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?
Like many industries and sectors, AI and automation are already changing the structure of IT teams. Routine operational work that used to be handled by junior engineers is increasingly carried out by intelligent systems. That work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just being done without human involvement.
The cyber threat landscape has shifted. Fast.
That means the traditional SOC, reliant on manual triage and static rule sets, is falling behind.
Enter the AI-powered SOC. Not just a nice-to-have, instead a necessary evolution in how we approach cyber defence.
Most organisations expect attacks to come from the outside: a malicious payload, a phishing email, a brute-force attempt at the firewall. But in many cases, the foundations of those attacks were laid weeks or months earlier – quietly, invisibly – through data already circulating on the dark web.
The pace of technological change in IT has never been faster, but it’s becoming a double-edged sword. With businesses racing to unlock the benefits of AI, automation and cloud-native architectures, the gap between the art of the possible and the skillsets on the ground is growing.