Businesses helped to connect to gigabit fibre network York CORE
City of York Council has launched a connection voucher scheme offering businesses up to £3,000 towards connection costs to gigabit speed services over the city's fibre network, the York CORE. The network, supplied by private fibre project firm CityFibre, already links nearly 190 sites across the city, providing council offices, schools, hospitals and businesses with next generation digital connectivity as part of the UK government-backed SuperConnected Cities programme. Connection services are available from network partners including York Data Services, Pinacl Solutions and Razorblue. CityFibre manages more than 100 private fibre projects in 50 towns and cities and seven separate metropolitan fibre networks under long-term contract with local authorities, police forces, healthcare organisations and universities.
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CityFibre: www.cityfibre.com
York CORE: www.theyorkcore.com
MongoDB to host public sector 'Hackathon' in Tech City
Open source 'NoSQL' document database software firm MongoDB is sponsoring a 'Hackathon' on 15 April in Tech City, London bringing together developers, DBAs and architects, to develop innovative data-rich apps for the public sector. Developer teams will have the opportunity to showcase their ideas and efforts in 10-minute slots, with five minutes for a live demo and five minutes for Q&A from the audience and judging panel. The event will bring together some of Britain's best developers in the public sector and provide an opportunity for them to share skills, thoughts and challenges on how best to improve public sector services through technology innovation. MongoDB is certified on the G-Cloud and already works with some of Britain's most high profile public sector organisations including The Met Office and the National Archives.
Public Sector Hackathon: www.mongodb.com/events/public-sector-hackathon
Local authority Direct Debit campaign targets new savings in 2014
An initiative which has already secured London councils cost savings in excess of £1.5 million over the last four years, has launched again for 2014. This year sees 16 of the capital's local authorities teaming-up with Bacs Payment Schemes Limited (Bacs), the company that runs Direct Debit in the UK, to encourage council tax payers to switch to the system. Last year, the initiative delivered savings of about £600,000 for participating local authorities, all through switching council tax payers to Direct Debit. Bacs estimates that if that were to be replicated across all of the UK's 400+ council tax collecting authorities, almost £14 million a year could potentially be put back into hard-pressed council budgets. A £25,000 prize will be awarded to one person picked at random from among all those registered to pay by Direct Debit by 11 July 2014 - including both new and existing regstrants. The 16 local authorities taking part this year are Barnet, Brent, City of Westminster, Ealing, Enfield, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets.
London Council Tax 2014: www.directdebit.co.uk/londoncounciltax
Cryptzone adds off-line encrypted file storage to mobile app
Data security firm Cryptzone has released the Android version of its security enhanced mobile browser - Mobile Access Protect (MAP) - to allow workers to use mobile devices to securely access documents and enterprise web based applications without the risk of data loss, the company says.The solution uses policy-based dynamic rules that allow organisations to create a mobile access strategy based on risk, it says. "We know many organisations still aren't providing users with mobile access to enterprise content for fear of data compromise". says Jamie Bodley-Scott, Product Manager for Secure Access at Cryptzone. "We've designed MAP to be policy-based to fully address these concerns and allow organisations to create access rules that align perfectly with their risk tolerance levels. Mobile access can be granted to content based on who is accessing, from which device type and varied by access location and time. You can even decide who is allowed to store encrypted content on a mobile device." Depending on the enterprise mobile security policy, MAP users can save files to a mobile device. Saved files are stored in the flash memory and individually encrypted. Policies also determine when these saved files are deleted.
Cryptzone: cryptzone.com
