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.
AI adoption in IT is not uniform. The most advanced tools often require significant investment in licensing, infrastructure and integration. As a result, access to AI capabilities is often dictated by budget, not just technical readiness and expertise.
If your data is exposed on the dark web, but you don’t know about it – can you still be held accountable?