A new Symantec-sponsored survey conducted by ReRez Research finds that as small and midsize businesses (SMBs) embrace server virtualisation, cloud computing and mobility, their disaster preparedness strategies are improving. And it's not a moment too soon.

Small Business Virtualization, Cloud and Disaster Recovery

"SMBs have a reputation of being less than diligent with disaster recovery," says Monica Girolami, director of SMB product marketing for Symantec. When disaster strikes, that inattentiveness can have seriously damaging effects to the bottom line.

Girolami reports, "We've seen that downtime for a small business costs about $12,500 per day per incident." If one too many mishaps pile up, losses of this magnitude can quickly wipe out a small business.

So it's fortunate that as SMBs adopt of virtualization and cloud services -- and as mobile technologies accelerates -- disaster recovery comes along for the ride.

Of the small business IT executives at 2,053 companies were polled worldwide for the 2012 Disaster Preparedness Survey (PDF), 43 percent said they deployed, or are in the process of deploying, private clouds, followed closely by 40 percent of respondents that are deploying or currently using public cloud services. Symantec classifies SMBs as organizations with a headcount of between five and 250 employees.

A smaller, but still significant minority of 35 percent reported using mobile devices to access business data. And server virtualization is proving to be less of a stranger to small business. Thirty-four percent of those surveyed said they are employing the server workload-enhancing technology.

Virtualized, Cloudy Infrastructures Laugh in the Face of Danger

While disaster recovery typically isn't the overriding reason for adopting those technologies, it factors heavily for many small-business IT professionals.

In terms of adopting server virtualization and public cloud services, 34 percent of IT executives said that the ability to quickly recover from a disaster had a "moderate to large" effect on their decisions.  Similarly, 36 percent reported the same for mobility solutions and 37 percent let those factors guide their private cloud strategies.

For a several SMBs, their faith in these technologies is being rewarded.

A substantial majority, 71 percent, said server virtualization improved on their capability to get back up and running in the wake of a disaster. For private and private clouds, 43 percent and 41 percent said the same, respectively. Mobile solutions improved on the disaster preparedness of 36 percent of respondents.

Better yet, virtualization, mobility and cloud services often overlap; better preparing SMBs for disasters, says Girolami. For instance, "public cloud and mobility go hand-in-hand," she states, making it possible for workers to "access information regardless of whether your network is up or down."

All told, SMBs with virtualized, cloud-friendly IT setups -- with a dash of mobile device support thrown in -- stand a good chance of surviving catastrophic events relatively unscathed. "These are going work together to make your infrastructure more resilient," comments Girolami.

Source: Internet World

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1: Migrating is not a simple process

If you have an on-premise Active Directory environment and you want to perform a migration, it won’t be an easy process. Exchange Server 2010 SP2 includes a wizard that reduces the number of steps from roughly 50 down to six, but the migration process is still tedious and requires a lot of advanced planning. Because I have only a couple of users in my organization, I opted to start fresh rather than migrating my user accounts.

2: You may have to start over with spam filtering

One of the biggest things that surprised me was that spam filtering suddenly became an issue. Prior to subscribing to Microsoft Office 365, I was using GFI Mail Essentials. I had spent a great deal of time fine-tuning my spam filters so that I rarely received any spam. Office 365 uses Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange. Although Forefront is a decent spam filter, I had to take the time to configure it.

3: Outbound email addresses might change

When you subscribe to Office 365, all user accounts have a default email address that ends in onmicrosoft.com. While it is possible to use your own domain, simply accepting mail for your domain name isn’t enough. Outbound messages will continue to use the .onmicrosoft.com domain unless you make some configuration changes, which are far from intuitive.

4: You can say goodbye to third-party utilities

Many organizations use third-party utilities to manage Exchange Server. If you are using any such utilities and they’re designed to be installed directly on an Exchange Server, you won’t be able to use them with Office 365 (unless you keep an Exchange Server on premise). Microsoft does not allow you to install software onto the Office 365 servers.

5: You might have DNS issues

When you add a domain to your Office 365 account, you will receive a list of DNS entries that you must be make for the domain to function correctly. Although most of these DNS entries are relatively straightforward, Microsoft Lync requires some SRV records to be created.

This shouldn’t be a problem for those who have Microsoft DNS servers, but it can be problematic for non-Microsoft DNS servers. For example, my ISP manages my DNS entries. The ISP had no idea how to create the SRV records because it uses a Linux DNS server. That isn’t to say that the DNS entries won’t work with a Linux DNS server — but if someone else manages your DNS, you might have trouble getting the necessary DNS records created.

6: You may have to use different management tools

Because I didn’t keep any on-premise servers, managing Exchange through the Exchange Management Console was no longer an option. Office 365 uses the Exchange Control Panel as the primary Exchange Server management tool. Likewise, user accounts are created through a proprietary interface rather than through the Active Directory Users And Computers console.

7: You might have to reset file server permissions

As I mentioned earlier, my goal was to outsource my entire Active Directory domain. In doing so, however, I was left with orphaned on-premise file servers. If you find yourself in a similar situation, make sure that you have a plan for your file server data before you decommission your domain controllers. I moved all my file data to an NAS appliance, but that isn’t going to be an ideal solution for everyone. In any case, just remember that if you are outsourcing everything except for your file servers, you probably won’t be able to use Active Directory accounts for managing file access.

8: Prepare to be bombarded with phone calls and email messages

One aspect of the transition that really surprised me was that I was bombarded with phone calls and email messages from Microsoft. While I appreciate having the opportunity to ask questions about the transition, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

9: You might not be able to immediately connect users’ mobile devices

One of the issues I ran into during my transition was that even though I was able to bring my mailbox online quickly, the logistics of the transition kept me from connecting my Windows Phone to my mailbox for several days.

The reason for this is that prior to the transition I had an on-premise domain and an on-premise Exchange Server. Rather than working through a co-existence scenario and migrating everything, I decided that it would be easier to start fresh. This meant that if I had immediately connected my phone to my new Exchange mailbox, my contacts, calendar entries, and old messages would have disappeared from my phone (which would have been a big deal).

So I had to create a PST file on my PC and move all my mail, contacts, and calendar entries from Outlook to my PST. Once that was done, I disjoined my PC from the on-premise domain and then connected Outlook to my new Office 365 mailbox. Then I copied all my PST data to the new mailbox. At that point, I was able to connect my phone to my mailbox without having to worry about losing access to my contacts and other data.

Obviously, this won’t be a concern for organizations that work through the “real” migration process. But smaller organizations that choose to abandon their on-premise domain will have to consider this.

10: Expect a loss of control

Finally, moving to Office 365 means giving up some level of control. For example, you won’t have any control over the patch management process, software upgrades, and other similar administrative tasks you may be used to performing on-premise.

Source: TechRepublic

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1: Your employees

Your own employees are your biggest source of security risks. Sometimes, it is deliberate; sometimes, it is not. Employees have the most access and the most time. We expend a lot of effort worrying about external threats, but in all honesty, all it takes is an employee bringing in a virus from a home PC on a USB drive to nullify all your forward-facing firewalls and measures. Disgruntled employees sometimes express their anger by hurting your computer systems. And of course, it is possible for a well-meaning employee to make a major mistake. Good governance, education, setting (and enforcing) policies, and knowing your employees are your best steps to closing the holes here.

2: Common coding mistakes

Certain mistakes in programming still get made despite years of warnings and education. Most common are SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. I still see these issues from time to time even in major software packages that you would think are trustworthy (WordPress is a good example). It’s hard to change software once you’ve installed it, so you need to keep these packages up to date even though it is quite a hassle.

3: Unauthorized machines

I’ve seen this one too many times. Someone decides to bring in an old PC and put it on the network to do something your existing infrastructure doesn’t allow them to do. They think that they are being helpful, working around the limitations of the IT department. After all, if IT won’t build a Web site for their group, it’s just “doing them a favor” to set up an old PC in the corner with a Web server on it, right? Wrong. The best way I’ve found to keep these rogue machines in line is with rigorous IP address audits and policies and scanning the network to create a list of machines. If machines can’t get IP addresses, they can’t do much harm.

4: Ancient “rock solid” servers

We all have them — that server buried deep in the data room that “just won’t quit.” Usually, it’s running some software package that is impossible to migrate to another machine. Sadly, these machines are often major security risks because they typically are no longer getting patches or we fail to patch them out of fear of breaking them. In addition, those older versions of operating systems often come with inherent security holes that no patching can fix. You need to replace these servers one way or the other. The best first step is to virtualize them. From there, it is a lot easier to try to update them.

5: Legacy applications

It’s not just the old servers that are big security risks; it is also the applications running on them, as well as other legacy applications you may have running. These applications would be a lot less problematic if they were current with their patches, but usually they aren’t. All too often, we miss a major version update because the upgrade is so difficult, and then we’re so far behind the ball that it’s impossible to catch up. Or perhaps the applications are completely discontinued. It’s painful to say it, but the best thing you can do is find a migration path to a recent version or another package entirely.

6: Local admins

We all know the dangers of allowing users to run with escalated privileges. Still, we occasionally end up with users being granted local admin rights inappropriately. In my experience, this often happens while troubleshooting a problem: We make the user a local admin to see if it fixes a problem and we forget to undo it. Regardless of how it occurs, it is a ticking time bomb for security. Use your central administration tools to make sure that the local admin list gets reset on a regular basis to the proper users and groups.

7: Incorrect share/file permissions

File permissions are tricky things, and most users are not even aware of how to set them. So what happens? Users create sensitive files in their usual networked location and those files get the default permissions, which are “collaboration friendly” to say the least. The next thing you know, everyone can read the documents, which are supposed to be confidential. Your best weapon is to pre- establish a share and file structure with the correct permissions. For example, give everyone a home directory for personal documents and create shares or directories around roles, projects, and teams with the appropriate permissions. The hard part is then educating them to use the correct locations — but that is much easier than trying to teach them permissions.

8: Hidden servers within applications

I have seen more and more applications lately that use a local Web server as an administration console. Sometimes, these applications are installed by users without permission. But occasionally, the IT department just does not realize what comes with an application. While these servers can be locked down so that they are not a risk (and with luck, they get installed like that), you need to verify that the applications are secured properly before allowing them to be installed on users’ machines.

9: VPN clients

Some users figure out how to set up VPN access on their personal machines. For a power user, it isn’t too hard to do. But you have no control over that machine, and once it is on the VPN, problems with the unauthorized machine can easily spill over onto the VPN. One thing you can do is audit the VPN systems to see who is connecting from what PCs and compare it to your list of authorized systems. Also, you can put additional firewalls around VPN clients to quarantine them. Finally, there are various systems to ensure that the clients connecting are on a preapproved list.

10: Disabled security software

Security software often puts up roadblocks to getting work done, so the “logical response” from many users is to find a way to work around it. For example, I’ve seen people set up anonymizers at home to sidestep IT policies. Power users (especially developers and system administrators) often know how to circumvent security tools. They may also be local administrators because of a technical need, which makes disabling software and changing settings even easier.

Combatting this is tough because these users often assume that they are “too smart” to be a security risk. What they fail to realize is that the modern crop of security threats do not require the user to make a mistake, like going to an obviously suspect Web site or downloading pirated software. Every Acrobat file, for example, is a potential plague rat at this point. Start looking for unusual trends, like large amounts of consistent traffic to an IP address and use centralized tools to ensure that settings are at the right levels and are reset periodically. Also, take any unnecessary local administration rights and firewall entire groups onto their own network segment to limit damage if those groups have a legitimate need for lower security.

Source: Tech Republic

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on securing your business network.

The government has named the 27 cities shortlisted for a share of millions in funding for 'ultra-fast' broadband.

It has already selected 10 large cities that will get part of a £100m pot for the fibre broadband upgrade, and it plans to choose another 10 smaller places that will be allocated money from a separate £50m fund to do the same. The 27-strong shortlist for the smaller pot was announced on Friday by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Those now bidding for the super-fast broadband funding are: Aberdeen, Brighton & Hove, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Exeter, Gloucester, Kingston upon Hull, Leicester, Londonderry/Derry, Newport, Norwich, Oxford, Perth, Peterborough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Salford, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Swansea, Wolverhampton and York.

The successful applicants will get the opportunity to provide local residents and businesses with fibre broadband speeds in the range of 80-100Mbps, as well as high-speed wireless connectivity.

"These ultra-fast speeds will allow more cities in the UK to compete with the fastest in the world, bringing new opportunities for growth, the development of high-tech industries and the transformation of public services," culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said in a statement.

To qualify for the shortlist, cities had to cover at least 45,000 homes and businesses, or at least 35,000 in the case of those in Northern Ireland. They also had to be places that ISPs such as BT were not already targeting in their private-sector rollouts.

By 18 May, the government will give the cities on the shortlist guidance on the next stage of the bidding process. They will now need to come up with plans for how they would use their share of the £50m, and the winners will be announced in the autumn.

The larger cities that get to share the £100m pot are: Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Manchester and Sheffield. All are now working on detailed plans for their deployments, the DCMS said.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT for advice on super-fast broadband availability for your business.

Microsoft is to increase its volume licensing prices for its UK licensing schemes from the beginning of July, the company has announced, with most increasing by a quarter or more and some by over a third.

Price hikes of up to 33.5 percent will hit businesses entering licensing agreements from 1 July, Microsoft said in a statement on Monday.

"Because of sustained currency differences between European countries, Microsoft is taking action to establish and maintain price consistency in the region for our volume licensing programmes," Scott Dodds, Microsoft's UK general manager of marketing and operations, said in the statement. "From July 1 in the UK, these adjustments will result in £ sterling price list rises for new volume licensing contracts of between 7.5 percent and 33.5 percent, to ensure greater consistency with the equivalent Euro price list."

