As lockdowns and stay-at-home orders persist, protecting the remote workforce will be enterprises’ prime focus in 2021. But as enterprises continue working remotely with very few making a complete return to the office, securing the remote workforce is proving challenging, according to research from Cato Networks.

In its fifth annual IT survey, The future of enterprise networking and security: are you ready for the next leap, the secure access service edge (SASE) platform provider surveyed 2,376 IT leaders to gain detailed insight into how IT organisations have responded to the pandemic and their plans for 2021.

The study revealed that IT teams struggled in the early days of the pandemic, rushing to meet the urgent need for widespread remote access. With only 7% of respondents indicating that everyone will move back to the office, four-fifths of the sample said their companies would continue with a remote workforce in whole

It may be home to the fabulously wealthy satellite towns south of Manchester and have the world-famous Roman city of Chester as its capital, but the county of Cheshire is essentially non-urban, and to improve communications in-hard-to-reach areas in the county, Airband is to supply more than 4,000 homes and properties in the region with full-fibre broadband.

The rural connectivity specialist won a £4.5m contract from Cheshire County Council to provide ultrafast gigabit-capable broadband in a project designed to see the county benefit from improved connectivity.

Funded by the UK government’s Connecting Cheshire initiative, which includes Warrington Borough Council, Cheshire East Council, Cheshire West and Chester and Halton Borough Council, the project will start in early 2021 and is expected to last until March 2023. Airband said it will use “innovative methods” to connect the hard-to-reach areas with gigabit-capable connectivity.

“The fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) deal with Airband comes at a key

With early investment in the infrastructure driven by demand from mission-critical organisations, and with more spectrum being made available for enterprise uses, the inaugural forecast for the worldwide private LTE/5G infrastructure market from International Data Corporation (IDC) is predicting a boom for the dedicated architectures for enterprises until 2024.

IDC defines a private LTE/5G infrastructure as any 3GPP-based LTE and/or 5G network deployed for a specific enterprise/industrial customer that provides dedicated access. That definition includes networks that may utilise dedicated (licensed, unlicensed, or shared) spectrum, dedicated infrastructure, and private devices embedded with unique SIM identifiers.

IDC also sees private LTE/5G infrastructure as those carrying traffic native to a specific organisation, with no shared resources in use by any third-party entities.

Given this basis, the analyst calculates revenue attributable to the sales of private LTE/5G infrastructure will grow from $945m (£695m) in 2019 to an estimated $5.7bn (£4.2bn) in 2024 with

The Nordics have already played a prominent role in introducing the term “pet tech”, and now its startup protagonists are hoping that leads to the region shaking its “testing ground” status to become top dog of the burgeoning sector.

The tag of being a playground to trial new applications and sub-sectors is nothing new; the region’s market size naturally lends to it being a stepping stone towards larger-scale international traction. However, when it comes to the rise of digitisation across pet ownership and management, the events of last year have accelerated these Nordic players towards the top of the international food chain.

One of these leaders is internationally renowned business, Pets4Homes – a UK-born company now benefiting from Nordic ownership and entrepreneurship as it looks to innovate and expand.

Axel Lagercrantz, CEO of Pet Media Group, who acquired the business together with co-founder Eyass Shakrah back in August 2019,

Nearly six billion calls were made from fintech application programming interfaces (APIs) to bank servers in the UK in 2020 and more than four million open banking payments were completed.

Figures from the UK’s Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) said more than four million open banking payments were made in 2020, compared with 320,000 in 2018, and nearly six billion API calls were made to servers in the UK, compared with just 66.8 million in 2018.

After three years of the UK’s open banking regulation, the OBIE also revealed that about 300 fintech firms currently offer open banking services and 2.5 million consumers use them, with hundreds of thousands of new users added each month.

In January 2018, banks were required to implement the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) Open Banking regulations. This led to the development of APIs in banking to give consumers more control over accounts. Through

Six of the world’s leading creative, technology and scientific organisations have formed a consortium to create new experiences inspired by the forthcoming BBC Studios Natural History Unit landmark series The Green Planet, presented by Sir David Attenborough.

Billed as a version of legendary BBC natural history series Planet Earth from the perspective of plants, the five-part series is said to be the first immersive portrayal of an unseen, interconnected world, full of new behaviour, emotional stories and surprising heroes in the plant world. During the series, Attenborough travels to the US, Costa Rica, Croatia and northern Europe, from deserts to mountains, from rainforests to the frozen north, to find new stories and a fresh understanding of how plants live their lives.

He meets the largest living things that have ever existed, trees that care for each other, and plants that breed so quickly that they could cover the