Remote working arrangements have led to benefits for the majority of UK office workers, despite a handful of employers failing to equip their staff with the technology required.

Most people working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic (55%) have registered a productivity boost due to additional free time in their day, according to research commissioned by Okta.

Remote working has also led to the majority of employees (62%) experiencing an increase in flexibility, which, in turn, allows them to focus more on work.

Despite a radical shift in the way many employees across the economy are working, only a third have felt their productivity levels take a hit as a result. Incidentally, this finding chimes with the proportion of people who feel let down by their employees with regards to being supplied with the technology needed to execute their roles remotely.

For instance, 28% of newly-remote workers reported their businesses had not equipped them with the necessary hardware, such as a laptop, in order to work productively from home. Meanwhile, 24% of remote workers said they couldn’t access the software they needed at the beginning of the pandemic.

The findings culminate in just 24% of respondents indicating they want to return to the office full-time, with a further 35% suggesting they’d prefer a flexible arrangement where they can work from home on a part-time basis.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to think and act differently”, said Okta’s EMEA VP and GM Jesper Frederiksen. “Businesses have had to learn the hard way about the need to digitally transform to survive, and it is these learnings that will help us emerge from this crisis stronger.”

Drilling down into the detail of changes to peoples’ day-to-day working arrangements, almost 40% said despite their new freedom that they were working the same hours as normal. A further 20% reported working longer hours than normal.

Despite the sudden shift away from in-person meetings to video conferencing platforms, the vast majority of workers have adapted smoothly, with only 5% saying they were not comfortable at all.

With lockdown measures forcing millions of people to work from home, the key question for many is whether it’s been for better or worse. A string of major companies has used feedback from the last few months to make fundamental changes to their working arrangements that could outlast the pandemic.

Twitter, for example, announced it would allow employees to work from home indefinitely beyond the pandemic. This came after OpenText revealed earlier this month that it would close half its offices and consign 15% of its workforce to permanent remote working.

The research, conducted by YouGov, put forward questions to 2,000 office workers across the UK. Beyond changes to productivity, there are aspects of traditional working that many miss sorely. 

Most workers (57%), for example, suggest they miss having in-person conversations with their coworkers, while half miss the relationships they have forged with those in the office.

This touches on an apparent trade-off between productivity gains and the opportunity to build relationships at work. This theme is something Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella referenced in recent comments, suggesting we shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate the productivity gains fuelled by remote working, as the social aspects of office working are too dear to sacrifice.

The research also raised concerns over whether organisations are fitted with sufficient cyber security protocols, with only a third of respondents “completely confident” that remote working security would keep them safe from cyber attacks.

This ranges across sectors, with workers the IT industry unsurprisingly feeling more protected than others. For comparison, just a quarter of respondents in the retail and education sectors shared a similar level of confidence.

“We’ve been in this for a few years now, but it’s taken a pandemic to actually kick it off.”

Giles Chamberlain, CTO of startup Pexip, is musing on one of the less expected outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic: the explosion in the use of video conferencing services. 

He’s right, of course. The technology, which some had even started to consider old-fashioned, has really come of age during the outbreak of COVID-19 and subsequent lockdowns, keeping tech-savvy businesses ticking over and revolutionising the humble pub quiz. 

Technology firms becoming successful businesses in a time of economic and political crisis isn’t anything new. Amazon grew out of the dot-com bubble, Uber and Spotify emerged from the wreckage of the Great Recession, and there is a feeling that something based on video conferencing will rise out of the coronavirus. The early front runner seemed to be Zoom, but security concerns have seen its reputation – and clientele – plummet.  

Pexip’s chief commercial officer Tom-Erik Lia has sympathy for Zoom.

“A lot of the things that Zoom has experienced have been a little bit unfair,” he says. “If you post your meeting link on social media, you’re going to have people all over the place, right?” 

Indeed, this was a common cause of the “Zoombombing” issue that dealt one of the first blows to its reputation and a slip up made by the UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson.  

Despite the empathy, however, Pexip is firmly one of Zoom’s rivals. The Norwegian firm also saw a huge surge in users when the coronavirus hit Europe, but so far, there have been no public security gaffs. 

