February is the shortest month, but you wouldn’t know it from the sheer amount of news that’s broken in just the past 26 days.

Amid growing fears of AI stealing jobs, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has claimed that firms are simply using the technology as an excuse for mass layoffs. Earlier this month, a series of Anthropic releases drove stocks down at a range of companies – all tied to fears that the SaaS model might be on its way out.

Also this month, Pure Storage has rebranded as Everpure – what’s behind this decision and what does it say about the company’s strategy going forward?

In this episode, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore some of February’s biggest stories.

Read more:

1. Sam Altman just said what everyone is thinking about AI layoffs
2. Why Anthropic sent software stocks into freefall
3. Anthropic says Claude Code can help streamline 'cost-prohibitive' COBOL modernization, but IBM says it's not that simple
4. What might cause the 'AI bubble' to burst – and what impact would that have on the business world?
5. Pure Storage snaps up 1touch in data management pivot

Digital sovereignty has quietly become one of the most urgent requirements in the tech sector. Once a matter for policy debate, this is now a critical business issue and as much a matter of resilience as one of compliance.

Indeed while we’ve spoken about the need for digital sovereignty before, recent geopolitical developments have cast the debate in far starker light. With European governments and businesses leaning heavily into digital sovereignty, it’s clear there’s an emerging race to secure critical workloads.

Just how important will digital sovereignty be in 2026?

In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss all things digital sovereignty – how it’s being realized, the scale of the transformation, and how we could see things play out.

Read more:

1. Sovereign infrastructure spend to triple in Europe as fifth of workloads stay local
2. What is a sovereign cloud?
3. Sovereign cloud services are now the “bare minimum” expected by customers, and hyperscalers are scrambling to meet demand
4. What the new AWS European Sovereign Cloud means for enterprises
5. What the new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud push means for European customers
6. CIOs wrestle with Europe's new digital sovereignty approach
7. Can the UK achieve AI sovereignty?

Risk management is a constant point of concern in the modern enterprise, with cybersecurity threats, compliance pressures, and financial leaps of faith all piling pressure on the teams who are forced to manage them.

But risk management can’t always be about bailing out the sinking ship. Sooner or later, businesses need to integrate their risk management systems and connect teams together via a centralized framework.

What are the benefits of overhauling risk management in this manner? And how can it be achieved?

In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with Qualys, Rory is joined by Ivan Milenkovic, VP Risk Technology EMEA at Qualys, to explore how businesses can reduce the burden on C-suite executives and improve their overall resilience by restructuring their approach to risk management.

Read more:

1. Risk Operations Center (ROC) | Qualys

This episode was first published on 18 July 2025.

Cyber attacks can feel a layer detached from the real world. Yes, businesses frequently see IP stolen, get frozen out of systems, or have data wiped by malicious actors. But if you haven’t got your finger on the pulse, cyber attacks can also fail to register in your day to day.

But there are instances where cyber attacks come crashing into the lives of everyday people, and become impossible to ignore: when attackers go after critical infrastructure and operational technology. Breaches and malware attacks at power and water plants, against core supply chain organizations, or against transport networks can all cause catastrophic damage, enormous financial losses – and even lead to deaths.

In this episode, Rory speaks with Magpie Graham, technical director of intel and services at Dragos, to discuss attacks on operational technology, critical infrastructure, and the future of large-scale cyber attacks.

Read more:

1. What is operational technology – and why is it at risk?
2. Manufacturing firms are struggling to handle rising OT security threats
3. When everything connects, everything’s at risk
4. Former NCSC head says the Jaguar Land Rover attack was the 'single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK' as impact laid bare
5. CISA shares lessons learned from Polish power grid hack – and how to prevent disaster striking again

Identity controls in the enterprise have only become more complicated over the last few years.

Initially, the focus was on IoT devices, which were exploding in the enterprise environment. But recent years have brought an onslaught of AI tools and AI agents, all of which come with security and governance complications.

How can business leaders get a grip on the adoption of AI agents, particularly as these tools begin to communicate with one another and with third-party enterprise tools?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Shiven Ramji, president, Auth0 at Okta, to discuss the future of identity, security and governance in the face of AI agents.

