Without a doubt, the most important data security measure you can take is to apply full-disk encryption on all mobile devices. "Let’s say somebody steals your encrypted laptop,” Merry explained: "If they don’t have the username and password, they simply can’t access the data on it. They can’t boot it. They can’t even access the files if they take out the disk and try to mount it from another system.”File-level encryption has a role to play too. "We attach files to emails, copy data to USB sticks and pass them around – there are lots of ways to share data, and as end users we do it instinctively,” Merry said. "For example, let’s say I copy an Excel spreadsheet from work onto my USB stick so I can work on it at home. A USB stick is easy to lose – you pull your keys out of your pocket and the USB stick falls out. As far as the law is concerned, if someone can pick up that USB stick and potentially make use of the data contained on it, that’s a data breach. It’s the same type of situation if you’re storing potentially secret or proprietary information on Dropbox, because you don’t know who might access it.”

"While your employees may not be carrying around top-secret blueprints, their systems may still hold data that needs protecting”
It’s worth thinking about tablets and smartphones too. "With company devices, you may choose to manage all aspects of security, including the apps users install,” noted Merry. "Or, you can have a BYOD scenario. In that case you can say: ‘It might be your device, but if you’re going to have company data on it then you need to protect it.’ Devices such as mobile phones have built-in encryption that you can activate.”Desktops and servers are rather less likely to fall out of pockets, but if you’re unlucky enough to be the victim of a burglary, you could be looking at a data-loss disaster. "You do get thefts from businesses – even large companies with big data centres,” warned Sian John. "And encryption is so easy to turn on now that it’s worth doing.”

The XPS 12 will be available from January 2016 and, to be honest, it’s a bit of a weird one. It takes the detachable hybrid recipe that has proved so successful in the firm’s Venue range of tablets and, by the looks of things, actually makes it worse.That starts with the appearance: for an XPS device, it’s surprisingly ugly. It’s mostly clad in matte-black plastic, squared-off unstylised edges, and only the kicked-up hinge at the back of the device serves to deliver any kind of visual interest. This is a detachable hybrid, so the idea is that it’s usable as a laptop but, when you want to kick back and relax, you can pull the two apart and use the screen as a tablet. The problem with the XPS 12 is that the part that joins the two together hasn’t been well thought out.First, there’s no hinge to speak of. Just a slot with a magnet holds the two halves together, and contacts provide power to the Bluetooth keyboard. There’s no adjustment available at all.

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The base has no extra battery to boost stamina, and the magnet – at least in the "pre-production” versions I was shown – proved to be worryingly weak. So weak, in fact, that the tablet came loose from its moorings and fell to the floor during the demo session I attended. The tablet survived the drop, which proves it’s reasonably tough, and the rest of the specification looks impressive. The XPS 12 will come equipped with: I really liked typing on the keyboard. The keys felt cushioned in all the right places, while remaining positive in action, and the long travel just added to the comfort.That "Infinity Edge” IPS display looked simply gorgeously, bursting with deep saturated colours and sharp as a tack. Best of all, Dell’s engineers appear to have ironed out the problems I experienced when I reviewed the Dell XPS 13 earlier this year, namely the backlight bleed and over-aggressive dynamic contrast.

As for core components, the Dell XPS 12 I was using (the "Signature Edition”) was equipped with an Intel Core m5-6Y54 running at a nominal clock speed of 1.1GHz bursting up to 1.5GHz, had 8GB of RAM, and was running Windows 10 64-bit.Aside from this, details of the various options that will eventually be available in January were thin on the ground, and prices aren’t yet available either.However, given the oddly stilted design, I’m not sure it’s going to provide anything more than a passing challenge to the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, Google Pixel C and Apple iPad Pro.When you're trying to watch technology transforming something, it’s important to keep your eye on the wider picture.

The team at the Millpool Community Centre, to me, seem resolutely embedded in the smaller, faster moving week-on-week experience, with events both major and minor swirling around the infrastructure of the centre without pause or patience.That’s just about the most difficult situation in which to appraise change from the inside of the business: I can’t think of a more distracting or emotional customer than a wedding reception, for example.You may chortle a bit, thinking about punch-ups and best man’s speeches, and those still happen – but this is 2015, so we now have the wedding video being shown as a hot edit on a projector above the happy couple’s first dance. Which in turn becomes a great background for that inevitable selfie. That’s a push for transformative change in technology, if ever there was one.For me, this is quite some journey. I first came to Millpool over two years ago as part of PC Pro’s Business Clinic series – where we visit a company or business that has a specific problem, and aim to help it.

In the past six months, Millpool has been making the switch from their mishmash collection of difficult-to-manage consumer laptops to a fleet of business-ready HP laptops. They’re not expensive, by any means, but they’re easy to maintain… and to take back to mint condition, in terms of the disk image, in event of someone or other changing something they shouldn’t.For this, likely to be my farewell visit, I became the somewhat unlikely star of a computer clinic event, when people could turn up and ask any technology question they were troubled by.The first strong sign of transformation was both simple and absolutely indicative of the state of PC computing in the first quarter of 2015: Ross Marven, Millpool’s resident all-round support guru, had grabbed one of the laptops we set up during the last visit, backed up the as-delivered config, and put Windows 10 Technical Preview on it.

The radically different visuals of Windows 10 shone out in the fully-populated computer suite, even serving to distract the occasional iPad user from their touchscreen woes and firing up the mournful virus-laden laptop owners to consider a jump forward from Windows 7.The next sign was subtle. All through the day, there was a steady dripfeed of traffic and activity around the big HP printer that we’d installed at the same time as the laptops. While chatting away about this or that laptop problem, or trying to explain the peculiarities of rural broadband supplier choice, I was keeping my eye on the printing activity.

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Mostly this was paranoia, after a very painful afternoon in my recent past, which I spent trying to explain the eccentric choices made by a certain Far-East printer maker’s Windows drivers: what should have been a fit-and-forget small business printer wasn’t due to the curious choice of paper sizes, managing to bemuse all the staff.I knew that Millpool had gone through a bit of staff turnover and that’s when working practices suddenly tend to jam up against unfamiliar or quirky business technology.Not this time! I ended up instead having a far more relaxed and even academic conversation about the merits of serif vs san-serif fonts in multi-column newsletter layouts. So, rather than having to make a grovelling apology on behalf of the printer maker, I was focusing on what really matters: the stuff being printed.So in this case, the transformation was so smooth that Millpool hardly noticed it while getting on with their lives and supporting their community.

Latest news: Don't forget that owners of Nexus handset such as the Nexus 5X benefit from being able to install and run Google's latest Android OS before anyone else. This year, however, Google is taking things a step further and has enabled over-the-air updates to Android N, making it far easier to try out the latest version of its mobile OS than it ever has been before. And the good news is that in the wake of Google I/O it's now stable enough to run on your main phone, so if you want to get a flavour of what's coming from Google right now, it's well worth a try.With support for inline replies, split screen multitasking and greater control over which apps use mobile data, it's an incremental update, but we like the new look and the new features. You can read our first impressions of Android N here, and our full, original review of the Nexus 5X follows.

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