As I’ve been answering a journalist’s questions this week, I’ve also been thinking about the articles, blogs and presentations that I’ve given over the past three years on the subject of cloud based services.

Ironically, three years ago we were calling them managed hosted services – which we had been doing for about seven years! So has anything actually changed or is it just PR spin?

NSUK began offering remote back-up services to a number of companies who required storage and proper back-up processes that they couldn’t do themselves. Over time we began hosting other services too, like Microsoft Exchange. Now, it’s not uncommon for a customer to hold all the IT services with us.

But one thing has definitely risen in popularity – the accessibility to these services. The likes of Google Apps and Microsoft 365 have brought low cost cloud services to the masses. Whilst it doesn’t offer the same flexibility as our private cloud services can, it could reduce the IT costs for a SME significantly.

Plus as Internet connectivity (even broadband!) is improving in many places, connecting has become far more efficient than when we started ten years ago.

So if you haven’t looked at hosting any of your services yet, you might be missing out and being left behind your competitors. Isn’t it worth a call to find out a bit more about it?

http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2012/03/19/david-cameron-s-road-privatisation-sp

If you don’t want to read through it, the key points are that he believes our Victorian-laid infrastructure may be a bit outdated and it’s having an effect on business. It may cost billions to put right but it’s investment in infrastructure that’s key right now.

And he’s right!

In my personal soap box corner, investing in good communications for your business can only be a good thing.
Whilst the costs for fibre optics are high, there’s a really good reason for that -it’s so much better than those Victorian copper pairs that you are relying on for broadband.

A business fibre ‘leased line’ really is an investment in the same way as is investing in your staff. You don’t just look at what an employee’s salary is to decide if they are going to help your business grow – do you? So why do it with fibre? (and by the way fibre is usually cheaper and less hassle than a member of staff!).

I don’t usually enable the comments feature on my blogs but I’m keen to hear from businesses on this one. Have you recently moved to a fibre line? What difference has it made? Have to looked at the costs but not seen the benefit?

Let us know!

(If you have come here from Twitter, welcome!)

Credit card sized computer built on LINUX costing $25 to encourage an increase in computer programming, which we appear to be losing through schools and Universities. It’s a project supported by Cambridge University.

This morning, at 6am the first batch of 10,000 went on sale and was scooped up in seconds, crashing the website with the number of hits. Fans of the Pi then went onto forums such as Twitter- which also was struggled under the deluge.

But why so much interest?

For me, it was about returning to the skills I learnt on my first BBCMicro home computer and at university. I wanted to see what I and my colleagues could programme. I am also still keen to get hold of some for local schools.  The Raspberry Pi charitable organisation is certainly right that schools don’t go far enough with computing skills. Knowing how to create a formula in Excel is NOT IT. Pupils and students need computers to ‘play’ with, to investigate and problem solve.

I just hope the next batch won’t be too far behind whilst it has the hype.

Apple may lead the technology market in status but to retain our computing skills I’d rather have a Raspberry Pi.

Even when the New York Giants and New England Patriots took the field on Sunday, they weren’t doing battle in soft leather helmets with no face masks. And there certainly wasn’t a spotty teenager on the sideline ladling out water from a tin bucket to quench their thirst after a big play.

So, if the Super Bowl teams have embraced emerging technology, why shouldn’t you?

However deciding between the different strategies can feel like you’re writing the Giants’ Play Book. Should you go for on-premise equipment with support from a third party? Recruit a backfield team of IT professionals? Migrate your services to the cloud or fully out-source with a dedicated hosted platform?

And whilst serious consideration is a must, taking too long a time-out to make the decision can also play into your competitors’ hands or force you into a Hail Mary situation.

But when you get the decision right, you free-up your key staff so that they can work more productively…and then the touchdowns come more easily.

NSUK works on a consultative basis with customers to ensure the right decision is reached for their needs. And sometimes that will mean not taking out services straightaway.

Plus our experienced project management team works closely with customers on their projects to help make a smooth transition during the changeover.

If you are looking to make up the yards in your IT, it’s worth finding out what we’ve got in our game plan that might just help.

In case the American Football terminology is a bit too obscure for you, here’s the link to the NFL official glossary http://www.nfl-360.com/glossary

But for businesses it was mayhem.

Staff that actually came in struggled with traffic tailbacks and crashes on the journeys to and from the office, or braved walking across icy footpaths and treacherous roads, or waited for public transport that hardly ran at all.

Many stayed at home.

An article published in the Daily Telegraph last February reckoned that a fifth of Britain’s workforce stayed at home during the December ‘Big Freeze’ with a loss of business to the country costing about £1.2 billion over the snow-bound period. So whilst many people are preparing themselves with snow shovels and grit. What can your business do to ensure you are not left out in the cold this winter?

Here’s our winter survival kit (and we supply all items if you’re interested!)

Test your systems actually work!
Isn’t hind-sight a great thing?! If only you’d checked last night’s backup actually did what it was supposed to. Do a restore test before you need to. It’s particularly important over the Christmas break when there’s less attention paid to these systems…unless they go horribly wrong!

SSL VPN
Without the need for installation on every machine, SSL VPN’s will provide remote access over a standard web browser allowing remote users with access to Web applications, client/server applications and internal network connections. So if your workers have broadband and a home PC there’s little reason for them to be completely snowed in with nothing to do on a work day!

Two Factor Authentication (2FA)
It sounds more complicated than it really is. It works a bit like your debit/credit cards. They’re something you have (the card) and something you know (your PIN) to enable access to your money. The 2FA token/device provides you with a one-time password to give you access to the systems you are logging into e.g your SSL VPN. Next time you log in you need to provide a new password from your token. There’s more information on our website but in short, it provides an additional level of security making sure those accessing the system are really who they say they are.

