Another jam-packed July: An insight into our clients’ July coverage

Despite the summer months ongoing and ‘vacation-mode’ pending, the Babel team has worked hard to ensure their clients’ coverage was as busy as ever. Here is just a glimpse of some of the coverage we secured this month…

Improving soil could keep world within 1.5°C heating target  

With ‘Just Stop Oil’ campaigns dominating the headlines and 2030 deadlines rapidly approaching, there is an urgent call to address climate change, and fast. Perhaps attention needs to be directed to a relatively unknown method of reducing climate change: through our soils. Improving farming techniques (for instance, by changing crop rotations and maintaining existing hedgerows) can help to store more carbon in soils. If half of the world’s soils can store just 1% more carbon, up to 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide will be absorbed. This will contribute significantly to targets to stay within 1.5C by 2030. 

These findings come directly from Babel client Downforce Technologies. Jacqueline McGlade, former chief scientist at the UN environment programme and co-founder of Downforce, spoke to The Guardian about the research. McGlade found that storing more carbon in the top 30cm of agricultural soils would be feasible where soils are currently degraded (currently around 40% of worldwide farmland). Downforce Technologies, which works with farmers to map out their land and provide them with highly accurate soil data, could allow farmers to eventually sell carbon credits based on how much additional CO2 they’re absorbing. Although changing farming techniques can be costly, McGlade assures that after two or three years, yields and profits would improve enough to make it worth the investment. Could this be the most effective way to protect the environment?

City fibre works with Project Gigabit to improve connectivity across the country 

With surging demand for internet access to chat with missed friends or virtually meet with colleagues during lockdown and beyond, the UK’s digital divide has become increasingly evident. In efforts to minimise this divide, fibre network operator City Fibre was awarded three contracts to subsidise the roll-out of gigabit-capable infrastructure to rural areas earlier this month. The UK Government is targeting gigabit-capable connectivity across 85% of the country by the end of 2025.    Project Gigabit, set to improve digital infrastructure, could be the answer. In 2023, many rural areas have already received or are in line to receive contract awards. Norfolk, Suffolk and Hampshire are the most recent beneficiaries of the project, with the contracts providing £318m and City Fibre investing an additional £170m. According to BDUK’s recent progress update, the total £610m investment has resulted in a 70% increase in the UK’s premises with access to gigabit-capable broadband. 

Stephen Kingdom, CTO at Xantaro, offers his take on the partnership in Computer Weekly, claiming that these new contracts demonstrate the UK government’s support for increased market competition. Awarding City Fibre “one-tenth of the five billion-pound Project Gigabit investment… will continue to increase competition in the UK broadband market… and boost economic growth”, he says.

Does the stagnating cybersecurity skills gap put businesses at risk?

Over the last few years, the cybersecurity industry has faced a stagnating skills gap, with around 50% of UK businesses lacking basic cybersecurity knowledge. Brian Higgins, security specialist at Comparitech.com, offers a potential reason for this: the required specifications often demand time and money that businesses simply cannot spare. Within this skills gap, the industry faces another problem: a lack of diversity in the workforce. For example, in 2023, only 17% of the cyber sector workforce were female. This figure has worsened since 2022, when 22% of women worked in the cybersecurity business. Unfortunately, correcting this underrepresentation requires investment, so it’s likely this issue will remain unaddressed in the short term.

Commenting on this issue for Infosecurity Magazine, Dan Middleton, Vice President UK&I, Veeam assures businesses that they will not be left exposed, so long as they surround themselves with an “ecosystem of security partners” to provide them with any security knowledge the business may need.

Could the EU Cyber Resilience Act be a ‘death knell’ for open source software?  

In an effort to improve cybersecurity and resilience across Europe, the EU passed its Cyber Resilience Act this month. But despite good intentions, could this legislation actually spell bad news for the software industry? Under this act, open-source developers will face liability for any software vulnerabilities. Many contributors are worried they will face lawsuits and are backing out of projects as a result. Critics are calling for lawmakers to caution restraint as the implications of this act could be detrimental to the industry.

CTO of Sonatype, Brian Fox, comments on the issue in ITPro, claiming that the act risks “severely undermining” open source projects across the EU and that it poses a threat to security and sustainability. He suggests that EU lawmakers have a “narrow outlook” on the benefits of open source software and proposes a closer working relationship between legislators and the open source community as an alternative solution.

The secret life of the 500+ cables that run the Internet   

With internet access often at the tip of our fingers, it’s easy to take our global connectivity for granted. From how they work to their future in today’s telco industry, Stephen Shankland explains the ins and outs of the workhouses of global commerce and communications: subsea cables. While the first subsea cables spanned major communication routes like London to New York, newer routes have been introduced globally, from the west coast of Greenland to the southern tip of Chile. With the costs of installing these cables reaching an incredible $250 million to $300 million, there is an understandable incentive to pack more data within the cables. However, capacity shortages make this particularly tricky.

Overcoming this shortage, networking tech giant Ciena has recently quadrupled the capacity of their fibre optic lines without changing anything underwater. Brian Lavallée, senior director at Ciena comments on the number of new cables being built to connect Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas and many island nations. “They’re all over the world. There truly is a mesh of these cables”, he mentions.

Conclusion  

And there you have it – July’s best bits of coverage! Visit our social media pages for more media mentions or contact us to hear more about how Babel can inject your business into the all-important conversations.