The ITPro Podcast

Identity controls in the enterprise have only become more complicated over the last few years.Initially, the focus was on IoT devices, which were exploding in the enterprise environment. But recent years have brought an onslaught of AI tools and AI agents, all of which come with security and governance complications.How can business leaders get a grip on the adoption of AI agents, particularly as these tools begin to communicate with one another and with third-party enterprise tools?In this episode, Rory speaks to Shiven Ramji, president, Auth0 at Okta, to discuss the future of identity, security and governance in the face of AI agents.

January is supposed to be a month full of new starts and potential, in which we try to embrace resolutions or set out our plans for the year ahead.But in the tech sector, it’s become something of an ominous month – the start of layoff season. January 2026 has been no different, with Amazon announcing 16,000 jobs cut in a plan that could see up to 30,000 cut by the end of May according to Reuters.Earlier in the month, Dell made waves at CES 2026 with the news that it’s reviving the XPS laptop line, just one year on from its announcement that the brand would be deprecated. What can we make of the job cuts and of Dell's reversal?In this episode, Rory welcomes back Ross Kelly, ITPro's news and analysis editor, to explore some of January's biggest stories.Read more:Amazon is cutting 14,000 roles in a bid to ‘operate like the world's largest startup’‘Lean into it’: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy thinks enterprises need to embrace AI to avoid being left behind – even if that means fewer jobs in the futureFresh Microsoft layoffs hit software engineering roles, documents showReturn of the XPS: Dell resurrects iconic brand at CES after customer demandDell kills off XPS and other brands for PC simplicity

Every business wants its payments to process smoothly. Simply put, if you’re introducing friction into your payment processes, you’re making it harder to drive revenue and dissuading users from becoming return customers.One sector that knows this better than most is iGaming, which has to meet the demands of users around the world including mobile payments, virtual wallets, and cross-border social gaming payouts.Delivering all this in near real-time, with adequate security and reliable infrastructure, is no small feat. How are these payment systems possible?In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with Paysafe, Rory is joined by Bob Legters, chief product officer at Paysafe, to discuss the best practices for building a payments strategy – and how this can be applied to iGaming.

One of the major challenges of today’s environments is the rising tide of bots, with generative AI driving a new era of the technology.Bots have been a part of the internet since at least the 1990s but recent technological advancements have swollen their number exponentially. Some of these net dwellers are benign, others are malicious, and some sit somewhere in between. But no matter what category they fall into, they can all cause problems for businesses. How much of an issue is this for businesses and what can they do to mitigate it? In this special discussion, in association with Fastly, Jane speaks to Marshall Irwin, chief information security officer (CISO) at Fastly, to discover more about how organizations can protect themselves from the risks of bots.

The environmental impact of AI is a growing area of study and one that businesses must begin to seriously consider.When you power a data center with coal, it’s obvious that it’s having a detrimental impact on the environment. But is a ‘green’ data center really green? And to what extent might the benefits of AI outweigh potential environmental negatives?In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss the shifting sustainability targets of the world’s public cloud giants, as caused by AI, and what they’re doing to get back on track.Read more:Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Report 2025Amazon 2024 Sustainability ReportGoogle 2025 Environmental ReportGoogle emissions have surged 51% in five years – but it’s making solid progress in data center efficiencyData center carbon emissions are set to skyrocket by 2030, with hyperscalers producing 2.5 billion tons of carbonSmall businesses are ‘flying blind’ on carbon emissions and struggling to meet sustainability goals – and the blame lies with big tech vendorsBig tech’s solution for AI-related carbon emissions could be more AIMicrosoft wants to drastically cut carbon emissions, so it’s building data centers with woodCan small modular reactors meet data center power demand?Google just confirmed the location of its first small modular reactor

The tech sector started this year with a bang at CES 2026, the annual event that brings together over 140,000 attendees to share the latest innovations in consumer and business technology.Unsurprisingly, at this year’s event AI was a primary focus – with more details on Nvidia and AMD’s latest hardware, alongside AI PC innovations by brands like Lenovo.Alongside these headlines, however, we also saw a return to form by companies such as Dell, with the resurrection of the XPS laptop range.What did we learn from CES about what to expect in business hardware over the coming year?In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Mike Moore, deputy editor at TechRadar Pro, to discuss the biggest moments from CES 2026.