The Oslo-based startup has been a big favourite for a number of organisations around the world, thanks to its comprehensive security, but also its flexibility. The Irish Court system has been using it during the lockdown, hosting hearings virtually where attendees can link up via other video conferencing services, according to RTE Ireland.    RTÉ Hist

“It is technically possible,” Chamberlain ponders. “You can call out from this meeting room we’re in at the moment into a Zoom meeting, or into a Microsoft Teams one. We just had one interesting experience of joining a Google meeting to a Microsoft meeting – pure Ghostbusters fashion, crossing the streams.

“We’re the only company that provides Google Meet interop, we’re one of three certified companies providing Microsoft Teams interop and then we specialise in the standards-based interop from people like Cisco and Huawei.”

Pexip is made up of a team of video conferencing veterans. It’s their work and their obsession, so much so that the firm recently debuted on the stock market via its own service. What better way to market your product to investors than to use it for an IPO? To say it worked is an understatement as Pexip is now valued at $942 million – not far off unicorn status. 

Pexip’s team has over 20-years of experience in video conferencing. Chamberlain and Lia had actually been working together long before their company was even an idea. The two met when a video conferencing firm from Oslo, called Tandberg, acquired a UK rival called Ridgeway. “I thought the company had been taken over by a bunch of crazy Norwegians,” Chamberlain quips. 

Tandberg was acquired by Cisco in 2010 and a couple of years later Lia and Chamberlain parted ways, each leaving to found their own video conferencing startups. Lia formed Videxio, which focused on the software as a service (SaaS) side of things, whereas Chamberlain’s company was called Pexip and specialised in video infrastructure. Both firms became relatively successful in the following years and in 2019 they merged, bringing Lia and Chamberlain back together again.

Having the two specialities in one service gives Pexip a unique advantage. Customers can either use it as a traditional video conferencing service or similar to the Irish Courts, they can self-host Pexip’s infrastructure and take on responsibility for security themselves. Both use cases have attracted the likes of Vodafone, Intel, Amnesty International, and many more.

“We’ve been going after the large enterprises from day one, that was always the target,” Chamberlain explains. “We sell to the US military and the US Federal [Government]. That means we’ve been through something called Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certification, which is a very elaborate certification process saying this stuff is fit for purpose.

“The distributed software, it’s incredibly hard to bolt on retrospectively. So building that in from the start, it makes it slower to develop the product, but it does mean you have a more secure system. We do have customers who deploy our stuff on networks that aren’t connected to the internet. That’s secure. You’re gonna have a real job hacking that one.”

So far, security is the main battleground in the race to be the top video conferencing company. Where Zoom has struggled, Pexip has flourished, as have other services, such as BlueJeans. But, will there be as much interest once the world opens up again?

“I think there’s a social change that will happen,” Lia explains. “Of course, not everybody likes to work from home. We have to respect that as well, but at the same time, I think a lot of enterprises didn’t prepare their workers to work from home. They didn’t have a policy to allow that flexibility and now they’ve been forced to. So I think that will never be the same again.”

Salesforce has stopped registering some European sales in the UK due to how volatile the pound has become since Brexit.

The software giant said it lost $79 million (£65 million) in 2019 due to the country’s planned exit from the European Union.

The company announced it has “started to implement initiatives” to bypass its UK sales office, such as charging customers directly from local offices in France and Germany, as well as investing resources in Dublin that could “partially mitigate the impact” Brexit has on its operations. 

“Revenues in Europe were negatively impacted by approximately $79 million in fiscal 2020 compared to fiscal 2019 as a result of the strengthening British Pound Sterling,” the company wrote in its annual report. 

“We recognise that there are still significant uncertainties surrounding the ultimate resolution of Brexit negotiations, and we will continue to monitor any changes that may arise and assess their potential impact on our business.”

Brexit was a big business concern at the start of the year, and though it’s since been overshadowed by the global coronavirus pandemic, it’s still very much an issue. Salesforce‘s European business accounts for roughly a fifth of its annual revenue, which came in at $17 billion in 2019,

The company had previously revealed plans to increase its Irish workforce to around 3,000 staff over five years, but that could be accelerated based on its own findings. It currently has around 2,000 employees in the UK, according to reports. 

Recently the company has seen a number of leadership changes, such as co-CEO Kieth Block stepping down in August and Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia leaving after just six months as the UK chief executive.

At the end of April, Salesforce was also forced to cancel its annual tech conference, Dreamforce, which was due to take place in November. 

