Emerging technology has an irresistible pull. Every CIO knows the feeling: a new platform promises efficiency, a new algorithm claims intelligence, a new vendor insists you’re falling behind. The pressure to adopt can be immense – from boards, from peers, from the market itself.
AI is arriving in universities at remarkable speed, but deciding how it should be used is proving far harder to match.
That was one of the clearest messages from the recent DIG25 roundtable hosted by Roc Technologies and the University of Reading – a conversation that surfaced not just what AI is doing in Higher Education, but what AI is demanding of it.
Progress shouldn’t feel this hard. Yet for many organisations, despite years of digital investment, transformation can feel like driving with the handbrake on. The ambition and tools are there but something unseen slows everything down.
It’s often said that Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Whether or not he said it, the point stands. Organisations talk endlessly about change, yet so often repeat the same mistakes.
Every 5th November, Britain remembers Guy Fawkes – the man caught red-handed beneath Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder. Now, Guy Fawkes wasn’t a ‘modern-day’ hacker, but, if you squint, the Gunpowder Plot is a story about infiltration, hidden threats, and the thin line between luck and disaster – some may argue not too dissimilar to the playbook of today’s cyber adversaries.
Not all change is progress.
Over the past 18 months, parts of the IT industry have been quietly rewriting the commercial rulebook. Several major vendors have shifted from perpetual licences to multi-year subscriptions, often accompanied by steep price rises and rigid terms.
The Procurement Act 2023 marks a fundamental shift in UK public procurement, replacing broad principles with a new regime of prescriptive transparency. For contracting authorities managing parts of the UK’s £385 billion annual public spend, this legislation introduces a series of legally mandated, data-intensive reporting obligations.
From NHS ransomware attacks to the Royal Mail being frozen out of global operations, cyber threats are no longer theoretical – they’re national disruptions. As attacks grow more targeted, stealthy, and sophisticated, the UK Government is taking a bold step to plug the legislative gaps and put resilience on the boardroom agenda.
It may come as a surprise, but most cyberattacks don’t happen at 10 am on a Tuesday.
More often, they happen when your teams are offline: when your SOC is running on minimal staffing, when an alert gets buried under hundreds of others.