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The Bank of England Now Oversees Your Cloud Provider

The Bank of England Now Oversees Your Cloud Provider

HM Treasury designated Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited and Oracle Corporation UK Limited as critical third parties, effective 13 July 2026 under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 regime. The Bank of England, PRA and FCA can now set requirements directly on the providers, including scenario testing, phased incident reporting to regulators and affected firms, self-assessments and skilled-person reviews. The piece explains the designation criteria, the obligations and their timeline, and the point the primary documents state plainly but commentary will miss, that regulated firms keep every outsourcing and operational resilience obligation they already had. It closes with practical steps for fintechs, insurers, payments firms and the MSPs serving them.

Daniel Thomas 6 August 2026
ERP for UK Manufacturers Turning Over £5m to £50m

ERP for UK Manufacturers Turning Over £5m to £50m

This guide compares the ten ERP systems realistically available to UK manufacturers turning over £5m to £50m — Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage X3, Sage 200 with a manufacturing add-on, SAP Business One, Epicor Kinetic, Infor CloudSuite Industrial, Oracle NetSuite, 123insight, WinMan and Priority. It establishes that only Business Central publishes a UK list price, explains the licence-versus-implementation cost structure behind quote-only pricing, documents UK data residency and compliance checkboxes, describes what buying through the UK partner channel means in practice, and turns the published record on ERP implementation failure into specific questions that de-risk selection.

Daniel Thomas 6 August 2026
Shadow AI Discovery and Governance Tools Compared for UK Buyers

Shadow AI Discovery and Governance Tools Compared for UK Buyers

The tools sold to govern employee AI use do five different jobs that vendors blur: discovery, enforcement, sanctioned access, data protection and licensing visibility. This comparison groups Microsoft Purview and Defender for Cloud Apps, the SASE platforms, browser and endpoint tools, and the AI gateways by the job each does, states which prices are published and which are quote-only, and sets out the Microsoft licence tiers and consumption meters Purview's AI capabilities require. It then examines the dividing line that matters most: which tools read employee prompt text, and why ICO guidance makes that a workplace monitoring decision needing a DPIA, transparency and a lawful basis before deployment.

Daniel Thomas 6 August 2026
Digital Social Care Records Hit 80 Per Cent Sixteen Months Late - What Providers Still on Paper Should Do

Digital Social Care Records Hit 80 Per Cent Sixteen Months Late - What Providers Still on Paper Should Do

The government's target of 80 per cent of CQC-registered care providers using a digital social care record by March 2024 was reached in July 2025, and DHSC's latest statistics put adoption at 83.7 per cent of locations in March 2026. This piece reports the documented target and outcome, then turns to the practical side for the providers still on paper: NHS England's 22-solution assured list and what assurance does and does not mean, the current state of funding, CQC's position on digital records, GP Connect access, published pricing, and the selection questions that DHSC-funded research links to buyer regret and abandonment.

Daniel Thomas 6 August 2026
Choosing a UK Data Centre for Cloud Repatriation in 2026

Choosing a UK Data Centre for Cloud Repatriation in 2026

The piece establishes that UK cloud repatriation is real but selective, with AWS itself telling the CMA that customers move back, and vendor surveys (disclosed as such) showing most organisations considering partial moves. It maps the UK colocation market from operators' own websites, showing London's 91 per cent grip on 1,803MW of live capacity against a thin regional layer, and explains why Ofgem's 125GW connection queue makes power the deciding constraint. It then sets out seven selection criteria with the exact questions to put to providers, weighs London against regional sites on latency, cost and staff access, and closes with a workload-led decision framework and a ten-point checklist.

Daniel Thomas 6 August 2026
How a 5-Person UK MSP Can Build a Cyber Essentials Certification Practice and Charge £500 to £2,000 Per Assessment

How a 5-Person UK MSP Can Build a Cyber Essentials Certification Practice and Charge £500 to £2,000 Per Assessment

Walks 5-person UK MSPs through building a Cyber Essentials certification practice. Covers the choice between becoming an IASME certification body and partnering with an existing one, assessor qualification requirements, the CyberSmart automated platform, pricing structures from £500 guided self-assessment to £2,000-plus for Cyber Essentials Plus, margin calculations, and how to package certification alongside ongoing compliance monitoring as a recurring revenue stream.

Kate Bennett 27 February 2026
Finance dashboard with AI analytics on multiple screens

Agentic AI for UK Mid-Market Finance Teams — What Sage Intacct and Dynamics 365 Finance Can Actually Do Today

Agentic AI — software agents that can plan, act, and iterate without constant human prompting — arrived in UK mid-market finance in late 2025. Sage Intacct launched a network of five AI agents covering close management, accounts payable, time tracking, assurance, and a Finance Intelligence Agent that answers natural-language questions through Sage Copilot. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance shipped an Account Reconciliation Agent and Copilot for Finance as a production add-on. Both platforms target the same pain point: finance teams spending 64 per cent of their time on manual work that leaves no capacity for strategic analysis. But the products differ in design, pricing, and readiness. Sage Intacct starts from around £6,570 per year and uses modular pricing with AI included at no extra licence cost. Dynamics 365 Finance costs £161.50 per user per month before Copilot credits, which are billed separately. The comparison covers what each platform can do right now, maps the capabilities against Making Tax Digital for Income Tax deadlines starting April 2026, and provides a practical evaluation checklist for UK mid-market CFOs.

Thomas Burke 27 February 2026
Email inbox with AI sorting visualisation on monitor

AI Email Triage in Microsoft 365 — UK Professional Services

Email triage — the practice of sorting incoming mail into urgent, actionable, and archive before reading anything in full — is one of the highest-value uses of AI in a small professional services firm. Microsoft shipped two features in 2025 that make this practical for non-technical teams. Copilot's Prioritize My Inbox feature, generally available from April 2025 in Outlook for Windows and Web, ranks every incoming message as high, normal, or low priority and shows a short explanation of why. Power Automate Premium, at £11.60 per user per month, lets you build classification flows using AI Builder prompts that sort email into categories like urgent client request, internal admin, and marketing — then route each to a Teams channel, a shared mailbox, or a task list. This article walks through both approaches step by step, covers the pricing for a 20-person UK firm, explains what UK GDPR means for automated email processing, and provides a checklist for going live.

Kate Bennett 27 February 2026
AI customer support chatbot with holographic chat interface

How to Automate Customer Support With AI for a UK E-Commerce Business Using Freshdesk or Zendesk

Two thirds of UK online shoppers expect a response within two hours, and 65 per cent of e-commerce support queries can be resolved without a human agent. This article compares Freshdesk Freddy AI, Zendesk AI agents, and Intercom Fin on pricing, resolution models, and UK compliance. It walks through the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requirements for AI-assisted support, explains the difference between per-resolution and per-agent pricing, and provides a ten-point checklist for getting your first AI support agent live without breaching UK consumer law.

Kate Bennett 27 February 2026