HTL Support News

Read the latest information and thinking on the world of IT Support Services.

The Case for a Holistic Approach to IT Security

The case for holistic approach to IT Security

An existential threat with authorities behind the curve

The National Crime Agency didn’t pull any punches in the report Cyber Crime Assessment 2016, published by its Strategic Cyber Industry Group. The Executive Summary warned of “an existential threat to one or more major UK businesses” and that “criminal cyber capability development currently outpaces the UK’s collective response to cyber crime.”

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Security Now: 5 on the Spot IT Security Checks to Reduce Risk to Your Firm

On the spot IT Security checks to reduce risk to your firm

Is IT security in your firm where it needs to be?

IT security is near the top of the agenda for every executive management team. Although IT is not something executive managers are likely to get hands-on with and is best left to qualified practitioners, there are simple spot-checks that executive leaders can make to see if basic security is being implemented.

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Enjoy the Efficiency of Hosted Desktop with the Performance Graphics Application Users Need

Hosted Desktop Graphics performance with NVIDIA GRID

Hosted Desktop is Now available to firms with heavy graphics demands.

Hosted desktop offers significant benefits to businesses of all types and sizes. Business applications are in the cloud, hosted on our servers in the data centre. Using laptops, PCs, tablets or thin clients, each user’s computing desktop is delivered through a business-class Internet connection.

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3 Reasons Recruiters Do It Better in the Cloud

3 reasons recruiters do it better in the cloud

Flexible, secure and cost effective: What are you waiting for?!

Businesses of all types are able to benefit from cloud computing. However, some of the advantages lend themselves particularly well to certain aspects which characterise the recruitment sector. They simply map on to the needs of the recruitment business much better than an on-premise approach to provisioning technology for a recruitment business. Here, we outline three of them.

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How to Recover from a Data Loss Disaster in 20 Minutes

How to recover from a data loss disaster in 20 minutes

Lies, damned lies, and statistics…

For many years, the IT industry has used the threat of going out of business as a way of compelling businesses to invest in backup and Disaster Recovery solutions. Essentially, there has been more than a little scaremongering about the risk of failing to back up data properly and putting appropriate plans in place for disaster recovery.

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Confused about Privacy: Untangling Safe Harbour, Privacy Shield, and GDPR

Untangling Safe Harbour, Privacy Shield and GDPR

Privacy Shield a more formal compliance framework

The ‘borderless’ internet has created legal problems for nation-states across the globe. Tax laws have brought all sorts of problems for international businesses as well as tax authorities and governments.

The laws on privacy are no less challenging. In the UK, the Data Protection Act, as enforced by the ICO, has been the cornerstone of safeguarding privacy. International standards are bounded by Privacy Shield and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

It is an area of some confusion. Here we help to untangle it with some key facts about Privacy Shield and GDPR.

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Cloud Trends: Some Developments That Benefit SMEs

Cloud trends that benefits small medium businesses

The cloud marches on… the question is where next?

The cloud is perhaps the fastest growing technology trend of the last decade. When the world was dealing with the aftermath of the credit crunch and reeling with the blows from The Great Recession, businesses still needed the latest technology tools to ensure they could be competitive.

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Christmas and New Year IT Systems Review Checklist

Christmas and New Year IT Systems review checklist

An ideal time to catch up and set out a review

Many firms experience a pre-Christmas rush of finishing off work and projects in early and mid-December. For items in the workflow that are on-going, there is often a sense of ‘parking’ them over the Christmas - New Year transition period until the return to work in January. Many businesses are likely to have reduced workload and staffing numbers.

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IT Support Maturity Model: What’s the Right Level for Your Business?

IT Support maturity model: What’s the right level for your business

Mapping IT Support services to a maturity model

If we apply maturity modelling to the IT Support function, we are able to produce an effective mapping that overlays the five levels of a traditional maturity model with five different service levels of support.

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3 Things IT Managers Do Better When Support Is Outsourced to a Specialist Msp

IT managers do better when support is outsourced

Throwing off conventional thinking to re-imagine the IT manager role

In conventional patterns of thinking about jobs within businesses of 10 - 100 people, the role of IT manager is seen as the go-to person for anything related to technology.

Across an infrastructure demanding provision of business technology tools to a workforce of varying degrees of technological competence, this might include anything from a broken mouse to troubleshooting software server problems.

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