“As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, our first priority is to help ensure the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and communities,” the company said.

“With this in mind, we have decided to reimagine our events through the end of the year in new and virtual ways. This will be true for all events, including Dreamforce, Tableau Conference 2020, Tableau Conference Europe, TrailheaDX India and our World Tours.”​

Users of the Zoom video conferencing platform reported major issues for several hours on Sunday, with the outage even disrupting the daily Downing Street coronavirus press conference.

Thousands of people began reporting issues from approximately 9 am yesterday, according to the web monitoring service DownDetector, with the company confirming the platform had sustained issues later in the afternoon. 

Zoom confirmed at approximately 3 pm that a portion of its users affected by the issues were unable to host or join meetings and that it was investigating the matter. The outage also hit the Q&A portion of the government’s daily coronavirus press conference, hosted at Downing Street, with journalists unable to field their questions due to the technical difficulties. 

“I think people watching will, I’m quite sure, be aware that Zoom users are encountering some issues at the moment,” said business secretary Alok Sharma, who was standing in for the prime minister. 

“And so, unfortunately, we won’t be able to get any journalists live on-screen. Instead, I’ll be reading out their questions which have been sent in.”

The company issued an update at around 5 pm suggesting the issue had been resolved, with users now able to host, join and participate in Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars. DownDetector, however, suggests a small number of users were experiencing problems into the evening, and beyond.

IT Pro asked Zoom what the root cause of the issue was, and what steps were taken to rectify the situation.

The video conferencing service has, in a short space of time, become integral to the functioning of many organisations, including arms of the UK government. Even the House of Commons has resumed its function as best it can while observing social distancing rules courtesy of services provided by Zoom.

Therefore, such service disruption, if sustained during working hours and over a far longer time period, could, in turn, affect the day-to-day operations of countless businesses.

The company’s meteoric surge in usage – with more than 100 million users added in a matter of weeks – has been accompanied with a much stronger spotlight thrown onto its relatively lax security and privacy policies. Zoom has consciously been addressing these issues in recent weeks as part of a 90-day security plan, however. 

The latest update, for example, added 256-bit encryption among stronger host controls to prevent incidents such as ‘Zoom-bombing’.

​A prolific form of Android spying malware was left undetected in the Google Play store for four years and is likely to have affected hundreds of thousands of users, according to the team of researchers who discovered it.

The team from cyber security firm Bitdefender discovered the “highly sophisticated Android espionage platform” earlier this year, although they believe it had been active since 2016, first targeting Android users in Australia and then users in the Americas and Europe, including the UK.

The malware has been further defined as a strain of spyware, which allowed its authors to snoop on any user that downloaded infected apps and access personal data, such as device preferences, the contents of their address books and messages, as well as device usage data and inactivity times.

Researchers have named the spyware ‘Mandrake’, as the criminals behind it were found to be using names of toxic plants for their development branches.

The team also found that Mandrake conducted phishing attacks on applications including Amazon, Gmail, PayPal, Google Chrome, as well as popular cryptocurrency wallet apps such as Lunoor, Coinbase and numerous banking apps from around the world. UK banks were not listed by Bitdefender among the victims.

The creators of the malware attempted to gain a strong presence on the app market and circumvent Google Play security by publishing their own malicious apps, such as OfficeScanner and CoinCast, and generated fake comments and downloads in order to ensure that their application made it to the trending section of Google Play.

The malware developers went to great lengths to ensure their apps came across as legitimate software, including by engaging with negative reviews and comments, and delivering fixes to the apps.

The marketing behind the malicious apps was so extensive that CoinCast not only had an official website, but also a strong social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube.

Hackers even tried to evoke trust among its potential victims by listing an address for its  OfficeScanner app on its Facebook page, namely the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Building in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Alongside CoinCast and OfficeScanner, Bitdefender also listed Abfix, SnapTune Vid, Currency XE Converter, Horoskope, and Car News as other malicious applications developed by Mandrake operators.

The Bitdefender team estimates “the number of victims in the tens of thousands for the current wave, and probably hundreds of thousands throughout the full 4-year period”.

“We can also extrapolate that every victim of Mandrake has most probably been exposed to some form of data theft,” they said.

The discovery made by Bitdefender comes weeks after a group of cyber security experts from Cybereason Nocturnus found that a mobile-based trojan was capable of compromising Android’s accessibility features in order to steal user data from banking applications and read user’s SMS messages, allowing the malware to bypass two-factor authentication.

