Shadow IT is the practice of using technology within a business without the knowledge or approval of the IT function.
This includes anything from a single employee using a low-cost app, to an entire department, such as Project Management, adopting a cloud software application to support its Line of Business (LoB).
When you enter into a managed services agreement with an IT support provider, you’re likely driven by the potential cost savings, particularly in terms of labour costs. What you probably don’t realise is that, in addition to helping you save on costs, an IT support provider can actually play a very critical role in the success of your business.
DDoS attacks that force websites to go offline and cripple servers are nothing new, but many of the massive DDoS attacks last year, which also happened to be the biggest in history, had a common characteristic we’ve never seen before. They all originated from hordes of zombified IoT devices, also known as IoT botnets.
Because IoT devices are here to stay, this threat won’t be going away anytime soon. If your network includes websites and other Internet-facing applications, you need to understand what these threats are, how it can impact your business, and what we in the business community can do to protect our IT infrastructures from these types of attacks.
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.
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.
For many years, the IT industry has used the threat of going out of business as a way of compelling businesses to invest in backup and Disaster Recovery solutions. Essentially, there has been more than a little scaremongering about the risk of failing to back up data properly and putting appropriate plans in place for disaster recovery.
The cloud is perhaps the fastest growing technology trend of the last decade. When the world was dealing with the aftermath of the credit crunch and reeling with the blows from The Great Recession, businesses still needed the latest technology tools to ensure they could be competitive.
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.
If we apply maturity modelling to the IT Support function, we are able to produce an effective mapping that overlays the five levels of a traditional maturity model with five different service levels of support.
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.