An IT Support Blog from London

HTL Support lets clients get on with what they do best

At HTL Support, we aim to offer professional IT support services with a difference. The foundation stone of our business is to employ expert technology support technicians with good people skills. Our friendly IT Guys take the hassle out of supporting IT issues so you can get on with the thing you most desire - running your business and practicing what you do best in servicing your customers or clients.

Benefits of Adopting Cloud Technology for Accounting Firms

‘’Cloud Computing’’ could be akin to a tech buzzword that has been around for years. However, unless they have been living under a digital rock, accounting firms will be aware that cloud computing has finally moved from just another buzzword to a real tool for businesses.

According to a report by Intuit, almost 80 percent of U.S. small businesses will be fully adapted to cloud computing by 2020 with an increasing number of respondents currently using it or planning to within the next two years.

An existential threat with authorities behind the curve

The National Crime Agency didn’t pull any punches in the report Cyber Crime Assessment 2016, published by its Strategic Cyber Industry Group. The Executive Summary warned of “an existential threat to one or more major UK businesses” and that “criminal cyber capability development currently outpaces the UK’s collective response to cyber crime.”

Is IT security in your firm where it needs to be?

IT security is near the top of the agenda for every executive management team. Although IT is not something executive managers are likely to get hands-on with and is best left to qualified practitioners, there are simple spot-checks that executive leaders can make to see if basic security is being implemented.

Hosted Desktop is Now available to firms with heavy graphics demands.

Hosted desktop offers significant benefits to businesses of all types and sizes. Business applications are in the cloud, hosted on our servers in the data centre. Using laptops, PCs, tablets or thin clients, each user’s computing desktop is delivered through a business-class Internet connection.

Privacy Shield a more formal compliance framework

The ‘borderless’ internet has created legal problems for nation-states across the globe. Tax laws have brought all sorts of problems for international businesses as well as tax authorities and governments.

The laws on privacy are no less challenging. In the UK, the Data Protection Act, as enforced by the ICO, has been the cornerstone of safeguarding privacy. International standards are bounded by Privacy Shield and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

It is an area of some confusion. Here we help to untangle it with some key facts about Privacy Shield and GDPR.

An ideal time to catch up and set out a review

Many firms experience a pre-Christmas rush of finishing off work and projects in early and mid-December. For items in the workflow that are on-going, there is often a sense of ‘parking’ them over the Christmas - New Year transition period until the return to work in January. Many businesses are likely to have reduced workload and staffing numbers.

Throwing off conventional thinking to re-imagine the IT manager role

In conventional patterns of thinking about jobs within businesses of 10 - 100 people, the role of IT manager is seen as the go-to person for anything related to technology.

Across an infrastructure demanding provision of business technology tools to a workforce of varying degrees of technological competence, this might include anything from a broken mouse to troubleshooting software server problems.

Shadow IT: Questionable practice in a business context

The vast majority of computer users routinely use cloud services of some description. Whether it’s a Gmail account or a file transfer service, almost all of us use free cloud-based tools. This might be OK for personal use, however, in a business context, such an approach is highly questionable. Why?

Insider threats: An unsavoury but unavoidable truth

When it comes to productivity and information security, insider threats are perhaps some of the most unsavoury considerations for a firm. Any business owner or senior executive would prefer to think they can implicitly trust the people that they pay but, unfortunately, it simply isn’t possible to ignore the risk of employee misbehaviour.

User Activity Monitoring (UAM) is a process that is enabled by productivity monitoring software, PMS. These applications are designed to track and record every action performed by a user. The software outputs a log file in plain English (rather than technobabble) and a video file that enables the firm to view each user’s onscreen actions.