For Liverpool the future is exciting! Last week the Aabyss team attended the 2018 Liverpool City Region Digital Summit hosted by LCR Activate, and what an event it was.

Fax machines have moved from office essential to dust collector in the space of 15 years. The development of the internet and printers outdated the fax machine quicker than most expected. Despite this, as printers are often all-in-one fax machines can still be found in the majority of offices and whilst forgotten about they can pose a big security risk.

Dependable outcomes prove a productive business. Whether productivity derives from acquiring new customers, streamlining business processes or maintaining an organisational workflow, a proper business plan provides a welcomed resource for progress in all areas concerned. Designing and adhering to a plan however can unearth difficulties that must be addressed. Optimising a business plan through a focus on technology will not only discover problems, but it will also allow management to comb finely through each business process and sort out incongruities that cause delay, waste and frustration. It will further provide support to expose any unsuspected or unknown risks that might deter future growth. By committing to act through a technological objective, businesses can expect to see real, tangible returns.

Ticketmaster have become one of the first companies to have a major data breach since the arrival of GDPR. Data including payment details, addresses, names and phone numbers of around 40,000 users have all been affected by the breach. Ticketmaster say the breach was first detected on the 23rd June and affected 5% of its customers.

TSB customers have reported a significant increase in phishing attacks connected to the recent TSB IT incident. A total of 176 complaints have been made since April 30 as hackers seize the opportunity to try and attack the vulnerable bank's customers. Nearly four weeks on from the banking meltdown the issue has not been averted and it has become an easy payday for hackers and scammers. With people’s apps and online banking being down this has allowed hackers to make off with thousands of pounds worth of savings from peoples accounts due to similar looking emails requesting personal account information, something a bank would never do over email.

The Successful Business "If you want to climb a mountain, start at the top of the mountain." Implicit within this analogy is an underlying need. That need is for C-Suite executives to know how each department, function, team and individual will be performing when the business is successful.

If vested interests try to sabotage the IT strategy – it’s working An IT strategy is probably the most important document that a Chief Information Officer (CIO) produces – and the most difficult to get right. Done well, by someone who has a broad overview of both business goals and the emerging IT landscape, it provides the IT roadmap for the business to forge ahead in the next five to ten years. Done poorly, done too late, or not done at all – a commoner state of affairs than one might think – it dooms the organisation to underperformance and poor productivity.

The British government have promised to spend £150m on its cyber defences against the “growing threat” of cyber-attacks. This follows on from WannaCry which struck last year and affected nearly 600 GP practices and 80 trusts.

A popular fitness and nutrition app ‘MyFitnessPal’ has suffered the largest data breach of 2018 so far affecting 150 million accounts. Hackers got away with usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords.

Data protection and privacy is expected across the internet nowadays. Data privacy concerns have been up in the air as multiple stories emerge concerning what companies do with people’s data and who they share this with.