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.

Data breaches can result in dire financial repercussions for any organisation that has to deal with sensitive data, whether that be personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), payment details, or other similar data. Depending on the number of records compromised, the costs range anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The latest Ponemon study, sponsored by IBM and released in July 2018, calculates the full cost of “mega breaches” (involving more than 1 million lost records) to be $350 million. This figure takes into account the more evident cyber incident expenses such as those for technical investigation, customer breach notification and credit monitoring, regulatory fines and litigation services, among many others. The organisation would also have to cover the cost of investing additional resources into network security improvements.

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.

In this blog, we’ve covered many of the ins and outs of BYOD (bring your own device), including the pros and cons. In reality, much of the discussion is no longer about whether employees should be allowed to connect to company networks with their own devices, BYOD is simply becoming the standard way of operating.

A study published in 2016 suggested that 59% of businesses allow BYOD, and things have certainly moved along in the intervening years. The only remaining point of discussion is BYOD cybersecurity. In this post, we give you eight top tips to help ensure BYOD does not pose a threat to your business.

A new IT security threat is infecting computers across the globe, and it could be wreaking havoc on your organisation’s devices as you read this post. This malware threat uses a computer’s processing power to mine cryptocurrency, without the knowledge or consent of the owner.

Unauthorised cryptocurrency mining–or cryptojacking, as it is commonly called, is spreading like wildfire. This is not surprising, given how simple it is for cryptojacking scripts to infiltrate a computer. Hackers can initiate it using one of two methods:

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.

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:

The year 2017 was a dismal year for IT security, particularly in the arena of ransomware.

Less than 12 months ago, the ransomware worm WannaCry wreaked havoc across the globe, placing large organisations – including NHS trusts in England and Scotland, at the forefront of one of the most prolific cyber attacks in history. Then followed NotPetya (initially believed to be the Petya malware of 2016) in June, which also spread quickly and, even without the aid of human intervention, managed to harm multinational companies.

Yet more ransomware attacks compromised the data of individuals and organisations, but they were not nearly as high profile as the aforementioned attacks, and this prompted many people to believe that ransomware is no longer the threat that it was twelve months ago. But is this really the case?