cell technology to run the network, as well as increase mobile signals across the city.

The way small cells work is by connecting into a fibre network, then being attached to street furniture, such as lamp posts, to broaden the reach of their frequencies. They can then mesh with other installed small cells, boosting signals for any mobile networks that choose to link to them.

In July, it was announced the joint venture between Nokia and Siemens was coming to a close with the former buying out the latter for €1.7bn.

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) was founded in 2007 and saw the two European firms partner on providing networking infrastructure to telecoms companies across the globe.

Although it was understood that Nokia ran most of the day-to-day operations of the partnership, Siemens was heavily invested in the venture, but today announced it was selling its entire 50% stake in the company to its cohort.

The government plans to open a ?10m competitive fund in early 2014 to "test innovative solutions to deliver superfast broadband services to the most difficult to reach areas of the UK", or rural Britain.

This will all fall under the umbrella of the National Infrastructure Plan from the government, which it claims will consist of ?375bn of funding to get these projects done, along with ?25bn of private investment from insurance firms.

Details were somewhat thin on the ground following the announcement, but the DCMS promised it would kick off in the new year.

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Top 10 financial services IT stories of 2013

Businesses finally started talking about growth again in 2013. While the finance sector still remains ultra-cautious there are investments being made in technology as customers demand new ways of interacting with banks.

Regulation, regulation, regulation is the current mantra, being chanted in finance IT departments as regulatory bodies tighten the rules that control banks fearing a repeat of the carnage created by the 2008 financial services crash. For example, the Independent Banking Commissions report and subsequent ruling means banks must separate (ring-fence) their retail and investment operations.

But there are some positive signs that IT is seen as an important tool in the recovery. In retail banking, Barclays, for example, is transforming itself for the digital age. As is Nationwide Building Society, which has transformed its legacy infrastructure. Retail banks have to improve customer services with the ability to switch accounts easier than ever with the new seven-day switching service live.

But legacy systems are a major thorn in the side of banks. The failing in IT at the Royal Bank of Scotland, where customers have been locked out of their own accounts, is evidence that banks need to rip and replace systems that have been running for 40 years.

Here are Computer Weekly's top 10 articles that go some way towards painting a picture of 2013 for financial services IT:

A parliamentary report that looks at the effectiveness of plans to separate retail banks from investment banking operations has called for legislation to prevent breaches of the ring-fence.

Nationwide’s ?1bn IT transformation is beginning to show its benefit as the building society launches its latest current account, in its bid to take a bigger share of the UK retail banking customer base.

Barclays Bank has added two features to its Pingit app, which will appeal to businesses by making it easier for customers to buy goods and services using their phones.

Barclays bank is to trial touchscreen devices in branches to add to its digital credentials, following the deployment of wireless in its branches.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has failed to invest properly in its IT systems over the years, leading to a number of high-profile IT failures that have caused customers the ultimate discomfort of being unable to access their own money. But how endemic is this underinvestment in UK retail banking?

The success of the Payments Councils project to introduce a system to reduce the time and complexity related to switching UK current account providers has stirred interest from overseas organisations.

CIOs at banks lack the job security required to transform IT by replacing legacy systems that have been in place for decades. IT heads at banks are lucky to get two years in the job, so to take on a multi-year project as complicated as legacy replacement is seen as professional suicide.

Social media is being used by a group of entrepreneurs to create a bank that uses the technology to overcome the cost and complexity of traditional banking, while increasing customer trust through an online community.

Matthew Oakeley left Oxford University with a law degree but switched to a career in IT. After 11 years at Swiss investment bank UBS he joined asset management company Schroders, where he has been global head of IT for eight years.

When Yann L’Huillier joined trading firm Tradition in April 2010. He had a three-pronged challenge: to prepare the organisation for increasing electronic trading; rebalance IT budgets to favour its trading activity – rather than merely keeping the lights on; and to restructure the global IT organisation.

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Top 10 mobile stories of 2013

It is clear that 2013 has been another huge year for the world of mobile. There have been phone, tablet and phablet launches, ups and downs, and a noticeable increase in the bring your own device (BYOD) trend that cannot be ignored.

