Tag: enterprises

Cyber Threats Could Force 1 in 4 SMEs to Shut Down After a Ransomware Attack

The latest Vodafone Business Cybersecurity Threat Report reveals a stark reality for Ireland’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), warning that 28% of businesses would be at risk of shutting down after just one ransomware attack, while 94% of Irish SMEs admit they feel unprepared to defend against advanced cyber threats.
With cyber criminals increasingly harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to launch faster, more convincing and more adaptive attacks, the report warns that no business is immune to risk.
AI: The Game-Changer in Cybercrime
The report highlights how AI is now being used to clone voices, impersonate trusted executives, and create highly realistic phishing campaigns, making it harder than ever for busy SMEs to spot malicious activity. These sophisticated identity hacks can lead to operational shutdowns, exposure of sensitive customer data, and long-term reputational damage to businesses.
The financial impact is expected to surge with cybercrime-related costs projected to rise by nearly 50% over the next three years as AI-driven attacks continue to evolve.
The report highlights the emergence of adaptive AI malware, a type of malicious software that can learn and adapt its tactics to evade detection. Traditional antivirus systems are becoming less effective against these shape-shifting threats, signalling a critical need for stronger, AI-enabled defences.
As Irish SMEs begin integrating AI tools into everyday operations, from automating customer service to analysing data, the research shows that 50% of small and mid-sized enterprises ranked cybersecurity among their top five priorities. However, 69% of SMEs admit they lack the proper cybersecurity measures to deploy these technologies safely. This gap is leaving many businesses exposed to new forms of cyberattacks.
However, Vodafone Ireland, connectivity and technology partner to six in ten Irish businesses, emphasises that there are practical steps SMEs can take to strengthen their cybersecurity, such as employee training, software updates, multi-factor authentication, regular backups, and partnering with expert providers for monitoring and threat detection. These measures can help businesses close gaps without requiring extensive IT expertise.
Speaking on the findings, Sinead Perry, Head of SMB Sales – Small & Medium Business at Vodafone Ireland, warned that no business is too small to be a target:
“The scale of AI-powered attacks means no business is too small or too remote to go unnoticed. If you’re online, you’re on the radar. For SMEs, the risk is real – they are big enough to be a target but often don’t have the same security resources as larger firms.”
“Attackers only need to succeed once, while your defences must work every time. Irish SMEs now face two major challenges: defending against AI-driven threats and ensuring their own use of AI is secure.”
“Today, SMEs manage more data than ever before and operate in a complex digital environment that rivals larger businesses. This makes them attractive targets, and with AI in the mix, this threat is evolving fast. SMEs must act now to strengthen their resilience and protect the future of their business. With 2.4 million customers in Ireland, Vodafone is a trusted connectivity and technology partner, uniquely positioned to support SMEs in navigating today’s cybersecurity challenges. This is why at Vodafone Ireland, we are working with leading global technology partners, like Google, Microsoft
and Zscaler, to help SMEs build stronger, smarter defences and protect the future of their businesses.”
The full Vodafone Business Cybersecurity Threat Report is available to download via the V-Hub knowledge centre: https://v-hub.vodafone.ie/knowledge-centre/how-to-defend-smes-from-rising-ai-driven-cyber-attacks.

SETU launches ‘Elevate’ digital resource to support micro-enterprises in the region

South East Technological University (SETU) has launched a new digital resource to support micro-enterprises in the region. ‘Elevate’ is an online platform that provides entrepreneurs with easy access to practical business assessments that help identify strengths and areas for development across a range of enterprise competencies.

The platform offers free online tools to evaluate digital readiness, sustainability practices, and innovation capacity, and to support succession planning. These tools enable businesses to identify growth opportunities and take clear steps towards development.

A key feature of Elevate is a set of interactive diagnostic tools that help business owners assess and challenge their operations. After completing a short series of questions, users receive a tailored report with recommendations to support future planning and sustainable growth. Each assessment takes only a few minutes to complete and focuses on strategic themes that can be further supported by SETU’s business support team.

The initiative is part of SETU – TU RISE (Technological University Research and Innovation Supporting Enterprise), which is strengthening research capacity and deepening engagement with enterprises across the south east. Elevate complements the activities of SETU’s recently launched Rural Innovation Hubs in Hacketstown, Urlingford, Rosslare Harbour and Dungarvan, giving business owners the opportunity to engage with the university in their locality or online.

