The world's largest reinsurer has struck a multimillion-euro networking deal with BT. The 42-month deal will see the telco supply Munich Re with an MPLS network across 60 sites in 33 countries.

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The National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) has signed a £5m contract with Siemens. Under the deal, Siemens will supply the NPIA with a secure access system.

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BT could face disruption from a deal to sell troubled outsourcer Satyam to one of its key suppliers, analysts are warning. An auction of a 31 per cent controlling stake in Satyam was won by Indian outsourcer Tech Mahindra on Monday, a company set up as a joint venture between BT and conglomerate Mahindra and Mahindra.

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Despite a jump in the very largest outsourcing deals, it seems businesses are increasingly turning towards smaller contracts. According to analyst house Gartner, the number of outsourcing deals worth less than $50m increased in 2008 while those of more than $50m actually declined.

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Carlsberg is revamping its IT. CIO Kenneth Egelund Schmidt talks to Jo Best on why sourcing and collaboration is the right recipe At Carlsberg IT, something is brewing.

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While everywhere from Egypt to Thailand is being cast as the next offshoring hotspot, India's slice of the business process outsourcing (BPO) pie is only going to get bigger. According to Gartner, Indian companies' share of the BPO market is set to double between 2008 and 2010.

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A new, vocal group of voters - outsourcing workers, many from India's tech hub Bangalore - are shaping the country's upcoming elections, says Saritha Rai. Vandana Prasad, a 29-year-old team leader at the Bangalore-based outsourcing arm of HP, recently got herself a voter ID card.

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"'Computing' really wasn't something I would have wanted to do". Hampshire County Council head of IT talks to silicon.com about where he found the excitement from "I didn't start out in IT at all but in the 1980s technology was beginning to take off and change how organisations actually worked. At that time organisations were looking for people who were, I guess, numerate and interested in technology to help make that transition."

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Cloud computing might be the hottest tech trend (and certainly the most hyped), but experts are split over whether IT chiefs should be worrying about the security risks behind it. Speaking at the RSA Conference, Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer at Sun, was enthusiastic about cloud technology, predicting that at some point cloud computing will mean that "no real [programming] will ever be done anymore on the computers of the company that's doing it".

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Shared services and outsourcing will be at the heart of a drive to cut £7.2bn from UK government's annual IT and back office costs. The savings drive was announced as part of the government's wider Operational Efficiency Programme report, published today, that sets out scope for the public sector to save £15bn each year across a range of areas.

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London-based broking firm Martin Brokers has saved money and improved the management of critical data by moving to a new online back-up provider. The firm is on course to save around £63,000 per year in storage costs and has a much more reliable system for dealing with critical data, following its switch to vendor oncore IT.

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The NHS project to digitise medical records in England has six months to shape up - or else. The Care Records Service project is four years behind schedule and NHS IT suppliers BT and CSC have been told they must speed up the roll out of key systems by November this year.

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Public sector suppliers are not being penalised when they fail to deliver, according to the government's spending watchdog. According to a report published today by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), dealings between government and the vendors who provide the public sector's IT, facilities management and BPO services are far too comfortable.

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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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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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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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Breaking up is always hard to do, especially when you and your partner are knee-deep in a multimillion-pound deal to transform back-office processes. But these messy divorces are not inevitable, with a bit of forethought and good contract discipline, outsourcing specialists at law firm DLA Piper say it is possible to avoid acrimonious staff custody battles and costly termination payments.

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ID cards, Oracle's move for Sun and the ever-interesting issue of how to keep hold of your job were three of the biggest stories on silicon.com in April. This month silicon.com's refreshed A to Z of ID cards was unveiled - giving the lowdown on 26 big aspects of this controversial government project (from Act to Zeitgeist in case you were wondering).

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Change doesn't have to be a painful experience. IT pro Ben Acheson offers some advice on how to make transitions go smoothly. There is only one thing you can be certain of in life and in business: change.

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Depressed UK retailers are looking to exploit digital channels to tackle lower customer spending during the downturn. According to a survey carried out by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and software vendor SAP, around half (51 per cent) of respondents are looking at new channels to market - such as transactional websites - as a way of insulating their business from lower customer spending.