With the growth of 4G mobile services and increased demand to be available at all times, smartphones are getting bigger and better, but the competition between mobile giants has created some nail-biting news, as Apple appeared in court, Nokia was bought by Microsoft, and BlackBerry’s future became uncertain.

Here’s a glance at the top 10 mobile stories of 2013:

As sales made on mobile device and tablets increased by 304% in 2011, retailers realised that mobile devices should become an integral part of their IT strategy. As we welcomed 2013, retailers everywhere were implementing their mobile IT sales strategies.

As mobile devices grew, manufacturers realised that the competition was on, and even networking firm Huawei wanted a piece of the action as it launched its own smartphone line-up to compete with Apple, Samsung and Nokia.

With Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nokia phone business, the thought on everybody’s mind was “where will they go next?” This article looked into how Nokia’s acquisition would affect the future of Microsoft.

One of the biggest mobile stories of 2013 was John Chen taking the position of CEO for BlackBerry and promising to push the company forward through failed acquisitions and rumours of scrapping the hardware business.

Apple rolled out iOS7, which turned out not only to be more stylish than the previous iOS, but also improved the security of devices making them safer to use for business.

The past 12 months has seen a rise in competition between tablets and tablet operating systems. As Microsoft rolled out Windows RT, customers moved to other devices. Microsoft's executive vice-president of devices and studios explained why Windows RT was a mistake.

With the delayed release of the BlackBerry Z10, it was expected that as they came in they would fly off the shelves. But soon after its release BlackBerry reported a drop in revenue and failed to report how many Z10 units had been shifted.

Despite BlackBerry’s future looking uncertain, there is no denying that its enterprise software is one of the most secure around. Secure enough that BlackBerry 10, along with Samsung Knox, were deemed secure enough for use by the US military.

The government is officially allowing public sector organisations to introduce BYOD schemes for employees to access data and applications using their own mobile devices. The regulations mean, for the first time, local authorities are officially allowed to use BYOD schemes, but it is clear from the report that CESG would prefer public bodies not to do so.

Mid-2013, iOS product sales dropped in favour of Google’s Android operating system, giving Google the upper hand in the hand-held OS market.

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Apple and China Mobile launch iPhone deal

Apple has signed an iPhone distribution deal with China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier.

The deal means the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C will be available from Apple retail stores and China Mobile retail stores across mainland China from January 2014.

China Mobile’s recent roll-out of its 4G network, which will provide 4G services for 16 cities by the end of 2013, means 4G will be available for iPhone 5S and 5C users where it was previously unavailable.

Apple suffered a fall in profits earlier this year after iPad sales dropped, despite iPhone sales increasing.

Although the deal is good for Apple, as well as for Chinese consumers who will be able to use their phones on the 3G and 4G networks, it may not lead to an increase in sales of iPhone handsets.

Gartner analyst Anshul Gupta said it was likely existing users would upgrade to gain the advantages of the superfast 4G network, but whether or not new customers would take on an iPhone would depend a lot on the price of the handsets, which has yet to be announced.

In a statement, Apple CEO Tom Cook said: “China is an extremely important market for Apple and our partnership with China Mobile presents us the opportunity to bring iPhone to the customers of the world's largest network.” 

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Top 10 business applications stories of 2013

This year, Fiat’s Ferrari division illustrated one approach to evolving enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to fit new business imperatives: adding an element of customisation, using Infor, to meet insurgent Chinese demand. Children’s luggage firm Trunki and online recruitment company Reed.co.uk took a systematic approach to adopting cloud applications to meet their respective business needs. Oracle declared more strongly than before for the cloud at its OpenWorld event in San Francisco in October.

One popular article showed how organisations as diverse as DMG Media, the Northern Ireland civil service, and Reynolds Catering are using enterprise software – such as mobile apps, BPM [business process management], and ERP – to do new things.

Contrasting cases of the use of ERP to transform business organisations were LJA Miers, a family-run company that turns rubber and plastic into gaskets and seals, and BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI). The former chose SAP’s Business One ERP system, running on the supplier’s in-memory database Hana, to re-cast its business. The latter is part of the defence giant, with the complex organisational politics attendant upon all such large corporates, and awash with ERP systems.

