A report by BMC Software has revealed that business success is being impacted by a lack of collaboration between IT departments and business decision makers.

More than four in ten of businesses hold the IT department accountable if something goes wrong during the digital transformation process, despite two-thirds of businesses claiming they don’t ask for advice from the IT department when opting to buy new software to help with their everyday work.

The most common reasons projects fail were listed by the software firm as misaligned objectives between departments and time pressures to get things done or new technology procured.

Because businesses are more focused on increasing revenues or reducing costs rather than integrating the technologies into existing infrastructure, things often go awry.

And because the wider business wants decisions to be made faster than standard procurement processes, they often choose ill-fitting technologies that can be implemented faster, but then are discovered that the wrong software and tools are selected to work alongside existing systems, which means integration actually takes longer.

BMC Software said only 42% of businesses are seeing the positive impact digital transformation has had two years after implementing a strategy.

After three or four years, this rises to 63%, demonstrating the time-to-value is a lot longer than business execs expect it to take. Such considerations should be better taken into account and discussed with the IT department before spending budgets.

“Digital transformation is not a one-off, unique journey that some organisations are experimenting with,” Kevin Plumberg, editor of the report said.

“It has become the norm, and companies where IT teams are working closely with the business rather than in silos are better positioned to manage the challenges that inevitably arise.”

The Department for Education (DfE) endured a 12-hour IT nightmare as a result of last month’s European-wide Microsoft 365 outage.

The government department’s IT systems were paralysed on 24 January, with more than 6,000 of its employees locked out of their cloud-based Microsoft and email accounts, according to a DfE source, Cloud Pro has learnt.

Crisis meetings were held throughout the day as officials scrambled with the consequences of a departmental-wide outage entirely out of their hands, and also unexplained at the time.

The civil servant, who requested not to be named, also confirmed that colleagues were forced to share confidential documents using Skype’s instant messaging.

“It beggars belief that we were locked out of email for an entire day, the whole department was in meltdown,” the source said.

A DfE spokesperson confirmed the department’s systems were partially disrupted by the European-wide Microsoft outage on 24 January, and that contingency plans were put in place to mitigate these effects.

“The Department for Education was one of many organisations impacted by Microsoft’s Outlook issues on Thursday 24 January,” the spokesperson told Cloud Pro. “The impact of disruption to email services was managed and services resumed within 24 hours.”

Staff used “smarter working technology” to continue delivering services as smoothly as possible, while “normal business continuity arrangements” were deployed to minimise the impact of disruption to mail services. The spokesperson would not confirm whether the ‘businesses continuity arrangements’ existed prior to 24 January. The department’s video conferencing and shared documents services were unaffected.

The Microsoft 365 outage struck organisations from 9:30am on 24 January, with firms across the continent experiencing severe IT difficulties. Microsoft acknowledged that it was experiencing problems with its services, and engineers worked to restore services at around 8pm the same evening.

“This incident underlines the very real risk authentication delays can have on critical email systems, disrupting government business and preventing officials from sharing confidential information securely,” said Centrify’s vice president John Andrews.

“With rising levels of cyber attacks, it’s vital that all departments ensure privileged access to confidential data is a major priority, so that systems are protected from outsider threats at all times.”

The incident demonstrates just how dependent massive organisations, including critical government services, are on third-party cloud vendors to provide an undisrupted service at the risk of sustaining organisations paralysis.

Microsoft also suffered a global authentication-related outage four days later, with users from nations across the world including the US and Japan unable to login to critical cloud-based services.

Google is beefing up its Chrome tools to help users ascertain when their data may be at risk.

Password Checkup and Cross Account Protection are the latest efforts from search giant Google to make users feel safe and secure when browsing online.

Password Checkup is a Chrome extension that will detect whether the username and password you’re using to login to an online account or service have been stolen. If either has, an alert will pop up in your browser, advising you of the breach and suggesting you change your password.

Google warns that this is only the first iteration of the tool though and it will be refined in the coming months, suggesting it’s perhaps not as accurate as it should be.

Cross Account Protection has been developed to address security if you use your Google account to login to third-party websites and services. Increasingly, businesses are integrating Google login, meaning you can simply enter your existing Google account username and password (or click a few buttons if you’re already logged in, to gain access to other services.

Although Google can implement protections if you’re using its services and it thinks you’ve been hacked, before the introduction of Cross Account Protection, Google was unable to implement the same security processes. However, now it will share any breach data with the third party, so they can take action, such as forcing you to re-login.

Google said only very limited data is shared with the third party and it’s working with the IETF and Open ID Foundation to allow more services to integrate the extra protection.

“Your privacy and security is of the utmost importance,” said Google spokesperson and security and anti-abuse research scientist Kurt Thomas. “With technologies like Password Checkup and Cross Account Protection, we’re continuing to improve the security of our users across the internet, not just on Google – and we’ll never stop improving our defences to keep you safe online.”

Dell EMC has unveiled updates to its Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA), enabling multi-cloud businesses to take advantage of enhanced data protection.

Targeted at mid-sized companies that have multiple offices or swathes of remote workers, Dell EMC’s updates have made it simpler and more efficient for businesses to run its security appliances.

For example, restores have been given a speed boost to make it 2.5 times faster compared to previous versions of the appliance. Additionally, recalls are now four times faster from the cloud to the hardware for IDPA, although 40,000 IOPS with 20 milliseconds of latency was added to Data Domain last year.

Data Domain OS 6.2 and IDPA 2.3 software’s support is extended to Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud through Cloud Tier support, adding to its compatibility with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, Virtustream, Ceph, IBM Cloud Open Storage, AWS Infrequent Access, Azure Cool Blob storage and Azure Government Cloud. Its Free-space Estimator Tool will also analyse cloud usage and reduce costs of both on-premises and cloud storage costs.

For Data Domain Virtual Edition, AWS GovCloud, Azure Government Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have now been tagged on as supported platforms, making it no longer an exclusive for AWS S3 and Azure Hot Blob users.

“As the industry leader in data protection appliances, Dell EMC is committed to delivering continued innovation in our data protection portfolio that supports and improves customers’ adoption of multi-cloud environments,” said Beth Phalen, president of Data Protection at Dell EMC said.

“Our appliances are powerful, simple to manage and make it easy to expand to public clouds with native cloud capabilities.”