Poppy Day

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy
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Recently I have had quite a few chats with clients and suppliers about the march to The Cloud. Covid19 and lockdown have had a big influence on changing attitudes, although I think I really saw a corner turned, in mid 2018. 

Council and Local Authority clients were always reluctant to consider the cloud. Turkeys didn’t used to vote for Christmas as a rule, nor did quite well paid council infrastructure teams. From 2018 onwards, within ten minutes of talking about procurement, I heard more and more, “Whatever we buy, must all be in the Cloud and off-prem”.

Solutions have been available in the Cloud for a decade, although recently we have more robust security protocols, offerings, Cyber Essentials and procurement safeguards, which all reassure.

Cyber security has become a new growth industry, almost from a standing start and something no site can really avoid taking seriously. Its not cheap and quite rightly has become big business. A client pointed me to an interesting article last week on cybersecurity company Darktrace, just about to float on the stock market for £3billion price tag.

Darktrace launched in Cambridge 8 years ago by an unlikely alliance of mathematicians, former spies from GCHQ and the US and artificial intelligence (AI) experts. Poppy Gustafsson (she,her) was 30 years old when she co-founded Darktrace back in 2013. 

She should be worth £20m after flotation, which is a nice wedge indeed. Readers of this blog will be aware of my thoughts on IT and gender mix. It is a very male geek dominated sector on the whole and Poppy has also become something of a gender diversity champion, in the bloke-dominated tech world.

The ICT industry average is about 15% female, Darktrace to their credit manage more like 40%. What’s the gender mix in your ICT or implementation/development team? Is it improving, or perhaps as David Byrne would say, ”Same As It Ever Was” ? In my own sons computer science college group, out of twenty students, only four are other than male.

Why are we so poor at encouraging females in the ICT foundation subjects of science, tech, engineering and maths? Amber Rudd wrote an interesting article on this, for the Times back in February, worth checking out 

As previously, I would say from what I generally see, that we are still not getting the best of mixed gender techie teams, on our helpdesks, IT Teams, development or implementation. There is a lot to do.

Read the Guardian article here.

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Related Post: For Social Housing, what do various payment methods, really cost ?

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Siouxsie and the Banshees - Poppy Day.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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The Heist

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I don't know if anyone noticed, but just the other week, it was announced that the NCC had quietly acquired the cyber security and popular pen(ertration) testing company RandomStorm.

The NCC newsroom release states:

"After a period of operating independently following its acquisition for £55 million in March 2015, Accumuli’s services have now been incorporated into the wider NCC Group offering.

Since the acquisition there has been significant investment in the business, with a new consolidated office and subsequent recruitment drive. More than £1 million was put towards a new state-of-the-art UK cyber Security Operations Centre in Leeds, which is home to around 70 full-time employees providing a range of monitoring, response and investigation services.

The Accumuli, RandomStorm and Signify brands have been retired and their services will all be delivered under the single NCC Group brand."

Read the full chapter & verse here

I have only recently become aware of the number of my contacts, who have had good experiences in the past with RandomStorm/Accumuli around the ever more crucial cyber security area.

Clearly complementary to a lot of the current NCC offering, a few sites have remarked to me that in this squeezed climate, particularly around social housing, they can expect to have to shop around for best value. It would be hoped that NCC retain the existing Accumuli customer base, keeping them happy and adding some additional value, that groups are able to provide.

Quite a heist. With Castleton Technology PLC now with a pretty rich portfolio of social housing applications and complementary hardware/cloud support offerings, possibly another one of the cyber security outfits might be next on their shopping list. NCC could learn much from Castleton to corner particular markets.

Just saying.....
 

Catch the blog monthly archive at https://archive.org/details/@housingitguy

Related Post: Working from home, essential in the current work environment 

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.


Rival Sons - the Heist.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.
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