The South African city of Cape Town is also no stranger to ERP. Find out how SAP runs Cape Town in one of our more popular case studies of this year.

SAP says it is taking its core ERP business with it as it moves to the cloud, goes mobile and underpins its software with Hana. Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO at SAP, announced the general availability of Hana on its Business Suite ERP software at Sapphire 2013 in Orlando.

Talent management does seem to be a hot new area for business applications, with the cloud an important delivery mechanism. Systems that enable a 360-degree view of the customer are also developing and attracting customer interest, which is why SAP says it bought Swiss commerce platform company Hybris.

Italian sports car maker Ferrari turned to Infor ERP technology to respond to impatient Chinese and Middle Eastern customer demand. Ferrari’s owner, Fiat, operates a centralised IT policy that says group companies should standardise on SAP. But chief information officer (CIO) Vittorio Boero and his team took the view that SAP was not going to deliver with the speed and customisation required for such fast-growing economies as China’s.

Cloud applications providers have often entered organisations by the back door. The "land and expand" approach is well-tested and has been used to considerable benefit by most of the leading software as a service (SaaS) applications firms with the (albeit often unaware) assistance of the IT department. Trunki and reed.co.uk show how more disciplined procurement approaches are replacing the land and expand strategies favoured by pioneering vendors.

Oracle launched 10 cloud services, as well as a cloud marketplace, to prove it is serious about its commitment to the cloud. Thomas Kurin, executive vice-president for product development at Oracle, kicked off the third day of the Oracle OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco by introducing a number of new cloud services.

In a recent survey of IT professionals by the Corporate IT Forum, delivering innovation was revealed as the leading operational target – indeed, nearly a quarter of respondents said it was their top strategic goal. In tough economic times, organisations are looking to achieve a competitive advantage by finding new ways to simplify processes, increase productivity and cut costs.

But while innovation is an important goal, delivering it is another matter – particularly when day-to-day tasks have to take priority. 

This feature shows new things done at DMG Media, Reynolds Catering, and the Northern Ireland Civil Service, using enterprise software.

When BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI) assembled a team to conduct a vital application upgrade, the company filled less than half the positions with IT people. Most of the team came from business functions, rather than the technology department.

The international defence manufacturer, which is part of aerospace, defence and security giant BAE Systems, is in the design phase of a project to upgrade and unify seven ERP systems. But large projects striving to unify ERP systems can become victims of tit-for-tat battles between business process owners who believe their way of doing things is best.

Aware of these potential dangers, John Booth, head of the project, brought people from the business into the heart of his team.

LJA Miers, a family-run company that turns rubber and plastic into gaskets and seals, has chosen SAP’s Business One ERP system, running on the supplier’s in-memory database Hana, to re-cast its business.

Managing director Andrew Miers, the grandson of the founder of the Cambridgeshire-based rubber and plastics converter, says he “fell in love with” Business One on Hana when demonstrated by Prospettiva, an IT services company located nearby.

The company is the first UK firm to implement SAP Business One version for SAP Hana.

For the past 10 years SAP has been running the city of Cape Town, South Africa.

The enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which was originally installed to transform the way the city is run, is still going strong despite political change.

It is considered one of the largest SAP implementations in local government. It encapsulates 420 business processes and handles 1.2 million consolidated invoices per month.

Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO at SAP, announced the general availability of its in-memory database appliance HANA on its Business Suite ERP software at Sapphire 2013 in Orlando. In a wide-ranging keynote informed by Darwinian evolution as a metaphor for business history, Hagemann Snabe said SAP had inaugurated three “quantum leaps” in its own technology in recent years: in-memory data management; business applications on the cloud; and an intensified focus on mobile users, often identified as a new generation of millennial workers.

There has been technology in the human resources (HR) area but, until recently, it has acted largely as an organisational hygiene factor. Businesses needed good IT systems to carry out simple tasks, such as checking how many people they employ and how to pay them correctly. But once you could do these things, technology did not offer talent management processes with much additional benefit. Now this has changed and, as with other areas of business, technology is having substantial and strategic effects on the capabilities of HR and other business leaders with responsibilities for talent management.

