An IT Support Blog from London

It seems like only yesterday that cloud computing was deemed the next big thing in the business and IT landscape. Service providers scrambled to offer the best cloud services available, while organisations carefully planned how they could best make a smooth transition into the cloud environment.

Now fast forward about a decade. Cloud computing remains a game-changing technology which initiated a paradigm shift in many companies, not only in how they set up their network infrastructure but also in how they run their operations. Over time though, provisioning resources in the cloud may become a tedious and complex task for IT administrators, especially if the primary aim of a business is a faster time to market their product.

This is where serverless computing comes in.

Disaster recovery is one of those topics that isn't particularly complicated, yet is easily misunderstood. It is, nonetheless, a crucial aspect of technology management. The cost of a disaster can be tremendous, and with no fast route to recovery, an adverse event can have game-changing consequences for a business.

Getting backup and disaster recovery right is not that hard, yet 50% of UK businesses are leaving their data at risk, according to a 2018 survey. Though businesses generally make some effort to guard against disaster, plenty of disaster recovery myths persist. In this article, we tackle those myths and propose steps to ensure a reliable disaster recovery scenario.

For many businesses, the adoption of cloud-hosted services is no longer a question, cloud provisioning is an accepted fact. As a result, Software as a Service (SaaS) has grown enormously and is now adopted widely, even at enterprise level. That said, some businesses are still operating via the traditional licencing model.

The reason for the shift to the cloud and Software as a Service is simple: the benefits of the SaaS model greatly outweigh the disadvantages. We’ve written this article to remind readers that adopting SaaS was the right choice and to encourage businesses operating a traditional model to finally make the switch.

VoIP eavesdropping is not a new cybersecurity risk. The protocol that drives most of today’s VoIP applications, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), has been in common use since the 2000s. However, according to IBM SecurityIntelligence, attacks that exploit the SIP protocols are on the rise. Thankfully, businesses have plenty of ways to reduce the opportunities for VoIP eavesdropping. Let’s take a look.

We saw advancements in technology that had never been witnessed. We’re talking about the explosion of voice technology such as Amazon Echo and the Google Assistant; low-code and no-code app development that has paved the way for fast, easy development of custom corporate apps; learning dexterity in robotics; successes in AI and natural language processing (NLP) that allow a machine to complete sentences, as well as other advances. And these breakthroughs are just the tip of the iceberg.

Technology for business and tech, in general, continues to advance, perhaps not as dramatically as before, but it will build on the groundwork already set. Here are the 5 big IT trends that could be hogging the headlines in the next few months.

The concerns businesses have about handing data over to cloud providers have, to a large extent, been assuaged. The ongoing growth of Microsoft’s Office 365 and the general trend towards cloud computing are evidence of this. Yet, as much as cloud providers are now seen as secure, businesses still need to take steps to prevent the loss of data stored in the cloud.

In an interesting finding, Gartner suggests that through 2022, 95% of cloud security failures will be the fault of customers, not cloud service providers. As much as Office 365 is easy to adopt administrators carry a strong responsibility to maintain security. Here are three steps that can help your business secure its Office 365 data.

Working remotely is an increasing trend, with many enterprises tapping into the cost-saving benefits of remote working while employees enjoy the freedom that remote working brings. That said, remote working is still evolving, and in most companies, there is room for improvement.

According to an HR News survey, 53% of UK employees do not think that their employers are doing enough to accommodate the needs of remote workers. The solution lies partly in the managerial approach, and in part in the deployment of technology. In this article, we will cover eight tech-led approaches that can boost the collaborative experience for remote workers.

Cloud providers follow the direction of the market, like many other businesses. These days,  more and more companies are looking to run their cloud-based applications on containers instead of virtual machines. As a result, cloud service providers have started providing support through the appropriate tools and environments to enable their customers to run container-based applications on their cloud infrastructure.

All the major cloud providers offer some form of container support. Some examples include:

Certain UK industries such as manufacturing, telecommunications, retail, and others who collect large volumes of data, have the potential to reap substantial benefits from Big Data analytics projects. If you really think about it, almost all industries accumulate huge amounts of data. And so it follows that practically all industries can potentially benefit.

We can’t feature every single industry here, or at least, in a single post. So, for now, let’s just focus on these 10 industries and provide brief examples or ideas on how these industries can take advantage of this relatively new trend:

We all witnessed the flurry of activity that led up to May 25, 2018; the date on which GDPR became enforceable. Organisations and businesses of all types made a gargantuan effort to ensure compliance. However, GDPR compliance is not a one-off effort.

GDPR compliance involves ongoing, but difficult to enforce, habits covering the responsible use and the protection of your customer data. Most resource-pressed businesses will benefit from whatever resources are available. Enter Office 365.