Working remotely is an increasing trend, with many enterprises tapping into the cost-saving benefits of remote working while employees enjoy the freedom that remote working brings. That said, remote working is still evolving, and in most companies, there is room for improvement.

According to an HR News survey, 53% of UK employees do not think that their employers are doing enough to accommodate the needs of remote workers. The solution lies partly in the managerial approach, and in part in the deployment of technology. In this article, we will cover eight tech-led approaches that can boost the collaborative experience for remote workers.

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?

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.

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.