The ITPro Podcast

Organisations all over the world are currently grappling with the challenges of how to adapt their culture to a new hybrid-first model. While many potential solutions have been posited, one organisation is taking a somewhat different approach; distributed HR platform Remote.com has turned to virtual reality technology to unite its employees, not just for meetings and brainstorms, but for social an...

Cloud is no longer an emerging trend; it’s now been a fixture of business IT for more than a decade. But with the home working revolution firmly cementing SaaS and IaaS tools as a cornerstone of today’s IT strategy, what’s next for cloud computing? This week, we’re joined by Tim Hancock, head of cloud and managed service at UK tech consultancy BJSS, to discuss how the cloud is going to evolve over...

When it launched Windows 10, Microsoft promised us the “last Windows”. Six years later, however, the company has reconsidered its position and brought out Windows 11. With its latest operating system promising a new look, an overhauled app store and new cloud integrations, we finally know what the new successor to Windows 10 has in store for users. Join us in this bonus episode of the IT Pro Podca...

The growing field of AI development has brought us many wonderful advances, but one of the areas in which it’s becoming most visible is customer service. Chatbots have now become so ubiquitous that it’s often difficult to get through to a real person at all. However, while chatbots are faster and more convenient than a human operator in theory, the reality is often somewhat less than ideal. In thi...

For many years, the tech industry has been complaining about a shortage of technical skills in areas from cloud platforms to container architectures. But while the tech skills gap remains a persistent concern, there is another skills shortage that’s being overlooked by businesses. The UK is falling behind in its level of ‘human-centric’ business skills, according to a new report, including HR and...

Hacking, ransomware attacks and other forms of cybercrime have become a fact of life in the modern age, but while the rates of these attacks have drastically increased, the ability of law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice seems to be lagging behind somewhat. Even when suspects are caught, it’s rare for cases to result in convictions. There are a number of factors that contribute to...

One of the most persistent goals in business IT over the past twenty years has been to reach the mythical nirvana of the ‘paperless office’ - a utopia in which paper-based workflows are ditched in favour of digitising documents and records. However, despite the continuing sophistication of scanning and digital document management technology, this goal remains elusive. But why does paper still hold...

Space exploration is currently in the midst of a renaissance, with more and more private companies and national governments launching test flights, satellites and probes. Just recently, scientists generated oxygen on Mars, and flew a remote helicopter over its surface. But what will these advances in space exploration mean for those of us stuck here on earth? The space race of the 60s led to many...

For the past decade, we’ve been assured that biometric security is the future, and that soon we’ll be able to do away with traditional forms of identification and authentication in favour of using our faces, fingerprints and even voices. However, while biometric technology is certainly more common than it was in 2010, the promised revolution hasn’t quite materialised. We still have to rely on PINs...

More and more employees now use their own personal devices for work, and 2020 saw a particular spike in this behaviour. But what many people don’t know is that your employer is legally entitled to monitor your activity on any device that you use to do your job. This raises a number of thorny issues, such as where the line is between security and surveillance, and whether it’s a violation of employ...

The pandemic has forced all of us online in ways we haven’t been previously, and that applies to hackers and cyber criminals just as much as it does to regular people. Over the past year, threat actors have adjusted their tactics in order to exploit our new patterns of behaviour, which makes defenders’ jobs all the more difficult. In this week’s IT Pro Podcast, we talk to James Bynoe, head of info...

After a year of forced remote working, lockdown restrictions are finally starting to ease, and organisations are starting to plan their return to the office. But once physical workspaces reopen, will we even want to go back - or has the last year given us a taste for the benefits of working from home? In this episode, we speak to IT Pro staff writer Sabina Weston to discuss our experiences of remo...

Silicon Valley’s community of leaders are frequently hailed as visionaries, and while it’s hard to argue with the fact that the innovation’s they’ve produced have changed the world, the qualities that make them so unique aren’t always positive ones. In the first episode, we examined some of the better aspects of Silicon Valley CEOs, but this week, we take a look at the negative elements of the com...

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

Over the course of its 110-year history, IBM has been at the cutting edge of a number of advancements, including inventing mainframes, kick-starting the PC revolution and birthing the first AI to beat humans in chess. It’s a storied history, but what does the company do these days? The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we look at how IBM’s various divisio...

Data collection has become a social and political hot potato in recent years, with social networks and tech providers under fire for aggressive data harvesting tactics. However, not all data collection is based on mining people’s information. In fact, some of the most useful datasets companies can use to feed their decision making has nothing to do with individuals, and are publicly available onli...

Ask any tech company, and they’ll tell you that diversity is a major priority for them. Nevertheless, when it comes to technical teams, there are still many women who find themselves becoming the first female employee to join a division full of men. This week, we’re speaking to Cloudera senior solutions engineer Ana Gillan about her experience as the first woman in Europe to join one of the compan...

When you stop to think about it, satellite TV is an astonishing technical achievement - a communications relay in orbit around the planet which allows us to beam live footage from across the world directly into our homes. While this is a staggering accomplishment, however, there’s more to running a satellite television network than the satellites themselves. In this week’s episode, we sit down wit...

“We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” From Robocop to the Six Million Dollar Man, popular fiction has fantasised for years about the potential possibilities of augmenting human capabilities with technology to make us faster, stronger and more intelligent. Recent improvements in fields like robotics, prosthetics and artificial intelligence have brought that dream closer than ever to being a...

The tech skills gap is something that gets brought up again and again, as organisations lament their struggles to find talented developers, engineers and security professionals. The problem, so they claim, is that there just aren’t enough potential employees in the industry to meet demand for these positions. But are companies struggling to fill roles because there aren’t enough qualified candidat...

Floppy disks. Fax machines. Cassette tapes. All are commonly thought of as obsolete technology, but are they really that outdated, or have their applications and use-cases simply become more niche? In this episode, we take a look at the concept of obsolescence, asking what truly qualifies a technology as being past its sell-by date and exploring why some of the oldest technology out there still ha...

Software is eating the world, and the developers who build it have been called ‘the new kingmakers’ – but creating a truly engaged dev team is about much more than just finding people who are able to hammer out code. The best development organisations are made up of brilliant, passionate individuals for whom programming isn’t just a job, but a craft. In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we’re jo...

For the past several years, advances in fields such as 5G, IoT, autonomous vehicles and AI processing have promised to unlock major new innovations for civic planning and public sector management. Technology vendors and local governments alike have laid out visions for glittering, high-tech utopias where next-generation systems manage everything from traffic flow to collecting the bins. For the pa...

On 31 December 2020, the UK’s Brexit transition period came to a close, taking us firmly out of the EU. Many issues have been raised over the flow of goods between Britain and its former partners, but the flow of data is a different matter altogether. Data has become an intrinsic part of modern business and with previous rules on international data transfers now at risk of irrelevancy, many organi...

Healthcare has always been a vital industry, but for obvious reasons, it’s more important now than it’s ever been. Hospitals are being faced with an environment in which they must do all they can to limit physical contact, and technology is playing a key role in making that possible. On top of the COVID-19 crisis, however, healthcare organisations still have to grapple with everyday IT challenges...