Computing's top 10 tech stories of the week: Facebook at Work, Azure outages and good news for BlackBerry

What were the big technology news stories of the past seven days? Read on, to find out

Bad news for Microsoft, some positive coverage for BlackBerry, and career opportunities for hackers. These are just some of themes from the last week in technology.

10. Drones 'used to harass people' and 'for criminal conduct' say police

Unmanned drones are "undoubtedly" being used to "harass people" and for other kinds of "criminal conduct", the UK police have told a government inquiry.

Speaking at the Lords Internal Market, Infrastructure and Employment Committee, Chief Inspector Nick Aldworth - who is working as a part of a national group to look at the increasing use of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems [RPAS] - said that such drones could be used in "reckless" or "malicious" ways.

However, he also asserted that privacy issues over the possibility of drones, say, "hovering outside people's bedrooms for nefarious reasons" were not a police matter, as such an act would not be against the law as it currently stands.

Aldworth admitted there was a increasing amount of drone footage appearing on the internet, but added that the difficulty is in finding who is responsible for posting it.

9. DDoS attacks cost businesses average of £25,000 per hour finds study

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are costing companies an average of $40,000 (£25,400) per hour, with around half of attacks lasting at least six hours and costing $500,000 (£317,570) per event.

These are the findings of a study by cyber crime protection firm Incapsula, which carried out a survey among 270 organisations in the US and Canada.
Fifteen per cent of respondents also revealed costs rising as high as $100,000 per hour in some circumstances.

Whilst it's very much in a security firm's interests to spread alarm about cyber issues, the threat posed by DDoS is very real, as regular Computing readers will know from the many stories we've written this year alone about companies suffering from this form of attack.

8. Intel's luxury bracelet will connect users to Facebook, Google and Yelp

Intel's luxury smart bracelet will connect users to Facebook, Google alerts and Yelp, using US carrier AT&T's data plan.

The chip maker, which is focusing its efforts on several new devices, including wireless PCs, is teaming up with luxury fashion retailer Opening Ceremony to release the bracelet, dubbed MICA, which is aimed at fashion-conscious women.

"We really approached this first and foremost about why would a woman want to wear this everyday, and how can it be incorporated into her wardrobe," Humberto Leon, creative director at Opening Ceremony, told Reuters.

Crucially, the bracelet will not need to be connected to a smartphone (like Apple's Watch) in order to make the most of the internet, as it will reportedly come equipped with a 3G radio.

7. BlackBerry-Samsung MDM security partnership is ‘positive for enterprise'

BlackBerry recently made the surprising announcement that it has entered a partnership with Samsung, one of its key rivals in the mobile marketplace.

Indeed, it's because of the rise of Android-based Samsung smartphones - along with Apple's iPhones - that BlackBerry has fallen so far behind in a space in which it used to be the dominant force, especially in enterprise.

However, it seems that the Canadian firm has taken an "If you can't beat them, join them" approach to its enterprise security software strategy, with the revelation that its latest end-to-end security platform, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 12, will be available as an alternative to Samsung's own Knox security software on Samsung tablets and smartphones.

"BlackBerry has developed a very close partnership with Samsung and we're committed to deepening the interaction between our engineering and product development teams for the long term," said John Sims, BlackBerry president of global enterprise services, on the announcement of the deal.

6. Lufthansa signs £800m outsourcing deal with IBM

German national airline Lufthansa has signed a seven-year £800m outsourcing deal with IBM for the technology giant to deliver IT infrastructure services to the company.

IBM claims that the agreement, which is still subject to the approval of the Lufthansa Supervisory Board and antitrust authorities, will optimise the airline's IT processes to increase efficiency and therefore generate cost savings of €70m.

Just a month ago, the airline said it would save "at least" €70m on IT infrastructure costs every year if it signed a deal with IBM.

IBM had reportedly been fighting it out with HP and French IT services firm Atos to acquire Lufthansa's IT infrastructure business, which had been up for sale since the beginning of April.

Now that the deal has been signed, Simone Menne, CFO at Deutsche Lufthansa AG and chairperson of the supervisory board of Lufthansa Systems AG, said that the agreement would "strengthen the competitiveness of Lufthansa Group as a whole".

5. Facebook at Work to compete with LinkedIn, Google and Microsoft

Facebook is working behind the scenes on a new website dubbed "Facebook at Work" in a bid to compete with social business and collaboration platforms from the likes of Google and Microsoft, as well as professional social network LinkedIn.

The project, which was first reported by TechCrunch, aims to enable users to chat to colleagues online using a similar tool to Facebook Messenger, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents, sources said.