January is supposed to be a month full of new starts and potential, in which we try to embrace resolutions or set out our plans for the year ahead.

But in the tech sector, it’s become something of an ominous month – the start of layoff season. January 2026 has been no different, with Amazon announcing 16,000 jobs cut in a plan that could see up to 30,000 cut by the end of May according to Reuters.

Earlier in the month, Dell made waves at CES 2026 with the news that it’s reviving the XPS laptop line, just one year on from its announcement that the brand would be deprecated. What can we make of the job cuts and of Dell's reversal?

In this episode, Rory welcomes back Ross Kelly, ITPro's news and analysis editor, to explore some of January's biggest stories.

Read more:

1. Amazon is cutting 14,000 roles in a bid to ‘operate like the world's largest startup’
2. ‘Lean into it’: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy thinks enterprises need to embrace AI to avoid being left behind – even if that means fewer jobs in the future
3. Fresh Microsoft layoffs hit software engineering roles, documents show
4. Return of the XPS: Dell resurrects iconic brand at CES after customer demand
5. Dell kills off XPS and other brands for PC simplicity

Every business wants its payments to process smoothly. Simply put, if you’re introducing friction into your payment processes, you’re making it harder to drive revenue and dissuading users from becoming return customers.

One sector that knows this better than most is iGaming, which has to meet the demands of users around the world including mobile payments, virtual wallets, and cross-border social gaming payouts.

Delivering all this in near real-time, with adequate security and reliable infrastructure, is no small feat. How are these payment systems possible?

In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with Paysafe, Rory is joined by Bob Legters, chief product officer at Paysafe, to discuss the best practices for building a payments strategy – and how this can be applied to iGaming.

One of the major challenges of today’s environments is the rising tide of bots, with generative AI driving a new era of the technology.

Bots have been a part of the internet since at least the 1990s but recent technological advancements have swollen their number exponentially. Some of these net dwellers are benign, others are malicious, and some sit somewhere in between.

But no matter what category they fall into, they can all cause problems for businesses. How much of an issue is this for businesses and what can they do to mitigate it?

In this special discussion, in association with Fastly, Jane speaks to Marshall Irwin, chief information security officer (CISO) at Fastly, to discover more about how organizations can protect themselves from the risks of bots.

The environmental impact of AI is a growing area of study and one that businesses must begin to seriously consider.

When you power a data center with coal, it’s obvious that it’s having a detrimental impact on the environment. But is a ‘green’ data center really green? And to what extent might the benefits of AI outweigh potential environmental negatives?

In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss the shifting sustainability targets of the world’s public cloud giants, as caused by AI, and what they’re doing to get back on track.

Read more:

1. Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Report 2025
2. Amazon 2024 Sustainability Report
3. Google 2025 Environmental Report
4. Google emissions have surged 51% in five years – but it’s making solid progress in data center efficiency
5. Data center carbon emissions are set to skyrocket by 2030, with hyperscalers producing 2.5 billion tons of carbon
6. Small businesses are ‘flying blind’ on carbon emissions and struggling to meet sustainability goals – and the blame lies with big tech vendors
7. Big tech’s solution for AI-related carbon emissions could be more AI
8. Microsoft wants to drastically cut carbon emissions, so it’s building data centers with wood
9. Can small modular reactors meet data center power demand?
10. Google just confirmed the location of its first small modular reactor
11. Hyperscalers go nuclear
12. Gas-powered data centers: what's behind the boom?
13. Could all data centers go solar?
14. TPUs: Google's home advantage
15. What is a tensor processing unit (TPU)?
16. AI’s thirsty secret

The tech sector started this year with a bang at CES 2026, the annual event that brings together over 140,000 attendees to share the latest innovations in consumer and business technology.

Unsurprisingly, at this year’s event AI was a primary focus – with more details on Nvidia and AMD’s latest hardware, alongside AI PC innovations by brands like Lenovo.

Alongside these headlines, however, we also saw a return to form by companies such as Dell, with the resurrection of the XPS laptop range.

What did we learn from CES about what to expect in business hardware over the coming year?

In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Mike Moore, deputy editor at TechRadar Pro, to discuss the biggest moments from CES 2026.