Customers entering into new Enterprise Agreements will see price rises of 25.7 percent on average, with a 21-percent price increase for Office 365. Open Value, Service Provider, and Independent Software Vendor agreements will all increase by 33.5 percent, and Open Licence Agreements will see an increase of 7.5 percent. Select and Select Plus agreements will go up by 24.6 percent on average.

Academic and consumer licensing will not be affected by the price increases, said the company.

Microsoft is in the process of negotiating with the Cabinet Office on public-sector licensing. The negotiations will probably offset price increases for the public sector, technology publication The Register said in a report on Tuesday.

A Cabinet Office spokeswoman declined to say how much the negotiations would offset the Microsoft price hikes on Tuesday, saying only that the government department will make an announcement in the next few weeks.

"The Cabinet Office and Microsoft will provide a further update shortly regarding pricing and licensing for the UK Government, to replace the PSA09 framework," the Cabinet Office and Microsoft said in a joint statement. "In the meantime we can confirm that the terms of the PSA09 framework will remain in place until June 30."

The Microsoft Public Sector Agreement (PSA09), updated in November 2010, said that Microsoft enterprise products can be "heavily discounted".

Open-source shift?

Customers may have to swallow Microsoft price increases in the short term, and then seek alternative software in the future, according to UK open-source company Sirius Corporation.

"A lot of people will find that they are locked-in [to Microsoft contracts], so in the short term will have very few options," Sirius Corporation chief executive Mark Taylor told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "In the long term, Microsoft's inflexible price elasticity is adding to incentives to move to open source."

Taylor likened Microsoft's price increases to the situation with petrol pricing in the UK, which has seen massive rises in a relatively short space of time.

Nevertheless, Microsoft customers in both the public and private sectors should expect to be able to negotiate with Microsoft on pricing, Microsoft channel reseller SoftwareONE told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

SoftwareONE UK managing director Zak Virdi, who is also a director of copyright enforcement organisation the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), said that public-sector organisations should not rush to buy new licences before July.

"People should wait for more instructions from the Cabinet Office," said Virdi. "Until that time they should not listen to scare tactics around price increases."

Private-sector organisations should take a measured look at systems requirements, and see whether it is necessary to buy new volume licences, said Virdi.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT to find out how these price increases will affect your business and to review the best way of mitigating against these hugs price increases.

The Advertising Standards Authority has widened its inquiry into the advertising of the Apple iPad.

The BBC understands the regulator is not satisfied that Apple has complied with an agreement to amend claims about the latest iPad's 4G capabilities.

The UK does not yet have widespread 4G coverage, and the iPad will be incompatible with it when it does.

The regulator said it had received dozens of complaints in relation to the issue. Apple has declined to comment.

The regulator had resolved some of the complaints after discussions with Apple about changes to its advertising, but said it is now looking into further concerns raised by consumers.

A letter to one complainant seen by the BBC says that Apple "have advised us that no further reference to the 4G capabilities of the iPad will be made on their UK website".

The letter goes on to say that this will resolve the complaint, and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will consequently be closing the file.

The ASA told the BBC that when it approached Apple the company said it had removed references to 4G from the webpage subject to the complaint, and had edited a video that contained references to 4G.

'Potentially problematic'

But Apple's UK site still offers consumers the chance to buy a "wi-fi + 4G" version of the iPad.

A footnote explains that "4G LTE" is supported only on certain networks in the United States and Canada.

The ASA said it had since been contacted by several complainants who had identified other "potentially problematic claims" about the iPad and 4G on the website.

"If it appears that the problem claims we asked Apple to remove are still appearing," the regulator said, "we will investigate these new complaints."

Apple said it would not comment on its discussions with the regulator, but a source at the company insisted that no undertaking was given to remove all references to 4G from its site.

Incompatible

4G mobile phone networks, which promise much faster web surfing, have yet to arrive in the UK.

But even when they do, the frequencies to be employed for the new networks in Britain - and the rest of Europe - are different from those used in the US and Canada.

That means that the "4G" iPad, in its current configuration, can never connect to 4G networks in Europe.

Apple is also in dispute with Australian regulators over the advertising of the iPad there.

The country's Competition and Consumer Commission accused the firm of misleading consumers by telling them that the product could connect to a 4G network in Australia when that was not the case.

Apple offered to refund any iPad buyers who felt that they had been misled.

Source: BBC

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Microsoft is to crack down on sexually suggestive apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, as part of a general tightening of the store's rules.

The company already has a content policy forbidding 'racy' apps but will now enforce it more strictly, Marketplace chief Todd Brix wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. He said Microsoft would allow "the kind of content you occasionally see on prime-time TV or the pages of a magazine's swimsuit issue", but nothing stronger.

"Our content policies are clearly spelled out: we don't allow apps containing 'sexually suggestive or provocative' images or content," Brix wrote.

"We will be paying more attention to the icons, titles, and content of these apps and expect them to be more subtle and modest in the imagery and terms used," he said. "Apps that don't fit our standard will need to be updated to remain in the store. This is about presenting the right content to the right customer and ensuring that apps meet our standards."

Brix suggested that "a small number of developers" might want to alter the tile icons of their apps by, for example, "showing male or female models in silhouette". He said the company would get in touch with the developers it was concerned about.

However, he added that Microsoft reserves the right to remove any app that customers find offensive.

The move is part of a series of steps Microsoft is taking to enforce a certain level of quality in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Apple and RIM take a similar approach with the iOS and BlackBerry OS stores, leaving Android's as the least filtered — and arguably least censored — smartphone app store.

Brix said Windows Phone developers had to stick to certain rules. They must not post their apps in multiple categories and, if they do have a range of similar or related apps, they must use visibly different icons for them.

Microsoft will also start enforcing the five-keyword limit set out in the Marketplace policies, and is "starting to examine app keywords for relevancy", Brix said, warning those who put in popular search terms as keywords for unrelated apps to clean up their act.

He also told developers to be more careful about their app titles infringing on the trademarks of others.

"I hope this insight into a few near-term changes we're putting in place helps save you time and reduces your risk of having apps pulled from the Marketplace," Brix said.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the best mobile solution for your business.

Virtualisation has swept the enterprise and its success has driven new innovation in hardware, software and security practices, as IT organisations demand greater performance, manageability and security from their virtualised infrastructure.

New technologies are coming to market that work at the server processor level and integrate with the hypervisor, the virtualised software system that manages and orchestrates individual virtual machines (VMs).

At the same time there is a new wave of innovation focusing on the operational efficiency of virtualised environments, with the introduction of sophisticated live migration tools, virtual network security, and software switches that sit behind the hypervisor.

Virtualisation and processors

The role of the processor in improving virtual systems performance dates back to the middle of the last decade, when chip manufacturers, Intel and AMD in particular, introduced features to make hypervisors more efficient.

They mainly accomplish this by dedicating a processor core, of a multi-core chip, to the operating system that runs the virtual environment, and this enables the VMs to run faster.

With Intel’s VT (Virtualisation Technology), for example, there is close integration between the processor and the virtualisation software – such as between Intel’s Xeon server processors and VMware’s cloud platform – which can improve performance in a virtualised environment, as well as supporting higher VM density.

At chipset level, the hardware helps to reduce the involvement of the hypervisor in managing I/O (input/output) traffic by calculating this itself, which also boosts performance.

Intel’s recently-launched Xeon E5-2600 product family incorporates Intel VT virtualisation technology, and supports up to eight cores per processor and 768GB of system memory. This combination means that Xeon E5-2600-based servers can deliver an increase in performance of up to 80% compared with servers based on the previous-generation Xeon processor 5600 series, according to Intel. Virtualised and cloud computing environments can benefit greatly from the improvement.

Intel rival AMD has its own technology called AMD-V, which incorporates virtualisation extensions in the Opteron server processor's instruction set. AMD also offers ‘Tagged TLB’: hardware features that facilitate efficient switching between VMs; and Rapid Virtualisation Indexing (RVI) which helps to accelerate the performance of certain virtualised applications by enabling hardware-based VM memory management.

Power efficiency

Virtualisation promises data centre power efficiency savings by enabling organisations to consolidate multiple physical servers. But there are additional ways of getting efficiencies in the data centre, and some organisations are looking at using ARM chips or Intel Atom processors for small, low-power servers.

The use of these tiny chips in virtualised environments is still at the early stages, but new virtualisation options are emerging all the time.

For example, chip start-up Calxeda has produced the tiny EnergyCore ARM system-on-chip (SoC) for cloud servers. The company has put four EnergyCore chips on a board to create an ‘EnergyCard’. Five EnergyCards could support 20 OS instances in two units of rack space, creating 20 virtual servers, at a very low energy rate.

Calxeda’s EnergyCore processor also virtualises the Ethernet port, presenting Ethernet traffic to the operating system via its management engine, and this enables the efficient routing of Ethernet data and power optimisation.

SeaMicro is another manufacturer that sells a low-energy virtualisation platform. Its ‘micro-servers’ are based on Intel's Atom and Xeon CPUs. As well as virtualising both Ethernet and SATA storage ports for the sake of efficiency and motherboard size, SeaMicro has also produced technology it calls TIO (Turn It Off), with which the motherboard can switch off unused CPU and chipset functions, making the virtualised environment more efficient.

Another interesting feature of SeaMicro’s virtualisation-ready servers is that, in the case of the Atom dual-core 1.66 GHz N570 processor (the first low-power Intel Atom processor to support virtualisation), each processor supports four threads and delivers what SeaMicro calls the industry’s best performance per watt for ‘internet’ workloads. “When used on a SeaMicro motherboard, and in conjunction with SeaMicro’s power management technology, the N570 uses, at peak utilisation, less than one watt for each gigahertz of compute,” says the firm.

Live migration

One of the most exciting software technologies to come to the aid of virtualised server estates is live migration for VMs, which enables a VM to be moved from one physical server to another whilst operational, without any noticeable effect from the end user's perspective.

This facilitates proactive maintenance, for example if an imminent failure is suspected, the IT department can solve the problem before services are disrupted. Live migration can also be used for load balancing, to ensure that server CPUs are used efficiently.

Forrester Research senior analyst Rick Holland said: “Technologies such as live migration help organisations harness the power of virtualisation and make the environment extremely dynamic. Today, 50% of enterprises use live migration, and 13% are planning to implement it in the next 12 months.”

Holland adds that there are many advances in virtualisation security technologies, with the ability to inspect traffic between VMs being a function worth developing. “Depending on your network architecture, virtualisation can create blind spots in your network, and many security professionals don’t have the tools to inspect intra-virtual-machine communication (traffic between two virtual machines on the same virtual server).”

Termed ‘hypervisor introspection’, this allows third-party vendors such as Bitdefender, Kaspersky Lab, McAfee, and Trend Micro to deploy a single virtual security appliance on the virtual server, which then takes over endpoint security responsibilities.

As well as improving internal security, this frees up memory and CPU resources that additional VMs can use if each one has a dedicated endpoint security agent assigned to it. The result, according to Holland, is an improvement in virtualisation efficiency.

He added: "The CTO at one highly virtualised enterprise said, ‘At 80% virtualisation, we are looking for any opportunity to increase the density and return on investment (ROI) of our virtualisation investment’."

For many IT organisations, server virtualisation is a routine part of their daily IT operations, and for others it still signifies a brave new world. But one thing is clear: as virtualised IT infrastructure becomes mainstream, there is still plenty of innovation, from both the hardware and software camps, to secure, manage and optimise virtual environments.

Source: Computerworld UK

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on virtualisation solutions for your business.

A severe Gmail service disruption on Tuesday affected up to 10 percent of users, according to Google.

The outage, which saw up to 35 million users unable to access accounts, lasted just over an hour. The disruption began at 5.42pm BST on Tuesday, Google said on its apps status dashboard.

"We've determined that this issue affected less than 10 percent of the Google Mail users who attempted to access their accounts during the affected timeframe," Google said. "While we have resolved this issue with Google Mail, it's possible that some users may experience message delays because affected accounts weren't available to receive messages."

Google does not give official figures for numbers of Gmail users. However, ZDNet UK understands that around 350 million people use the email service.

Some users of the Ars Technica open forum complained that both work and personal email accounts had been affected.

Source: ZDNet

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With the Windows 8 release just around the corner, there has been a lot of talk about what we can expect from Microsoft’s latest desktop operating system. However, Microsoft is also developing an ARM edition of Windows 8 that will be used on consumer electronic devices, such as tablets and cell phones. I thought it might be fun to list some of my predictions for the next Windows Phone release.

1: It will run Metro apps only

Metro apps are a new type of application that will run only on Windows 8. X86/X64 editions of Windows 8 can run legacy applications through something called Desktop Mode. Microsoft has confirmed that Desktop Mode will exist in ARM editions but says that the only applications supported will be Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and Microsoft Office.

My prediction is that Windows Phone 8 will not include Desktop Mode at all. I think that Microsoft will offer Metro versions of Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Office instead.

2: There will be many throwbacks to Windows Phone 7

The more I learn about Windows 8, the more I can’t help but get the impression that Windows Phone 7’s operating system was an experiment in the Windows 8 development cycle. So I think we’ll see a lot of throwbacks to Windows Phone 7. For example, I think that Windows Phone 8 will make even more extensive use of live tiles, but that the Start screen will be more customizable than it is on Windows Phone 7.

3: You’ll be able to join the phones to a domain

Windows Phone devices running Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 could be joined to a domain, but Microsoft removed this functionality in Windows Phone 7. As much as I love my Windows Phone 7 device, there are a few areas in which it’s lacking. I think Microsoft will try to address these shortcomings in Windows Phone 8 by offering the ability to join the phone to a domain and various other enterprise-related functions.

