Monday 01 February 2010
Into the Cloud
The rise in the excitement surrounding cloud computing over the past year or so has prompted business owners to review how their data is stored. More companies are happy to send their data to a new home in the cloud, wherever that might be.
Cloud computing is rapidly gaining momentum and becoming more readily accepted by others than the IT specialists. Cloud computing service providers deliver business programmes online, while the software and all the company’s data are stored on remote servers.
In the business world usage of this technology is predicted to grow rapidly. Estimates vary but experts say that the growth in this sector will be tenfold by 2013.
The benefits to businesses are the availability of flexible and low cost IT. Cloud computing is particularly attractive to new entrants in the market as the economic difficulties of the last two years has brought its financial advantages to the fore. Business owners can see the benefits of removing the need to invest capital in on site structures.
If you go down this route you need to be happy that your data is as secure as it would be on your own premises. If outsourcing some of your data or putting into the cloud, you should go and find out what security measures the service provider has put in place.
As soon as a company’s data leaves the confines of its own IT structure, the potential is there for it to get into the wrong hands. So you need to introduce an element of the real world to gain a level of comfort and confidence that your data is secure. Just as with any outsourced service, you need to trust the people that are handling your business. At the end of the day, if data gets lost it is still your responsibility and liability.
So weigh up the financial benefits of being able to save a lot of capital expenditure in developing your own infrastructure, against the loss of your close control. Are you a worrier?
You will always reap the benefits of emerging technology and innovation if you have justifiable faith in the service providers.
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Friday 22 January 2010
SideWiki – is it Open Warfare? Asks Stuart Wilkin
There’s been a bit of a scare in the PR industry, ever since Google launched its Sidewiki technology at the end of last year. The application allows members of the public to post a comment in a browser window directly next to a brand’s website. And so marketing and PR professionals face another challenge as they strive to manage the brand reputation of their clients.
So far things have been relatively quiet, but how long before open warfare breaks out. There are some rules. The targeted website can flag illegal or abusive content using a ‘Report Abuse’ button. But other than that you can’t edit or delete users’ opinions.
Brand managers have used social media to promote their businesses, but now things are anything but one way. And subversive comments directly next to a company’s website could dilute the site’s credibility and, in the worst case, drive customers away.
There may be some amusing banter appearing next to football clubs’ websites in due course, but is this new application rendering PR agencies a little less potent? You can use it to you advantage by persuading happy customers to post warm comments.
The long term impact may be just a reminder that you always need your business to have substance behind the spinning words. If you have a good product and give your customers excellent service they’ll buy from you anyway. Concentrate on that.
And if you interact regularly with your customers, surely new and nimble threats like this will be less of a worry. After all, websites in 2010 should be about two way communication. You don’t need to be scared of people telling you what they think.
But if we all stoop to the temptation of posting comments on competitors’ websites then we will be hurtling headlong into the Wild West. And then watch the PR people run for cover!
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Tuesday 12 January 2010
It's snow joke
With this bad weather preventing access to work places accross the UK it struck me how badly prepared many businesses are for these types of situations. Many business will have had no access to their voice based communications systems when the were excluded from their offices.
Luckily for us we decided to practice what we preach & recently installed our web based IVR system on our non geographic number. Our engineers were able to "dial in" from their mobile phones & receive calls from the office number as if they were sat in the office. All this was done from the internet with no access to the office. This also gives us redundancy should our phone system or phones lines have an outage.
In a lot of cases business are using a single circuit & are relying on geographic numbers to provide voice communications into their organisation. This is a frightening prospect - despite email being the most popular form of communication voice is still hugely important and should therefore require some form of continuity.
Harry Edwards,
Managing Director
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Thursday 19 November 2009
A Website's Not Just For Christmas, writes Stuart Wilkin
Children are guilty of it. They rush around with the verve and direction of a puppy on steroids, determined to show anyone and everyone their sparkling new toy. And then, by around the 15th January, it’s consigned to the big box on top of the wardrobe that holds Buzz Lightyear, ‘My First Scalextric’ and more of last year’s technology, never to be vaunted again.