The new site, which will supposedly look like Facebook, would allow users to keep their personal and professional profiles separate. The FT suggested that the new website was already being trialled internally and being piloted at a number of companies ahead of an official launch.

The social network, which has been banned by many organisations because of fears over its impact on staff productivity, will be hoping that companies will decide to unblock the website if their employees can better collaborate and work using the site.

4. 'We'll hire hackers' to solve cyber skills crisis say over half of UK firms

Good news for cyber criminals looking for honest work: more than half of UK firms would consider hiring a hacker or someone with a criminal record to ensure they can deal with cyber security threats in the face of a cyber-skills crisis, a survey from ‘Big Four' professional services firm KPMG has found.

KPMG surveyed 300 senior IT and HR professionals in organisations employing 500-plus staff in an attempt to find out how enterprises are acquiring cyber skills. It found that many firms are becoming "increasingly desperate" as they struggle to get the right people on board.

Nearly three-quarters (74 per cent) say they are facing new cyber security challenges that demand skills that they don't already have in-house. For example, 70 per cent admit that their organisation lacks data protection and privacy expertise. Meanwhile, seventy per cent of the firms surveyed said that they were wary about their organisation's ability to assess incoming threats.

A key concern for 60 per cent of respondents was a shortage of cyber experts who can communicate effectively with the business.

It remains to be seen, however, how many hackers want to trade the basement and hoody for the office and a suit.

3. John Lewis builds own BPM application on the Appian Cloud platform

Department store John Lewis has deployed its own business process management (BPM) application on the Appian Cloud platform. The application is part of an ongoing programme to create a joined-up system covering the entire sales process from the customer's point of view, from initial contact through to home inspections, contracted installers, the sale and after-sales service. It allows all data related to a sale to be attached to the customers' record, and for this information to be aggregated for analysis to reveal patterns and trends.

Work on the new system started in March 2013, with Appian selected from a shortlist of six suppliers. Mark Fishman, project manager for retail operations development at John Lewis, told Computing that the relatively complex processes involved in sales of home furnishings and fitted kitchens were previously being managed manually.

"The home furnishing department's orders for fitted kitchens, curtains, blinds and floor coverings were often managed using paper, and the ordering and estimating systems were not linked to this," he said.

"This made it difficult for us to have a view of the customer order outside of the local branch the order was placed in, and tasks and follow-up were dependent on paper files. In order for us to be able to offer these services in different formats and across different parts of the business we needed a systemic solution - Appian provided this."

2. Sainsbury's Matt Wills leads back-to-front DevOps revolution at grocery chain

"We want to revolutionise grocery shopping in the digital world," declares Matt Wills, the digital operations manager at supermarket chain Sainsbury's.

Neither he, nor Sainbury's, would be the first to proclaim such an aim. Ever since the ill-fated WebVan dot-com start-up - and subsequent spectacular crash - in the late 1990s, supermarkets both new and well-established have sought to shake-up the established order using technology and the internet, in particular.

But Sainsbury's is taking a back (office) to front approach, by embracing development-operations (DevOps) in its IT, refreshing the technology used by staff away from the shop floor first, and establishing a modern digital operations capability that enables DevOps staff to quickly spin-up environments as and when they need.

Speaking at the BMC Exchange event earlier recently, Wills admitted that Sainsbury's had allowed its IT infrastructure to become dated. Indeed, when he joined from Virgin Media his first workstation ran Microsoft Windows XP. "But in the last year, Sainsbury's has absolutely transformed," he added.

Part of that transformation involves the implementation of a private cloud to slash the length of time it takes to procure and provision servers and software for developers to build applications on. There were, for example, "six separate provisioning times, probably more. Deliveries were planned in months, when it should have been just minutes," said Wills.

1. Microsoft Azure suffers huge outage affecting websites and Office 365

The biggest story of the week was the news that Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure was hit with a fault which took many third-party sites offline, and also interfered with Microsoft's Office 365 online apps.

Azure had problems from 00:52 GMT on the 19th November across the world, with the Microsoft Azure status page stating that some customers would see partial service interruption if they were using storage, virtual machines, websites and a host of other Azure services.

"Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services," a Microsoft spokesperson said at the time.

"We are working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible."

According to the Microsoft Azure status page at the time of writing, the Azure core platform components are all working properly. Microsoft mitigated many of the issues but it is still investigating issues that are impacting a subset of virtual machines customers in North Europe and West Europe.

The latest outage will come as a blow to the software giant in its bid to rival Amazon and others in the cloud computing space.