Hybris CEO Ariel L?di said SAP bought the Swiss commerce platform company to move beyond traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and enable it to deliver a multi-channel customer experience, in-store as well as through e-commerce, to companies that sell goods and services. In much of the press coverage surrounding the acquisition, announced in June and completed on 1 August, Hybris had been labelled a CRM supplier. But this was a mistake, L?di told Computer Weekly at an event in New York outlining the “vision” for Hybris as an SAP company.

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Alan Turing pardoned

Alan Turing, the second world war cryptanalyst and pioneer of computer science, has been given a posthumous royal pardon for the 1952 homosexuality conviction that destroyed his life. Turing was chemically castrated and lost his security clearances.

The Queen granted the pardon after a request by Justice Minister Chris Grayling under what is called the ‘Royal Prerogative of Mercy’.

As reported by the BBC, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Sharkey, who wrote a private member's bill calling for a royal pardon in July 2012, said: “This has demonstrated wisdom and compassion. It has recognised a very great British hero and made some amends for the cruelty and injustice with which Turing was treated.”

Turing’s work was part of the code breaking effort at Bletchley Park which played a significant role in the Allied victory over Germany and its allies. It may have shortened the war by two to four years, as Jack Copeland, a philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury, Christ Church New Zealand, writes in an essay the BBC commissioned on the 100th anniversary of Turing’s birth. This had much to do with breaking the German Enigma machine codes, against which Turing marshalled computing machines called ‘Bombes’. These diminished the German U-Boat threat in the North Atlantic.

Turing also made a breakthrough against a German enciphering machine more sophisticated than Enigma, named ‘Tunny’ by the British. The algorithms used to make inroads on Tunny were incorporated into the making of Tommy Flowers’ Colossus computer. Winston Churchill ordered the ten ‘Colossi’ to be destroyed at the end of the war.

Computer conservationist Tony Sale reconstructed Colossus at Bletchley Park, where it is part of the National Museum of Computing.

Turing’s postwar work took him to the University of Manchester, where he continued pioneering work in computer science. He committed suicide in his home in Wilmslow in 1954, two years after his conviction for gross indecency.

Danny Dresner, a Manchester based security consultant, said:

“Rightly or wrongly I've never been interested in the back story just the remarkable contribution to ending the war and the logic behind the way we work with technology now.

“It seems to me that an alternative universe where Turing lived happily into later life would be benefiting from ... well that's the problem; we lost Turing so we don't know.

“The University of Manchester has such an assured place on the pedestals of history we can only be sure that Turing's genius would have continued to be exploited in the right way.

“Turing pioneered the translation of thought into computing devices -- something that we are marvelling at with 21st century projects that continue the Turing legacy either directly or in spirit. The circumstance of our loss -- it is ours, not his -- is just another own goal for humanity.

“A moment of pride to be in that field; a tear too”, he said.

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Top 10 IT security stories of 2013

The need to evolve IT security strategies to match new and emerging threats has come clearly to the fore in the past year as attackers become increasingly adept at evading traditional security controls and stealing data without being detected.

Attackers have quickly adapted to new technologies, exploiting a range of security vulnerabilities in mobile, virtualised and cloud environments to target sensitive data, but social engineering mainly in the form of email phishing continues to be a key factor in most targeted attacks.

The need to defend against disruption has also increased in the past year with a growing number of disruptive cyber attacks by hackers with political agendas, with denial of service attacks becoming more powerful and more common.

The past year has seen a sharp shift in focus from traditional perimeter defences to more data-centric security controls, intelligence-based security systems and building a capability to detect, respond and mitigate the effects of data breaches once they occur.

There has also been an increasing emphasis on the need for information security professionals to be aligned with the business to enable new opportunities and information sharing in secure ways.

As a growing number of devices become internet enabled, security experts expect the so-called internet of things to present a whole new order of security challenges.

Read our top 10 IT security stories of 2013 here:

White hat hackers have shown that usernames, passwords, contact lists, details of e-commerce accounts and banking details can be sniffed easily from public Wi-Fi hotspots. To illustrate one of the many ways people can have their data compromised, the white hat hackers from First Base Technologies conducted two tests in partnership with security firm Trend Micro.

