An IT Support Blog from London

Technology is so central to the operations of any organisation of size that, irrespective of field of business, technology has the ability to either drive or impede growth.

For this reason, a continued close match between your business and your IT support company is essential to growing your business. Your support provider must grow, scale, and respond with your organisation.

But how do you know whether the IT outsourcing provider you are currently using can grow alongside your business? We think these are the seven key capabilities you should identify.

Data breaches can be very costly. Costs can include the usual financial consequences such as response and remediation, customer breach notification, litigation expenses, and regulatory fines, but can also include less obvious consequences such as the cost of business disruptions, loss of customer trust, and higher insurance premiums.

Clearly, it’s imperative for businesses to find ways to avoid a data breach, and here is how it can be done.

Start-ups and small businesses are often highly cost-conscious, with a can-do attitude that usually sees the founders becoming involved in a range of non-core activities – including in supporting the IT that helps businesses tick over.

However, as a business grows, owner-managers must realise that it’s impossible to personally service every business requirement, and that experts in their respective fields, such as IT, can deliver so much more.

In this article, we outline how taking steps to outsource IT support can help you grow your business more quickly and more sustainably. Read on to find out why outsourced IT support is an essential step for growing businesses.

Technology is central to your business, but your business may not necessarily be in the business of technology. That’s why you rely on an IT support company to conduct the day to day maintenance of the tech that supports your business.

Over time, however, there may come a need for a change in support providers. Your business may grow, presenting increasingly complex technology needs that your existing supplier cannot cope with. Or, your support company may simply drop the ball too frequently.

What are the signs that your company should consider switching, and how should you go about making this switch? Read on to find out!

Cloud solutions have revolutionised the IT industry because they offer a lot of advantages over locally-hosted computing infrastructures. Therefore, it is no surprise that businesses have evolved their systems to allow them to migrate to a cloud environment.

A cloud-based strategy is far from perfect, however. All cloud computing vendors have, at some point failed, experienced major downtime, and/or been subject to massive DDoS attacks. Dealing with any of these scenarios would have a significant negative impact on any organisation. That’s why it’s time to consider a multi-cloud strategy.

A rapidly growing pool of productivity data is aggregated by Microsoft thanks to the broad adoption of cloud productivity suites. Indeed, Office 365 is leading the field with triple the market share of its closest competitor, G Suite.

Office 365 and the Azure cloud platform is therefore a rich source of information detailing how employees conduct their daily work routine, and this has led Microsoft to launch Workplace Analytics. But who gets access to Workplace Analytics, and can it provide real insights for your business?

When it comes to IT services, many businesses still go for the fix-it-when-it-breaks approach. And why not? They think that getting the services of an IT support company only when a problem actually arises will save them money. But does it really?

If you also think that saving your financial resources for a time when something breaks down is the right way to manage your organisation's IT ecosystem, then it's time for you to know all about reactive and proactive IT support. This should help you to determine which would work best for your business. But first, on to the definitions.

We saw advancements in technology that had never been witnessed. We’re talking about the explosion of voice technology such as Amazon Echo and the Google Assistant; low-code and no-code app development that has paved the way for fast, easy development of custom corporate apps; learning dexterity in robotics; successes in AI and natural language processing (NLP) that allow a machine to complete sentences, as well as other advances. And these breakthroughs are just the tip of the iceberg.

Technology for business and tech, in general, continues to advance, perhaps not as dramatically as before, but it will build on the groundwork already set. Here are the 5 big IT trends that could be hogging the headlines in the next few months.

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.

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.