Commenting on the new initiative, Brian Ogilvie, Head of Entrepreneurship and Rural Engagement, said, “As part of SETU’s wider activities to foster entrepreneurship and business engagement, Elevate reinforces our commitment to the business community, particularly those in rural locations.”

Ian Campbell, Business Development Manager at SETU, added, “Alongside our four new rural innovation hubs across the region, Elevate provides an accessible pathway for business owners to engage with the university’s supports, including our Technology Gateways. It offers valuable insights to inform decision-making and future planning.”

Visit elevate.setu.ie to begin your business’s journey with SETU.

Equinix’s Fabric Cloud Router Enabling Enterprises in Ireland to Easily and Efficiently Connect Applications Across Multiple Clouds

Equinix, Inc, the world’s digital infrastructure company, has announced the general availability of Equinix Fabric Cloud Router to its customers in Ireland. The service will help enterprises easily connect applications and data across multiple clouds and on-premise deployments through virtual routing.

Equinix Fabric Cloud Router can help customers simplify their complex cloud-to-cloud and hybrid cloud networking challenges by providing an easy-to-configure, enterprise-grade, multicloud routing service that can be deployed in under a minute. Utilising Equinix’s secure private connectivity, customers can connect applications across public clouds in more locations than any other service, improving application performance, reducing cloud costs and accelerating services to market.

Customers can deploy Equinix Fabric Cloud Router in all 58 Equinix Fabric-enabled markets globally, including Ireland, with low latency connectivity to all major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as hundreds of other service providers like Akamai, ServiceNow and Zoom.

Equinix Fabric Cloud Router, a key component of Platform Equinix®, helps customers meet those demands in four specific ways:

Multicloud Performance – Customers achieve the low latency between all major cloud providers with Equinix’s industry leading cloud-adjacent locations around the world, eliminating the need to backhaul traffic through a remote location. This superior cloud-to-cloud networking performance enables customers to quickly and easily support evolving infrastructure demands, like cloud migrations.

Private Connectivity – By easily deploying private network connections, customers can avoid exposing sensitive data and network infrastructure to the risks of the public internet and support data sovereignty requirements.

Enterprise-Grade – Customers can act with confidence knowing they are supported by a 99.999% uptime SLA and can scale bandwidth and connectivity across clouds without constraint using speeds up to 50Gbps, with hundreds of gigabits of aggregate throughput supported per router.

Lowering Costs – Enterprises can reduce cloud egress costs by up to 75% using private cloud connections rather than egress over the internet. Built-in Equinix Fabric Cloud Router resilience can save IT teams even more by eliminating the need for expensive redundant routers. Delivered as a service, customers can pay only for what they need without being locked into long-term contracts and have the flexibility to scale up and down as needed.

Delivered as a service on demand and in near real time, Equinix Fabric Cloud Router can remove the costs and complexities of owning and operating a physical router or licensing a virtual router. Enterprises can also accelerate their multicloud adoption by avoiding vendor lock-in with Equinix’s cloud agnostic service, eliminating networking constraints and enabling them to choose the right cloud environment and provider for specific workloads.

Peter Lantry, Managing Director for Equinix Ireland, said: “Equinix Fabric Cloud Router helps our customers in Ireland to easily connect applications and data across multiple clouds and on-premise deployments. With data-heavy workloads on the rise, particularly as businesses start to unlock the power of AI, cutting-edge solutions like this will play a key role in the growth of our economy, removing routing limitations and enabling our customers to move data between different cloud providers with more ease than ever before”.

Dell Offers Complete NVIDIA-Powered AI Factory Solutions to Help Global Enterprises Accelerate AI Adoption

Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) is strengthening its collaboration with NVIDIA to help enterprises adopt AI technologies. By expanding the Dell Generative AI Solutions portfolio, including with the new Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, organizations can accelerate integration of their data, AI tools and on-premises infrastructure to maximize their generative AI (GenAI) investments.

“Our enterprise customers are looking for an easy way to implement AI solutions – that is exactly what Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are delivering,” said Michael Dell, founder and CEO, Dell Technologies. “Through our combined efforts, organizations can seamlessly integrate data with their own use cases and streamline the development of customized GenAI models.”

