An IT Support Blog from London

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.

Now that most organisations are all caught up and aboard the cloud computing train, the focus has now shifted to discovering and unlocking the promised value of the cloud. While the cloud’s elasticity and agility have provided enterprise-grade IT infrastructure to smaller businesses without incurring heavy capital expenditures, it has also led to significant waste of resources and difficulty in controlling cloud spending.

A McKinsey Digital article reveals that a whopping 80% of companies find it challenging to manage cloud spend. Further, the Anodot 2022 State of Cloud Cost survey reports that 49% of businesses struggle with cloud costs. This scenario is certainly not what enterprises anticipated when they decided to embark on the cloud journey. Fortunately, there’s a sound approach to managing costs so you can maximise your cloud solutions; it’s called cloud cost optimisation.

For years now, firewalls have been considered as one of the critical pieces of an organisation’s IT security infrastructure. The importance of firewall security has become even more apparent as the world further advances into digital technologies, and this is why firewalls are evolving in features and functionality and its market is growing at a fast pace.

In this blog post, we discuss the important considerations to keep in mind when choosing a firewall for your enterprise. But to start with, it’s best to refresh our basic knowledge.

If your organisation has migrated to the cloud, then good for you. Depending on the extent of your utilisation of cloud solutions, you would have already saved your business valuable time, manpower, and money. As enterprises may discover at some point, however, there are also some challenges to embracing cloud computing. One of these is to understand exactly where your cloud spend is going. To avoid inefficiency and wastefulness, it’s important to use cloud resources in the right way by applying cloud cost optimisation.

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.

Today more than ever, enterprises need to invest in a computing infrastructure that can ably secure data and other high-risk assets, keep applications and workloads running, and in general, ensure maximum operational efficiency. Part of the upkeep needed for IT infrastructure and data center hardware is equipment maintenance.

For servers, routers, and other storage and networking equipment that are 3 years old at most, technical support can be easily had from the devices’ original equipment manufacturers (OEM) such as HPE, IBM, Dell EMC, NetApp, Cisco, and other mainstream suppliers. However, for organisations needing to maintain older equipment and/or a disparate collection of devices, third-party maintenance (TPM) services would prove to be a more feasible alternative.

As organisations evolve, so do their IT infrastructure needs. Whether it’s due to organisational expansion (merger/acquisition), launching of a new application, physical relocation of a company, the need for faster connectivity, or any other reason, it may come to a point when the enterprise’s current data solutions will no longer suffice. This is when a data center migration would have to be seriously considered.

Now more than ever, business organisations are using technology for a variety of reasons: maintaining operational efficiency, keeping cybersecurity threats at bay, harnessing the value of data, adapting to the evolving workforce, and many more. This means that companies have to ensure that their IT systems and equipment are working as they should at all times.

As technology requirements grow however, the task of keeping everything together—from IT infrastructure to applications to end user devices, is challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises. Most businesses barely have the budget for a dedicated tech personnel, let alone an entire IT team. The good thing is that even if you don’t have a dedicated IT department, you can benefit from the technical expertise and services of one with the help of a managed service provider.