Software giant VMware has said it plans to acquire specialist Kubernetes company Octarine, a deal at the core of VMware’s drive to become a major security provider.

Following the firm’s decision to snap up Carbon Black seven months ago, VMware is hoping to integrate Octarine’s security platform for Kubernetes applications into its broader security services. 

The company’s technology helps simplify DevSecOps and enables cloud-native environments to be more secure from development through runtime, according to Carbon Black’s CEO Patrick Morley.

“The unique properties of the cloud (speed, agility, scale) mean that developers are increasingly using containers to modernize applications. As with any major technology adoption, attackers are not far behind, looking to take advantage of new risk areas,” he said.

“Protecting workloads is critical to the security of applications and data inside every organization. Building Octarine’s innovation into the VMware security portfolio will present a major opportunity for our team to further simplify and improve security for our customers.”

The move is seen as a leap forward for VMware, which has launched a significant push into the security market through investments and acquisitions.

Over the past two decades, there can be few tech workers who have put in a harder shift than Microsoft’s branding department. Barely a week seems to pass without them changing the name of a product, sometimes putting it back to the original name a few months later, just to confuse the hell out of everybody.

The latest makeover victim is Office 365 – the subscription suite that encompasses Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on – which is being rebadged as Microsoft 365. One can only imagine the amount of blue-sky, think-outside-the-box, no-idea-is-a-silly-idea brainstorming that went into that one.

In this case, however, I suspect the name change is more than just cosmetic. In fact, it could be an indication of a massive change to come.

While the contents of a Microsoft 365 subscription look very much like Office 365 right now, I wouldn’t mind betting that switching to the more general Microsoft name tag is paving the way for the company to add Windows to the package. No longer will your operating system be priced into the cost of a new PC or laptop. Instead, those devices will come with a 30-day free trial of Windows (much like Office does now), after which you’ll be expected to take out a subscription to keep the operating system active. 

If you’re muttering “not another bloody subscription” as you read this and are about to let out a scream that will be heard two counties away, let me explain why this might not be such a terrible thing. 

First, you pay for Windows anyway. You may not notice it, and you might have been told Windows 10 was “free”, but it’s not. The PC makers pay anything up to £50 per licence for Windows 10, and that cost is added to the price of new computers. If Microsoft were to turn that into a free trial, you’d hope the PC makers would pass on the savings. 

Second, if Microsoft is charging you directly for Windows, it has a responsibility to support it. That means not simply directing you to a website or “chat assistant”, but proper telephone support, because if they don’t fix your problem, you don’t pay them next month. In other words, Microsoft will have a direct financial incentive to sort out its support.

Finally, and this is the biggie, a Windows subscription makes it much easier to move to the model that will shape computing in this decade: streaming. I’m 99% certain that by the end of this decade, you won’t be running Windows on the PC in front of you, but streaming it over the internet. 

Your Windows installation will be hosted in one of Microsoft’s massive data centres, and whether you’re using a laptop, desktop PC, tablet or streaming device plugged into a screen – much like Amazon’s Fire Sticks – you’ll stream Windows over your fibre broadband connection. 

Microsoft will look after backup for you; Microsoft will store all your documents, photos and other files; Microsoft will charge you for all this in one convenient monthly sum and will call it Microsoft 365. Well, at least until the branding department has another brainwave.

​Appian has unveiled three new apps intended to help organisations better weather the storm created by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The three apps, COVID-19 Response, Paycheck Protection Program and Workforce Safety & Readiness, were all built and released over the course of the fast two months and address different aspects of the challenges businesses are facing right now.

Speaking at the opening day keynote of the company’s now virtual annual conference, CEO Matt Caulkins said COVID-19 Response, which was launched in March, “is about responding to [the disease] and tracking the health of an employer’s workforce”.

“Everything about this application is free – the software is free, the intellectual property is free, the installation, the web hosting, the support and services, everything is completely free,” said Calkins, adding that it quickly became the most popular launch in the history of the company.

“It was taken up really well by our customer base, we had 500 downloads in the first few days, and then soon it was over 1,000,” he said.

Paycheck Protection Program, launched in April, focuses on helping banks process one the US government’s key financial responses to the coronavirus pandemic: small business loans.