Hosted services/outsourced IT
This is increasingly becoming the main-stay of the Net Support portfolio. The press like to use the ‘cloud computing’ terminology but in essence, it’s outsourcing part or all of your IT services leaving your company free to concentrate on its core skills and take advantage of a full IT department at your fingertips- even if it snows!

VoIP
Voice over IP offers real flexibility as well as telephony cost savings for businesses. Calls can be routed to any phone in or out of the office to any landline or mobile with ease. Our hosted VoIP solution gives you enterprise-grade functionality that’s even affordable for SME’s.

Video conferencing (VC)
Just because you can’t get somewhere doesn’t mean you can’t join the meeting. VC reduces travel time and cost whilst increasing employee productivity. Choose from individual laptop based software or full immersive conference suites to transport you to meetings anywhere in the world at any time.

Lync
Unified communications enable you to work from anywhere at any time and on any suitable device. Real-time information keeps you in touch with colleagues whilst the online collaboration enables material sharing without sending emails back and forth. Plus it integrates all the best features of VoIP telephony and video conferencing. The Microsoft Lync server integrates with all your Office applications so you can really be productive wherever you are this winter.

Be one step ahead this winter- call us on 029 200 22 300 or email sales@tewdric.com

Whilst Net Support is quite solidly a ‘Microsoft House’, the influence of Apple, under his two terms at the company, is constantly felt in today’s business landscape and has to be admired. The power of the Apple brand has undoubtably re-shaped the way we work. For instance, the Apple Mac was the first computer to use a mouse to move the cursor around the screen and, until recently, became the standard for most devices (until iPhone made touch devices the leading-edge technology of choice).

I have been selling connectivity to organisations for nearly ten years but the real serge in demand has only been recent  – I would say it has only been since the introduction of the iPhone that company directors have really embraced the power of remote access and now iPads seem to be on every executive’s desk that they want to ’synch’ with their corporate network.

His vision was not just product-based either. I found out today that, at great expense, he changed the warehouses at Pixar around to encourage communication and interaction between the design team and the management which was suffering from poor performance and was losing money. The result was the first Toy Story film which revitalised the whole computer animation film industry.

From a nostalgic point of view I realised today that in such a short timescale the real innovators of the computer revolution have  made so many of the advancements that are shared and loved by millions of people around the world.

In the words of  Steve Jobs himself ;  “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

More worryingly is that the question about IPv6 addressing isn’t even asked.

For those of you who don’t get involved in networking and IT within your business I can understand that you may be unaware that the current style of IP addressing is coming to an end. The current system is a 32-bit address system and looks something like 91.194.46.2. Those mathematical brainiacs amongst you will realise that there can only be a maximum of 2³² unique combinations (about 4.3 billion) and some of these are allocated to private networks and multicast address. For the rest of us, what you need to know is that the world has exhausted this allocation and so has run out of IPv4 addresses.

Therefore the IPv6 style allows greater combinations as it is 128-bit addressing and is presented as hexadecimal.  If you want some numbers to throw-around that’s about 2¹²⁸ which is about 340 undecillion (…………nope, I’d never heard of it either but apparently that’s 36 noughts).

More importantly, if you haven’t seen an IPv6 address it looks like: 3fde:1900:4245:3:200:f8ff:df31:57cf

 What this means to your business is you need to ensure that any of your company’s public facing devices such as firewalls, VPN’s, etc can cope with the changeover that will occur in the next few years… or at least someone on hand who can help you and understands why!

 Why not book to attend one of our seminars on this subject? Email sales@nsuk.com to book your place today for 12^th October

If you were to predict the answer to questions about the necessity of trips, length of journey and delays, then I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised by the answers but what I liked about the survey is it asked questions that are often hard to quantify – even for the business executive.

1 in 10 Executives reported to have missed a child’s birthday or wedding anniversary due to having to take a short haul flight abroad for work purposes. But as half the flights taken were for regular meetings, surely this could have been avoided?

Isn’t it time to start working smarter, not harder? To see the full results click here

With only 3 working days notice, it would have been impossible to implement a disaster recovery strategy had we not already had one. Fortunately, we just used the 3 days to double check everything was in order and working as they should be including getting our diesel generators ready to fire up in time for the big outage.

There was, of course, a moment of breath-holding when Western Power flicked the off switch but everything went as planned and the UPS back-ups kicked into life. Jonathan, Giles and John were on site at 5.30am for no need at all, right?!

But it did get me thinking; as a data centre, what would have been the effect if it hadn’t gone to plan? Our whole modus operandi is based around the resiliency and well-designed back-up solutions we put in place that clients wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to do just for their business.

For our hosting clients who rely on us so heavily for their IT – their current emails, data and applications all of which resides in our data centre, it’s imperative that our strategy is robust. The cost to their business could, quite literally be in the millions of pounds and would certainly see the end of NSUK.
But it’s not just about having power back-ups for the servers. Backing up the data and applications properly is just as crucial.

Say, a real business disaster occurs. How long do you think it would take to get your business running again and how would you do it? What are you likely to lose/sacrifice? 30 second’s worth of data? An hour’s? Week’s? Month’s?…..more…? This may depend on the last time you actually tested your back-ups actually work whether it’s based on your site or with a 3rd party.

As off-site back up Oolio disappeared off the face of the earth and world wide web last week, it may be worth a little check you can get to your back up when you just in case you really need them!

We have encountered a number of individuals and businesses who fell outside the scheme previously when it only assisted thoses up to 512kbps. This scheme should really provide better solutions of communities now who want a permenant solution such as fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) or fibre to the home/premise (FTTP).

It is a shame that the grant was not extended allowing more of this capital allowance per individual – say up to £2,500, to help smaller villages but we do expect the scheme to become more popular.