The internet is not reliable or secure enough to cope with the load we are putting on it, according to President Obama's cyber security advisor. The global digital infrastructure is "neither secure enough nor resilient enough for what we use it for today", which means fixing it is one of the biggest economic and national security problems of the 21st century, according to Melissa Hathaway, acting senior director for cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils.

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There may be a number of unresolved security issues around cloud computing - but if you try to resist the trend you are likely to be shown the door. This was the claim of Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of security company Qualys speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week.

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Think IT security is already devilishly over-complicated to implement? Just wait until you have to worry about securing the real world as well as the virtual. Use of technologies such as RFID will force a rethink of how IT security is implemented, because the adoption of such devices will mean the internet takes on a "physical dimension" rather than just living inside PCs, according to Ari Juels, chief scientist and director of RSA Labs.

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Sage chief executive Paul Walker talks to silicon.com about the software company's tactics in the recession, its approach to cloud computing and what happens when the Facebook generation turns entrepreneur. Paul Walker has been chief executive of Newcastle-based business management software company Sage since 1994. He joined as an accountant three years after the company was founded in 1984, rising to finance director in 1987.

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UK software maker Sage will continue to expand its cloud offerings to cater to the Facebook generation, despite the current low take-up of such apps. Sage is planning to launch additional applications that can be delivered via the web in the coming year or so according to the company's chief executive, Paul Walker.

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As the recession forces companies to become leaner and the comparative savings from offshoring diminish, banks and businesses are considering returning work back to the UK. Speaking at the FT Global Outsourcing and Offshoring Conference yesterday, Ian Cramb, chief operating and technology officer for global consumer group for EMEA at Citigroup, said increasing efficiency at home has spurred the company to review which offshored work could be brought back in-house.

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While young mobile users prefer to get online to check social networking sites, silver surfers are hungry for financial services via their phones. According to a report by market researcher comScore, mobile financial services are most popular with Europeans over 55.

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UK multinationals have this week laid bare their sometimes rocky relationship with outsourcing and described how offshoring is helping them survive the recession. Aviva Global Services (AGS), the business unit that provides back office and IT services to the financial services group Aviva, set up its first in-house, offshore operation, known as a captive, in 2003 with 2,500 staff.

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The Naked CIO asks: could the banks' hard times lead to better times for smaller businesses? I know it is unkind to hit someone when they are down, however in this case I believe it is warranted.

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Changing the sector you work in can be a great way to survive a recession. IT director Mike Roberts explains how it's possible - even a good idea. I started my career in IT back in 1979 when the world of technology was very different to how it is today. Since then I have worked in almost every business sector and learnt that experience in one sector is no barrier to working in another.

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Financial trading businesses in London can now link to stock exchanges via the city's sewers. Optical fibre network provider, Geo, has opened a new high-capacity network for financial trading organisations to carry out automated trades more efficiently. Follow the link to see photos of the Geo network in London's sewers.

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Barclays has announced fresh tech job cuts that could see up to 350 permanent IT posts axed. Job losses will take place in the Global Retail and Commercial Banking (GRCB) Technology department this year, staff were told by email.

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UK health retailer Boots is to trial contactless payments at UK stores. Customers at 15 Boots shops in London and six in Liverpool will be able to use MasterCard PayPass cards to make contactless payments from the second half of this year.

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Software companies lost £1.49bn to piracy in the UK last year - and that's before the impact of the economic downturn. More than a quarter of the desktop software installed in the UK last year - 27 per cent - was pirated according to the sixth annual global IDC software piracy study, sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which represents the interests of software makers including Apple, IBM and Microsoft.

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The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has revealed some of its crime fighting successes over the last year. Soca's annual report, published yesterday, details a year of fighting e-crime, from leading the UK operation to shut down the online forum DarkMarket and hunting the gang who tried to electronically transfer more than £229m from a London-based bank.

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A bank card that allows workers to securely access company IT systems from outside the office is being trialled in the UK. Up to 1,000 staff at Deloitte and Visa will be given new Barclaycard Corporate Visa cards, revealed by silicon.com last year, which generate one-time-use passcodes that allow remote access to the company IT system over a virtual private network (VPN).

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With businesses gathering more data than ever before, they are using increasingly sophisticated tools to make the right decisions using that information. At predictive analytics company SPSS' annual European conference in Prague this week customers discussed how they have used data mining and modelling to improve their businesses.

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With millions expected to abandon the office today to mark the annual Work From Home day, silicon.com sent its reporters out into the field (literally) to see whether homeworking is all it's cracked up to be. Over the past five days the Work Wise UK initiative has been encouraging people to take part in the annual event aimed at raising awareness of the benefits of flexible working, with the hope of increasing the number of homeworkers to 14 million by 2011, and the silicon.com team - as in previous years - gave it a go too.

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Predictive analytics software maker SPSS believes the huge growth in data created by cloud computing will significantly fuel interest in its technology. Although much of SPSS' technology operates within corporate firewalls due to the sensitive nature of data it deals with, it is also going to play an increasing role in making sense of unstructured information floating around the web, according to CEO Jack Noonan.

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Faster Payments, the system designed to speed up the movement of money between banks, has now seen £53.5bn in transactions since its launch last year. In the first quarter of 2009 alone, Faster Payments saw £20.6bn pass through its network according to statistics from UK payments association Apacs.

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The 300-year-old London Stock Exchange (LSE) is continuing to update its electronic trading platform. According to Dame Clara Furse, who stepped down as CEO of the exchange yesterday, new functionality is expected to be added to the LSE's TradElect electronic trading platform.

