An IT Support Blog from London

Creating and maintaining your own blog is very hard work. It entails hours of work thinking of creative titles, working on themes, and producing quality content. Plus, you need to keep your site relevant by updating it with new content regularly, performing SEO, and promoting to new and existing clients through social media. All this takes time and effort.

So imagine then, when someone simply copies the whole of your post and puts it up on their own website. Imitation, as they say, is the greatest form of flattery, and it does feel good to know that another company thinks highly enough of your unique content to use it for their own websites without permission. But clearly, this immoral and unprofessional behaviour is tantamount to theft and can leave the original content creators feeling hard done by. All that work and someone else copy-pastes your articles just like that.

Because your main objective is to grow your business, it can be burdensome when you also need to allocate time to manage your IT assets - even if that can also translate into business benefits. The good news is that there’s a way to grow your business and manage your IT assets without spending much time on the latter. It’s called managed services.

This isn’t an article for explaining what managed services is. We’re assuming you already know what managed services is but are still looking for a good reason to hire one. This post should take care of that. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the major benefits of working with a managed services provider.

Disasters are by definition rare and unpredictable and therefore not front and centre when executives think about day to day operational activities. Yet an information technology disaster can strike any business, and the costs to recover from such an event can be tremendous. As with many risks, the probability of a disaster affecting your company’s information technology infrastructure can be mitigated, and so can the fallout should the worst happen. One of the best ways to reduce the damage is to have a well-designed and tested disaster recovery plan (DRP) in place.

It is not challenging to see the value in Business Intelligence software. The ability to easily and quickly analyse and report on the data captured by your organisation can transform decision-making processes, delivering insight into the way your company functions – and how your customers respond. Yet in the past, many companies were inclined to put aside any efforts to explore BI products.

Though Excel is a capable and ubiquitous tool for analysing data, users need to have a certain level of expertise that is difficult to come by. For most people, complex spreadsheets are simply too arcane. On the flipside, specialist BI tools hosted locally can be expensive to license and maintain. Enter Cloud BI – an affordable, accessible approach to slicing and dicing data.

Technology expenditure is usually taken on in a reluctant manner: few businesses rush forward with adopting the latest technologies, instead deferring IT expenditure for as long as they can. Whether it is updating on-premise servers, migrating to the cloud or overhauling a creaking website – management teams tend to delay spending the funds for as long as possible. But is this wise? Are there hidden costs to squeezing the last bit of usage out of outdated technology?

When businesses embark on cyber security initiatives, one of the things that’s often overlooked is DNS security. Many people forget or simply aren’t aware that a compromised DNS infrastructure (or any critical component of that infrastructure) could potentially lead to considerable downtimes, malware outbreaks, data breaches, and several other forms of cyber incidents.

These things can happen because DNS or the Domain Name System plays a crucial role in almost any user-initiated activity that takes place on the Internet. DNS is in charge of resolving the easily-recognisable names like www.somesite.com or ftp.companyx.com that users enter into their web browsers, email clients, or file transfer clients into the IP addresses (e.g. 200.100.10.10) that computers use to communicate with one another.

Although cloud security is often brought up as a major issue in cloud adoption discussions, there still remain a few misconceptions that need to be corrected and clarified. In order for businesses to make the right steps in securing their cloud-based digital assets, they need to distinguish the myths from the facts. This blog post can help in that regard.

These are some of the basic things you need to understand about cloud security.

The prevalence of firewalls and anti-virus software has closed many of the common attack vectors that cyber criminals use to gain unauthorised access to networks and to bypass online security. For this reason, attacks increasingly rely on fooling users into allowing access to systems: legitimate-looking emails that easily clear the common-sense hurdle can hide malware and well-planned hacking attacks.

Even with the necessary protections in place, it is surprisingly easy to “spoof” an address, with a form field that looks correct in every way; except for the fact that the sender is not who it appears to be. Most users will think twice about opening an attachment sent by an unknown sender, but if the attachment appears to be from a colleague the usual caution is sometimes left by the wayside.

Most businesses make use of cloud services to some degree. Whether it is occasionally dipping into a SaaS application when required or relying on cloud based services for all your computing and storage needs, there is almost always some of your private business data stored in the cloud. This raises questions around who holds ultimate control of data, and the storage location of your data. Surveys illustrate the level of concern: the 2017 McAfee State of The Cloud Survey underlines how only 23% of respondents fully trust public cloud providers to keep their data secure.

When managed correctly, a private cloud can be a worthwhile investment for certain businesses. It comes with almost all the benefits of public clouds minus the data privacy concerns. Of course, not everyone can afford a private cloud, especially the kind that’s built on-premise (i.e. not virtual private clouds offered by CSPs). So who should invest in one?

In this post, we look at some major indicators that denote a company’s suitability for a private cloud investment.