HTL Support News

Do we keep our IT services in-house, or do we outsource IT responsibilities? That is the question many management teams ask themselves when they look at the benefits of managed IT services. Outsourcing IT services save costs, introduces new knowledge and helps businesses focus. However fully outsourcing IT functions is not the best route for every organisation, and there are pros and cons to each approach. But how about opting for a mixed model?

Leading IT Support Company, HTL Support, has acquired Serviced Cloud – the long-established private Cloud Company.

HTL’s recent expansion has played a key role in the Serviced Cloud merger. The two companies have worked closely together for many years in what has been described as a natural partnership, providing a bespoke service for large and small business.  The merger represents a formalizing of the business arrangements, yet will be seamless for the special relationship with customers. There has been no disclosure relating to the costs to HTL in taking Serviced Cloud under its umbrella.   

It’s a back-and-forth sentiment that’s not uncommon in many organisations: business executives believe that IT is not doing enough to support business goals while IT leaders are of the opinion that management is holding out on IT investments, preventing them from doing more. In today’s ever-evolving business landscape where the right use of IT can give organisations a competitive edge, the need for aligning technology with business objectives has never been more important.

Both sides–management and the IT organisation – may assert that they are working towards the achievement of the company’s goals. But unless their efforts are aligned, i.e. IT contribution is clearly manifested in efficiency, productivity, and profitability, top management will be hard-pressed to see technology as an enabler of core business strategies and IT people will continue to feel underappreciated.

Settling the finances around your company’s IT requirements can be a fraught process, with information technology often at the bottom of the list of priorities when fixing budgets. Cloud computing has the potential to make budgeting for IT requirements far easier, but there are pitfalls along the way.

Creating and maintaining your own blog is very hard work. It entails hours of work thinking of creative titles, working on themes, and producing quality content. Plus, you need to keep your site relevant by updating it with new content regularly, performing SEO, and promoting to new and existing clients through social media. All this takes time and effort.

So imagine then, when someone simply copies the whole of your post and puts it up on their own website. Imitation, as they say, is the greatest form of flattery, and it does feel good to know that another company thinks highly enough of your unique content to use it for their own websites without permission. But clearly, this immoral and unprofessional behaviour is tantamount to theft and can leave the original content creators feeling hard done by. All that work and someone else copy-pastes your articles just like that.

Because your main objective is to grow your business, it can be burdensome when you also need to allocate time to manage your IT assets - even if that can also translate into business benefits. The good news is that there’s a way to grow your business and manage your IT assets without spending much time on the latter. It’s called managed services.

This isn’t an article for explaining what managed services is. We’re assuming you already know what managed services is but are still looking for a good reason to hire one. This post should take care of that. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the major benefits of working with a managed services provider.

Disasters are by definition rare and unpredictable and therefore not front and centre when executives think about day to day operational activities. Yet an information technology disaster can strike any business, and the costs to recover from such an event can be tremendous. As with many risks, the probability of a disaster affecting your company’s information technology infrastructure can be mitigated, and so can the fallout should the worst happen. One of the best ways to reduce the damage is to have a well-designed and tested disaster recovery plan (DRP) in place.

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.

Technology expenditure is usually taken on in a reluctant manner: few businesses rush forward with adopting the latest technologies, instead deferring IT expenditure for as long as they can. Whether it is updating on-premise servers, migrating to the cloud or overhauling a creaking website – management teams tend to delay spending the funds for as long as possible. But is this wise? Are there hidden costs to squeezing the last bit of usage out of outdated technology?

When businesses embark on cyber security initiatives, one of the things that’s often overlooked is DNS security. Many people forget or simply aren’t aware that a compromised DNS infrastructure (or any critical component of that infrastructure) could potentially lead to considerable downtimes, malware outbreaks, data breaches, and several other forms of cyber incidents.

These things can happen because DNS or the Domain Name System plays a crucial role in almost any user-initiated activity that takes place on the Internet. DNS is in charge of resolving the easily-recognisable names like www.somesite.com or ftp.companyx.com that users enter into their web browsers, email clients, or file transfer clients into the IP addresses (e.g. 200.100.10.10) that computers use to communicate with one another.