But then children are young, easily distracted and fickle, and until we destroy the most precious gift of childhood, not knowing how much anything costs, you can’t really blame them for loving each new toy for about the time it takes one of our more numb footballers to go without setting fire to a fifty pound note.
Children and footballers have their excuses, but we don’t. Everybody loves a revamped website, for about two weeks. And then the pressures of business take their toll and we concentrate on actions that make money, forgetting how much we’ve spent on the website until the invoice arrives.
These days if you’re not online you’re nowhere. But you want to increase the traffic to your website and then turn traffic into sales. People need a reason to return to your website, and without a reason they’ll simply forget about it.
So when you have a shiny new site, make sure that the IT guy isn’t the only soul interested in it. Engage more of your team, because the more people who can take care of the site, the more vibrant it will become. Like any vital part of your business, ongoing maintenance is crucial. A good content management system isn’t cost prohibitive any more, and you need to constantly refresh your content to rise up the search engine listings.
If your customers aren’t interested in returning to your website because it never changes, then Google probably won’t be interested either. So it becomes something of a spiral of malaise - less visitors and less visitors returning.
So show your website the same love and attention that you gave to your Cindy doll all those years ago. You might find that the love is returned in the shape of business!
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Wednesday 07 October 2009
Cyber Slacking – Maybe the Aussies have got it right, writes Stuart Wilkin
There have been many miles of column inches devoted to cyber slacking, ever since an office worker in Slough was caught with his pants down in 1998. And whether it’s online shopping, keeping abreast of the footy news (have Manchester City signed Peter Andre yet?) or the myriad of social networking sites, the time can simply fly by.
So discussions between finance directors and the IT crowd have latterly been dominated by the question of how much is this costing us and how can we persuade the shirkers to work?
The land of the free across to pond has become largely hysterical, as is often the case when money’s involved. In the US you can use any one of a number of online services to calculate how much cash you’re leaking by the hour. Apparently, a company with 100 internet users could lose up to $4m in productivity annually from just an hour of daily web surfing. And I thought lunch was for wimps over there. And another site shrieks: ‘non-work related surfing results in up to 40 per cent loss in productivity a year,” AAAAGH!
But before you come over all draconian and buy a web filtering application that electrocutes your PA the minute he or she types faceb… there is another school of thought that’s gathering momentum.
The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that employees who regularly shop online or have a look at Twitter during office hours could actually be boosting their productivity. Trust the Australians (‘I think we’ve overdone it on the sherry’) to champion this cause. But a boffin at Melbourne University has discovered that workers who surf the internet for leisure are more productive than those who don’t. Now before you say ‘that’s obviously because those who don’t surf can’t switch their workstation on’ the academic has done his homework.
Studying 300 employees he found that those who engaged in searching the internet for fun at work, for less than 20 per cent of their working day, were nine per cent more productive than those who didn’t. What the hell were the other’s doing?
Let’s not worry too much about that. The point is that checking your personal emails at the office or researching for your next holiday makes staff happier, and in turn more productive. And there’s a lot to be said for keeping your good people happy.
So there’s an element of compromise to be made. On the one hand, you need to get the work done, but you have to maintain a happy and energised workforce. A web filtering service that screens objectionable sites but allows leisure surfing at certain times in the day will show respect for your employees while keeping the personal activity within the 20 per cent target. And it’s probably no where near as expensive as you might think.
In days gone by, at times of pressure, good managers would encourage their people to go outside and take a walk for half an hour to clear their head. Now you don’t even need to get off your seat to relax.
Of course obesity is another question altogether.
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Tuesday 29 September 2009
Is There a Ghost (or a Worm) in your machine? Asks Stuart Wilkin
Question …. Would you rather have swine flu or a Conficker worm? And you only have ten seconds to answer.
