An IT Support Blog from London

It is not challenging to see the value in Business Intelligence software. The ability to easily and quickly analyse and report on the data captured by your organisation can transform decision-making processes, delivering insight into the way your company functions – and how your customers respond. Yet in the past, many companies were inclined to put aside any efforts to explore BI products.

Though Excel is a capable and ubiquitous tool for analysing data, users need to have a certain level of expertise that is difficult to come by. For most people, complex spreadsheets are simply too arcane. On the flipside, specialist BI tools hosted locally can be expensive to license and maintain. Enter Cloud BI – an affordable, accessible approach to slicing and dicing data.

When managed correctly, a private cloud can be a worthwhile investment for certain businesses. It comes with almost all the benefits of public clouds minus the data privacy concerns. Of course, not everyone can afford a private cloud, especially the kind that’s built on-premise (i.e. not virtual private clouds offered by CSPs). So who should invest in one?

In this post, we look at some major indicators that denote a company’s suitability for a private cloud investment.

Of all the types of malware wreaking havoc these days, one clearly stands out - Ransomware. This troublesome malware appears to be gaining a lot of fans in the cybercrime community and has, in turn, caused considerable stretches of downtime on a large number of organisations.

Server virtualisation has been a viable IT strategy for some time. Virtualisation has its origins as a technical concept in the 1960s, but it is more recently that the virtualisation of servers has become commonplace, and it is a matter of priority for many IT managers: the 2017 Spiceworks State of IT survey suggests virtualisation is at the top of the list for software investment. The reason for this is simple: by making use of virtual server hosting UK companies are saving on expenditure and seeing the implementation and management of software applications becoming much more flexible.

Forrester Research expects the global private cloud solutions market to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 11% from 2016 to 2021. While this is certainly small compared to the growth rate of public cloud solutions, it still means there are enterprises out there who are interested in using private clouds. But when would you likely choose a private cloud over a public cloud?

The ever growing number of personal computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets in the enterprise can present serious challenges in costs, maintenance, security, compliance, and productivity. But many of these challenges can now be addressed by employing hosted desktop. You may not be aware of them yet but there are actually several business benefits of moving toa hosted desktop. Here are some of them.

Saves hardware, power, and maintenance costs

Just like many cloud solutions, hosted desktop enable you to save on hardware costs. Instead of using desktop computers in your offices, you can use thin clients instead. These are lightweight machines that don’t require certain built-in components like hard disks, CPUs, or RAM. That means, they’re substantially cheaper than the average desktop computer.

Information technology risks range from the very apparent to the silent and hidden. The majority of businesses mitigate the most obvious risks: only an irresponsible IT operation will do without network firewalls in place or skip on regularly updating operating systems and software. Yet it is the less obvious risks which can trip up even carefully run IT functions – and which can cause progressive or indeed sudden harm to your business.

Based on the 2016 edition of Ponemon’s annual Cost of Cyber Crime report, phishing is now one of the most prevalent cyber-attacks today. Should you be worried about it? It depends. If you think any of the consequences of phishing attacks outlined below can impact your business, then maybe you should be.

Tarnish your company’s image

Most phishing attacks are designed to steal personal information. The way cyber criminals do this is by crafting legitimate-looking emails that compel recipients into disclosing their personal details.

You walk into your office tomorrow. Before you can get a cup of coffee, one of your managers tells you that your IT service contract is going to expire in two months.

You've been frustrated with poor service and technology for months. Now, you have an opportunity to improve the situation. Your IT manager stands at the ready with a few recommended IT service providers. Are you equipped to sort through the options and call them?

Before you sign on the dotted line to renew your IT service contract, go through these questions. Investing an hour today could save you months of effort, risk and frustration.

Acceptable practice or unacceptable risk?

Shadow IT is the practice of using technology within a business without the knowledge or approval of the IT function.

This includes anything from a single employee using a low-cost app, to an entire department, such as Project Management, adopting a cloud software application to support its Line of Business (LoB).