The ITPro Podcast

• November rundown: CrowdStrike's insider threat

  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 newsletter

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• Why do AI projects fail?

  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.

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• SPECIAL EDITION: Partnering to solve legacy cloud challenges

  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

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• Classic episode: Can better connectivity boost rural business?

  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

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• Inside a cloud outage

  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

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