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IT suppliers will have to commit to boosting the tech skills of their workforce if they want to win government contracts under plans unveiled yesterday. Speaking at a government and IT industry summit, Skills Secretary John Denham said there is a risk employers will cut training in the downturn so the government is looking at ways of encouraging workforce investment, especially in IT, viewed as vital for the UK's future economic growth.

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Amazon Web Services has unveiled a new service that lets users physically ship their data on drives, to be uploaded to the company's cloud-based S3 storage facilities. AWS Import/Export, currently in beta, was announced on Thursday. In an Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog post, the team noted that "hard drives are getting bigger more rapidly than internet connections are getting faster", and said a service such as Import/Export had been frequently requested by customers who wanted their data to be remotely hosted, but who had storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level.

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Looking to save money from offshoring? Lawyer Scott Thiel offers some tips for what to put in your contract. In the current economic climate, projects aimed at reducing operating costs are at the forefront of businesses' agendas. This emphasis on cost savings is driving a wave of interest in offshoring and what it can achieve across the businesses.

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The latest symptom of the worldwide recession? The West becoming hostile towards Indian outsourcing hubs such as Bangalore, says Saritha Rai. Is Bangalore, India's globalisation hotspot and magnet for outsourced jobs from the West, caught in the eye of the global economic crisis?

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As the downturn continues to put the squeeze on IT budgets, CIOs are only reaching for their chequebooks for outsourcing projects that can deliver ROI in six months. According to a research report that surveyed 25,000 IT outsourcing buyers, outsourcing deals that can promise ROI within 180 days are nine times more likely to get signed off than those with a two-year or longer turnaround.

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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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Broadband Britain was back on the agenda this month - with speed and bandwidth once again hot topics. First up Virgin Media announced it was trialling 200Mbps broadband - four times faster than its current UK top speed service of 50Mbps.

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UK customers are ending their spending freeze with Satyam, the outsourcer has claimed. Satyam UK and Ireland head Som Sarma told silicon.com that the company's existing UK customers initially put new spending with the company on hold following revelations in January that its revenues had been inflated.

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What's in the works at Westminster City Council? Jo Best speaks to the CIO about the latest trends and projects. After a career in IT and government spanning more than 20 years, Westminster CIO David Wilde doesn't appear to have lost his enthusiasm for the latest IT trends.

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Despite a degree of reluctance to outsource, retailers are likely to increasingly warm to handing over their technology to third parties as the economy continues to struggle. According to a new report from analyst house Datamonitor, pressure on margins from spending-shy shoppers and the resulting need for cost-cutting will prompt retailers to embrace outsourcing.

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CSC has landed six new deals worth £31m with the Civil Nuclear Police Authority (CNPA) and five UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) companies. The contracts will see the outsourcer provide the six organisations with a number of infrastructure services including desktop, helpdesk and network support, applications management and database administration.

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The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has cut £110m from its IT outsourcing spend by consolidating its suppliers. Over the past year the MoJ has reduced its number of suppliers from six to two, according to its annual departmental report for 2008/09.

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Organisations should monitor the health of outsourcing partners and avoid long-term contracts, according to research published by analyst firm Gartner on Monday. Prices are falling in the world IT services market, which is good news for customers, but could drive some suppliers out of business, Gartner said.

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Drinks giant Diageo has signed two outsourcing contracts worth $35m with services company CSC. The first contract, worth $7m, will see CSC design and install a new supply chain management system for the company, based on SAP.

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BAA's tech team have had a busy past year with offshoring a large part of its IT, the opening of Heathrow T5 and the sale of Gatwick Airport. Service delivery manager, Kevin Mercer, told the Gartner Outsourcing Summit this week how the team were helping steer the UK's largest airport operator through a challenging period.

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City University London is setting up a centre dedicated to training the next generation of CIOs. The centre will provide short courses and ultimately a Masters-level qualification for mid-career IT professionals looking to develop themselves and acquire the skills to move up the IT ladder.

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Saritha Rai visits Infosys's giant Mysore training centre to gauge how outsourcers are using education to maintain their edge in challenging economic times. Just before nine o'clock every morning, thousands of twenty-somethings stream across an expansive landscaped campus - past the Domino's Pizza, the 24x7 library, the official merchandise store - and into large classrooms. A hundred or so file into one room, firing up their computers as their lecturer clips on his microphone and gets started on a two-hour session about Java technologies.

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