An IT Support Blog from London

Given the fast pace with which the digital world is evolving coupled with the constant pressure to improve efficiency, productivity, revenue, and data security, it’s no surprise that many organisations struggle with IT-related functions. IT environments are increasingly becoming more sophisticated, but not all companies have the necessary IT talent to manage and maintain these environments. Fortunately, enterprises are increasingly recognising the importance of outsourcing business IT support functions. It's the only logical solution to tame the proverbial “IT beast”.

This article highlights eight essential IT services that external providers can effectively handle. From the intricacies of cybersecurity and cloud management to the essentials of help desk support and disaster recovery preparation, a deeper understanding of these services enables organisations to make strategic planning in resource allocation.

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.

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.

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.

With the speed with which technology evolves these days, IT hardware is phased out much faster than organisations would prefer. Servers, routers, and console managers—all part of a data center’s infrastructure, need to be working efficiently at all times to ensure continued business operations.

No equipment is expected to last forever, though. Regardless of how good the quality of your equipment is, how diligently you’ve maintained it with IT support London services (for UK-based enterprises), or how well it fits with the rest of your network, there will come a time when your device will reach this stage of its IT lifecycle—the End-of-Service Life (EOSL).

Data has become a highly-prized asset in today’s business environment, and the data centres that store all the valuable information have thus, moved far past being mere storage facilities to becoming key business resources. Managing and maintaining a data centre however, is a multifaceted process that requires the right people, skills, and tools.

What makes managing a data centre more complex is the fact that the modern version of it is no longer just the rows of neatly-stacked on-premise IT infrastructure as they are often represented in stock images. Instead, the data centre now has extended beyond traditional boundaries and could be spread across multiple physical sites, colocations, and the cloud.

In this post, we discuss five key best practices that data centre administrators can implement to ensure that their IT infrastructure is operating at peak efficiency.

As one of the key underlying technologies that enable cloud computing, virtualisation is largely responsible for many of the innovations and digital transformations in businesses over the last two decades. While you can certainly leverage virtualisation through cloud computing, you can also gain substantial benefits if you choose to use virtualisation directly, i.e., in your on-premises data center. Here are 6 ways you can do that.

The world continues to grapple with the long term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and organisations are compelled to sustain remote working arrangements for their employees. In the haste to quickly adapt to the new and evolving work environment however, it appears that one essential concern has taken a back seat: security.

IT company Hewlett-Packard recently released Blurred Lines & Blindspots—a comprehensive global study assessing organisational cyber risk in today’s remote working era, and in it, a number of worrying, albeit unsurprising, findings were revealed. Of the over 8,000 office workers surveyed:

Technology has always moved rapidly –even more so in today’s cloud-centric world where the next major feature is an automatic update away. Needless to say, the companies that can make the most of the technology available to them are likely to enjoy a competitive advantage over their peers.

How can businesses stay ahead of the technology curve – making maximum use of the technology available to them, while ensuring that competitors never gain a competitive advantage due to their greater ability to harness the latest technology? Let’s take a look.

The start of a new year always brings with it the impulse to make sweeping changes around us. This often involves getting rid of things we would now classify as unusable and other stuff that have simply lost their appeal—an activity commonly referred to as decluttering.

Businesses in particular, would significantly benefit from this as it could potentially free up some office workspace and eliminate unnecessary tasks. And now that many of business activities and employees’ functions revolve around the use of technology, a digital decluttering has become as important as a physical one.

Performing a digital declutter within the organisation may simply require a few straightforward processes to be initiated by the users themselves, or may necessitate the intervention of the inhouse IT team or professional IT services. That said, here are six surefire ways to digitally declutter your company: