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.

Video conferencing has been affordable for companies large and small for many years, yet many businesses have not wholeheartedly adopted collaboration by video. Though it is estimated that 64% of companies already use video conferencing for meetings, many operations skip video collaboration altogether, despite the rapid growth in the number of people working from home, including in the UK.

If your company relies solely on phone calls, IM and emails to communicate, it is worth taking a step back and considering the benefits of video conferencing. Keep reading as we outline the benefits of video conferencing, and the video collaboration options available for your business.

It’s a decades-old question that businesses continue to ask: should we outsource our IT? What benefits can a managed service provider (MSP) bring to our business, and are managed services cost effective? The ideal option varies from business to business, but the strong growth trend for managed services provision indicates an increased willingness among businesses to utilise managed services. Why? Let’s look at some of the primary benefits of MSPs.

Only two months left before GDPR is implemented any eligible organisation not following the regulations could suffer colossal penalties, as much as four percent of the company's annual turnover or 20,000,000 Euro’s whichever is the Greater!

Does GDPR applies to you?

Only half of UK businesses are even aware of GDPR, whilst a solitary three percent are prepared for the upcoming Cut-off date. Many large organisations such as eBay, Yahoo and Adobe have had data breaches. Therefore many companies assume that the new regulations only apply to companies dealing with personal data -unfortunately this is not the case!

HTL Support's Business Briefing event on 23 February was a resounding success and offered delegates real insight into the EU General Data Protection Regulation legislation and its likely effects on the IT sector. Demand for the event was far in excess of available places and is an indication of just how relevant the impact of GDPR is to anyone working in IT.

Do we keep our IT services in-house, or do we outsource IT responsibilities? That is the question many management teams ask themselves when they look at the benefits of managed IT services. Outsourcing IT services save costs, introduces new knowledge and helps businesses focus. However fully outsourcing IT functions is not the best route for every organisation, and there are pros and cons to each approach. But how about opting for a mixed model?