We’re just over a week into 2026 but already, enterprise cybersecurity teams will be hard at work repelling attacks – and business leaders will be worrying about the year ahead.On the one hand, we’re told that AI tools are beginning to empower security teams to go further and faster. On the other, the use of AI by hackers to launch attacks also appears to be on the rise.All of this is happening against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions and continual attacks by state-sponsored hacking groups against businesses. How will all this come together in 2026 and beyond?In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Jamie Collier, lead advisor in Europe at Google Threat Intelligence Group, to explore the risks – both novel and ordinary – enterprises face in 2026.Read more:NCSC issues urgent warning over growing AI prompt injection risks – here’s what you need to knowCyber experts have been warning about AI-powered DDoS attacks – now they’re becoming a realitySalt Typhoon attack on US congressional email system ‘exposes how vulnerable core communications systems remain to nation-state actors’OpenAI says prompt injection attacks are a serious threat for AI browsers – and it’s a problem that’s ‘unlikely to ever be fully solved'OpenAI turns to red teamers to prevent malicious ChatGPT use as company warns future models could pose 'high' security riskA flaw in Google’s new Gemini CLI tool could’ve allowed hackers to exfiltrate dataGoogle says you shouldn't worry about AI malware – but that won’t last long as hackers refine techniquesNorth Korean IT workers: The growing threatNorth Korean hackers...

As we ring in the new year, we’re returning to the ITPro tradition of looking ahead and discussing the key trends that will shape the tech sector in 2026.While there will undoubtedly be surprises ahead, both exciting and concerning, it’s also possible to look at some of the standout moments from 2025 to help us understand where we’re headed.So what can we expect IT decision makers to come up against in 2026?For this new year’s edition of the podcast, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s News and Analysis Editor, to discuss the key trends that will shape 2026.FootnotesAI adoption is finally driving ROI for B2B teams in the UK and EUAI is finally delivering bang for its buck, according to MicrosoftUK firms are pouring money into AI, but they won’t see a return on investment unless they address these key issuesFormer NCSC head says the Jaguar Land Rover attack was the 'single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK' as impact laid bareIf you're not taking insider threats seriously, then the CrowdStrike incident should be a big wake up callNorth Korean IT workers: The growing threatUS Department of Energy’s supercomputer shopping spree continues with Solstice and EquinoxInside Isambard-AI: The UK’s most powerful supercomputerNvidia just announced new supercomputers and an open AI model family for science at SC 2025

2025 has almost come to a close and the new year is right around the corner.At this time of year, it’s usual to reflect on the year and consider some of the biggest, most impactful things that have happened. But here at ITPro, we like to take a different approach: what didn’t happen?The tech industry can’t help but make bold promises and some just don’t pan out. What are some of the biggest targets, trends, and predictions that just haven’t come to fruition in 2025?In this episode, Jane and Rory are once again joined by Ross Kelly, news and analysis editor at ITPro, to discuss the biggest misses of the year.Read more:Is enterprise agentic AI adoption matching the hype?‘Agent washing’ is here: Most agentic AI tools are just ‘repackaged’ RPA solutions and chatbots – and Gartner says 40% of projects will be ditched within two yearsAgentic AI carries huge implications for security teams - here's what leaders should know'It's slop': OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy pours cold water on agentic AI hype – so your jobs are safe, at least for nowIBM is targeting 'quantum advantage' in 12 months – and says useful quantum computing is just a few years awaySAS thinks quantum AI has huge enterprise potential – here's whySAS rejects generative AI hype in favor of data fundamentals at Innovate 2025Post-quantum cryptography is now top of mind for cybersecurity leadersWhy does Nvidia have a no-chip quantum strategy?Meta executive denies hyping up Llama 4 benchmark scores – but...

Cybersecurity teams are facing a double edged sword of challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, AI tools offer a great deal of autonomous working and the promise of automating some of the more laborious tasks that a cybersecurity team has to undertake.On the other hand, attackers are also using AI to launch large scale attacks such as sophisticated phishing campaigns and identity theft. To fight this threat, cybersecurity teams will need to unify data like never before and take advantage of as many new technologies and processes as they can.How can they go about this? And what does a unified cybersecurity strategy really look like in 2026?In this episode, Rory is joined by Mandy Andress, chief information security officer at Elastic, to explore how businesses can evolve their threat detection and security posture, as well as how AI is lowering the barrier to entry for attackers.Read more:In the age of AI threats, the future of security is unifiedAI-generated code is now the cause of one-in-five breaches – but developers and security leaders alike are convinced the technology will come good eventuallyAI-generated code risks: What CISOs need to knowAgentic AI carries huge implications for security teams - here's what leaders should knowThe NCSC touts honeypots and ‘cyber deception’ tactics as the key to combating hackers — but they could ‘lead to a false sense of security’

