Industry news

Oracle is appealing against a settlement of $306 million with SAP, for a corporate-theft case, according to details released in court documents.

The settlement centers on SAP’s admission of guilt surrounding the illegal downloading of Oracle software by a SAP subsidiary, which undercut Oracle software support for Oracle’s own applications.

SAP was in agreement to pay Oracle $306 million, but the company has now appealed the ruling, instead seeking the original $1.3 billion in damages, awarded in 2010.

Vodafone have partnered with mobile operator Zain who provide telecommunications services in the Middle East.

The partnership will see the two companies offer services in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq. Both companies will allow customers to use each other’s services and products.

According to a Vodafone spokesperson, the partnership will allow the companies to "harmonise roaming rates in multiple countries"..

Russia has posted record oil production figures, reaching the highest post-Soviet figures ever seen.

Russian oil production currently ranks 2nd in the world, behind Saudi Arabia, with oil accounting for 30 percent of domestic gross product.

Russia’s energy ministry reported that 10.38 million barrels were produced daily in August. Much of the oil came from state owned oil production firm Rosneft, which is looking to carry out oil exploration in the Artic.

Somerset County Council is preparing to launch legal action against Southwest One, a joint shared services venture, established in 2007 with IBM.

Preparation for legal action comes after the joint venture failed to deliver promised procurement savings. Under the joint venture Somerset County Council saw consecutive yearly account losses.

Derek Pretty, chairman of Southwest One, said in a statement: “"The company is still working on reaching the efficiency levels that are required to fund the savings which have been committed to the joint venture partners through service improvements, procurement savings and operation costs reductions".

China’s manufacturing output fell to a nine-month low in August as signs point to a economic slowdown.

A reduction of domestic and global demand is being blamed for the poor figures, with Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight, saying: “China's manufacturing sector continues to struggle, weighed down by a significant domestic slowdown”.

China’s rapid growth in past years has been questioned, as whether such a rapid rise could be sustainable.

Capita has bought business travel company Expotel, for £16 million in order to increase market reach and size as the IT company expands into the business travel market.

Expotel, based in Stockport, hold the likes of Scottish Government, Virgin and the National Grid, as customers.

Paul Pindar, chief executive of Capita, said: "The combined company will be able to offer both bespoke, niche solutions and a unique end-to-end travel proposition to its current and future clients.”

Samsung was found not to have infringed on an Apple patent by a Tokyo court.

The suit was filed by Apple in the August of last year, with the court case ruled on a patent relating to smartphone and tablet synching. Samsung said “We will continue to offer highly innovative products to consumers, and continue our contributions towards the mobile industry's development".

Apple is continuing to pursue other lawsuits in the country where legal pay-outs are typically low in comparison to USA rulings.

The conclusion of David Gibson, VP of strategy, Varonis on 10 simple steps which can be employed to prevent data from being misused or stolen.

8. Audit Permissions and Group Membership Changes

Cleaning up permissions and group memberships is critical, but keeping everything in order is impossible without an audit trail of changes over time. Only by tracking all permissions and group membership changes can you be sure that only the right people continue to have access to your data sets. Enforcing access controls is simply impossible without a record of all the daily changes. If inappropriate access or group membership is granted, an audit trail of who made the change and when can help ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

9. Lock down, delete or archive stale data

In many organizations stale data is clogging up vast amounts of storage space and making it harder to manage. In addition to the cost of storing all of this stale data, keeping it on your active servers also increases the risk of it being misused. Automation can analyze access activity and identify any data that is not being used. Once the data owner confirms that he data is indeed stale and no longer needed, data may be archived or deleted.

10. Clean up stale groups and access control lists

Unneeded complexity slows performance and makes mistakes more likely. Organizations often have as many groups as they do users – many are empty, unused or redundant. Some groups contain other groups, which contain other groups, and so on. In some cases, these nested groups end up creating a circular reference where group ultimately contains itself. Also, access control lists often contain references to previously deleted users and groups (also known as “Orphaned SIDS”). These legacy groups and misconfigured access control objects should be identified and remediated to improve both performance and security.

Constant vigilance and automation are going to have to be your watchwords given the myriad number of threats which are now part of the IT security landscape. Automation will also have to be part of your armoury and, of course, you will have to keep up-to-date with all the new relevant threats. However, if you keep these top 10 tips that the head of your agenda you will be making your organisation a safer place to do business and are less obvious targets for hackers or insiders bent on stealing your secrets.

In follow on from a recent blog from Craig Carpenter, VP, Marketing, Recommind, I wanted to expand on how organisations can best extract maximum value from Big Data, in particular the importance of unstructured information.

We all know that data growth is accelerating at a rapid pace and storage space seems to be moving in lock step with that – but there’s no value in simply storing it and in fact there are considerable costs to that approach.

Most companies today have the ability to analyse data to identify facts – e.g., we sold this product to this person on this date. But organisations are missing valuable information without considering the relationships between those facts. Through the use of machine learning and automatic categorisation technology, organisations can identify the relationships between entities such as people, titles, instances, dates and departments. And from that they can better predict future trends, being able to figure why someone did something, rather than just what they did and thus ascertaining whether the same conditions may exist in the future and if so, what the result will be.

Big data is valuable (when analysed) because it’s different from what was considered data before. Data now is not only numbers, its words and numbers (and potentially images and audio and video too). Those words could be regular words but they could also include slang and vernacular. They could be in multiple languages. Put those together with the numerical data and you have a much bigger, if sometimes messier picture of what’s going on. But today’s tools are starting to be able to extract value from that messier data and include data sources that weren’t previously analysed using software.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of where big data analytics is being put to work.

According to recent statistics from WIPO the number of patents filed each year, worldwide is almost 1.5 million, with more than half a million patents granted in that time. Without the tools to accurately index and categorise information, R&D departments may find it difficult to cross check patents they hold against potential breaches of their patents. Similarly when searching for prior art they need to pull in all sorts of data sources in various formats to make sure they’re not about to infringe on other company’s patents. We’ve seen recently how costly that can be in various high profile cases. Such automation of the patent analysis process is big data analytics in action.

Fraud in healthcare is a huge problem worldwide, but especially in the US. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that between $70 and 234 billion is lost to healthcare fraud annually – effectively stolen money that results in higher healthcare costs for the rest of the population. Software exists today that can accurately index and categorise information and ultimately identify relationships between entities that in fact indicate fraudulent acts.

By surfacing information that resides in the countless repositories and extracting intelligence that aligns with business goals, organisations and can reduce fraud, or identify new opportunities for valuable intellectual property. And there are many other examples.

By embracing technology to help them identify these opportunities, businesses can embrace and take advantage of the data explosion, rather than hiding from what could end up a data minefield. In the third instalment in this series we will look at some of the risks associated with big data – and how best to ameliorate them.

Data breaches have risen by more than 1,000 percent in five years, with local governments being the main victims.

The data breach figures were released under a Freedom of Information (FoI) request and showed that local governments had seen a rise in data breaches of 1,609 percent, while other public sector organisations saw a rise of 1,380 percent.

The rise in data breaches may prove to become an expensive oversight, as the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) now has the power to issue penalties, with over £2 million in fines handed out to organisations regarding the Data Protection Act.