I bet you said swine flu. And that’s not to underestimate the miserable and debilitating virus that hit the headlines, curiously around the same time as the MPs expenses farce in early summer. Swine flu, hippopotamus flu or any kind of flu is bad news. But for those of us who aren’t in the IT crowd the Conficker worm somehow sounds more menacing. We’re not absolutely sure what the consequences of having one would be. But we don’t particularly want to find out.
The worm, first detected in November last year, spreads rapidly to computers through a flaw in the Windows operating system. And while things seemed to go a little quiet over the summer (a bit like swine flu) the brightest minds in technology are facing up to defeat by the Conficker worm which has infected more than 5 million computers already.
At the moment, the worm is in waiting, but once the hackers issue instructions it could turn quite vicious in an instant.
Now Microsoft has offered a $US250,000 reward for information leading to the identification of the individuals behind the virus.
With any potential threat to your IT security the key is to know where your weak points are. And social media sites, with unregulated content, and in some offices unregulated usage are the latest targets. A worm can crack into a Facebook account and send a message to anyone on the user’s friends list.
And it's a message a colleague would be certain to open since it comes from a trusted friend – and hey ho – they’re infected, with the risk that everything they do from hereon will show up on the hacker’s computer.
If you do get an infection - the potential downtime, the hassle factor and real risk of fraud will likely be more of an interruption to your business than a bout of flu.
But even now too few people have top-notch, up-to-date security software. IT experts are advising clients to undertake 360 degree unified threat management, incorporating a managed web filtering service. If you watertight the web browsing in your office at every entry point you can start to feel more secure.
The tried and tested housekeeping practices like backing up your hard drives and only opening attachments from known sources still hold true. But as technology advances so do the worms and you now at least need someone to tell you if you click on a ‘bad website’.
Unless you operate a 360 degree protection policy you are pretty much an open door to infection. And prevention is almost always better than the cure.
Put it this way. Working in a multi station office with a bog standard anti virus system is rather like an eighty year old warding off flu with a Werther’s Original. It might work but why take the chance?
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Thursday 24 September 2009
When cash is tight slashing your IT budget is a false economy, writes Stuart Wilkin
If you’re old enough to remember the last recession in 1991, you’ll also remember that it was relatively gentle. Comparisons are difficult; after all it was an entirely different time. The Spice Girls were still at school (apart from the ginger one) and the nearest thing to reality TV was the Generation Game.
In the business world there was no banking sector meltdown, no iconic images of bankers carrying the contents of their desks out of the London office of the doomed Lehmans Brothers bank, and at that time Alastair Darling’s hair probably matched his eyebrows.
We all just cut our cloth and carried on.
In the nineties finance directors knew where to squeeze when times were hard – training, marketing and IT. Ten years ago IT still wasn’t seen as an essential business tool. But forward thinking businesses now recognise that protecting their IT budget and building a strong infrastructure will help to drive efficiencies in all other areas of the operation.
Cutting your budget on IT now and then playing catch up when things improve just won’t work. Research in the US found that twenty five per cent of companies said they would put up with lower network performance, because budget restrictions slowed investment in IT systems and support. The study also showed that these were the same businesses that typically underperformed compared to their peers.
IT investment should be driven by sound business reasons that can justify the expense, and be targeted at ways of improving efficiency.
Many businesses have legacy infrastructures and new technology tends to be smaller and has less need for cooling. With energy costs increasing as they have, efficiency in this area merits attention.
And a managed IP service that enables telephones and PCs to be switched off when not in use will make savings overnight.
Poor IT can result in reduced productivity, wasteful expense and risk of fraud.
But if you want The Birdie Song to be on the radio, Graham Taylor to be the England Football Manager and a sidecar to carry your mobile phone then cutting your IT budget is for you.
And don’t forget training and marketing while you’re at it.
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Sunday 02 August 2009
Focus IT customers save on electricity bills
Our management system is enabling us to actually cut our clients electricity bills. As well as cost saving this is also doing wonders for our green credentials! We'll go into more detail soon.
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Sunday 02 August 2009
Green Bragging rights for Alcatel Lucent
According to Alcatel the lower power consumption of these managed switches would give an ROI of two years when compared to a basic non managed switch..... buy a decent managed switch and save the planet!