4: There will be a consumer and a pro edition

Although there is no history of this (at least not with Windows Mobile), I am going to go out on a limb and predict that Microsoft will offer a consumer and a pro version of Windows Phone 8. I expect the consumer version to be heavily oriented toward social networking and gaming, while the pro version will likely offer things like group policy support and the ability to be managed via System Center products.

5: It will be time to say goodbye to Zune

One of the key features in Windows Phone 7 is that devices have Zune HD built in. From what I have seen so far in some of the Windows 8 preview builds, it appears that Microsoft might be dropping the Zune label. I expect Windows Phone 8 to play music and videos, and I expect it to use a Zune-like interface, but I doubt that Microsoft will refer to the interface as Zune.

6: It will offer a more full-featured version of Microsoft Office

Windows Mobile devices have always included mobile versions of Microsoft Office, but even the version included with Windows Phone 7 lacks much of the functionality found in the full version. My guess is that it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft releases a Metro version of Office, and I will be surprised if Office Metro isn’t included on at least the pro version of Windows Phone 8.

7: There will be better hardware

Windows Phone 7 devices use decent hardware, but I expect Windows Phone 8 devices to run on even better hardware. At a minimum, I expect to see phones with multicore processors. I also think that the phones will offer something that was sorely missing from Windows Phone 7 devices — SD card support.

8: More accessories will be available

One of my biggest gripes when Windows Phone 7 was released was that even though the devices included a built-in Zune HD, Zune HD accessories are not compatible with the phones. In fact, there aren’t many accessories you can buy for Windows Phone 7 at all.

Apple has made a fortune licensing companies to make accessories for the iPhone. I think Microsoft will probably follow suit with Windows Phone 8 and try to flood the market will cool hardware accessories.

9: There will be a dashboard-like Start screen

Windows Phone 7’s Start screen consists of a series of live tiles. For example, my phone has tiles that tell me how many email messages are unread, how many calls I have missed, and what the stock market is doing.

Live tiles are a good idea, but in Windows Phone 7 they’re a bit too ridged. I think that in Windows Phone 8, Microsoft will make the live tiles much more customizable. In fact, I think that the phone’s Start screen will resemble a dashboard, providing all the most relevant information at a glance.

10: SkyDrive integration will be tighter

Windows Phone 7 offers SkyDrive integration, but SkyDrive is primarily used as a place to store Office documents. I think that in Windows Phone 8, SkyDrive will be accessible throughout the operating system and will be treated as all-purpose storage.

Source: TechRepublic

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The Cloud is to provide an hour's worth of free Wi-Fi a day to passengers on the London Overground.

Wi-Fi access will be available at no charge in and around all 56 London Overground-operated stations. The hotspot rollout will begin in the summer, with 12 stations scheduled to be hooked up by the end of this year.

"Access to the internet is no longer limited solely to home or to the workplace, and people's expectation is to be able to work and communicate effectively and seamlessly while they're on the move. So we're delighted to support this initiative which will bring reliable, free Wi-Fi to London Overground's customers," Steve Murphy, managing director of London Overground Rail Operations Ltd (LOROL), said in a statement on Monday.

The stations in line to get Wi-Fi connectivity this year are Willesden Junction, West Hampstead, New Cross Gate, Forest Hill, West Croydon, Norwood Junction, Surrey Quays, Dalston, Wapping, Hackney Central, Kensington Olympia and Shepherd's Bush.

Passengers will only have to register once for the service, which will give them 60 free minutes of use each day, according to London Overground.

Earlier in March, Virgin Media signed a similar deal to provide Wi-Fi in London Underground stations. The operator will initially provide its service in 80 Tube stations free of charge, but will likely introduce fees after the Olympics for non-Virgin customers.

London Underground and London Overground are operated by two different entities — Transport for London (TfL) and LOROL respectively — although the services of both are generally delivered under TfL's branding.

TfL confirmed to ZDNet UK that passengers will need separate accounts for The Cloud's Overground network and Virgin's Underground network, and there would be no interplay between the two systems.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT for advice on Cloud Computing solutions for your business.

Thinking of buying a server for your growing business, but don't know where to start?

So, your business has grown large enough that you need your first server. Congratulations! Acquiring a server is a big decision, so some trepidation is understandable. This guide will explain the basic principles of the technology, help you decide which class of server will best fit your needs, and give you some ballpark pricing, so you don’t overspend or acquire a product that’s insufficient for your needs.

I’ll also explore the chief alternative to running your own server - relying on the cloud - and provide a primer on one of today’s hottest server trends: virtualisation. You’ll find this guide useful even if you ultimately decide to hire an IT consultant to analyze your requirements and make a purchase recommendation.

Server basics

Although a small server might look no different from a high-end desktop PC, the machines are designed for very different tasks. A desktop computer is designed for one person who needs a user-friendly operating system to run desktop applications such as a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, and a web browser. A server runs a specialised operating system designed to support many users. It’s engineered to run multiuser applications such as email, messaging, and print servers; shared calendar programs; databases; and enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software.

A server also makes it easy for your employees to share data and collaborate, since it operates as a central repository for all of your documents, images, contacts, and other important files. It can host a company intranet, for sharing information with your employees quickly and economically. Set up a virtual private network, and you and your employees can access the data on the server remotely from anywhere you have internet access. On top of that, a server can automatically back up your desktop and laptop systems, so you’ll never lose critical data if one machine fails or is lost or stolen. Servers are designed to be reliable, secure, and fault-tolerant, with redundant storage options. If you expect your business to expand, choose a server that’s scalable and can grow with you.

If you operate a small to medium-size business, the question isn’t "Do I need a server?" but "Which type of server do I need?" Before we get into that, however, let's address the number-one alternative to operating and maintaining an on-site server: relying on the cloud.

The cloud alternative

Why not put everything in the cloud? Services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Windows Azure, and Rackspace Cloud Hosting offer a number of benefits. For starters, they don't involve a significant capital outlay, and you won’t need an IT staff to manage the server. You won’t need to worry about the equipment or software becoming outdated or obsolete, either. In the days when businesses relied on big-iron mainframes, this strategy was called "time sharing." And the cloud is burdened with many of the same limitations as that model was.

The stability and reliability of whichever service provider you choose is your first and most important concern. If that firm goes belly-up or experiences a disaster, your business could quickly grind to a halt. What’s worse is that you could temporarily or permanently lose access to all your data. If you lose your connection to the Internet, you’ll be cut off from your applications and data, and your employees won’t be able to share files. You could lose the ability to manage your business until your internet connection is restored. And if your business uses large files, and your broadband connection is too slow, your operation’s productivity will suffer.

Storing your data on equipment outside your immediate control also brings up privacy and security concerns. And although you’re not paying for an IT staff, ongoing maintenance, and investments in new capital equipment directly, you’re still incurring a share of those costs indirectly - they’re reflected in the fees you’re paying the service provider. The cloud is no cure-all.

Choose the right server for your needs

The big names in the server market are Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Lenovo, and Oracle. Choosing the right server depends in large measure on the applications you intend to run on it. If all you need is file sharing, automated client backup, and light-duty remote access for PCs (typically 10 or fewer), consider a NAS or even a Windows Home Server machine; HP, Netgear, QNAP, Seagate, and Synology are the major players in this arena. If your business has more than 10 employees using computers, if you need to operate an email or print server, manage a complex database, or run sophisticated server-based applications (such as ERP or CRM), if you have very large storage requirements, or if you require large-scale virtualisation capabilities, you’ll want a more robust option such as a tower, rack, or blade server.

A virtual-machine primer

Before I go into a detailed explanation of each of those server types, here’s a quick primer on virtualisation for anyone who might be unfamiliar with the concept. Small to medium-size businesses have been behind the curve when it comes to adopting virtualisation to date, but the technology can deliver significant benefits to companies of nearly any size because it allows the enterprise to make more efficient use of IT resources.

Virtualisation enables one server to behave as several servers, each with its own operating system and unique set of applications. A virtual machine consists solely of software, yet it has all the components of a physical machine: It has a motherboard, a CPU, a hard disk, a network controller, and so on. The operating system and other applications run on a virtual machine just as they would on a physical machine - they see no difference between the two environments.

In virtualisation, a program known as a hypervisor places an abstraction layer between the operating systems and the hardware. The hypervisor can operate multiple virtual machines with the same operating system or different OSs on the same physical server. Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware are among the top virtual-machine developers.

How does virtualisation make more efficient use of your IT resources? Servers are designed to accommodate peak - versus average - loads, so they’re underutilised most of the time. In fact, the typical server utilises only between 5-15% of its overall resources. Running several virtual machines on one physical server uses those resources more efficiently, boosting utilisation to between 60-80%. Instead of operating one physical server for email, one for database management, one for your intranet, and yet another for CRM, you can run all of those applications on several virtual machines running on the same physical hardware.

Virtualisation eliminates the need for additional physical servers, and the tech-support overhead, power, cooling, backup, physical space, and other requirements that go along with them. What’s more, you can deploy a new virtual server in a few minutes.

Now let's examine the various server options on today’s market, starting with the most basic.

Server options

Windows Home Server 2011

As you can tell by the product’s name, Microsoft’s Windows Home Server 2011 is aimed squarely at the consumer market. It’s designed for ease of use and has strong media-handling capabilities, including real-time transcoding and integration with Windows Media Center. But the operating system is built on the same code base as Microsoft’s very strong business-oriented server OS, Windows Server 2008 R2, and it could be good for your business if you don’t need to support more than 10 PC clients.

Windows Home Server machines are designed to operate "headless," meaning you don’t need a monitor, mouse, or keyboard to manage them. Instead you use the Remote Desktop Connection feature in Windows to connect to the server over your network. A server running Windows Home Server 2011 won't be capable of virtualisation, but it is a very inexpensive file-sharing and backup option, and it does support secure remote access. LaCie’s 5big Office is one good example of a Windows Home Server machine tailored for small business. It costs just $599 and includes a single 2TB drive, 2GB of RAM, and a gigabit ethernet interface. It offers four additional drive bays for expansion, and it supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 5+spare.

Microsoft is expected to release Windows Server 8 between the third quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013 (you can download a beta version now). The company is building the new OS on the same code base as Windows 8, and the product places considerable emphasis on cloud computing and virtualisation. Microsoft has declined to say whether it will release a consumer version of Windows Server 8 or if Windows Home Server 2011 will be the end of the line for its consumer-oriented server OS strategy.

Network-attached storage

NAS is a simple and inexpensive server infrastructure; in that respect, it’s similar to Windows Home Server. But NAS can deliver plenty of bang for the buck to businesses with modest server requirements. A NAS arrangement can be as simple as plugging a USB hard drive into a USB-equipped router, but most small businesses will need something more robust. A high-end NAS can rival a full-blown server, including support for virtualisation.

A hardware device, commonly referred to as a NAS box, acts as the interface between storage and clients on the network. The NAS box requires no mouse, keyboard, or monitor, and is controlled by a remote client over the network. A bare-bones embedded operating system - typically Linux-based - runs on the NAS, although the latest devices also provide a front-end interface that makes setup and administration over your network easier (again, similar to Windows Home Server).

You can purchase a simple NAS box with a single 1TB drive, such as Seagate’s BlackArmor NAS 110, for less than $200, with prices rising rapidly as you add capacity, expandability, and other features. If all you need in a server is a device for sharing files, gaining remote access, automatically backing up client PCs over the network, or hosting IP security cameras, one of these budget models will fit the bill. At the other end of the scale, you’ll find devices such as Synology’s RS3412xs ($4,000 plus, not including the drives), a rack-mount NAS device that can host up to 10 hard drives and even supports virtualisation.

Tower servers

Tower servers (and their smaller cousins, micro towers) are the first step up from a NAS. You can easily mistake a tower server for a desktop PC - and in fact, you can press a desktop PC into service as a server. Tower servers cost more than NAS products, but they’re much less expensive than rack-mount systems. They can operate on the floor or on top of a desk, but you can also retrofit them to sit in a rack. Tower servers are generally quiet, because they don’t require a lot of cooling fans. A high-end tower server with a fast CPU, lots of RAM, and a plethora of hard drives can pack a punch, especially when you take virtualisation into account (provided that the CPU and operating system support it).

On the downside, you’ll need a keyboard, monitor, and mouse to manage each tower server, or you can invest in a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) option that enables one set of peripherals to control several machines. (You can control micro towers running Windows Server using Remote Desktop Connection via a client PC.) More important, a tower server provides limited scalability once you’ve maxed out its capabilities. If you anticipate your IT requirements expanding rapidly, a rack or blade server is a better alternative than finding space for a bunch of towers.

Tower servers come with the same operating system choices as rack and blade servers do, including various flavors of Windows Server and Linux. Prices range from $350 for an HP ProLiant MicroServer with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive (expandable to four 2TB drives) running Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation to $2,500 for a Dell PowerEdge T710 tower server with an Intel Xeon CPU, 4GB of memory, and a single 500GB hard drive. Be aware that not all tower servers include the price of an operating system.

Rack servers

If you anticipate the need to run several servers, either right away or in short order, consider moving up to rack-mount models. These types of servers come in a standard width (to fit in a 19-inch rack) and a standard height (a multiple of 1.75 inches, or 1U; a standard rack is 42U high). A rack permits you to fit many servers into a relatively small footprint, and typically it includes a cable-management system to keep your installation neat.

Most rack servers are highly expandable, with sockets for multiple CPUs, copious amounts of memory, and lots of storage. Rack-server systems are highly scalable, too; once you have the rack in place, you won’t need floor space for additional servers until the rack is full. Although they typically cost more than tower servers, they’re cheaper than blades.

