Hammer Weekly Update, week ending 28 December 2025

Week ending 28 December 2025 put attention on networking, security, AI and cloud in UK and EMEA. We’ve boiled it down to the few stories with practical impact - and concrete steps partners can take this week.

Death, torture, and amputation: How cybercrime shook the world in 2025

The Register (Security) reports: Death, torture, and amputation: How cybercrime shook the world in 2025. The human harms of cyberattacks piled up this year, and violence expected to increase The knock-on… [1]

Latency to inspection points and PoP reach now shape experience as much as raw bandwidth; failover timing needs timing, not theory. Hammer can align SASE/SD-WAN SKUs to branch counts and lead times, and sequence rollouts to avoid link flap surprises.

Measure user latency to the nearest SASE PoP and capture variance.
Pilot split-tunnel policies for collaboration apps; record packet loss.
Time branch failover under controlled link flap.

Middle East tech trends 2026: AI, cyber security and sovereign infrastructure take centre stage

Computer Weekly reports: Middle East tech trends 2026: AI, cyber security and sovereign infrastructure take centre stage. As artificial intelligence moves from experimentation to production and cyber threats escalate… [2]

Controls must stand up to real phishing and ransomware drills, not just policy-recovery points and identity boundaries are the failure points. Hammer can bundle Microsoft 365 backup and a managed SOC handover into a repeatable rollout plan with timelines.

Run a restore test from an immutable backup set and record RTO.
Map MFA and conditional access coverage for high-risk apps.
Stage a 30-minute phishing drill and time the run-book.

Why AI job loss headlines miss the bigger story

Computer Weekly reports: Why AI job loss headlines miss the bigger story. Efficiency gains are just the first act in the growth of the AI economy. [3]

Expect pressure on rack density, GPU power budgets and memory bandwidth; design choices affect UPS/PDU loading and cooling headroom. Hammer can source AI servers and pre-stage delivery to match cooling upgrades, and translate model sizing into an orderable BOM.

Model peak rack draw; confirm UPS/PDU headroom for target density.
Benchmark NVMe throughput against expected inference concurrency.
Lock delivery dates for AI servers to align with cooling changes.

Amazon Connect expands automated agent performance evaluations to 5 additional languages

AWS What’s New reports: Amazon Connect expands automated agent performance evaluations to 5 additional languages. Amazon Connect now automates agent performance evaluations in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish using generative AI. [4]

Guardrails around identity, network and spend need to ship with the platform-landing zones and budgets should be codified, not manual.

Codify a landing zone (identity, network, logging) and deploy to all accounts.
Enable budget alerts/anomaly detection and assign owners.
Right-size or schedule off non-prod instances before month-end.

From AI to analog, cybersecurity tabletop exercises look a little different this year

The Register (Security) reports: From AI to analog, cybersecurity tabletop exercises look a little different this year. Practice makes perfect It's the most wonderful time of the year … for corporate security bosses to run tabletop exercises… [5]

Controls must stand up to real phishing and ransomware drills, not just policy-recovery points and identity boundaries are the failure points.

Run a restore test from an immutable backup set and record RTO.
Map MFA and conditional access coverage for high-risk apps.
Stage a 30-minute phishing drill and time the run-book.

How we picked these stories: we scanned UK/EMEA enterprise feeds and vendor advisories, filtered for architecture/procurement significance, and kept only items with clear next steps.