Digital Transformation Weekly: WannaCry cyber attack cost NHS £92m
The Department of Health and Social Care estimated the WannaCry ransomware attack from last year cost the NHS £92m. It includes £19m worth of lost output due to disruption to services and £73m in direct IT costs — the support needed to recover data and restore systems affected by the attack.
The department added that it’s not possible to estimate with certainty the financial impact of the WannaCry attack, which disrupted services across a third of hospitals and around 8% of GP practices, impacting 19,000 patient appointments.
The Department’s latest update on cyber resilience in health and care also said that over the next three years £150m of funding will support the health and care system from the impact of cyber attacks.
Brexit – an opportunity for digital transformation
We’re still to find out exactly what Brexit will mean for the country but it’s an opportunity for the Public Sector to drastically change their digital processes.
That’s the view of our CEO and Founder Aingaran Pillai, who says government departments can transform not just front-end services but also ensure their end-to-end service is digitally enabled.
“Brexit is an opportunity for government institutions to assess their processes, think outside the box and build innovative solutions that allow them to deliver end-to-end digital services effectively,” he says.
Find out more about the five things Ainga suggests central government departments need to do to better prepare themselves for Brexit.
Microsoft u-turns on open-source
Microsoft has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), effectively making its 60,000 patents open source and available to OIN members.
The move by Microsoft is surprising since there has been friction in the past between the company and the open source community over the issue of patents.
But it seems, Microsoft’s view of the open-source community has shifted: “Joining OIN reflects Microsoft’s patent practice evolving in lock-step with the company’s views on Linux and open source more generally,” said Erich Andersen, corporate VP and deputy general counsel of Microsoft.
Legacy infrastructure holding back banks
Last month RBS and NatWest customers were unable to use online and mobile banking services. Both TSB and HSBC were also hit by IT glitches. This piece looks at what the issue is with banking IT systems.
Banks face IT difficulties due to legacy infrastructure, with outages occurring because new services are not embedded properly with old systems. Smaller challenger banks, which have mobile-only applications, don’t have the same complex legacy problems and therefore can focus more on incremental improvements that aren’t complicated by decades-old systems, it argues.
Automation and… bagels.
You read that right! Apple’s Bagel emoji has been getting criticism on social media for looking… well too artificial. And this quirky article plots the journey of how the new emoji tells the sad story of automation.
“The sad truth is, many actual bagels do resemble Apple’s computer-generated aberration,” says the piece, which goes on to illustrate how automation has changed the true nature of bagels; from being lovingly hand baked to becoming a ‘stodgy, supermarket-friendly bagel pap, as depicted in this emoji.’
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