An IT Support Blog from London

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.

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.

The year 2018 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.

2019 is shaping up to be a year in which 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.

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?

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:

HTL Support is always working towards improving the service offered to clients. Whether it's through our specialist IT knowledge or just the way in which we interact with customers, there are always lessons to be learned. One of the best ways we find to hone our skills is to get out there and meet clients face to face.

One such opportunity to do that very thing, which we like to make the most of whenever possible, is to visit industry shows. This is exactly what we did on the 16th and 17th of May this year when we visited the Business Show!

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.

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.