Our top IT stories this week: Hadoop at Harte Hanks, 'poisonous' Pharmacy2U fined, and HBOS security flaw
Here they are again, our top stories from the past week
Our top seven stories from the past seven days.
7. Cleaning up! How Northumbrian Water deployed big data to identify potential flood risks
Northumbrian Water's Adrian Holmes-Morris lifts the lid on Project SNIPeR, a big data project designed to identify potential floods before they happen.
Aggregate Industries, which supplied all the concrete for the London 2012 Olympic Stadium, had previously been attempting to use IBM Cognos business intelligence, but Gibbons told Danny Palmer that "harnessing the platform to analyse data wasn't taking off within the organisation".
5. 'Poisonous' online pharmacy Pharmacy2U fined by ICO for illegally selling NHS patient data
The Information Commissioner's Office has fined Pharmacy2U, the UK's largest online pharmacy company, a total of £130,000 for illegally selling customer details and breaching the Data Protection Act.
"Patient confidentiality is drummed into pharmacists. It is inconceivable that a business in this sector could believe these actions were acceptable," said ICO Deputy Commissioner David Smith.
4. Lloyds Banking Group fixes HBOS security flaw that exposed customers' online banking records
Lloyds Banking Group has fixed a critical security flaw that could have exposed tens of thousands of customers' banking records, or been exploited to conduct identity theft or money laundering.
The flaw was discovered last week not by security experts, but by the finance website founded by Martin Lewis, MoneySavingExpert.com. Lloyds claims that it is now fixed.
3. Nationwide Building Society outsources IT infrastructure services to Capgemini
Nationwide Building Society has signed a contract with Capgemini that will see the consultancy provide IT infrastructure services to the UK building society.
The five-year contract includes the provision of service integration, service desk and end user services. According to Capgemini, the aim of the agreement is to simplify and modernise Nationwide's end user IT experience.
2. How Yodel plans to spend £20m on IT transformation
Black Friday didn't used to mean much to UK shoppers until a couple of years ago, when suddenly the American Thanksgiving-based retail nightmare - and its online equivalent "Cyber Monday" - seemed to hit our shores in a big way.
While fisticuffs in Asda over large-screen televisions characterises Black Friday in the media in the UK, for companies like parcel delivery company Yodel, the massive challenge of making deliveries turn up on time easily makes it the most fraught two days of the year.
Yodel CIO Adam Gerrard has a desire to "put some rationality back into retail" as, currently, "the entire logistics industry goes into meltdown" around events like Black Friday.
1. Why Harte Hanks moved from Cloudera's Hadoop to MapR for its new marketing services platform
Donna Belanger, head of partner tools at Harte Hanks, spoke of the company's advances in using big data technologies to gather customer insight from mutiple devices, and why the company eventually chose MapR's Hadoop distribution over that of rival Cloudera.
Big data argy-bargy was our top story this week.