An IT Support Blog from London

Artificial intelligence has been growing in leaps and bounds in the last decade, making processes easier and bringing about significant changes in almost every industry. It’s not surprising that the AI global market is expected to hit US$ 1.8 trillion by 2030, from just US$ 136 billion in 2022. Now while most of us have had some experience with AI-assisted online shopping and have definitely heard of autonomous vehicles—some of the most well-known applications of AI, there’s a lot more out there.

A recently-introduced AI-powered technology has created such a huge impact across many fields, with social media feeds inundated by reviews and potential use cases of this tool. We’re talking about OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In this post, we discuss what it is and how it works, why it’s gaining a lot of attention, and how it can be relevant to your business.

No organisation today can function without technology. Gone is the traditional office environment and with it, the tons of paperwork, adding machines, airmail envelopes, and the trusty old landline. Even in-person meetings and physical reporting for work have become optional. What has become indispensable in the modern workplace instead, is the assortment of IT devices—servers, desktops, laptops, connectivity devices, smartphones, etc., as well as IT services and applications for every business process.

An enterprise’s IT hardware and software components however are only as good as their capacity to function effectively, and the users’ collective ability to utilise them. Consider the potential loss of opportunity for instance, if an ecommerce website experienced downtime for even a few hours. Or think about the employees’ wasted time if they are unable to use their PCs or access their work applications due to some technical issue. This is where the value of IT support is most apparent.

With cybersecurity, you really don’t know what to prepare for. Organisations think they’ve got everything covered, then something comes completely out of left field. No wonder the ongoing battle in the online security field is sometimes referred to as a cat and mouse game—the black hat malicious actors are busy discovering vulnerabilities in IT systems, and the white hat defenders are scrambling to counter the threats.

Undergoing a digital transformation (DX) has been a top business objective for many organisations over the last decade. With the availability of a wide range of technological tools and processes these days, it’s only natural for companies to want to leverage these tools to promote business growth. Despite the efforts, investment, and time that enterprises channel into a digital strategy however, the reality is that a good portion of digital transformation projects fail.

There are many factors that can contribute to DX failure. In this post, we discuss the 5 key reasons why success could be out of reach, and how you can counter these challenges so your company can forge a better path. But first what is digital transformation?

Threats to organisations continue to grow according to a report by Netherlands-based Surfshark. Based on the VPN company’s findings, 108.9 million accounts experienced data breaches in the 3rd of 2022—a whopping 70% surge on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

The continuing rise in successful attacks despite the availability of tools that can help monitor incoming threats may be attributed to the lack of cybersecurity incident management. This means that security alerts that could have effectively warned against impending risks were left unattended, leaving enterprises vulnerable.

As we go further into the technological age, cybersecurity has become an integral part of the discussion in every boardroom, data centre, office, and just about any place where digital assets reside. One of the latest (and perhaps the most effective as well) strategies to be added to the IT security arsenal of cyber experts is Zero Trust.

One of the few positive things to have come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has helped organisations recognise that it’s possible to have employees work from home successfully. In fact, remote working may have brought on enough benefits for enterprises to consider making it a more permanent arrangement under the new normal.

The rise of virtual computing environments and the constant challenge to lower operating costs have spurred the demand for thin clients. From its current 2022 valuation of USD 1.19 billion, the global thin client market is expected to reach USD 1.32 billion by 2030, or an annual growth rate of 2.8%.

What has further aided the increased usage of thin clients is the advancement of technologies such as faster broadband networks, more powerful servers, cheaper storage, and a host of cloud solutions to cater to the enterprise’s every need. In this blog post, we discuss what a thin client is, what its advantages are, and the use cases that would make it better over the PC.

As we head further into the digital era, the need for cyber security has never been more apparent. Organisations are moving many of their business applications and data into the cloud, making the cloud a prime target for cyber criminals and threat actors. If you’re not yet paying extra attention to your cloud security, then it’s high time you did.

Cloud Security Defined

Cloud security is a discipline of cybersecurity that focuses primarily on protecting the cloud. Also referred to as cloud computing security, it is the collection of security policies, guidelines, procedures and technologies designed to work together to secure cloud-based applications and systems.

Enterprises of all sizes are now paying more attention to cloud security with the increased reliance on a cloud environment. Not only are business data, customer information, and other valuable data assets being entrusted to cloud storage, but the ‘attack surface’ of cyber threats has also significantly expanded with employees using a variety of smart devices as they work from anywhere.

The adoption of remote work has never been as rushed as in the last couple of years, fueled by the global crisis that was COVID-19 and the movement limitations it brought about. Amidst all the adjustments that businesses have had to make to cope with the situation, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and related cloud solutions paved the way in helping organisations successfully shift to a remote workforce.