Welcome to our latest round-up of news from the technology and hosting world. Here’s what we’ve discovered this month.
Supply Chain Breaches
According to a recent report from SecurityScorecard, 97% of the companies in the FTSE 100 experienced third-party and fourth-party supply chain breaches in the last 12 months, with similar figures seen among the major companies in Germany, France and Italy. This compares to 12% of UK companies facing direct breaches, compared to 8% in Germany, 7% in France and 3% in Italy.
The communications sector, which had the weakest overall security posture, faced the most supply chain breaches, while the energy, basic materials and financial sectors experienced the fewest problems. Generally, companies with higher market capitalisation demonstrated better resilience against breaches.
With the EU’s new Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) coming into force in January 2025, financial companies and their technology supply chain vendors will need to implement robust security standards to protect against third and fourth-party breaches. This will also impact UK companies that work with EU customers or do business with EU financial firms.
UK AI Leads Europe
The UK has become the leading AI investment centre in Europe and is ranked fourth globally, behind the US, China and Israel. With over 1,800 venture capital backed startups and 20 unicorns, the UK sector is currently valued at £72.5 billion and attracted 16% of the UK’s venture capital investment in Q1, 2024. This follows an excellent year in 2023, during which AI startups raised £2.7 billion in investment, achieving a year-on-year growth of 10% and outperforming the wider investment trend.
Some of the UK companies that have benefitted most from the funding include Conigital and Abound, which both received over £500 million, and Builder.ai which received nearly £200 million. The sector also saw a considerable increase in investment in generative AI, which now accounts for 9% of total AI funding.
AI is now a key player in a UK tech sector that is also the largest in Europe and the third most valuable in the world, at £866 billion, with London alone valued at £511 billion.
Public Cloud Surge
Spending on public cloud services and the adoption of AI has increased by almost 20% over the last year, according to IDC, with public cloud revenue rising to £527 billion in 2023. The biggest spend was on Software as a Service (SaaS), which accounted for 45% of the total, while Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) each accounted for around 20% of spending.
With a combined market share of over 40%, it is no surprise that Microsoft, Google, Oracle, AWS and Salesforce remain the dominant cloud providers – with Microsoft out front at almost 17%. IDC anticipates further growth during 2024, with revenue expected to reach £630 billion as companies race to integrate AI.
IWM Digitisation
The Imperial War Museum (IWM) is undertaking a major digitisation project that will preserve valuable World War II materials for future generations. Using state-of-the-art scanning technology, the museum aims to digitise over 24,000 hours of film and video, as well as 11 million photographs, in preparation for the centenary of the start of the war in 2039.
To store such huge amounts of data and ensure its integrity over the long term, the museum has opted to use the latest Linear Tape Open (LTO) format, LTO-9 tapes. Each of these new tapes is capable of storing a whopping 18 terabytes of information. These are stored in a Spectra Logic tape system that can accommodate 1,500 LTO tapes.
LTO systems are nothing new but being cheap and reliable have long been regarded as the most cost-effective way to store data for the long term. However, new technologies are being developed which may replace them. One of these, developed by UK company, Holomem, stores data as holograms which are burnt into polymer using lasers. Unlike LTO magnetic tape, the data cannot be tampered with after it is written, it has greater temperature resilience, and it lasts for 50 years compared to the tape’s 15 years.
AI in Education
Schools in the UK have begun to utilise AI in some extraordinary ways. Cottesmore School in West Sussex, for instance, now has an AI headteacher which supports the school’s teachers and assists students with additional needs. Students at the private boarding school even have one-on-one AI tutors and can use AI technology to design their perfect school.
The school’s human headteacher, Tom Rogerson, believes AI has a future role to play in education, providing a sounding board for staff and offering bespoke, personalised learning for pupils while increasing efficiency. The technology is also able to provide deeper insights into pupil progress data, enabling schools to better meet the needs of individual students.
Visit our website for more news, blog posts, knowledge base articles and information on our wide range of hosting services.
