Shadow IT is the practice of using technology within a business without the knowledge or approval of the IT function.
This includes anything from a single employee using a low-cost app, to an entire department, such as Project Management, adopting a cloud software application to support its Line of Business (LoB).
When you enter into a managed services agreement with an IT support provider, you’re likely driven by the potential cost savings, particularly in terms of labour costs. What you probably don’t realise is that, in addition to helping you save on costs, an IT support provider can actually play a very critical role in the success of your business.
At HTL Support, we aim to offer professional IT support services with a difference. The foundation stone of our business is to employ expert technology support technicians with good people skills. Our friendly IT Guys take the hassle out of supporting IT issues so you can get on with the thing you most desire - running your business and practicing what you do best in servicing your customers or clients.
‘’Cloud Computing’’ could be akin to a tech buzzword that has been around for years. However, unless they have been living under a digital rock, accounting firms will be aware that cloud computing has finally moved from just another buzzword to a real tool for businesses.
According to a report by Intuit, almost 80 percent of U.S. small businesses will be fully adapted to cloud computing by 2020 with an increasing number of respondents currently using it or planning to within the next two years.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.