“My favourite thing about this application is the way it showcases the power of automation. It uses artificial intelligence to read loan applications and then it uses robotic process automation to upload them to a government portal and it uses people to manage compliance,” said Calkins.

“This is the North Star of automation, it’s the combination of human workers and digital workers in the same workflow. It’s exactly what the automation industry is aiming for.”

Finally, Workforce Safety & Readiness helps organisations prepare for the reopening of their offices as the pandemic starts to subside.

“The purpose of the application is to get your employees back to work safely, carefully, and cautiously and we do that by considering more information than we would have if you just told people to come back if they met CDC (Centres for Disease Control) guidelines,” explained Calkins. 

“Instead, we’re going to take a lot of things into account – how many workers should really be in each facility in your organisation and which workers should they be on day one? And on day 10? And on day 50?” he continued.

“We’re going to take into account a lot of additional factors in the name of safety, such as how many people live in their household and how old are those people? Who do they come to work in the same office with, to be sure that we don’t have them both come in on the same day? Can their job be done at a distance effectively?

“All this information is stored in a HIPAA-certified cloud and it’s exceptionally easy to use. Users log in every morning  on any device to update their health, answer a few questions  and then they’re told whether they should come to work today and what days they should plan to come to work.”

All three apps are available immediately.

Twitter has told employees that they can choose to work from home forever if they wish as the coronavirus lockdown continues to shape the new normal in working culture.

The San Francisco-based company has also announced that they will not be reopening their offices before September, “with very few exceptions”. Even when offices do reopen, the staff will be able to choose whether they want to return to them.

In a blog post detailing the decision, Twitter’s People VP Jennifer Christie said that although Twitter “was one of the first companies to go to a work from home model in the face of COVID-19”, the company does “not anticipate being one of the first to return to offices”.

“Opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs,” she said.

The decision was made after Twitter has found that their 4,600 employees can work from home in a successful manner. Nevertheless, Christie emphasised that staff who prefer working from the offices will be able to do so: “Our offices will be their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions, when we feel it’s safe to return.”

The company also announced a ban on business travel before September, as well in-person company events for the rest of the year. Events scheduled for 2021 are to be assessed by the end of 2020.

Commenting on Twitter’s announcement, Saka Nuru, head of product marketing for Fintech Eco Systems and Payments at Intuit Quickbooks, said that “we will no doubt see more [companies] follow in Twitter’s footsteps in the months to come”.

“The fact that Twitter can commit to this promise, is an indication of how adept our technology solutions have been at facilitating remote working. Cloud-enabled Software-as-a-Service solutions as well as video conferencing service have evidently been a huge success when transitioning to a largely at-home environment, even for larger companies,” he said.

Twitter’s unprecedented announcement comes days after Facebook and Google confirmed that they will continue to allow employees to work from home for the rest of the year. Apple, on the other hand, is reportedly planning to allow some employees back into its global offices soon, including its Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California. ​

The parent company of shopping chain Lidl is reportedly gearing up to launch a cloud computing service for third party retailers. 

German-based Schwarz Gruppe recently acquired software firm Camao IDC, according to Lebensmittel Zeitun, and is now looking to build a rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud computing is a fiercely competitive industry with some of the biggest names in tech fighting for a share of the market. Companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft all deliver slightly different cloud-based services, but each one trails behind AWS.

Cloud Pro has approached Schwarz for comment as there is very little detail on the alleged service, but there is a suggestion that it will be more of a rival to China’s Alibaba as it appears to be more e-commerce-based.  

The acquisition is alleged to have brought 70 cloud computing specialists into the Schwarz Gruppe, which is seen as a key part of the strategy. The company’s head of strategy and business management, Stefan Herold is said to be heading up the new cloud division, which is thought to have been accelerated due to the current coronavirus pandemic. 

Many cloud-based services have enjoyed a surge in users, with remote and automated technologies coming to greater prominence since lockdowns have been enforced. Most retail outlets have either closed and furloughed staff or have shifted to online operations only. 

It is thought that Schwarz will use its cloud service to enable an online delivery service for Lidl, which was reported in January as launching sometime this year.

In October, Lidl advertised for ‘digital managers’ for an unnamed e-commerce project and the company’s UK digital director Alex Murray reportedly suggested online plans were in the works during an industry conference in 2018.