In the race to train and deploy generative AI models, companies have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into GPUs, chips that have become essential for the parallel processing needs of large language models.Nvidia alone has forecast $500 billion in sales across 2025 and 2026, driven largely by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO at Nvidia, recently stated that “inference has become the most compute-intensive phase of AI — demanding real-time reasoning at planetary scale”. Google is meeting these demands in its own way. Unlike other firms reliant on chips by Nvidia, AMD, and others, Google has long used its in-house ‘tensor processing units’ (TPUs) for AI training and inference.What are the benefits and drawbacks of Google’s reliance on TPUs? And how do its chips stack up against the competition?In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss TPUs – Google’s specialized processors for AI and ML – and how they could help the hyperscaler outcompete its rivals.Read more:

HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 was in full swing this past week, with thousands of attendees descending on the Fira Barcelona to hear the latest news on the networking, servers, storage, supercomputing – and, of course, AI.It’s a pivotal time for the firm, as it consolidates its hardware partnerships and heralds a recent acquisition, while laying out its strategy to help customers not only meet demand, but expand their networks and adopt new technologies.What are some of the biggest things HPE announced – and what does the firm have lined up for 2026 and beyond?In this episode, Rory interviews Jane live on the ground to unpack all things HPE.

As a business leader, you’d like to believe that your staff are entirely trustworthy. Effective enterprises run on workforce confidence – but in some cases, that trust can be misplaced.In November, CrowdStrike admitted one of its own employees had provided screenshots of internal systems to hackers in exchange for a sizable payout. Industry experts have told ITPro the incident should act as a wake up call to the all-too-serious risk of insider threats.Earlier in the month, websites all over the world went offline after a major outage at the content delivery network service provider Cloudflare. What was the cause of the incident: had Cloudflare fallen victim to the kind of DDoS attack it’s famous for preventing?In this episode, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore some of November’s biggest stories.FootnotesIf you're not taking insider threats seriously, then the CrowdStrike incident should be a big wake up callNearly 700,000 customers impacted after insider attack at US fintech firmAI means cyber teams are rethinking their approach to insider threats‘Insiders don’t need to break in’: A developer crippled company networks with malicious code and a ‘kill switch’ after being sacked – and experts warn it shows the huge danger of insider threatsEverything you need to know about CloudflareThe Cloudflare outage explained: What happened, who was impacted, and what was the root cause?Cloudflare says AI companies have been “scraping content without limits” – now it’s letting website owners block crawlers and force them to paySecurity experts issue warning over the rise of 'gray bot' AI web scrapersCloudflare is fighting back against AI web scrapersNearly half of all digital initiatives still fail – here’s how you can learn from the ‘digital vanguard’ and deliver successSubscribe to the IT Pro newslettera...

It seems that everywhere you look these days, businesses are implementing AI features, tools, chatbots, and pilots. But researchers keep coming to the same conclusion about the benefits of enterprise AI adoption – that return on investment is slim to none.While this isn’t the case for every business, it’s certainly a worry that hangs over discussions of the technology. The secret to making AI projects succeed is knowledge that every leader is after right now – and knowing what not to do is just as important.Where are businesses going wrong with AI adoption? And how can they apply the learnings of the past few years to ramp up return on investment?Today, we’re joined by Alan Trefler, founder and CEO at Pegasystems, to unpack the main hurdles businesses face when it comes to AI adoption – and why AI failure is becoming such a widespread concern.In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Alan Trefler, founder and CEO at Pegasystems, to unpack the main hurdles businesses face when it comes to AI adoption – and why AI failure is becoming such a widespread concern.