Since rack servers operate in very close proximity to one another, they require more active cooling than tower servers do. The fans in these servers can be quite loud, and you’ll need a climate-control system to keep a full rack cool. For those reasons, most businesses isolate their rack servers in a dedicated room. Rack servers can be more difficult to maintain, because they must be physically pulled from the rack for servicing. And like a tower server, rack servers require a KVM arrangement for setup and management.

Chancellor George Osborne has announced taxation plans designed to boost UK technology and start-ups.

"Today we... set Britain this industrial ambition: that we turn Britain into Europe's technology centre," Osborne announced in his Budget speech to parliament on Wednesday.

The UK gaming industry, which some estimates put at being worth £2.875bn in 2010, will be given the same kind of tax perks as the film industry, said Osborne.

"The film tax credit, protected in our spending review, helped generate over £1bn of film production investment in the UK in the last year alone," said Osborne. "Today I am announcing our intention to introduce similar schemes for the video games, animation and high end TV production industries."

Osborne added that "it is the determined policy of this government to keep Wallace and Gromit exactly where they are."

Start-ups spun out of universities will get tax breaks in the form of being able to award more tax-advantaged share options. The HMRC Enterprise Management Incentive scheme will see the grant for tax breaks on share options given to leading employees doubled.

"We will help new start up businesses recruit and retain talent — by more than doubling the Enterprise Management Incentive Scheme grant limit to £250,000, and easing the rules so that academics in our universities can turn great ideas into great companies," said Osborne.

Research and development (R&D) will get tax relief through capital gains changes. There will be an 'above the line' R&D credit — a credit against the company’s corporation tax bill, rather than the current system of an enhanced deduction or 'superdeduction'.

"I confirm that from next year we will also introduce an 'above the line' R&D tax credit that business organisations like the EEF, IOD and CBI have campaigned hard for," said Osborne.

Technology infrastructure also got a fillip — broadband infrastructure got £50m for smaller cities. In addition, Osborne announced the full list of 10 'super-connected' cities that would get to share £100m for broadband investment: Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and London.

In addition, the government pledged better mobile reception on and around rural roads.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the fastest broadband options for your business.

Internet-driven business made up 8.3 percent of the UK's economy, a bigger slice than in any other Group of 20 nations, according to figures from Boston Consulting Group.

E-commerce, online ads, cloud data storage and other internet-related spending contributed £121bn to the UK's gross domestic product in 2010, according to The $4.2 Trillion Opportunity report, published on Monday. The total is likely to rise to £225bn, or 12.4 percent, by 2016 — a feat that would see the UK keep the top spot, the management consultant firm said.

If it were formally categorised as a sector, the internet would be the fifth largest in the UK, ahead of education, healthcare and construction, according to the report.

"Around the world SMEs which embrace the internet are growing faster and adding more jobs than those that don't," co-author David Dean, a Boston Consulting Group senior partner, said in a statement. "By encouraging businesses to adopt the internet, countries can improve their competitiveness and growth prospects."

Online retail in the UK racked up $102bn, or just over £64bn, in the period — almost half the total for the UK internet economy as a whole. The internet directly accounted for 13.5 percent of the country's retail sector in 2010, a figure that should rise to 23 percent by 2016, Boston Consulting Group said.

However, those figures do not cover sales where people decided which product to buy online before going to the shops. The 'research online, purchase offline' (ROPO) share of the overall British retail sector was 11.5 percent, the report said. By comparison, in Germany online sales had a 7.1 percent share and ROPO sales, 16.2 percent.

G20 internet economy

According to Boston Consulting Group, the total size of the G20 internet economy was $2.3tn (£1.5tn) in 2010, or 4.1 percent of the total GDP for the group of major nations. It expects this to nearly double by 2016, to $4.2tn or 5.3 percent.

South Korea came second after the UK in the impact of the internet on its economy, followed by China, Japan and the US.

Boston Consulting Group reckons the annual growth rate of the UK internet economy will be around 10.9 percent through to 2016. This is impressive when compared with the 6.5 percent predicted for the US. However, the developing markets in the G20 are expected to see higher rates — Argentina is expected to maintain internet economy growth of 24.3 percent, for example.

The company also surveyed UK consumers about their attitudes to the internet, finding that respondents would on average demand £2,175 a year to live without internet access.

The report was fairly comprehensive, being based on three years of research that examined 90 percent of global GDP. The company's methodology involved the measurement of "total spending on finished goods and services", it said, noting that this covered consumption, investment, government spending and net exports.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on hosting solutions for your internet buisness.

How to recognise a computing revolution when you see one.

While introducing the new iPad, Apple CEO Tim Cook this week said on stage that we're entering a "post-PC" world. Former Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie agreed, telling Reuters: "Of course we are in a post-PC world."

Most people hearing that might wonder what in the hell they're talking about. Yes, we've all got cell phones and tablets. But our main computers are still PCs, aren't they? The answer is: Yes, but not for long.

What does "post PC" mean, anyway?

When Cook says iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad are "post-PC" devices, what does he mean?

A post-PC device has the following four characteristics:

1. It's an appliance

The PC architecture at its core is a hobbyist kit. To buy one, you shop for components that will be bolted inside a giant metal-and-plastic box. You choose the operating system, the amount, type and brand of memory and storage, the size, type and brand of monitor, the specific video card and a dozen other choices. Later, you may choose to add or swap out things, add a second dual-booted operating system or partition the hard drive. A PC is designed to be tinkered with, optimised and upgraded.

A post-PC device is a theoretical "black box". It's not for people who like to tinker with tech but for people who want to use it without worrying about how it works, or whether it can be customised or improved by user effort.

2. It's got a multi-touch UI

Pre-PC devices had the first-generation user interface: the command line. PC devices have the second-generation user interface: windows, icons, menus and pointing devices (the WIMP user interface).

Post-PC devices have the third-generation user interface: multitouch, physics and gestures (MPG). Just as there was an awkward overlap between first and second-generation with first Windows-on-DOS, then DOS-in-Windows, there is a similar transition with multitouch elements on Macs and Windows 8 PCs.

3. It doesn't have file management

PCs force users to engage in file management. User data files have to be backed up, organised and kept track of. System files like drivers and DLLs are often troublesome and have to be replaced or upgraded.

Post-PC devices need updates, of course, but the user doesn't track down the location of files and manage them. When a new app is installed, the user sees the icon, and that's it. There's no drilling down to see all the files installed. There's no file management.

4. Apps function on the app store model

The post-PC approach to dealing with software is that it's discovered on an app store, downloaded with a single touch and deleted with another touch. Updates all come at once from the app store, and it all happens behind the scenes with minimal user involvement.

The post-PC world is coming to a desktop near you

When Cook and others talk about moving to a "post-PC world," this is what they're talking about. Apple specifically is making its PCs more post-PC. Microsoft is making the next version of Windows very post PC. But these PCs acquiring post-PC characteristics are simply transitional features designed to prepare us for the truly post-PC world coming soon.

Yes, people will use something like an iPad, people will and are already using the iPad specifically, as their main or only computing device. The number of people buying and using iPads and other tablets is growing fast. And the number of people buying new PCs is slowing, and will soon decline.

It won't stop anytime soon, however. You'll be able to buy PCs well into the post-PC future.

The New York Times recently gave a succinct status report on this changing of the guard:

"In 2011, PCs outsold tablets almost six to one, estimates Canalys, a technology research company. But that is still a significant change from 2010, the iPad's first year on the market, when PCs outsold tablets 20 to one, according to Canalys. For the last two years, PC sales were flat, while iPad sales were booming."

Whenever pundits accurately predict something, people will tell you you're wrong, crazy and/or an idiot, right up until the point where they say: "Well, duh, of course that's what everyone has known all along." That's why prediction is so ungratifying, everybody skips the "wow, you were right" part.

My prediction two years ago in this space that iPads would replace desktop PCs for many people was met with almost universal disagreement.

I've made a whole lot of related and equally unpopular predictions, including that giant desktop tablets would go mainstream, and that you, the mouse-loving nay-sayers, would learn to love your on-screen, all-glass keyboard. I'm here to report for the first time that the public attitude on all this has reversed itself. Such predictions were met with "you're wrong and you're an idiot" right up until a couple of months ago. Now, I'm getting a lot more: "Well, duh, obviously."

A huge percentage of tech fans and professionals now accept the inevitability of the "post-PC" future, the mouseless desktop tablet and all the rest.

The clincher is the universal application of post-PC elements to PC platforms. Both the "Lion" and more recent "Mountain Lion" versions of OS X (Apple also removed the word "Mac" from OS X) introduced a huge number of interface and app elements from iOS.

And, of course, Windows 8 features a "Metro UI", clearly a tablet user interface that can also be used with a mouse, that's optional on PCs but required on tablets.

With so much conspicuous writing on the walls, it's becoming clear that the post-PC, touch-tablet centric world is coming to desktops. Meanwhile, the power and capabilities of the PC world are trickling down to the post-PC tablet space. Consider:

• The screen resolution on the new iPad is higher than Microsoft Xbox 360.
• Mobile broadband connections will eventually exceed the performance of many home Internet connections.
• The use of a keyboard is very widespread on iPads.
• The growth of "content creation" tools has spread, and now even versions of Photoshop and Microsoft Office are becoming available.

The number of consumer activities that cannot be done on an iPad is rapidly dwindling. As an increasing number of consumers embrace iPads and other tablets as their full-time computing device, they're going to want bigger ones for the desktop.

No, the PC isn't going away, but it is moving away from the centre. The PC of tomorrow will be like yesterday's "workstation" of the '90s. The PC will become a relatively high-priced powerhouse reserved for hardcore specialists and professionals. But the vast majority of users will soon use post-PC devices that look and feel and work a lot like the iPad.

Source: Computerworld UK

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on how alternatives to PC's can benefit your business.

Are you currently in the midst of implementing a disaster recovery plan in your small or mid-sized business? I outline three tips to help get you going in the right direction.

Be Pragmatic

While it is tempting to write down enthusiastic objectives to recover from just about any disaster, I think small businesses need to be realistic about the increased costs that a smaller recovery window entails. Stipulating that a faulty server must be back in action within 48 hours for example, will likely require hardware replacement SLAs (Service Level Agreements) of 4 hours to be worked out with vendors; as a next-business-day arrangement won’t cut it if a crucial server were to go down on a Friday.

As you can imagine, this will likely cost much more than a "next-business-day" arrangement. In the same vein, requiring that all systems must be restored on the same day will probably necessitate the purchase of additional server hardware to be placed on cold standby.

With that in mind, I strongly advocate balancing your organization’s needs carefully against what is possible with the available budget. In short, be pragmatic.

Flexibility Stretches Your Resources

Rather than spend an excessive amount of time coming up with fancy ROI (Return On Investment) charts or lamenting about the lack of budget to acquire top-of-the-line tape backup systems, small business owners should be flexible and consider alternative ways of stretching their existing resources.

Configuring incremental backups can greatly reduce the amount of storage capacity required for data backups, while the judicious use of data compression can further reduce this -- albeit at the cost of a slightly longer backup process.

Another possible consideration is the use of cloud-based systems in your disaster recovery plans. For example, data that changes frequently can be encrypted and stored in the cloud, while cloud-based messaging infrastructure could be tapped into as temporary replacements for crashed local systems.

Availability is Not a Backup

Many small businesses and SOHOs tend to confuse the high-availability offered by redundant storage drives in a typical NAS or SAN array with data backups. While availability has a huge role to play in business continuity, it may be of little help in a disaster such as a fire or flood. A full recovery from these highly destructive disasters mandates the presence of independent data backups stored at unaffected locations.

Source: Internet News

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the most appropriate disaster recovery plan for your business.

Given the high rate of project failures, you might think that companies would be happy to just have their project finish with some degree of success. That’s not the case. Despite the odds, organizations expect projects to be completed faster, cheaper, and better. The only way that these objectives can be met is through the use of effective project management processes and techniques. This list outlines the major phases of managing a project and discusses key steps for each one.

PLANNING

1: Plan the work by utilizing a project definition document

There is a tendency for IT infrastructure projects to shortchange the planning process, with an emphasis on jumping right in and beginning the work. This is a mistake. The time spent properly planning the project will result in reduced cost and duration and increased quality over the life of the project. The project definition is the primary deliverable from the planning process and describes all aspects of the project at a high level. Once approved by the customer and relevant stakeholders, it becomes the basis for the work to be performed. For example, in planning an Exchange migration, the project definition should include the following:

• Project overview: Why is the Exchange migration taking place? What are the business drivers? What are the business benefits?
• Objectives: What will be accomplished by the migration? What do you hope to achieve?
• Scope: What features of Exchange will be implemented? Which departments will be converted? What is specifically out of scope?
• Assumptions and risks: What events are you taking for granted (assumptions), and what events are you concerned about? Will the right hardware and infrastructure be in place? Do you have enough storage and network capacity?
• Approach: How will the migration project unfold and proceed?
• Organization: Show the significant roles on the project. Identifying the project manager is easy, but who is the sponsor? It might be the CIO for a project like this. Who is on the project team? Are any of the stakeholders represented?
• Signature page: Ask the sponsor and key stakeholders to approve this document, signifying that they agree on what is planned.
• Initial effort, cost, and duration estimates: These should start as best-guess estimates and then be revised, if necessary, when the workplan is completed.

PROJECT WORKPLAN

2: Create a planning horizon

After the project definition has been prepared, the workplan can be created. The workplan provides the step-by-step instructions for constructing project deliverables and managing the project. You should use a prior workplan from a similar project as a model, if one exists. If not, build one the old-fashioned way by utilizing a work-breakdown structure and network diagram.

