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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.