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The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is to shed around 700 jobs in its IT and property divisions over the next few months. The job losses are part of a bank-wide effort to cut £2.5bn in costs which on 7 April this year saw the organisation announce it is to shed around 9,000 jobs globally including around 4,500 positions in the UK.

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It might be Facebook's worst-kept secret. It's become increasingly clear in recent weeks that Facebook is finally inching toward the launch of a micropayment platform. The social site has been expanding the presence of its virtual currency, which Facebook debuted last November when it changed the monetary units for its Gifts product into "credits" rather than US dollars, with credits now bundled with some promotional items in the Gifts app.

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One year on from the launch of the Faster Payments service and 180 million transactions - worth more than £70bn - have passed through the system. The Faster Payments directive, which first went live on 27 May 2008, aims to cut the time it takes UK banking customers to move money from several days to a few hours.

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HSBC is fighting financial fraud by overhauling its approach to transaction monitoring and examining how emerging technologies could improve security. The bank is looking to bring all of its fraud detection systems onto a single platform, its head of group fraud risk at HSBC, Derek Wylde, told silicon.com.

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The mobile phone has spelled the decline of the landline, the wristwatch and the alarm clock - could cash be on the way out too? According to analysts, an increasing number of us will be using our phone to spend our money this year. Research from market watchers Gartner found that 2009 will see the number of people making payments via their mobile phone jump 70 per cent to reach 73 million users worldwide - up from 43 million in 2008.

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The London 2012 Olympics could be set to pioneer smart tickets that double up as contactless payment and Oyster cards. Research into a 'cashless' Olympics and the "feasibility of integrating systems for ticketing, ID authentication and transport", is currently being carried out by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (Post), an independent body that advises MPs on matters of science and technology.

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David Lister has held senior IT roles at Boots, Reuters and RBS. He talks to Nick Heath about why he left RBS and how he will meet the challenges ahead as group CIO for National Grid. Wherever David Lister goes, change almost always follows.

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More than a year after appearing on the statute books, the info watchdog's power to fine is not yet operational. Lawyer Grant Campbell urges those involved not to lose momentum. Data losses have provided the UK press with an ongoing stream of stories for more than 18 months now.

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Virgin Atlantic Airlines is integrating its IT and finance departments, with IT director Mike Cope leaving the company as a result. The airline told silicon.com: "Virgin Atlantic is integrating the activities of its IT and Finance departments, as well as other business services, so they are closely aligned under Finance Director Tim Livett. As a result of this new strategy, our Director of IT, Mike Cope, is pursuing other opportunities.

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Transport for London (TfL) CIO Phil Pavitt has been appointed the new CIO of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). He will take up the £180,000 per year position in September, where he will oversee 1,400 staff and a budget of £1bn, making the HMRC one of the largest IT departments in Europe.

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Malicious software has been found on Eastern European ATMs that allows criminals to steal account data and PINs and even empty the machine of its cash, a computer forensics expert said. About 20 cash machines have been compromised in that manner, mostly in Russia and the Ukraine, but there are "early indications" of compromised ATMs in the US, said Nicholas Percoco of Trustwave, which provides data security and payment-card compliance services.

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'Business intelligence'? Is this just another oxymoron, like police intelligence or military intelligence?Don't be so harsh, though the basic principles of all three are certainly the same - gathering information and making informed, critical decisions. OK. So what kind of information?Almost anything really - any data that a business creates and which could give it a strategic insight into what it is doing well, what it is doing badly and more importantly what it could do better. One area where this is proving useful is in retail.

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Almost half of chief information officers worldwide spent less on IT in the first quarter than they had planned, according to a Gartner survey. In the Gartner report, released on Monday, 46 per cent of CIOs said their 2009 IT budget had changed since it was finalised. In that group, more than 90 per cent had made an average reduction of 7.2 per cent in the first quarter.

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Apple's plan to allow developers to add in-app payments to applications sold through its iPhone App Store could be the next big step the company takes as it charges ahead in the mobile market. Apple announced the new feature at the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event in March. At the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, the company is expected to announce the release dates for the software upgrade.

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Microsoft plans to stop selling Microsoft Money, its personal finance program. Although Microsoft will stop selling the product at the end of June, it plans to support it through January 2011.

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Business intelligence has enjoyed a boom despite the less than healthy state of the global economy. According to analyst house Gartner worldwide revenue for technology related to business intelligence, analytics applications and performance management grew by 22 per cent in 2008.

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Barclaycard is increasing the number of its cardholders that will have contactless functionality on their plastic. Barclaycard Gold and Classic cardholders on the receiving end of a new or replacement card will now be able to make payments of up to £10 by swiping their card against a reader, thanks to contactless payment technology within the card, similar to the system used for Oyster travelcards on the London Underground.

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Approximately two in three UK adults are still not using mobile banking - with both security and inertia playing a part in their decision to shun the technology. According to new research from analyst house Gartner, 30 per cent of UK adults said they were using mobile banking services at the end of last year - leaving 70 per cent who are avoiding the services.

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Intel, Oracle, BT and a number of other high-profile IT companies have backed the launch on Wednesday of the Kantara Initiative, which aims to bring greater harmony to identity management. The project, which has been in the making for a year, is dedicated to examining ways of improving interoperability between different identity technologies and standards. It also intends to address topics such as privacy, which can be sidelined by purely technical discussions, according to Kantara.

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