Create a detailed workplan, including assigning resources and estimating the work as far out as you feel comfortable. This is your planning horizon. Past the planning horizon, lay out the project at a higher level, reflecting the increased level of uncertainty. The planning horizon will move forward as the project progresses. High-level activities that were initially vague need to be defined in more detail as their timeframe gets closer.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROCEDURES

3: Define project management procedures up front

The project management procedures outline the resources that will be used to manage the project. This will include sections on how the team will manage issues, scope change, risk, quality, communication, and so on. It is important to be able to manage the project rigorously and proactively and to ensure that the project team and all stakeholders have a common understanding of how the project will be managed. If common procedures have already been established for your organization, utilize them on your project.

4: Manage the workplan and monitor the schedule and budget

Once the project has been planned sufficiently, execution of the work can begin. In theory, since you already have agreement on your project definition and since your workplan and project management procedures are in place, the only challenge is to execute your plans and processes correctly. Of course, no project ever proceeds entirely as it was estimated and planned. The challenge is having the rigor and discipline needed to apply your project management skills correctly and proactively.

• Review the workplan on a regular basis to determine how you are progressing in terms of schedule and budget. If your project is small, this may need to be weekly. For larger projects, the frequency might be every two weeks.
• Identify activities that have been completed during the previous time period and update the workplan to show they are finished. Determine whether there are any other activities that should be completed but have not been. After the workplan has been updated, determine whether the project will be completed within the original effort, cost, and duration. If not, determine the critical path and look for ways to accelerate these activities to get you back on track.

• Monitor the budget. Look at the amount of money your project has actually consumed and determine whether your actual spending is more than originally estimated based on the work that has been completed. If so, be proactive. Either work with the team to determine how the remaining work will be completed to hit your original budget or else raise a risk that you may exceed your allocated budget.

5: Look for warning signs

Look for signs that the project may be in trouble. These could include the following:

• A small variance in schedule or budget starts to get bigger, especially early in the project. There is a tendency to think you can make it up, but this is a warning. If the tendencies are not corrected quickly, the impact will be unrecoverable.
• You discover that activities you think have already been completed are still being worked on. For example, users whom you think have been migrated to a new platform are still not.
• You need to rely on unscheduled overtime to hit the deadlines, especially early in the project.
• Team morale starts to decline.
• Deliverable quality or service quality starts to deteriorate. For instance, users start to complain that their converted e-mail folders are not working correctly.
• Quality-control steps, testing activities, and project management time starts to be cut back from the original schedule. A big project, such as an Exchange migration, can affect everyone in your organization. Don’t cut back on the activities that ensure the work is done correctly.

If these situations occur, raise visibility through risk management, and put together a plan to proactively ensure that the project stays on track. If you cannot successfully manage through the problems, raise an issue.

MANAGING SCOPE

6: Ensure that the sponsor approves scope-change requests

After the basics of managing the schedule, managing scope is the most important activity required to control a project. Many project failures are not caused by problems with estimating or team skill sets but by the project team working on major and minor deliverables that were not part of the original project definition or business requirements. Even if you have good scope-management procedures in place, there are still two major areas of scope-change management that must be understood to be successful: understanding who the customer is and scope creep.

In general, the project sponsor is the person funding the project. For infrastructure projects like an Exchange migration, the sponsor might be the CIO or CFO. Although there is usually just one sponsor, a big project can have many stakeholders, or people who are impacted by the project. Requests for scope changes will most often come from stakeholders — many of whom may be managers in their own right. One manager might want chat services for his or her area. Another might want an exception to the size limits you have placed on mailboxes. It doesn’t matter how important a change is to a stakeholder, they can’t make scope-change decisions, and they can’t give your team the approval to make the change. In proper scope-change management, the sponsor (or a designate) must give the approval, since they are the only ones who can add funding to cover the changes and know if the project impact is acceptable.

7: Guard against scope creep

Most project managers know to invoke scope-change management procedures if they are asked to add a major new function or a major new deliverable to their project. However, sometimes the project manager doesn’t recognize the small scope changes that get added over time. Scope creep is a term used to define a series of small scope changes that are made to the project without scope-change management procedures being used. With scope creep, a series of small changes — none of which appear to affect the project individually — can accumulate and have a significant overall impact on the project. Many projects fail because of scope creep, and the project manager needs to be diligent in guarding against it.

MANAGING RISK

8: Identify risks up front

When the planning work is occurring, the project team should identify all known risks. For each risk, they should also determine the probability that the risk event will occur and the potential impact on the project. Those events identified as high-risk should have specific plans put into place to mitigate them so they do not, in fact, occur. Medium risks should be evaluated to see whether they need to be proactively managed. (Low-level risks may be identified as assumptions. That is, there is potential risk involved, but you are “assuming” that the positive outcome is much more probable.) Some risks are inherent in a complex project that affects every person in the company. Other risks may include not having the right level of expertise, unfamiliarity with the technology, and problems integrating smoothly with existing products or equipment.

9: Continue to assess potential risks throughout the project

Once the project begins, periodically perform an updated risk assessment to determine whether other risks have surfaced that need to be managed.

10: Resolve issues as quickly as possible

Issues are big problems. For instance, in an Exchange migration, the Exchange servers you ordered aren’t ready and configured on time. Or perhaps the Windows forest isn’t set up correctly and needs to be redesigned. The project manager should manage open issues diligently to ensure that they are being resolved. If there is no urgency to resolve the issue or if the issue has been active for some time, it may not really be an issue. It may be a potential problem (risk), or it may be an action item that needs to be resolved at some later point. Real issues, by their nature, must be resolved with a sense of urgency.

Source: TechRepublic

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The cost of entry-level Android smartphones will drop to around $70 — or £44 — within the next two years, as a result of falling component prices, Google has predicted.

That could lead to "an Android in every pocket", given the subsequent massive reduction in need for feature phones, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt said in a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress 2012 on Tuesday.

"Next year's $100 phone is this year's $400 phone," Schmidt told the MWC audience in Barcelona. "Many people are working on phones in the $100 to $150 range. When you get to the $70 point you get to a huge new market... Smartphones will cost what feature phones cost now next year."

Android expansion

Schmidt said the number of Android device activations had roughly doubled every six months and now exceeded 850,000 per day, making more than 300 million in total.

"We'll need to produce more people," Schmidt quipped. He added that he hopes market forces will help curb the forking of Android devices — that is, non Google-certified devices — as people want access to Google-specific features such as the Android Market.

"We understood this stuff would happen, it is anticipated and it's fine... We don't prevent them from doing it, we don't contractually require them [to use Android services]," Schmidt said. "We don't sue them. It's their choice, but we hope that pressure from consumers [will] get some of those platforms to see the benefit of joining the larger Android Market ecosystem."

In 2012, Google intends to expand the full Android ecosystem with Ice Cream Sandwich on every device, in the hope of bringing more non Google-certified manufacturers into the fold, he added.

"If you just do the math, the thing is huge — it's a scale you've not seen. There's nothing in the market today with that scale," Schmidt said.

Control of the web

He also talked more generally about the role of the internet and technology, saying these can be a great leveller across the world — in some cases allowing people to rise up against dictatorial regimes. However,  Schmidt also cautioned that 40 countries now engage in active censorship of the internet — up from just four when Google began — and that some Google products or services are blocked in 25 of the 125 countries in which it operates.

"Some governments will always want to try and control and restrict access to the web and technology," he said. "Even in the US we have seen worrying legislative and regulatory proposals, and we will see more of these efforts, but I think they will fail.

"No system of censorship can be absolute... but we need to act now to avoid the rise of a new digital caste system."

During a Q&A session, Schmidt was asked about Google Fibre — the company's super-fast fibre network in Kansas City — and said that its network should easily be able to handle a sustained 300Mbps to 500Mbps connection.

The result of this, Schmidt said, is that the distinction between content formats, such as TV, DVD and high-definition video, will become irrelevant as fibre eliminates the technical limitations on delivery.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the best smartphone for your business.

In the DIY culture of small businesses, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the options out there, and finding the time and money to dedicate to IT projects is not easy. All the same, IT is becoming an increasingly important aspect of being able to connect with customers and close sales. Here are 10 things you can do (some of which are pretty easy) that can help you use your IT resources to increase your revenues and profits.

1: Turn off the spam filters for sales accounts

Time and time again, I see businesses that have their accounts for inbound customer communications set up like personal accounts. Unless you make very little profit, the time needed to manually sift through spam is far less than the cost of lost sales, as important communications go astray. No spam filter is perfect, and lots of customers’ emails somehow end up in the junk email bin or get deleted outright. If you are going to use a spam filter on these critical emails, use one that does not permanently block the emails.

2: Beware the coupon sites

Coupon sites are all the rage right now, but many small businesses have been burned by them. Not only are you giving a deep discount, but the terms are often tough for a small business to work with. Things like not being able to restrict the number of coupons sold, delayed payouts (to account for refunds), and the site’s fees often mean that the business takes a beating. If you come out of pocket on inventory or have other per-sale costs, you can lose your shirt in a hurry.

Even for businesses without a per-sale cost model, the deals can be damaging. For example, a local gun range owner reported to me that his deal for inexpensive lane time sold a lot of coupons, but the coupon customers all showed up right before the coupons expired, causing big lines for the full-price customers.

3: Always provide an incident or reference number

While no one is a big fan of automated replies of the “Your email is important to us” variety, one valuable purpose they can serve is to provide a reference number for the incident or contact. Even if you do not use anything fancy for this, giving customers some sort of number to refer to is an important part of being able to follow up with them (or for them to follow up with you). It also helps ensure that when you talk to a customer, you both know what the call is in reference to.

4: Automatically notify customers as the status changes

The “big boys” with their automated systems often get a few things right — like status change notification emails. You need to be doing this, especially if your products are custom items. I’ve recently been dealing with a lot of vendors selling made-to-order or on-demand items, and a common theme is that communications are very poor. After a while, you wonder if you should just cancel your order and place one with a company that has the items in stock but not quite as customized.

Keep your customers in the loop and they’ll be less likely to start looking at other vendors and cancelling orders. Many e-commerce solutions offer this functionality, so it’s worth checking the documentation. If your system doesn’t offer such a feature, you should make a habit of sending emails manually.

5: Get a CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are typically associated with big businesses, and this has been the case for a while. CRM systems usually require a ton of maintenance and upkeep, and they have high costs and difficult installations. But a new breed of CRM vendors are changing the rules and offering CRM systems (usually Web-based, with zero install or IT department needed) that are targeted at the small business. A CRM system is much more than a fancy email client; things like those order status change notifications and contact reference numbers are usually baked right in. Add on top of that CRM’s other uses, and it is well worth your time to look into using a CRM in your business.

6: Search for yourself

Do some searching on the Internet for your business, and you may find yourself with a pile of things to take care of. For example, many sites list businesses’ contact details, hours of operation, etc., and if those are wrong you will need to correct them. If there are reviews sites talking about your business, take the time to read each review. Then honestly evaluate whether they point to any problems you need to address or whether they give you a new opportunity for business.

While the temptation may be to post bogus reviews or to respond with nasty comments on the bad reviews, don’t. Instead, use these reviews as an opportunity for customer service! If a customer had a bad experience, publicly offer to make it right. You need to make this a regular part of your workflow too, because taking a month to respond is just as bad as not doing it at all.

7: Analyze your Web site

It’s easy to put up a Web site, but it is a lot more work to determine whether it is helping you generate sales. Start with Web log analysis software or Google Analytics to get an idea of what users are looking for, what pages are popular, how long it takes users to find the information they need, and so on. If you have a complex site or online applications, you may want to seriously consider hiring a usability expert. The cost of an expert can easily be paid for by an increase in sales if you do enough business online. Even if you can’t afford a usability expert, using your logged traffic and conducting informal listening labs can provide you with valuable data to improve your site.

8: Put Skype to work

I cannot say enough good things about using Skype for business. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it combines a ton of useful functions, such as VoIP, IM, international calling, Web conferencing, and screen sharing, into one package. And it has enough market penetration within businesses that you can use it for dealing with customers in a business-to-business situation much of the time. For me, being able to do Web conferencing and screen sharing is a critical part of doing business, and I can’t work without it. I like to backstop Skype with dedicated screen-sharing systems too, just in case I’m working with someone who does not have Skype, but I find that this is increasingly rare.

9: Hire a pro for your Web site

One of the great temptations for any small business is to try to save money by doing things themselves or having an unqualified friend or family member do them. And while that may work in the short term, the long term costs are often much higher than you think. This is especially true for a Web site, where the difference between an amateur job and a professional one is glaringly obvious. Sure, it may cost you some money to have a professional do your Web site, but they will get it done much faster than you will, and your time does have a value to it. More important, the professional will do things much better than you will. If you’ve ever decided not to purchase something from a company because its Web site did not feel professional or lacked things like a proper shopping cart and ordering system, you can see how easy it is to lose sales by doing your Web site yourself.

10: Use “Real email” — no excuses

I see this time and time again: The small business that would rather save $5 or $10 a month by using a free email account from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc., than to just buy a proper domain name and get good email. What’s the problem here? Well, for one thing it is unprofessional. It looks absolutely horrible to a potential customer to be dealing with a company too cheap to get email. If your target market is individual consumers or you have a unique offering that no one else does, you may be able to get away with it, but certainly not when working with other businesses.

Another problem is that the free email often has overly aggressive spam filtering that you can’t control. You do not have to give up the things you like about these services by getting “real” email, and in fact, some free mail providers (including Google) have a paid option that gives you additional control, lets you use a domain name, and so on.

Source: TechRepublic

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Converge IT's dedicated legal division today launches the latest version of its Smart CRM software - and smart has just got smarter!

