Las Vegas has been taken over by Google Cloud this week, with Google Cloud Next 2025 in full flow. There have already been a number of headline grabbing announcements: we've seen the launch of a powerful new AI accelerator chip by the name of Ironwood, huge updates to Google Cloud's security capabilities, and new agentic AI development kits for enterprises. But there's been much, much more on top. In this episode, Ross Kelly, news and analysis editor at ITPro, speaks to Rory about Google Cloud's...
Apr 11, 2025•31 min
When something goes wrong with IT at work, chances are you’ll be asked to submit a service ticket. This is a tale as old as time – see a problem, submit a ticket, wait for the service desk to come to your help. But all this could be set for change. Advances in technology have opened the door to software problems being detected and remediated automatically, while internal learning platforms could also provide employees with the information they need to fix issues themselves. How will all this com...
Apr 04, 2025•27 min
The rule that your AI is only as good as your data is now well understood, with businesses all over the world looking to modernize their data sources and infrastructure to make the most of AI products and services. But something that can be easily lost in these discussions is consideration of the exact format your data exists in at rest. Unstructured data is especially important for AI and knowing where it fits into your AI strategy is essential. This doesn’t just mean knowing where it res...
Mar 31, 2025•23 min
March is very nearly at an end and it’s been quite a month for diverging views in the industry. Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, has spoken out against the tech sector’s apparent fixation on achieving AGI while comparing the potential for AI to the rise of Excel spreadsheets in business. The Microsoft chief has turned his attention to the material benefits of AI, as we enter a crunch year for AI developers. Elsewhere this month, UK tech firms are being offered support with adopting a four-day we...
Mar 28, 2025•21 min
Computer systems that can autonomously work on menial tasks have been the promise of technologists – and science fiction authors – for decades. While we’ve dabbled with the likes of robotic process automation and machine learning in the past, the arrival of advanced AI software has put these lofty ambitions back on the table. According to AI developers, new tools known as AI agents will free up workers as never before, with the ability to autonomously complete tasks based on pre-approved instruc...
Mar 21, 2025•34 min
How much has your company invested in AI? Are you finding it a revolutionary technology, or still waiting for the promised gains to materialize? As businesses seek to unlock productivity gains from AI, investment in the technology has continued to rise. All across the world, firms are buying AI products, undergoing digital transformation in preparation, or even fine-tuning AI to suit their bespoke use cases. But how much of this is going to pay off? And what do you do if your AI project fails on...
Mar 14, 2025•28 min
International Women’s Day is here, a time for all those who care about women’s equality to celebrate the achievements of women both contemporary and historical and to focus on gender equality in our society. The tech sector still has a sizable gender divide, with only around one quarter of all tech roles held by women. Tech leaders need to enter into open dialogue over how to make tech careers more attractive to women and to empower women within their workforce. In this episode, Rory speaks to E...
Mar 07, 2025•33 min
February is the shortest month of the year – but that hasn’t stopped this month from being packed full of dramatic tech news. Microsoft has made waves with Majorana 1, a first of its kind quantum chip that the tech giant says could open the door to usable quantum computers in years, not decades as previously thought. Elsewhere this month, Sam Altman made a series of public rebukes of Elon Musk, following an offer by a Musk-led consortium to purchase OpenAI for over $97 billion. And could the tec...
Feb 28, 2025•18 min
The cybersecurity landscape gets more complicated every year, with emerging technologies such as AI and the shifting geopolitical landscape bringing extra chaos to any CISO’s desk. Though automated defense systems are a welcome feather in cap for any company, it’s not just the good guys who have access to the latest tools. Off-the-shelf frameworks to launch attacks are becoming more common and businesses can’t rely on any single service to be a silver bullet. What are the individual forces at pl...
Feb 21, 2025•43 min
Years after first identifying the potential risks of AI systems, world leaders are having to balance concerns with an acknowledgment of the gains achievable through certain AI systems and nowhere is this more true than the EU. The Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris has seen a number of high-profile announcements made on EU AI investments, on both a continental and regional basis. But it’s also highlighted the distance the EU has yet to go for true international AI competition – up ag...