Digitally signed malware is a fast-growing threat that is aimed at bypassing whitelisting and sandboxing security controls, say security researchers. “We found 1.2 million pieces of new signed malware in the last quarter alone,” said David Marcus, director of advanced research and threat intelligence at McAfee. This is malware that is signed using legitimate digital certificates that have not been stolen or forged, but acquired from certificate authorities (CAs) or their sub-contractors, he said.

In July, the FBI issued a warning about an increase in spear-phishing attacks targeting multiple industry sectors. Spear phishing – a highly targeted phishing email – is one of the tools used by attackers to compromise endpoints and gain a foothold in the enterprise network. According to the FBI, victims are selected because of their involvement in an industry or organisation the attackers wish to compromise.

The Open Web Application Security Project (Owasp) continues to rank SQL injection attacks at the top of its 10 most critical web application risks. But what is an SQL injection (SQLi) attack, why are they important, and why have they remained unsolved more than 15 years since they first appeared – and has that changed? 

RSA executive chairman Art Coviello ended his opening keynote speech at RSA Europe 2013 with a call to the IT security industry to show the same spirit as Europe in setting up a common market after the Second World War. But what exactly does he have in mind?

New security technologies are finally making it easier for security to enable the business and drive value, according to Dave Anderson, senior director at Voltage Security. Many of the largest organisations in the world are beginning to use information security as a strategic advantage and to re-establish the value of data. “Although we have been talking about this for years, it has become much easier to achieve in the past year to two years,” he told Computer Weekly.

Most firms are not as prepared as they should be for responding to cyber attacks, says e-discovery firm Guidance Software. But with sensible reviews of processes and communications strategies, up to 70% of firms could put themselves on a much better footing, said Nick Pollard, the firm’s senior director of professional services.

The number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks monitored at over 20Gbps this year is more than three times greater than for the whole of 2012, according Arbor Networks. Despite the business risks of DDoS attacks, a survey by communications firm Neustar, published in July, found that 20% of UK respondents admitted that their companies have no DDoS protection in place.

The Syrian hacktivist attack on the New York Times website highlights urgent need for registry locking, says communications and analysis firm Neustar. The site was unavailable after the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) that supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was able to access the domain name system (DNS) settings for the site. The SEA breached the NYT’s domain name registrar Melbourne IT and changed the DNS record to point to systems in Syria and Russia.

The internet of things will pose enormous security and privacy challenges, a CW500 Club meeting heard. By 2020, trillions of sensors will be feeding data across the internet, recording everything from people’s movements to what they have just bought. Such data may prove invaluable for city planning or alerting consumers to special offers on their favourite products in a nearby shop, but it also poses unprecedented risks to individuals' privacy and security, a meeting of senior IT leaders heard.

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Top 10 IT privacy stories of 2013

Stories related to US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about internet mass surveillance programmes by the US and the UK have dominated this year.

The revelations have sent ripples through the technology industry and international political community, sparking unprecedented debate around online privacy, security and related issues.

Technology companies have introduced several measures to distance themselves from the spying programmes, including publishing data request reports and introducing advanced encryption.

The European Union has commissioned reports on privacy and called on the US for reforms, along with an alliance of the biggest technology firms. 

Other top stories on privacy in the past year have included reports on Google’s efforts to satisfy European data protection authorities that its privacy policies do not violate European laws and growing calls for a revision of that policy.

Read our top 10 privacy stories of 2013 here:

Top technology firms have joined forces to call for urgent reforms of all internet surveillance programmes, such as Prism in the US, and Tempora in the UK. Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Yahoo have formed an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group. The group says documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide.

In November, the European Commission called on the US to provide guarantees to restore trust in the wake of revelations of mass internet surveillance by whistleblower Edward Snowden. In the past, trust has relied on the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles designed to ensure US companies respect EU citizens’ right to protection of personal data. But in the light of the Snowden revelations this year of spying on EU citizens, companies and leaders, the EC wants further guarantees and processes to rebuild trust.