The upgrade revolves around the development of the 'Legal Service Centre': comprising a secure customer portal, social media integration and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), the Service Centre is designed to enhance client delivery, connectivity and communication.

Click here for an update on Smartlegal News.

1. FileApp

If you store Word, Excel and other Office documents online, you may not need to keep copies of the files on your iPad. But many iPad users prefer to store PDFs, Word docs, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets on their tablets. The free FileApp file manager for iPhones and iPads makes it easy to transfer files to and from a PC via Wi-Fi or USB. (Note that transfers require the free DiskAid program.)

FileApp lets you view files listed by type, date, name, or last opened. It lets you email files, play music tracks and videos, and password-protect the program to restrict access to the files.

For £2.99, FileApp Pro lets you create and edit text documents, attach multiple files to an email, and rename, create, move, copy and delete multiple files and folders.

2. PaperDesk Lite

Considering the tote-ability of the iPad it's no surprise note-takers are among the most popular apps for the device. (Last April, I compared three handwriting apps for the iPad.)

The free PaperDesk Lite notebook app for the iPad lets you add images and audio recordings to notes you create via the iPad's built-in keypad or by handwriting. The program also lets you import PDFs, send your notes as email attachments, manage your notes in an Explorer-like window, and password-protect notes.

To add a note or folder, press the plus sign in the top-right corner to open a pop-up window that also has options for importing a PDF and sending a note to the Dropbox online-storage service. Press the settings button in the bottom left to secure notes with a password and choose one of the two interface styles in the free version. You can also search your notes, add a task list for notebooks, upload notebooks to Google Docs, share them on Twitter, and bookmark specific notebook pages.

The free PaperDesk Lite limits you to three notebooks, each no larger than three pages. The £2.49 version of PaperDesk does away with these limitations and adds the MyPaperDesk.com service that stores your notebooks on the developer's secure servers.

PaperDesk Lite didn't produce the precise writing of the other iPad note-taking apps I've tried, but the ability to add images, voice recordingsand PDFs gives notes a new dimension (other notepad apps also let you add images to your notes). Unfortunately, the tool controls and other options that appear as a small toolbar in portrait mode take up too much of the screen in landscape mode (my preferred note-taking orientation).

3. Nightstand Central

A travel alarm clock has topped the list of business travellers' take-alongs for about as long there has been business travel. These days most people rely on a wake-up call to get them to their first appointment of the day on time. iPad users no longer have to trust to their hotel's automated call service to rouse them in the morning... or whenever.

The free version of Thomas Huntington's Nightstand Central app converts your iPad into a digital clock that also displays the local temperature and weather forecast. You can set multiple alarms that use one of 15 different sounds. The alarms can be set to repeat and to fade in; you can also choose the alarm volume, fade in and snooze delay.

Other options let you choose from dozens of screen backgrounds, customise the time display to show 24-hour time or hide the seconds, and have the device determine your location automatically or add your own location. The 69p full version removes the ads that appear at the top of the clock display and lets you add custom wallpaper and alarm sounds, among other features. It also lets you use the iPad as a flashlight and reposition the clock and weather information it displays.

4. Onavo

If your phone bill isn't covered by your employer while you're travelling, Onavo could prove invaluable for keeping an eye on your data usage and preventing 'bill shock' when you get home.

The app, which is available for free, measures exactly how much data you use while at home or abroad, and where exactly the data has been used. More than that, Onavo goes one step further than a simple data monitor: it actually compresses all the data sent to or from the handset on its servers. It then serves up the requested page — in the same way the Opera Mini web browser's server-side compression works — to reduce the total amount of data used.

Currently, the app only supports download data and not streaming services such as YouTube or Skype, but the creator says that is being worked on right now.

People keen to check out potential privacy issues might want to check out the Onavo privacy policy, which makes no bones about the fact that it collects personally identifiable information, although the company did tell ZDNet UK that it anonymises any personal information and only collects the minimum required to provide the service.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on mobile working solutions for your business.

1: Outlook comes in various configurations and flavors

Users should know that they might encounter different features as they move from one machine to another. For instance, when using Outlook or Outlook Web Access at home or offsite, they might be confused or frustrated when Exchange-specific features or options aren’t available. In addition, Outlook Express is only a mail client. Knowing the differences isn’t necessary — but knowing there are differences should ward off a few support calls when favorite features aren’t available.

2: It’s all too easy to make embarrassing mistakes

It’s easy to do things wrong, regardless of the email client being used. Perhaps the most common mistake users make is to click Reply All when replying to just the sender. (Fortunately, this isn’t as easy to do by mistake in Outlook 2010.) Good training is the only way to prevent such errors. You can head off other types of mistakes by creating a policy regarding appropriate use of company email. That way, users won’t be confused about what they can and can’t do. The following links should help your users avoid potential disasters and use email more effectively.

3: It’s essential to protect against viruses, phishing, malware, etc.

Keeping Outlook users safe from nasties is easier than it used to be, and this is really a job for IT personnel, not the users themselves. On the other hand, well-informed users are your first line of defense. If you give them the information they need, your job will be easier. Here are a few basic guidelines to share with users:

• Don’t open email from unknown sources.
• Don’t open attachments from unknown sources.
• Don’t enter your company email address on Web sites.
• Don’t turn off your virus protection software.
• Keep your virus protection software updated.

If you think the first three are impractical, you’re right. In fact, in many organizations, those guidelines would be impossible to follow. The more practical approach is to help users recognize and respond to potential threats — phishing and malicious email messages that appear to be legitimate — as they arrive.

4: The interface can be customized

Outlook has a lot going on: email, contacts, tasks, calendar. Most users will want to tweak the interface to work more efficiently, and every user’s needs will be unique. You could spend a lot of time fine-tuning the interface for each user, but instead, teach them how to customize the interface themselves. You’ll save time and ultimately, your users will be happier.

5: Email is stored locally

Perhaps the most important thing for your users to remember is that email messages downloaded to an offsite system will be saved on that machine; those messages won’t be accessible to other machines. If they need a message at work, they can forward it to their work account before logging off. Exchange Server and other mail servers have other options, but administrators don’t always support them.

6: Data files can blow up

Outlook data files (.pst) are susceptible to corruption if they grow too large. To avoid trouble, train users to keep an eye on the size of their data file. The limit is 2GB; users should regularly delete unwanted mail and archive old messages long before the .pst file reaches that size.

7: Data files can be repaired

When corruption does occur, users can run Inbox Repair Tool to diagnose and repair the error. If that fails, users can run the crop tool. Doing so will reduce the size of the data file, resulting in some data loss, but it should get Outlook back on track. Exchange users should contact their administrators for help before running the crop tool; it might not be necessary. Here are a couple of other useful resources:

• Repair Outlook 2007 Data Files (.pst and .ost)
• How to understand the repair feature in Office 2003 and in Office XP

8: Data files should be backed up

Knowing how to regularly back up Outlook data files is the best protection against corruption. When the worst happens, your users can still access their backup files. How often depends on the users, but every day isn’t too often for users who do a lot of work in Outlook. Show them how to back up everything, including their calendar, contacts, journal, and tasks. Exchange users should contact their administrators because the administrator may be backing up all files already. If that’s not the case, the administrator can provide specific instructions for manually backing up data files.

9: Archiving is a good practice

Outlook can archive mail automatically, and most users will probably benefit from this arrangement. Determining how often Outlook archives mail will be up to you and your users (or dictated by a department policy). They should know how often Outlook is archiving their mail. They also need to know where their archived mail is stored and how to recover it if necessary.

10: There are ways to avoid spam filters

Users don’t want their messages filtered into spam folders. There are a few dos and don’ts your users can practice to avoid triggering these filters:

• Avoid using words and phrases that trigger spam filters. Use the phrase “spam keywords” in your favorite search engine to find current lists of problematic text.
• Use plain text and avoid HTML, images, and links when possible.
• Write a detailed subject line.

Source: TechRepublic

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on how other Microsoft products can benefit your business.

Smartlegal, Converge IT's division dedicated to the legal sector, are sponsoring the "Employment Team of the Year" category in this years Manchester Legal Awards. We have a strong affinity for Manchester, as it was where we started out and it's where many of our clients are located. We look forward to spending an enjoyable evening with clients, colleagues and friends and we would like to wish all the shortlisted candidates the very best of luck.

For more information on the evening viist www.manchesterlegalawards.co.uk

As someone who spends a considerable amount of time on the road, I often have to connect to the Internet from places other than my home. Even though Internet access is nearly ubiquitous, Internet access while traveling can be expensive and sometimes, surprisingly limited. So I thought I’d compile a series of tips for those who need to use the Internet while traveling.

1: You might be better off using a public Wi-Fi hotspot than your hotel’s connectivity

Almost every hotel provides Internet access, but there may be situations in which you have to look for a public Wi-Fi hotspot instead of using the hotel’s Internet service. Some hotels are notorious for blocking various protocols and Web sites. For example, a lot of hotels block Netflix to try to get customers to order pay-per-view movies. I have also been on cruise ships that blocked VoIP to force passengers to use onboard telephones, which can cost eight dollars a minute or more.

Of course, hotels don’t just block Web sites and Internet protocols in an effort to make money. Sometimes, they may have security or bandwidth preservation in mind. I’ve stayed in hotels that blocked instant messaging traffic, YouTube videos, and even videoconferencing.

2: Wired connectivity may provide a better experience

Some hotel rooms offer wired Ethernet in addition to the Wi-Fi signal that can be found throughout the hotel. Oftentimes, I have found that the wired connection results in a more reliable experience. Sometimes in hotels, the airwaves are oversaturated with Wi-Fi traffic, which may lead to slow or unreliable connectivity. Using a wired connection allows you to avoid the frustration of not knowing what you’re going to get with Wi-Fi.

3: Beware of data plan limitations when using a mobile hotspot

Some smartphones can be configured as mobile hotspots. They include miniature wireless access points that allow laptop computers to access the Internet through the smartphone’s Internet connection. Although these devices work well, it’s easy to run up a large bill unless you have an unlimited data plan.

A few years back, I had a wireless plan that limited the amount of data I could upload and download. Whenever I was working directly from my phone, I would keep my data limit in mind. But when I worked from my laptop, the experience was basically the same as using it from any other Wi-Fi connection (although a bit slower), and I would sometimes forget about my data limitations.

4: Cut and paste can save lots of money on cruise ships

The Internet connections on cruise ships tend to be outrageously expensive. Most of the ships I have sailed on the last few years have charged about $.85 a minute for Internet access. To add insult to injury, the Internet connections are throttled to a painfully slow speed, which makes it easy to rack up a large bill.

I try to stay off the Internet when I’m vacationing, but every once in a while I need to send an email message. One little trick I use is to compose the email message before I actually get online. Every cruise ship does things differently, but I have found that I can sometimes compose an email on my own computer and save the message to a text file on a USB flash drive. When I get to the ship’s Internet café, I log on, sign into my email account, and then copy and paste the message. This has saved me a lot of money because I’m not spending billable time composing my messages.

5: If Internet access stops working, check your roaming settings

I depend on my Windows phone for most of my Internet needs when I’m traveling. Every once in a while, though, Internet access comes to a grinding halt. This can be attributed to a setting (which exists on most smartphones) that disables Internet connectivity automatically if you’re roaming.

Sometimes, roaming restrictions are controlled at the server end. Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 both contain an ActiveSync policy setting that can be used to prevent Direct Push from synchronizing users’ mailboxes while they’re roaming. This setting won’t affect general Internet access, but it will prevent email from working.

6: Free Internet access can sometimes be limited

Some hotels have been known to charge as much as $40 for Internet access, so it’s tempting to stay at one that offers free Internet access. Before you book, though, it is a good idea to do a quick check online to see if there’s a catch to the free Internet access.

Most of the hotels I have stayed in don’t limit your use of the Internet beyond what I have already talked about. Last year, however, I stayed in a hotel in Atlanta that imposed a three-hour limit for free Internet access. Even though three hours might sound like a lot, it’s amazing how quickly you can burn through it.

7: Be careful about using mobile Internet on a cruise ship

Even if you have an unlimited data plan from your cell provider, using your smartphone while on a cruise ship can be very expensive. Most of the major cruise lines offer a service called Cellular at Sea. Essentially, the ship has its own cell tower and when you use your phone, you’re roaming at a rate set by the cruise line. The service gets turned off while the ship is in port, however, which allows you to use the regular cellular service for wherever you happen to be.

Incidentally, some cell providers will allow you to use your cell phone (Internet access and all) from an American territory for the same rate you’d have if you were in America. For example, I have used my smartphone in places like Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Guam without incurring any additional charges.

8: Access Wi-Fi in the air

Given how strict the airlines are about the use of portable electronic devices, it is easy to assume that Internet access while flying is out of the question. However, in the last year or two, many of the airlines have begun offering Wi-Fi on their planes. The service tends to be slow and expensive, but if you really need to access the Internet while on the go, having Wi-Fi while in the air is great.

9: In a hotel, there is no such thing as privacy

We all know that Wi-Fi networks are anything but private. However, that point was underscored for me in a big way last year. I was staying at a hotel while attending a technology conference. One night halfway through the conference, a friend called and told me I just had to come down to his room and see something. Apparently, he had gotten bored and decided to sniff the Wi-Fi network for fun. You absolutely would not believe the types of things people search the Internet for from a hotel room late at night.

10: Never underestimate the value of local storage

Although this might seem completely counterintuitive, don’t underestimate the value of local storage. Yes, the Internet is nearly ubiquitous and there are many ways to access it while traveling. But I have learned through experience that if I really need access to a file, I should bring a copy of it with me rather than count on getting access to it from a cloud service provider. I have just seen too many situations in which hotel networks failed to operate correctly. I don’t want to end up without access to a critical file just because I chose to put my faith in the almighty cloud.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on your business mobile working needs.

