Tech
£3bn opportunity in digital network upgrade of UK critical infrastructure | Computer Weekly
Research from leading UK connectivity provider BT has concluded with the clear message that now is the time to act on upgrading the UK’s critical national infrastructure (CNI) sectors from outdated analogue networks to digital infrastructure, with the financial, societal and environmental benefits of such a move offering the potential to deliver a £3bn net benefit to the economy by 2040.
The study, conducted by Assembly Research, evaluated the costs, risks and potential gains from digital migration across energy, water, health (NHS), emergency services and local government. It accounted for the direct cost of upgrading, as well as the rising expense of maintaining legacy systems like the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the 2G mobile network – both decades old and increasingly challenging to support. Data from UK comms regulator Ofcom shows that resilience incidents on the PSTN have risen by 45%, underscoring the urgency of change.
The UK’s transition to digital connectivity is a major national infrastructure programme endorsed by Ofcom and the government. The PTSN will be fully retired in January 2027, with businesses and public services urged to complete their migrations by the end of 2025 to avoid last-minute disruption. In 2024 alone, BT migrated nearly 300,000 legacy PSTN business lines. Yet many CNI providers in the UK still rely on ageing analogue systems for critical operations, while other countries are moving faster.
The research showed that digital network upgrades could transform a number of sectors – in particular the NHS, councils, ambulance services, emergency services, the environment and the energy sector – freeing up resources and preventing millions of unnecessary callouts.
For example, the study calculated that 600,000 NHS staff hours and 12 million council staff hours could be freed up, the equivalent of 6,500 staff working full-time for a year. It also estimated that up to 750,000 unnecessary ambulance trips could be prevented, avoiding more than 100 journeys every day. Emergency services are said to have the possibility to avoid 280,000 false fire service callouts by retiring outdated fire alarm systems.
Outside the health sector, the study hinted at £1.4bn in potential savings from improved resilience and demand forecasting in the energy sector, while possible environmental gains cited amounted to saving 3.42 megatonnes of carbon emissions, equal to powering every home in Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city, for a year.
Putting a financial figure on these gains, the study noted that for the energy sector, digital networks could deliver improved resilience, help prevent outages and enable more accurate demand forecasting, translating to an estimated £1.4bn in savings. In the water sector, smarter network monitoring and reduced electricity usage could generate efficiencies worth £771m.
In addition, the study argued that local governments stand to gain £486m by modernising telecare systems and cutting the cost of maintaining ageing analogue equipment. In the NHS, digital transformation promises better call handling and more efficient emergency response. The study added that emergency services could see fewer false alarms and improved call management, enabling faster, more targeted responses.
Jon James, CEO of BT Business, said the results of the study sent a clear message that delaying the shift to digital carries a real cost to public services, the environment and the wider economy. “Legacy systems are becoming increasingly unreliable, and the case for action is urgent,” he noted. “BT is committed to guiding the UK’s critical national infrastructure sectors through this upgrade with the resilience and support they need.”
Matthew Howett, founder and CEO of Assembly Research, said: “For the first time, we’ve lifted the lid on legacy network migration, and worked to understand the scope and scale of how key UK industries are still relying on ageing fixed and mobile networks. Our research found that while the energy and water sectors are already well into their migrations, it’s vital that others follow to avoid growing costs and missed efficiencies.”
It’s September 29, the day that America celebrates its least guilty vice and addiction, known in the streets as “java” or “joe.” That’s right, it’s National Coffee Day—the day that thousands of people burn $2 worth of gas waiting in a drive-thru to get a free $2 cup of coffee from Dunkin‘.
Or how about this instead? Get free or cheap coffee without leaving your house, like a civilized person in the age of the internet. Take advantage of online coffee subscription deals instead.
WIRED has long considered delivery coffee subscriptions to be the promise of technology fulfilled: The best coffee, from all over the country and world, gets scooted to your door without you lifting more than a finger. Anyway, three of WIRED’s absolute favorite coffee subscriptions are offering big introductory deals for National Coffee Day 2025, so it’s a good day to discover the joys of always having good coffee.