Feb 14, 2025•34 min
As the dust settles on DeepSeek, we’ve had the chance to see who walked away from the impact it had on the stock market unscathed. Apple and Meta did not undergo the same rapid stock shocks as Nvidia, Microsoft, and others in the immediate aftermath of the DeepSeek R1 launch – the latter has actually seen a healthy surge in the past few weeks. Why is this? And who actually wins thanks to DeepSeek? In this episode, Rory speaks once again to ITPro’s news and analysis editor Ross Kelly to ana...
Feb 07, 2025•20 min
Every business has a bright future in the cloud, which is scalable and flexible to suit the needs of the modern enterprise. But rapid cloud adoption and data protection regulations, as well as emerging new regulations tied to AI, have been set on a collision course in recent years, with enterprises held to stringent regional laws that oversee how sensitive data can cross borders. One solution to this problem is sovereign cloud. But how do sovereign clouds actually work and how can firms such as ...
Jan 31, 2025•38 min
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen, so the saying goes, and that is certainly true of the final week of January 2025 with the widespread impact of DeepSeek. To say the Chinese large language model has caused an upset in the market would be an understatement. Within days of its release, it wiped more than a trillion dollars off the US stock market, and sent big tech into a public spiral. But where did DeepSeek come from? And what does it mean for the...
Jan 31, 2025•31 min
This episode was first published 12 July 2024. Every business will, at some point, be impacted by cyber attacks. Companies task security teams to prepare the first line of defense against cyber attacks, and most have plans in place for the damage they leave behind – be it data loss, encryption by ransomware operators, or large-scale service disruptions. But something that often goes unremarked upon in the wake of cyber attacks is the psychological, human effects of cyber attacks. When the dust s...
Jan 24, 2025•28 min
The Consumer Electronics Show has blown through Las Vegas, bringing – as always – a flurry of futuristic tech launches, promises, and some prototypes that will never see the light of day. But among the giant TVs and robotaxis, there were also some big moments for business tech. From the dependable rollouts of AI PCs to novel – and more powerful – devices, a number of announcements will have caught the eye of business leaders. In this episode, Jane and Rory talk to ITPro’s reviews editor Bobby He...
Jan 17, 2025•29 min
Anyone who works outside of a major city, or has ever tried to get work done while on a trip to a more rural location, knows that rural connectivity can be patchy. Despite the UK’s high population density and relative lack of difficult terrain, rural connectivity remains an uneven picture. Many rural businesses are still struggling to receive fiber optic cables, let alone leverage 5G signals to keep up with the demands of modern business. Is UK connectivity improving? And how far have we still g...
Jan 10, 2025•38 min
January is a time for planning, goal-setting, and looking to the future and here on the ITPro Podcast things are no different. While there are sometimes unexpected developments – take ChatGPT in 2022, for example – it’s nevertheless possible to tease out trends from the year gone by that can influence the new one. For this new year’s edition of the podcast, Jane and Rory are joined by Dr John Honchell, IT industry analyst at Future B2B, to unpick the top trends from this year that will shape 202...
Jan 03, 2025•32 min
It's now a Christmas tradition on the ITPro Podcast to look back at trends that were expected to dominate the year but then fizzled out. What predictions have gone the way of flying cars and the Metaverse? Which are delayed, perhaps permanently? In this episode, Jane is joined by Bobby Hellard, ITPro’s reviews editor, and Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to discuss three of the trends that failed to materialise this year: Intel’s AI dominance, a nuclear solution to data center energ...
Dec 27, 2024•28 min
It’s the last week before Christmas but while everyone else may be winding up for the festive season, the news never sleeps. In this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Jane is joined by news and analysis editor Ross Kelly to look back at some of the biggest stories from the month of December. Included in this episode: The US charges 14 members of a North Korean IT worker scam Ireland has become a ‘data dumping ground’, says Friends of the Earth Is virtual reality the next frontier in software develop...
Dec 20, 2024•18 min
This week, Google announced that it had made a major step forward in quantum computing with its new quantum chip Willow. The AI and search giant stated that it had successfully completed calculations that would previously have been impossible using its new piece of hardware. In doing so, Google has taken shots at existing supercomputer infrastructure and driven excited chatter on social media – as well as worried posts about how the end of encryption is just around the corner. But how significan...