The dream of every small-to-medium business is to harness one’s success and turn it into sustainable growth – expanding operations, hiring more workers, and delivering more value to a wider customer base.But achieving this in the modern enterprise environment requires as much focus on IT strategy as business strategy. Without the right approach to cloud, technology, and cybersecurity, businesses will struggle to scale past a point. Camp Australia knows this better than most. When the leading provider of Outside School Hours Care in Australia came to the conclusion that its decades-old IT and cloud processes were holding it back from unlocking its full scalability, it partnered with SoftwareOne to migrate to Microsoft Azure and adopt the benefits of a unified cloud environment.How did SoftwareOne help Camp Australia achieve these goals? And what are the key lessons to be taken away from this successful transformation project?In this episode, in association with Hyland, we’re speaking to Justin Itin, Sales Lead at SoftwareOne and Peter Lane, CTO at Camp Australia, to explore Camp Australia’s digital transformation project and how SoftwareOne helped facilitate it.Read more:Find out more about SoftwareOneFind out more about Camp Australia

This episode was first published on 10 January 2025.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 got to go?In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to David Happy, non-executive director at JET Connectivity and non-executive chairman for transport at Wales Fiber, and Colin Wood, innovation lead at Dorset Council, to better understand the state of rural connectivity in the UK.Read more:UK rural businesses set for broadband improvementsInvest 2035: the UK's modern industrial strategyUK gov has ramped up broadband roll-outs to tackle 'hard-to-reach' areas in 2023BT and OneWeb succeed in "game changer" satellite connection trialThe battle for space broadband dominance is hotting upUK government to run Starlink trials in Snowdonia, Lake District

The end of October was punctuated with a series of major cloud outages, first at AWS and then at Microsoft, bringing a wide range of websites and business applications offline.In the previous episode, we spoke about this in a reactive sense – the immediate customers impacted and the likely causes.But it's also important to break the problem down at a strategic and technical level. Just how do outages at this scale occur – and what’s it like as an insider, fighting to bring services back online?In this episode Rory speaks to James Kretchmar, SVP & CTO of the cloud technology division at Akamai Technologies, to get an insider’s perspective on cloud outages and how businesses can navigate these incidents.Read more:Amazon Web Services outage live: Hundreds of apps including Slack, mobile carriers, banking services downThe AWS outage brought much of the web to its knees: Here's how it happened, who it affected, and how much it might costThe Microsoft Azure outage explained: What happened, who was impacted, and what can we learn from it?Australia internet banking outage blamed on DDoS mitigation serviceWhy the CrowdStrike outage was a wakeup call for developer teams

The global services market is expected to grow at 8% compound annual growth between now and 2028, representing a $1.7 trillion opportunity.But partners looking to seize on this opportunity face a slew of challenges. Establishing a services offering for customers demanding the scale of the cloud and complex technologies like AI is difficult without the right service provider, for example.Whether you're already offering cutting edge IT services or just scaling within your region, it's a huge benefit to get a helping hand with pre-sales, managed services, and ongoing support.What does this look like in practice, and who can partners turn to? In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with TD Synnex, Jane and Rory speak to Stephen Ennis, VP of Technology Acceleration at TD Synnex.

It’s Halloween! And what better way to mark the day than discuss one of the biggest horror stories of October?We are of course referring to the AWS outage, which on 20 October took down some incredibly notable websites and caused global disruption. It’s the latest, most severe example of why data centers are considered critical infrastructure – and acts as a stark reminder to IT administrators that even big tech can fall foul of technical errors.Of course, October hasn’t just been defined by negative stories. At the end of the month, the US Department of Energy has revealed a slew of supercomputer announcements. What are they for, and when can they be expected to be up and running?In this episode, Jane and Rory once again welcome Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to the show to discuss the biggest developments of the month.

Business software is evolving faster than ever before, with advancements such as AI spurring developers to introduce new ways of working and interacting with the software layer.But by and large, business hardware has stayed much the same for the past decade. With a few notable exceptions, the laptops, desktops, and portables we use for work today are simply evolved versions of what we were using in 2015.Is this set to change? And what could the hardware of the future look like?In this episode Rory speaks to Bobby Hellard, ITPro’s reviews editor, to explore some of the latest advances in business hardware and ask – is this the best it gets?Read more:The Huawei MateBook Fold Ultimate Edition is a unique take on what it means to be a laptop – but good luck getting it outside of ChinaE-ink is on-trend and I'm all for itReMarkable Paper Pro review: The e-ink color tablet that lets you thinkThe ReMarkable Paper Pro Move gives you e-ink in a pocketable package – but it's not without faultSupernote A5 X2 Manta review: A premium e-ink tablet that's still somewhat SpartanThe Amazon Kindle Scribe is no bullet journal – it is, in fact, a fairly basic E Ink tablet