Twitter has announced it is using a spin-off of the Diffie-Hellman method, first developed by GCHQ in the 1970s, to protect users' data from snooping by government intelligence agencies. Perfect forward secrecy (PFS) is now live across all platforms, Twitter said, which makes it “effectively impossible” to collect data on users without the company’s permission, according to experts. The move is part of a bid to make it more difficult to collect data on users without going through legal channels.

Yahoo is to encrypt all user data that moves between its datacentres by April 2014 in a bid to regain trust after allegations that the US government secretly accessed users’ data. The internet firm previously announced it plans to encrypt all email communications from January 2014 after allegations of US government agencies accessing email traffic. Yahoo is among several large technology companies trying to distance themselves from the Prism internet surveillance programme.

Google has expressed outrage while Yahoo has reiterated denials of complicity in response to reports that the NSA tapped into datacentre links. The documents suggest the NSA worked with UK intelligence agency GCHQ to copy large amounts of user data transmitted over the fibre optic link through an interception point outside the US.

Business is facing a new challenge in securing data in the wake of revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, said Norbert Pohlmann, chairman of IT security organisation TeleTrust. “We now know that the US National Security Agency has made the whole security system weak by building in weaknesses that criminals can use,” he told the ISSE 2013 security conference in Brussels. Pohlmann said that, in light of Snowden's revelations, businesses need to find new ways to secure backdoors in hardware and software, and protect data.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has re-iterated warnings that the democratic nature of the internet is under threat from increased surveillance and censorship. A firm advocate of net neutrality, Berners-Lee has been a strong critic of internet surveillance by UK and US intelligence agencies, describing the decision to crack encryption methods as “appalling and foolish”. Berners-Lee has also been among the strongest opponents to proposed legislation in the UK and US aimed at censoring content and giving authorities the right to monitor electronic communications.

In September, Microsoft and Google announced they plan to sue the US government for the right to reveal more information about its official requests for user data collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa). Secret orders under the act have been used by the NSA and other US government agencies to gather data about foreign internet users. Microsoft and Google are among the top technology companies that have been trying to clarify their position on sharing data ever since they were linked to the NSA’s Prism internet surveillance programme.

Privacy campaigners have filed a legal challenge to internet surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency and UK intelligence agency GCHQ. Papers filed by Privacy International call for an immediate suspension of the UK’s use of material from the NSA Prism programme. They also demand a temporary injunction to the UK’s Tempora programme, which allows GCHQ to tap into undersea cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the country.

The UK’s privacy watchdog has joined data protection authorities in France, Spain, Germany and Italy in demanding changes to Google’s privacy policy. An investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found that Google’s privacy policy raises serious questions about its compliance with the UK Data Protection Act.

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Retailers must distinguish between smartphones and tablets, says IBM

Mobile and online shopping increased this Boxing Day, according to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark.

The statistics, based on retail sales the day after Christmas, showed an increase of more than 40% compared to Boxing Day in 2012.  

However, IBM said these latest findings show that retailers must distinguish between smartphones and tablets, because they are being used in different ways by consumers.

On Boxing Day, IBM said most traffic to the 200 participating retail websites came from mobile devices, which outstripped PC traffic for the first time. Consumers were using smartphones to browse websites, while tablets were being used to purchase.

According to IBM, shopping via mobile increased by 42% over 2012, to 58% of all online traffic, while sales via mobile devices exceeded 45% of all online sales – an increase of 63% year-on-year.

But tablets drove 29% of online sales, twice that of smartphones, which took up 16%. Additionally, the average order value (AOV) on tablets was ?83.55 while AOV on all mobile phones was ?78.06.  

"Mobile has rapidly become the dominant channel and now retailers really need to look at the role each device is going to play within the overall customer journey and decision-making process,” said James Lovell, smarter commerce retail solutions consultant, Europe, IBM.

“The key challenge will be how they maximise the effectiveness of these devices to help augment the in-store customer experience as well as the traditional digital only channels,” he said.

The IBM statistics also stated iOS users were more likely to shop and purchase online than Android. iOS traffic generated 42% of all online traffic and 35% of all online sales, while Android generated 15% of all online traffic and 10% of all online sales

The AOV of iOS users was ?82.33 per order, compared to ?78.93 per order for Android. 