Here are National Coffee Day deals on Atlas Coffee Club, Trade Coffee, and Podium Coffee. Each is 50 percent off for the holiday.
Atlas Coffee Club Deals and Promo Code
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Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
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Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
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Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Atlas Coffee Club
Coffee Subscription
Atlas is WIRED’s favorite overall coffee subscription for multiple very good reasons. It roasts very good coffee. It also offers reliable, friendly, and swift service—a simple necessity when conducting long-distance relationships over the web. But especially, it offers single-origin coffee from a different country each month, letting you try coffee with flavors you likely haven’t tried before. Arabica coffee from Vietnam, or coffee grown in multiple regions of China or India. It’s cool. It’s kinda what you want showing up at your door, and you can choose your favorite roast level to suit the kind of person you are.
Anyway, Atlas Coffee Club deals are going big for National Coffee Day.
Between September 29 and October 1, 2025, enter the Atlas Coffee promo code FREECOFFEE to get the following discounts and freebies:
National Coffee Day Deals at Trade Coffee
Courtesy of Trade Coffee
If Atlas is our favorite single-origin roaster subscription, Trade Coffee is your ticket to coffee from everywhere—the best and broadest selection of coffee from the best coffee roasters all over the country. I like Trade, especially, as a great way to find roasters I would have never tried, whether chocolatey roasts from Canton, Georgia, or big funky, fruity, light roasts from Portland, Oregon.
And so a Trade Coffee deal is always welcome. On National Coffee Day, Trade Coffee is offering half off a one-month trial subscription.
National Coffee Day Deals from Podium Coffee Club
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Podium Coffee Club
Coffee Subscription
Podium Coffee Club is yet another vision of coffee subscription, and also among my favorites. The name says it all: It’s a coffee subscription devoted to only award-winning coffees that have been judged among the best in the country and world in large and credible competitions. Podium picks just one wonderful coffee to send you each month, depending on whether you asked for the Gold or the Platinum subscription.
The Podium Gold subscription is generally very balanced, classic, excellent coffee beans. The Podium Platinum subscription, in part, raises its standards for how prestigious an award a coffee might need to be included. But also, the Platinum picks are often rare, funky, interesting, or just different—coffee that changes your mind about what coffee’s supposed to taste like. Either way, lucky you, it’s cheap today with an exclusive code from WIRED.
Enter the Podium Coffee Club promo code WIREDNTNLCFF50 for half off your first month’s subscription.
As cloud adoption accelerates, organisations rely on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to define expectations around availability, security, and performance, to access and process data or service use. Yet SLAs often lag behind innovation. For CTOs and CISOs, this misalignment is a strategic risk and they need to work out how to innovate securely when infrastructure guarantees do not reflect the complexity or criticality of modern digital services.
Rather than viewing SLA gaps as blockers, technology leaders should treat them as indicators of where governance, architecture and measurement must evolve. By taking steps to align SLAs with business objectives and complementing them with Experience Level Agreements (XLAs), Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), organisations can take control and innovate efficiently.
Innovation is advancing faster than SLA maturity
Modern cloud architectures increasingly rely on container orchestration and serverless computing. Technologies like robotic process automation, generative AI, and edge computing are reshaping service delivery. Yet SLA provisions from major cloud providers (e,g, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) typically offer 99.9% to 99.99% availability, while actual performance varies depending on configuration and dependencies.
To bridge this gap, organisations can use XLAs to measure service quality and user experience. OKRs should align with XLAs to track business goals, while SLAs and KRIs support delivery and risk management. This model then links technical output to business impact and enables leaders to assess whether innovation is translating into measurable outcomes.
Evolving governance to close SLA gaps and curb shadow IT
Public cloud spending is projected to reach $723 billion this year (Gartner). However, SLA limitations can drive unauthorised use, especially in fast-moving domains like generative AI (MIT). Recent incidents involving ChatGPT, xAI (Grok) and GitHub repositories that were accessed through Microsoft Copilot show how sensitive internal data, submitted by staff seeking efficiency, was indexed by public search engines even after repositories were made private.
