The long-awaited and much-hyped 5G network has finally launched in some markets and will be rolled out in more major cities by the second half of 2019. 5G is the fifth and latest evolution of wireless connectivity and is expected to have a transformative impact on consumers’ lives and businesses across most industries. The reason for such excitement is, of course, the high speed, low latency, better network reliability and massive device connectivity that 5G performance promises.

While faster speeds are always a welcome development for end-users, the business landscape is where 5G is anticipated to have the most impact. In fact, an Oracle-commissioned survey of 265 business leaders and IT executives across 11 countries reveals that many enterprises are well aware of the possible opportunities that 5G connectivity can create. More than 80% of the respondents say that it can significantly improve many aspects of business operations, and more than 82% believe that it can pave the way for launching new products and services.

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.

Choosing an IT support company is not a decision that should be taken lightly. Bear in mind that, due to the deep dependence of modern businesses on their IT infrastructures, the choice of IT support company can make a substantial impact on business processes. In this post, we outline 10 important questions you need to ask when choosing from a list of candidates.

Cloud apps move fast, we all know that. It can be tedious to keep up with non-stop changes to cloud app portfolios, and Microsoft’s Office 365 is possibly one of the worst offenders. There are benefits, of course; it’s hard to complain about new app features that are added at no extra charge.

However, it can be challenging when tech companies re-appropriate brands that make sense in their existing format. We all know Office 365, but what exactly is Microsoft 365 and why should you bother?

It’s a no-brainer. Acquire the solution that is the only solution available. Especially if you have the budget for it and its benefits are crucial to your business. However, what if there are two or more equally attractive options? Oftentimes, the options belong to one of two camps - open source and proprietary. Which one is best for your business?

It’s important to identify the advantages of each camp before you start choosing, because a lot of the problems you can encounter later on are simply due to misconceptions about these two families of software.

There are now many grey areas in the market. For example, a proprietary solution also exposes a substantial, but not total, part of its source code to the public. In this article, we’ll only be focusing our discussions on traditional open source solutions and traditional proprietary solutions.

Password security is a major issue that no business or enterprise can ignore. Countless hacking attempts succeed due to inadequate password security. However, remembering all those strong and (hopefully) unique passwords can be tedious, to say the least. Are password managers an alternative? Let’s take a look.

All businesses suffer when their IT systems fail. The catastrophic fallout can result in considerable income loss and comprehensive damage to reputation. Customer confidence is a precious commodity, and it will evaporate in light of an IT system failure.

Curing the symptoms of an IT failure is possible, but also time-consuming and expensive. A systems outage of even a few hours could result in months' worth of lost earnings. How much value do you place on your brand image? Your brand will suffer considerably in light of a system failure.

Organisations now have access to more data than ever, but most are only able to use a fraction of this data, leaving a virtual goldmine of information resource untapped.  What companies don’t realise is that being able to harness this data effectively can yield business information that will prove valuable to the organisation.

The challenge is to extract relevant insights from the various forms and sources of big data which inundate enterprises on a daily, even hourly, basis. The key to meeting this challenge is Big data analytics.

Medium to large operations face a tough decision when choosing how to provision IT support, either  internally or by means of an outsourced provider . Both routes carry costs, benefits and disadvantages.

The stand-out benefits of IT outsourcing

After many years of providing outsourced IT support to countless businesses, HTL has come to see the specific areas of a business which benefit most from outsourced support, and why outsourcing is often the better choice. As a result, we think you should evaluate these five benefits when considering outsourced IT support.