Dec 13, 2024•25 min
If one company can be said to have walked away the winner of the generative AI boom of the past few years, it’s OpenAI. The startup, which was founded as a non-profit with a mission to drive progress toward artificial general intelligence – aka a conscious machine – has led the pack of generative AI developers since it launched ChatGPT in 2022 and quickly became a household name. But in recent months, more and more questions have been raised about the viability of OpenAI in the long term. As som...
Dec 06, 2024•37 min
November has come to a close, and the depths of winter are just around the corner. But that doesn’t mean events in tech are slowing down at all – nor that attackers are taking an early Christmas break. In the past month, we’ve seen a slew of cyber incidents, ranging from high-profile exploits of Microsoft vulnerabilities to a ransomware attack on a supply chain software company integral to high-street brands. Elsewhere, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has hailed the strides his company has made with us...
Nov 29, 2024•27 min
HPE’s annual European conference took place this week in Barcelona and the company’s focus is still firmly on AI. This is bolstered by its supercomputing credentials – El Capitan, the latest supercomputer to come online in the US, was awarded the title of fastest supercomputer just a day before the conference kicked off. In this episode, Jane sits down with Gerald Kleyn, vice president of customer solutions for HPC and AI at Hewlett Packard Enterprise at HPE Discover Barcelona 2024 to discuss wh...
Nov 22, 2024•19 min
What does it mean to be secure in your sector? While every organization has its own cyber security policies, numerous pieces of legislation also set out minimum requirements for security that firms must reach or else be held accountable through fines. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act – which came into force in 2023 and applies from 17 January 2025 – aims to do just this for financial entities within the region. But what does being DORA-ready mean in practice? And how will the legislat...
Nov 15, 2024•29 min
It's that time of year when the clocks change and the nights draw in, the familiar starts to take on a new aspect as the shadows lengthen, and in the world of IT, trends that have been taken for granted are also starting to take on a new shape. As countries battle productivity problems, can they replicate the success of Iceland's four-day working week? Elsewhere, developers have started to question just how useful AI coding tools really are, and OpenAI has had another successful funding ro...
Nov 08, 2024•28 min
It’s All Hallows’ Day, and we’ve still got Halloween on the brain. It’s that time of year when we tell the scariest stories we can – and for those in tech, there are none scarier than that of major cybersecurity incidents. In this episode, Rory and Jane talk to Solomon Klappholz , ITPro’s cybersecurity reporter, about some of the spookiest cyber incidents of 2024 and what businesses can learn from these ghoulish tales. Footnotes CrowdStrike CEO confirms update "defect" as the source of mass disr...
Nov 01, 2024•26 min
Every organization has to prepare for the future to the best extent possible, whether that means modernizing one’s infrastructure or adopting cutting-edge technologies like AI. In every sector, leaders are faced with the task of keeping their business up-to-date and competitive by integrating AI workloads within their environment. But getting a project underway and ensuring it delivers sufficient ROI can be a challenge. In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with Dell Techn...
Oct 30, 2024•40 min
This episode was first broadcast 4 August 2023. As the economy has become increasingly dependent on data, companies have sought to make more profit from mining user actions such as through loyalty schemes or social media interactions. But individual rights also have to be respected, and businesses have to follow strict data protection procedures. Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are one method for companies to securely search through data to derive value – for example, a bank could search t...
Oct 25, 2024•29 min
It’s not every day that cybersecurity marketing professionals get to speak to one another, compare notes, and come up with innovative solutions for getting their voices heard. Despite being a cornerstone of the tech industry, cybersecurity is in need of constant marketing on its behalf. Developers need individuals willing to enter the boardroom to advocate for their product and cybersecurity marketers have to arm themselves with the right storytelling skills to get their message across. The Cybe...
Oct 18, 2024•27 min
To fully embrace the benefits of the cloud, businesses have to distribute existing workloads across hybrid and/or multi-cloud environments. While the benefits of this digital transformation are undeniable, it’s not a process without its challenges. This can be particularly true for firms with sprawling environments, perhaps as the result of mergers and acquisitions over the years, or those looking to get data in the right shape to be used for machine learning or AI. How can businesses reconcile ...
Oct 11, 2024•35 min