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Top 10 UK cyber security stories of 2013

Cyber security has moved up the national agenda in the past year, with the UK government paying increasing attention and allocating increasing budget to bolstering UK cyber defences.

The government has stepped up its efforts in this area to help support UK business, with special attention to those that form part of critical national infrastructure and financial infrastructure.

The launch of the first national cyber threat sharing partnership marked an important step forward in the past year, with another milestone due in 2014 when the UK national CERT becomes operational.

The UK government plans several more initiatives in 2014 aimed at promoting the UK as a safe place to do business online and at taking a global leadership position on cyber security matters amid growing calls for international treaties on cyber security and cyber weapons.

Read Computer Weekly's top 10 UK cyber security stories of 2013 here:

In March, the UK government announced a partnership with industry to share information and intelligence on cyber security threats. Cyber attacks were rated as one of the top four threats to UK national security, alongside international terrorism, in the National Security Strategy of 2010 and a re-assessment in 2012.The Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CISP) delivers a key component of the UK national cyber security strategy in facilitating information-sharing on cyber threats.

In November, Chris Gibson was confirmed as the director of the UK’s new national computer emergency response team (CERT-UK), which is set to become operational in early 2014. Francis Maude, the Minister for Cabinet Office, said Gibson brings a wealth of experience in cyber incident response in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally. “His first-hand knowledge and understanding of cyber security will be invaluable as he leads the national CERT,” he said.

Most of the FTSE 350 companies place cyber risk on the board agenda, with over half accounting for cyber risk in their strategic risk register, a cyber governance health check has revealed. In July 2013, the heads of the UK’s intelligence agencies and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills called on the country’s top 350 listed companies to take part in the exercise. The call was made a day after business consultancy firm KPMG published a report revealing that cyber leaks at FTSE 350 firms are putting the UK’s economic growth and national security at risk.

Five organisations have been named as the first certified consultancies in the government’s scheme to help UK organisations respond effectively to the increase in cyber attacks. The Certified Incident Response scheme is backed by CESG, the information assurance arm of GCHQ, and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI).

Security experts welcomed the most extensive cyber threat exercise in two years to test the preparedness of the financial infrastructure to withstand a sustained cyber attack. On 12 November 2013, Operation Waking Shark 2 tested thousands of staff at London’s major financial institutions with a simulated cyber attack on systems on which the UK’s financial system depends. The Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority monitored responses to assess the ability of the UK’s core financial services providers to withstand cyber attacks.

The UK must set rules for the cyber security of critical national infrastructure to ensure utilities are safe from attack, says Chris McIntosh, chief executive at communications firm ViaSat UK. “We need legislation because simply issuing a government advisory means there will always be organisations that will ignore that,” he told Computer Weekly.

The UK government is to invest more than ?850m to develop and maintain what it calls“cutting-edge” capabilities to tackle cyber threats.“Crime is at record low levels and this government is taking action to tackle the cyber threat, investing more than ?850m through the national cyber security programme,” the Home Office said. The statement comes after a report by the Home Affairs Select Committee said that, despite being the preferred target of online criminals in 25 countries, the UK is still complacent about cyber crime.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is teaming up with nine large defence firms and telecoms providers to strengthen the UK’s cyber security. The Defence Cyber Protection Partnership (DCPP) is the latest in a series of cyber security initiatives by the government since cyber threats were categorised as one of the national defence priorities in 2010. The partnership will look to implement controls and share threat intelligence to increase the security of the defence supply chain.

In March, UK communications intelligence agency GCHQ announced a second academic research institute, which will find new ways of analysing software automatically to combat cyber threats. The GCHQ group’s work is aimed at providing businesses, individuals and government with additional confidence that software will behave in a secure way when installed on operational networks. Funded by a ?4.5m grant, the new research institute is made up of teams from six universities and forms part of the government’s plan to increase the UK’s academic capability in all fields of cyber security.

Governments must understand that cyber weapons are extremely dangerous and have to agree not to use them, according to Eugene Kaspersky, founder and chief of security firm Kaspersky Lab. “It would be good if governments were to sign a treaty against the use of cyber weapons in the same way as they have done against nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,” he told Computer Weekly.

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