"In a test conducted by Network World, Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 6850 came out top for the lowest power consumption when idle and joint third for power consumption when fully loaded. When idle, the OmniSwitch 6850 used just 79 watts, outclassing the competition and saving money for customers on their ever increasing electricity bills. According to Network World, who provides information, intelligence and insight for network and IT executives, the test results give Alcatel-Lucent ‘green bragging rights’ for its product."
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Friday 31 July 2009
Why are Businesses prepared to stick with antiquated break fix IT services?
Many IT support companies claim to have a proactive approach to delivering IT services. But does that mean logging on to servers once in a while to check the event logs? Or manually checking the virus pattern date by eye? Some help is better than no help, but in truth any business employing ad hoc IT services is running a big risk of a major IT disaster.
At Focus IT, making the shift away from "break-fix" IT services is easily the best decision we have ever made. No more running around with heads buried in the sand (if that's physically possible) and blissfully unaware of whatever IT disaster might be lurking round the corner. The visibility we have gained is truly ground breaking. We can now predict a physical disk failure before it happens.
With our Managed IT Services Portfolio gaining momentum and adding new features every day we have the time to deliver what clients really want and, importantly, give them complete peace of mind. So back to my original question - why are some businesses prepared to stick with antiquated break fix services?
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Monday 27 July 2009
Focus IT welcomes Shaw Austin....
Shaw Auston is a firm of Chartered Accountants and Business Consultants, based in Chester, providing accountancy, taxation and business services to a wide range of small and medium sized businesses throughout the UK.
We are delighted and proud to be proactively managing Shaw Auston's IT infrastructure and providing managed backup services.
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Sunday 26 July 2009
Managing Director, Harry Edwards, joins the CIS
The Centre for Internet Security (CIS) is a not-for-profit organization that helps enterprises reduce the risk of business disruptions resulting from inadequate technical security controls. The CIS provides enterprises with resources for measuring information security status and making rational security investment decisions.
We have joined the CIS primarily to increase our overall awareness of the kind of hardening standards required by clients who are aiming for PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards) compliancy. As well as this it gives us an even more detailed insight into security and procedures operated by the strongest businesses.
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Saturday 25 July 2009
Welcome to the new focus IT Blog
We have a new name, Focus IT, which reflects our approach. We focus on making sure our clients IT systems are performing 24x7 so they can concentrate on running their businesses.
As well as perfecting our portfolio of Managed IT services and choosing our new name, we have also had our website refreshed and brand developed by those clever folks at Axon Garside.
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Most viewed
2. SideWiki – is it Open Warfare? Asks Stuart Wilkin
4. A Website's Not Just For Christmas, writes Stuart Wilkin
5. Cyber Slacking – Maybe the Aussies have got it right, writes Stuart Wilkin
6. Is There a Ghost (or a Worm) in your machine? Asks Stuart Wilkin
7. When cash is tight slashing your IT budget is a false economy, writes Stuart Wilkin
8. Green Bragging rights for Alcatel Lucent
9. Focus IT customers save on electricity bills
10. Why are Businesses prepared to stick with antiquated break fix IT services?
11. Focus IT welcomes Shaw Austin....
12. Managing Director, Harry Edwards, joins the CIS
13. Welcome to the new focus IT Blog
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Blog archive
- SideWiki – is it Open Warfare? Asks Stuart Wilkin
- July (4)
- Why are Businesses prepared to stick with antiquated break fix IT services?
- Focus IT welcomes Shaw Austin....
- Managing Director, Harry Edwards, joins the CIS
- Welcome to the new focus IT Blog
- Focus IT customers save on electricity bills
- Green Bragging rights for Alcatel Lucent
- Is There a Ghost (or a Worm) in your machine? Asks Stuart Wilkin
- When cash is tight slashing your IT budget is a false economy, writes Stuart Wilkin
- Cyber Slacking – Maybe the Aussies have got it right, writes Stuart Wilkin
- A Website's Not Just For Christmas, writes Stuart Wilkin