“AI factories are central to creating intelligence on an industrial scale,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Dell are helping enterprises create AI factories to turn their proprietary data into powerful insights.”

High quality results from high quality data

Through close collaboration between Dell and NVIDIA, additions to the end-to-end Dell Generative AI Solutions portfolio helps customers modernize with AI, accelerate business transformation and boost productivity:

  • Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is the industry’s first end-to-end AI enterprise solution integrating Dell’s compute, storage, client device, software and services capabilities with NVIDIA’s advanced AI infrastructure and software suite, all underpinned by a high-speed networking fabric.1 Delivered as a fully integrated solution, Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA takes advantage of rack-level design, with rigorous testing and validation to deliver a seamless solution for transforming data into valuable insights and outcomes. This solution also leverages existing offerings in enterprise data security with accompanying Dell services offerings in security and privacy.

The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA supports a wide array of AI use cases and applications to support the entire GenAI lifecycle, from model creation and tuning, to augmentation and inferencing. Customers can also take advantage of enterprise-grade professional services that help organizations accelerate their strategy, data preparation, implementation and adoption of the AI Factory, advancing AI capabilities. The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is available via traditional channels and Dell APEX.

  • Dell Technologies will collaborate with NVIDIA to introduce a rack scale, high-density, liquid-cooled architecture based on the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Superchip. These systems will support the next-generation ecosystem aiming to provide the foundation for improvements in performance density for enterprise AI workloads.
  • Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers will support new NVIDIA GPU models, including the NVIDIA B200 Tensor Core GPU, expected to offer up to 15 times higher AI inference performance and lower total cost of ownership.2 Dell PowerEdge servers will also support other NVIDIA Blackwell architecture-based GPUs as well as H200 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platforms.
  • Dell Generative AI Solutions with NVIDIA – Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) leverages new microservices in NVIDIA AI Enterprise to offer a ­­pre-validated, full-stack solution to speed enterprise AI adoption with RAG. This solution helps organizations improve GenAI model quality and increase results accuracy with proprietary business data and knowledge bases.
  • Dell Generative AI Solutions with NVIDIA – Model Training offers a pre-validated, full-stack solution for organizations seeking to build their own custom, domain-specific models.
  • Dell Data Lakehouse, now globally available, is an open, modern data lakehouse that helps organizations discover, process and analyze data in one place across hybrid and multicloud environments.
  • Dell PowerScale is the world’s first Ethernet storage solution validated with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX H100 systems, helping customers achieve faster and more efficient AI storage.3

Across it all, Dell Professional Services for GenAI expands with support from NVIDIA AI and infrastructure experts to help customers integrate, manage and secure these solutions to achieve business results faster. Dell Implementation Services now include capabilities to deliver Dell’s new RAG solution, model training and the Dell Data Lakehouse, as well as new Advisory Services for GenAI Data Security that help customers assess and minimize security risks.

“Organizations are rushing to experiment with AI but there are many challenges to achieving ROI. Data sovereignty issues, legal and compliance concerns and data quality are all top of mind. New offerings, such as Dell’s Generative AI Solutions with NVIDIA – RAG, provide enterprises a simpler on-ramp to GenAI, helping to increase confidence and develop their own trusted GenAI capabilities that can deliver substantial business impact,” said Dave Vellante, Chief Analyst, theCUBE Research. “Our research shows that companies are turning to industry leaders like Dell and NVIDIA to help provide AI expertise and services to lower risk and get to ROI sooner.”

Availability

  • Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is available globally through traditional channels and Dell APEX now.
  • Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers with NVIDIA B200 Tensor Core GPUs, NVIDIA B100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs have expected availability later this year.
  • Dell Generative AI Solutions with NVIDIA – RAG is available globally through traditional channels and Dell APEX now.
  • Dell Generative AI Solutions with NVIDIA – Model Training will be available globally through traditional channels and Dell APEX in April 2024.
  • As previously announced, the Dell Data Lakehouse is now available globally.
  • Dell PowerScale is validated with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX H100 and NVIDIA OVX solutions now.
  • The Dell Implementation Service for RAG is available in select locations starting May 31.
  • Dell infrastructure deployment services for model training is available in select locations starting March 29.
  • Advisory Services for GenAI Data Security is available in select countries starting March 29.