While cloud platform risk can be managed by restricting users to approved systems this does not eliminate the emergence of shadow IT and staff may still bypass official channels, exposing private data. Management requires policy, training, and awareness, supported by clear governance and technical controls.
That underlines the need for continuous oversight and proactive governance and monitoring which moves from static compliance to dynamic enablement. This requires the alignment of technical controls with business goals, educating teams on acceptable use, and embedding KRIs into decision-making. Taken together these measures can help prevent shadow IT and maintain operational integrity.
Security and governance: Foundational enablers of cloud innovation
Cloud providers operate under shared responsibility models where infrastructure security is managed by the provider, while data, configuration, and access controls remain the customer’s responsibility.
This reinforces the need for layered security across the stack: hypervisor, application, access, monitoring, and operations. Security as Code, zero-trust architectures, and cloud-native tools such as AWS Security Hub and Google Cloud Security Command Center enable organisations to enhance security. These are also critical for compliance with regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.
Governance frameworks such as the NIST Risk Management Framework and COBIT can help link IT with strategy. When integrated with OKRs, XLAs, SLAs, and KRIs, these frameworks can enable a structured approach to managing innovation responsibly.
Architectural strategies to address SLA limitations
Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies increase flexibility, allowing businesses to adjust SLAs through design choices such as microsegmentation, restricted access, and dedicated tenancy. Self-hosting open-source tools like Apache Spark can reduce reliance on commercial providers but need internal skills and governance to manage them. In addition, generative AI platforms may require hybrid configurations to meet data sovereignty requirements. This means that architectural decisions should reflect business needs and risk tolerance, not an idealised pursuit of perfect security.
Strategic withdrawal when SLA gaps are too significant
In some cases, SLA limitations, especially around compliance or sovereignty may require a shift to private cloud or self-hosted solutions. Offerings like AWS Outposts transfer some operational responsibility to the organisation, enabling greater control but requiring enhanced governance and technical capability.
That requires leaders to understand when strategic withdrawal from unmanageable risks can preserve resilience and readiness. Monitoring SLA exposure can then ensure agility and preparedness to allow organisations to re-engage when conditions improve or risks are mitigated.
Conclusion
SLA gaps are therefore not barriers to innovation but indicators of where leadership must act. CTOs and CISOs need to focus not just on meeting technical guarantees but ensuring cloud adoption supports measurable business outcomes.
They can do this by aligning OKRs with XLAs, and underpinning them with SLAs and KRIs, to build governance that is resilient and responsive. In highly regulated yet innovation-reliant economies, technology leaders must balance ambition with accountability. That can mean stepping back when risks are too great, and whether through hybrid cloud, compensating controls, or strategic vendor selection, remaining focused on enabling innovation securely and sustainably.
Ashley Barker, digital strategy and operations expert and Irfan Ahmed, cybersecurity expert, PA Consulting
German airline group Lufthansa said Monday it will cut 4,000 jobs, nearly 4% of its workforce—a move underscoring the slump gripping Europe’s largest economy.
Lufthansa said the majority of the job cuts would be in Germany and take place by 2030, targeting administrative rather than operational positions.
The group, which employs around 103,000 people, includes Eurowings, Austrian, Swiss and Brussels Airlines, as well as the recently acquired Italian flagship airline ITA Airways.
Germany is facing a second straight year of recession, with unemployment at a decade high.
The downturn has hit some of the country’s corporate giants hard, squeezed by Chinese competition, high energy costs and slow adoption of new technologies.
Lufthansa’s announcement comes just days after another major German company, industrial giant Bosch, said it would cut 13,000 jobs, or 3% of its global workforce.
“The Lufthansa Group is reviewing which activities will no longer be necessary in the future, for example due to duplication of work,” the company said in a statement.
“In particular, the profound changes brought about by digitalization and the increased use of artificial intelligence will lead to greater efficiency in many areas and processes,” it said.
Lufthansa set new financial targets for 2028-2030, including an adjusted operating margin of 8 to 10%.
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