A new Disaster Recovery solution is the latest addition to the Converge IT Hosted Solutions suite. Using real-time imaging technology it provides continuous data replication within the Converge IT data centre; this allows for both rapid bare metal recovery in the event of a single server failure, and a complete off-site DR facility in the more unlikely event of a full site failure. Half a dozen firms have already signed for the service ahead of its formal launch, including O'Neill Patient.

Michael Lennon, O'Neill Patient's IT director, explained: "Our clients need to be sure we can continue to deliver outstanding levels of service under any circumstances. Following a review of our Disaster Recovery strategy, we decided that we needed a new and improved technical solution based on the following key goals: speed of recovery; flexibility; reliability and security. The Converge IT offering meets all of these needs."

Converge IT's Nigel Wright comments: "The idea of downtime is becoming unacceptable. It's not just about maximising productivity, or not missing milestones and deadlines, or avoiding compromising your reputation, it's about being 'always on' - always accessible to clients, always available to staff, with 24/7 continuity being the new normal. This new service is designed to give firms the required level of protection and reassurance at an affordable cost. Or put another way, corporate level contingency at SME prices."

Contact us now for advice on your business Disaster Recovery requirements.

Telecoms provider BT plans to accelerate the rate at which full-speed fibre-to-the-premises connections are implemented using a new technology it calls 'FTTP on demand'.

The company made the announcement on Friday, following the successful completion of a trial FTTP-on-demand scheme in St. Agnes, Cornwall.

The product uses BT's existing — and still ongoing — rollout of fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology, but instead of using copper cable for the final link between the cabinet and the premises it will use fibre to connect them.

Previously, FTTP speeds weren't possible in FTTC-enabled areas, but BT has developed a solution that takes advantage of the fibre it has already deployed between the exchange and the street cabinet, the company said in a statement on Friday. "The technological development has the potential to transform the UK broadband landscape. This is because FTTP — which will soon offer end users speeds of up to 300Mbps — could be made available anywhere in BT's fibre footprint where a customer requires it."

BT aims to carry out further trials of the technology during the summer, with the aim of making it commercially available to business or residential customers by the spring of 2013. The company said the service will also deliver "fast" upstream speeds, making it an attractive prospect for small businesses needing to download and upload large amounts of data.

"The release of information about a new FTTP-on-demand product for areas of the UK where BT has already deployed its FTTC product is a surprise. While it was known that the fibre service FTTC could be extended, this was not expected to happen for some years," Andrew Ferguson, editor of Thinkbroadband said.

However, according to Rupert Wood, principal analyst at Analysys Mason, FTTP on demand will mainly be of interest to small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

"This is realistically going to be for the odd SME that won't pay for a dedicated fibre or EFM connection," said Wood. "However, I would be very cautious about assuming that 25 percent of the super-fast roll-out — or at least the purely commercial bit — would be FTTP. Cost and speed of roll-out hold this back, and the emergence of 100Mbps FTTC makes the case weaker."

BT did not say how much the FTTP-on-demand service would cost on a monthly basis, or indicate the connection cost. 

Alongside the announcement of  FTTP on demand, BT reaffrimed its commitment to doubling the speed of its Infinity FTTC packages to around 80Mbps in spring 2012. By the end of the year it said more than 10 million homes and businesses will be able to access the fibre-based services, with two-thirds of the country getting access to them before the end of 2014.

BT's announcements came alongside its third-quarter 2011 financials, in which it revealed revenue was down five percent in a year-on-year comparison,. However, profits showed an increase of 48 percent, before adjustments, up to £652m for the three-month period ending 31 December 2011.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on your business broadband options.

The UK's average home download speed is on the rise, but it could be even faster if more users upgraded at minimal cost, according to Ofcom.

November's average broadband speed was 7.6 megabits per second, up from 6.8Mbps in May, says the regulator.

Upgrades offered by Virgin Media and BT helped boost the figure.

Ofcom says many of the 42% of homes which subscribe to speeds of 10Mbps or less would benefit from switching deal or provider at little or no cost.

The 22% headline speed bump is a notable improvement, according to the price comparison website broadbandchoices.co.uk.

"In reality, the average speed increase of 1.4Mbits will save you around 6 minutes when downloading a 2 hour film," said Michael Philips, the firm's product director.

"This doesn't sound a lot but faster connections improve your general web-surfing experience and are definitely worth the investment, for example if more than one person shares the connection in a household."

Ofcom noted that the price difference between many of the so-called super-fast services and current generation connections was "relatively small".

It said Plusnet customers could roughly double their promised speed to "up to" 40Mbps by swapping to a service with the firm that cost £5 more a month.

It said TalkTalk clients could enjoy a similar gain by paying their provider an extra £10 a month, while one of BT's deals offered an equivalent speed bump at no extra charge.

Marketing restrictions

The figures are contained in Ofcom's sixth study into residential fixed-line broadband performance.

It is the first report since internet service providers were told they would only be able to claim a maximum speed if it was available to 10% of their customers.

The new rules come into effect in April. Using them as a guide Ofcom provided a breakdown of its figures saying that:

• 6Mbps was the average speed for services advertised as "up to" 8Mbps
• 14Mbps was the average speed for connections advertised as "up to" 20/24Mbps

The regulator said speed upgrades offered by Virgin Media and BT accounted for most of the period's gains.

Virgin Media's "up to" 50Mbps cable deal was the fastest surveyed offering average download speeds of nearly 49Mbps. The firm's 100Mbps service was not included in the research.

BT's roll-out of FFTC (fibre to the cabinet) technology helped boost its statistics. The move involves running fibre from its exchanges to street cabinets which are then linked to homes by normal telephone lines.

Since the cabinets are closer to most homes than the exchanges, users enjoy faster speeds.

It has led to the creation of the firm's Infinity offer which promises "up to" 40Mbps. The service was found to provide an average speed of 36Mbps.

'Disappointing'

The study said that other ISPs "did not change significantly" over the six months.

Orange's "up to" 20Mbps ADSL service fared worst out of the maximum-speed offers surveyed. It was found to provide average download speeds of 7.2Mbps.

The firm said it believed the next report would show an improvement.

"It's disappointing to see the outcome of this survey, although it was not unexpected as it was conducted last year as we were moving a large number of our customers to our new broadband network," a statement said.

"Since this time, we have completed the migration and the vast majority of our customers have seen a significant improvement in the download speeds they receive."

The news site thinkbroadband.com said the research also highlighted the need for investment in out-of-town connections.

"Rural areas have an average of 3.3Mbps versus urban at 8.8Mbps," said the firm's editor Andrew Ferguson.

Ofcom says it plans to publish the next report in July, using data collected from tests run in May.

Summary of data speeds sampled by Ofcom in November 2011:

Source: Internet News

Contact us if you wish to improve your business broadband speeds.

Quick, did you hear that? It was your network calling you, pleading for an upgrade. Oh wait, was that the sound of weeping desktops begging for a refresh? You know they’re there — the warning signs that it’s time for change. We tend to ignore them for a variety of reasons. For starters, change causes work stoppage, overtime, and budget explosions. But eventually, there’ll be no choice. Before that time comes, it’s best to heed the signs. Let’s examine 10 clear indications that your IT landscape is in need of change.

1: You can’t remember the passwords to your security equipment…

… and you’re not sure resetting them to factory defaults will actually work. When equipment gets old enough, you never know if a factory reset will even come back to life. The loss of passwords could easily lead to such a situation. Oh sure, the lesson here is to never forget your security information. But more than that, when passwords are lost, it could be a sign that it’s time to start replacing those ancient pieces of hardware.

2: Your support contracts have all run out

Some companies live and breathe by their support contracts. Without the contracts, those companies would surely die a slow, painful death. Many companies rely on support contacts only for particular pieces of software or hardware (especially when they’re costly). Other companies use support contracts only when absolutely necessary. Regardless, when all those support contracts have ended, it’s a good sign your software is out of date and in sore need of upgrading.

3: You’re still using ancient software

When was the last time you walked through your company to find out what versions of various software products were deployed? During that pass, did you happen to see anything seriously out of date? You’d be surprised at what’s out there. On occasion, I still see Windows 98 or NT machines or Windows XP machines running Office 2000. Ancient software can cause far more issues than you think. This is especially true when users collaborate with people in other companies (who are most likely NOT running Microsoft Office 98 or StarOffice).

4: Your company has become a hackers’ playground

If you keep getting hacked, something is amiss. Depending upon what is being targeted, this could be either hardware or software related. Either way, you may be facing poorly configured security hardware, buggy (or ancient) software, or lax security policies. One break-in is understandable. Multiple hacks? Not so much. If you’re attacked more than once, it’s time to make some major changes.

5: You’re falling way behind your competitors

There are companies out there not keeping up with the Joneses. Some might think this silly, but when other companies are passing you by, they can offer clients and customers a lot of features and products you can’t touch. Your competition can do this because they’ve taken advantage of the latest technology or they’re leveraging their systems and resources with imagination and groundbreaking innovation. You, on the other hand, have stuck with “what works” for so long it no longer works. If your competition is smoking you, it’s time to step back and examine your landscape to find out why you’re being left in the dust.

6: Network slowdowns are crippling business and productivity

How often do your end users complain of network slowdowns? Are your clients able to get quick access to your services or sites? If complaints are coming in faster than you can troubleshoot, it might be time to revisit that backbone. The amount of data being transferred through your pipes isn’t the same as it was five or 10 years ago. With so many more Web-based tools in play, data usage is through the roof. That ancient DSL or cable line needs to be upgraded in the worst way. Slow data means slow workers means a slowdown on profit. Share that with the board or the CEO and see how quickly they move on upgrading those data pipes.

7: You haven’t embraced mobile devices

How long have you shunned the mobile device? Are you still not allowing users to get their email on their smartphones? Do you not allow wireless on your network? If that’s the case, it’s time to wake up and join the new world order. Not only do you need to allow those devices on your network, you need to open up the Exchange floodgates for iOS and Android devices.

8: Your employees are jumping ship

There are many reasons why employees leave. But when you start hearing rumors that one of those reasons is horrible IT policies or support, you know it’s time to rethink things. No, you do not want end users to attempt to dictate IT policies. But at the same time, you don’t want your policies to be a contributing factor to high employee attrition.

9: You can’t support telecommuters

People need the ability to work from anywhere and everywhere. This isn’t nearly as difficult to manage as it once was, yet some businesses still refuse. Why? In some cases, their network infrastructure simply won’t handle the load or the task. If your infrastructure can’t handle a few telecommuters, it’s seriously time to upgrade.

10: You keep seeing HIPAA red flags

If your company falls under the HIPAA jurisdiction and you’re tossing red flags left and right, run (don’t walk) to the front of the infrastructure upgrade line and get your network/software/topology to follow the rules and guidelines set in place by HIPAA. This isn’t one of those situations where you have the luxury of dragging your feet. You have to move. Otherwise, you face some serious fines.

Time for a change

In all honesty, is your IT landscape up to par? Does it meet today’s needs and follow best practices in today’s demanding IT-centric world? If not, it’s time to take a hard look at what needs to change. If any of the problems listed here sound familiar, it may be time to shake off the shackles of “If it’s not broke…” and migrate to the here and now.

Source: TechRepublic

If any of the above sounds familiar then contact us for a free onsite network review.

British datacentre owners are entering the cloud services market en masse, a move eased by developments in virtualisation management but hindered by the challenge of setting themselves apart.

At Cloud Expo Europe in London this week, several companies launched high-end public and hybrid cloud services, and all sought to put their own spin on a technology that is fast becoming a standard.

"Cloud technology has entered a utility-based model," said Lukasz Olszewski, a systems architect at UK datacentre operator Telehouse. "We want to differentiate ourselves on the quality of our services."

The growing sophistication of virtualisation frameworks from VMware, Red Hat, Citrix and Microsoft has let datacentre operators easily create clouds on any range of hypervisors, then deliver services on top of that. Clouds based on Red Hat, Microsoft, Citrix and VMware all made an appearance at the London trade show.

"The hypervisor itself is kind of commoditised," said Sam Johnston, Equinix's director of cloud and IT services. "You've got VMware, ESX, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM... that kind of low-level function is essentially commoditised."

Among those with a launch at Cloud Expo Europe was colocation specialist Telehouse, which has started selling virtual datacentre, storage, disaster recovery and infrastructure cloud services, based on its four facilities in London. On Wednesday, Infiniserv announced an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud backed by dedicated connectivity, while London-based telecommunications service provider Interoute now offers similar packages.

In addition, Gloucester-based hosting and cloud company Rise demonstrated its Microsoft-friendly IaaS cloud, which has a management portal designed for less technically-savvy customers, and Claranet showed off its IaaS hypervisor-agnostic virtual datacentre.

Standing out

The challenge for companies is to differentiate themselves to potential customers, when the service they are selling is becoming a standard, the datacentre owners confirmed. The range of services could also confuse some businesses, they said.

"In terms of competitors, there's still a lot of head-scratching going on in the industry," said James Henigan, product and IT services director at Rise. "The market growth is going to come, but we need to help the end-customer understand what they need."

The datacentre owners said their new cloud services are squarely targeted at existing customers, rather than being pitched at drawing in new clients.

"The obvious community for us is our existing connected customers — around 3,000," Interoute's chief technology officer Matthew Finnie said. "The value proposition to those guys should be a no brainer... We see it really as computing infrastructure for our big internet customers or big corporate customers."

Source: ZDNet

Converge IT offer Cloud Solutions for SME's and Enterprise businesses throughout the UK, contact us now at our IT Support Centre for advice.

Disasters are inevitable. Even though people know they have to plan for the worst, life gets in the way. Then when disaster strikes, it takes them down. Rather than just sitting and waiting for a crisis, it's wiser to prepare for it. Here are some things you should do to be ready.

1. Get a good battery backup

You may be dubious about the value of a good battery backup, but it could mean the difference between getting some data and none whatsoever. Let me give you a recent example. I recently had a client that lost power to its building. Problems started to escalate and it looked as if we were heading for a disaster. But thanks to a battery backup, I was able to remote quickly into the machine, get a backup running immediately and avert a total loss.

2. Start creating nightly data backups

This measure goes with the first point. Without backups, you are completely lost. So making regular, reliable backups is the single most important thing you can do to prepare for a disaster. What's more, you need more than just a backup to an external drive. You must also have an offsite backup. As long as you have data, recovery is always a possibility. Make sure backups are nightly and successful. Backups are not a matter of set it and forget it.

3. Start creating weekly full images

Full images are just as crucial as data backups. Some backup products, such as Acronis ABR with Universal Restore, allow you to take a backup image and load it on dissimilar hardware, providing you with one of the fastest routes to recovery. Just ensure you have a recent image — at least a weekly one — or else restoring it will saddle you with an out-of-date system.

4. Document server and client applications

One of the problems with recovery is knowing what software is installed and where. So, document all the software on the system. Make sure you also record the versions of each piece of software. Know as much about your system as possible and don't rely on memory.

5. Check the status of RAID storage

I can't tell you how many times I've had clients with failing RAID storage. Their array is on its last drive when that also fails. Had they monitored the status of the array and replaced it, they wouldn't be in a situation where it couldn't be saved. RAID should not be looked at as a backup system — though some seem to think that's its purpose. It is crucial to monitor RAID-drive status at all times to prevent disastrous levels of loss.

6. Rotate backups offsite

What good are backups if they're in a building fire? Of course, you can place them in a fire-proof safe, but why take a chance? Set up a system for rotating your backups at least weekly offsite. In fact, if you really want to be safe, have three external drives. You'll have one working, one in a fire-proof safe, and one offsite at all times. Although this approach requires you to rotate them more frequently to ensure each is relatively up to date, it will mean you always have a backup available.

7. Document the network

Documentation shouldn't stop at software on servers and clients. You also need to document the network. Know what you used, how you used it, the address schemes, and security measures. This documentation will make it much easier to recover the network. Also, make sure you use diagrams as well as descriptions. The documentation must be clear and thorough enough to enable any network admin to re-create your network quickly.

8. Have an offsite failover for your website

It's great to have all these backup plans, but if you're faced with disaster and depend on your website for revenue, you need an offsite failover. It will allow you to switch easily if your onsite server is out of commission. When you create this offsite failover, make sure you have the sites set up to update regularly, so you're not switching to an out-of-date server.

9. Relocate your software offsite

The organisation will have made a significant investment in all that software — unless it's like me and uses only open source. That investment needs protecting by locating all the installation media offsite. Better yet, burn copies of that data and store the originals offsite. That way, should disaster strike, you won't have to spend days tracking down the installation media to get back up and running. Also make sure that all install keys are stored with the media.

10. Develop a solid recovery plan

Finally, you must have a plan for dealing with disaster. When the inevitable happens, you need to know how to react. Every second you flounder adds to the disaster. Ensure you know exactly what to do. Your plan needs to be set out, step by step, so that panic doesn't get a chance to take over.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT for advice on your business continuity plan.

It is estimated that unstructured data - everything from email to spreadsheets, documents and digital media - accounts for at least 90% of an organisation's data. You systems are bloated with everything from personal iTunes playlists to the early versions of that PowerPoint presentation you delivered in March. To make matters worse, analysts at Gartner and IDC predict that data growth in IT organisations will grow by as much as 800% in the next five years.

Corporations can fight information bloat by using tools that provide a file-by-file inventory to identify files that are duplicate, unused, infrequently accessed or violate policy. In short, there are ways to shed those unwanted terabytes. Here are some tips how:

1. Inventory your technology

Most companies don't know how big their problem is. They can't tell you what file content they have, how much exists, who created it, what resources it is consuming or how much data is duplicated. When we first begin working with an enterprise, we typically find an average of 50%-60% of any given organisation's NAS data has not been viewed in several years.

Since many view the task of sifting the bad data from the good as too daunting, the problem just gets worse. Traditional, manual profiling is difficult and expensive. As such, profiling is done infrequently - sometimes annually - making it impossible to understand the data's impact to the corporation and its storage resources.

Before you can identify wasted files, re-tier storage or trend on storage usage patterns, you need to understand your current capabilities and decide what tools you need to be successful. There are several that offer varying degrees of visibility into some or all of your unstructured environments.

Native array monitoring tools often stop at array capacity and can't provide file-level information, such as when the file was last accessed. Furthermore, this view tends to overestimate your true capacity, leaving you searching for budget to buy more arrays sooner than is truly necessary. Solutions that walk the file tree tend to be cumbersome and place a significant burden on your system, slowing down not only your visibility reporting, but potentially your network as a whole. These "boil the ocean" tools tend to take months or years to deploy and may force users to install agents to feed a relational monitoring database, which can weigh your system down and present scalability challenges.

More lightweight solutions can be deployed in a matter of weeks, not months, and work without the use of agents. Some use a purpose-built database to collect file metadata (versus the complete file). This enables them to characterise and report on billions of files at 10x to 100x faster than a standard relational database. Many of these solutions can be paired with a data mover or user script to implement removal, archiving or re-tiering of data.

2. Identify inappropriate files

End user files make up a hefty portion of an organisation's unstructured data and often include several duplicate versions stored in multiple locations. From employees' personal files of photos, videos, playlists and potential viruses, to outdated versions of old documents, virtually every company is storing these files in some form or another. These files are resource hogs. You need to put a priority on identifying the files so they can be removed or re-tiered - and their storage reclaimed.

Data owned by employees who are terminated or reassigned also represents a security concern. These files should be quickly identified and quarantined or archived to ensure corporate guidelines on data ownership and retention are maintained. If your data centre needs a diet, make sure your administrators are able to aggregate and analyse file information by file type to make their roles as watchdogs for enforcing corporate retention and unauthorised usage policies more efficient.

3. Re-tier your data

Make sure you understand the value of the data you're holding on to. IT organisations are often shocked to learn they can save millions through automated tiering of less-than-critical data. The sheer growth of data makes it critical to store unstructured data on the most cost-effective storage tier throughout its life cycle. Tiering criteria include the availability, security and reliability needed for those files. With the annual cost of owning Tier 1 storage running around $8,000 per terabyte, it's vital that only the data that is most critical to business be stored here.

Once you've identified useful information such as the last access dates, you can determine the "value" of individual files to an enterprise and move data to specific storage tiers based on the value of the data. Furthermore, once each file's value is determined, administrators can establish and monitor data storage policies. These enable administrators to set up automated tiering policies that streamline the process and help ensure that only the most critical information is stored on pricey Tier 1 storage.

4. Implement trending protocols

It's important to monitor the information you collect to see how your data grows and changes over time. Capturing the changing impact of data on your corporation - or trending - gives you a greater understanding of the resources the data is using. That knowledge enables you to set actionable policies to better manage that data.

Depending on the tools you use, you'll be monitoring your storage environments more often. You want to be sure you avoid tools that only aggregate the file level information and do not make file level information accessible to the user, as you can't trend on what you can't see. Imagine being able to aggregate file level information and see trends in this data over time, rather than being limited to "point-in-time" views.

In short, know your data. Unbridled data growth leaves sensitive and non-corporate files hanging in the lurch, representing potential security risks. Identify duplicate end user files, their locations and owners so you can consolidate inactive files or old versions and remove duplicate files to free up storage resources for business critical information.

If you follow these tips, bulky NAS volumes can finally shed some weight.

Source: ComputerworldUK

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on your business data management and storage.

Virgin Media customers on 50Mbps plans are in line to get 120Mbps at no extra charge, the company revealed after mistakenly sending upgrade emails to some of its cable broadband subscribers.

Last week, the ISP announced it will increase headline speeds across all its packages, with the top-tier plan going from 100Mbps to 120Mbps, and other plans doubling in speed. On Monday, Virgin Media confirmed it had incorrectly sent an email to some customers across all its tariffs, saying they would be upgraded to 120Mbps once an infrastructure upgrade had been completed.

"Our first email, intended for our 100Mb customers, was accidentally sent to some customers on other tiers which may have led to some confusion. We're sorry for any misunderstanding and will be writing to customers again soon to clarify how the upgrade will affect them," a Virgin Media spokesman said.

"In the meantime, as part of our double-speed programme, we are delighted to confirm that 50Mb customers will actually be upgraded to 120Mb," he added. Previously, the company had said people on the 50Mbps plan would move to 100Mbps.

The price of the 120Mbps package will stay the same for current 50Mbps subscribers, while those on 100Mbps packages will see their cost drop to the 50Mbps level — £35 per month if taken without a Virgin phone line, or £25 with a phone line.

Some 50Mbps customers may initially see a speed increase to 100Mbps before the 120Mbps tier has been provisioned in their area, Virgin Media said. The upgrades are scheduled to begin rolling out in February and should to be completed by mid-2013, it added.

In September, BT introduced plans to "roughly double" the speed of its 40Mbps fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) service to around 80Mbps. In addition, it said it will use fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology to deliver speeds of up to 300Mbps to some customers during 2012, but did not say exactly when these services will be launched.

Source: ZDNet

Contact us at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on your business communication requirements.

1: Your employees

Your own employees are your biggest source of security risks. Sometimes, it is deliberate; sometimes, it is not. Employees have the most access and the most time. We expend a lot of effort worrying about external threats, but in all honesty, all it takes is an employee bringing in a virus from a home PC on a USB drive to nullify all your forward-facing firewalls and measures. Disgruntled employees sometimes express their anger by hurting your computer systems. And of course, it is possible for a well-meaning employee to make a major mistake. Good governance, education, setting (and enforcing) policies, and knowing your employees are your best steps to closing the holes here.

2: Common coding mistakes

Certain mistakes in programming still get made despite years of warnings and education. Most common are SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. I still see these issues from time to time even in major software packages that you would think are trustworthy (WordPress is a good example). It’s hard to change software once you’ve installed it, so you need to keep these packages up to date even though it is quite a hassle.

3: Unauthorized machines

I’ve seen this one too many times. Someone decides to bring in an old PC and put it on the network to do something your existing infrastructure doesn’t allow them to do. They think that they are being helpful, working around the limitations of the IT department. After all, if IT won’t build a Web site for their group, it’s just “doing them a favor” to set up an old PC in the corner with a Web server on it, right? Wrong. The best way I’ve found to keep these rogue machines in line is with rigorous IP address audits and policies and scanning the network to create a list of machines. If machines can’t get IP addresses, they can’t do much harm.

4: Ancient “rock solid” servers

We all have them — that server buried deep in the data room that “just won’t quit.” Usually, it’s running some software package that is impossible to migrate to another machine. Sadly, these machines are often major security risks because they typically are no longer getting patches or we fail to patch them out of fear of breaking them. In addition, those older versions of operating systems often come with inherent security holes that no patching can fix. You need to replace these servers one way or the other. The best first step is to virtualize them. From there, it is a lot easier to try to update them.

5: Legacy applications

It’s not just the old servers that are big security risks; it is also the applications running on them, as well as other legacy applications you may have running. These applications would be a lot less problematic if they were current with their patches, but usually they aren’t. All too often, we miss a major version update because the upgrade is so difficult, and then we’re so far behind the ball that it’s impossible to catch up. Or perhaps the applications are completely discontinued. It’s painful to say it, but the best thing you can do is find a migration path to a recent version or another package entirely.

6: Local admins

We all know the dangers of allowing users to run with escalated privileges. Still, we occasionally end up with users being granted local admin rights inappropriately. In my experience, this often happens while troubleshooting a problem: We make the user a local admin to see if it fixes a problem and we forget to undo it. Regardless of how it occurs, it is a ticking time bomb for security. Use your central administration tools to make sure that the local admin list gets reset on a regular basis to the proper users and groups.

7: Incorrect share/file permissions

File permissions are tricky things, and most users are not even aware of how to set them. So what happens? Users create sensitive files in their usual networked location and those files get the default permissions, which are “collaboration friendly” to say the least. The next thing you know, everyone can read the documents, which are supposed to be confidential. Your best weapon is to pre- establish a share and file structure with the correct permissions. For example, give everyone a home directory for personal documents and create shares or directories around roles, projects, and teams with the appropriate permissions. The hard part is then educating them to use the correct locations — but that is much easier than trying to teach them permissions.

8: Hidden servers within applications

I have seen more and more applications lately that use a local Web server as an administration console. Sometimes, these applications are installed by users without permission. But occasionally, the IT department just does not realize what comes with an application. While these servers can be locked down so that they are not a risk (and with luck, they get installed like that), you need to verify that the applications are secured properly before allowing them to be installed on users’ machines.

9: VPN clients

Some users figure out how to set up VPN access on their personal machines. For a power user, it isn’t too hard to do. But you have no control over that machine, and once it is on the VPN, problems with the unauthorized machine can easily spill over onto the VPN. One thing you can do is audit the VPN systems to see who is connecting from what PCs and compare it to your list of authorized systems. Also, you can put additional firewalls around VPN clients to quarantine them. Finally, there are various systems to ensure that the clients connecting are on a preapproved list.

10: Disabled security software

Security software often puts up roadblocks to getting work done, so the “logical response” from many users is to find a way to work around it. For example, I’ve seen people set up anonymizers at home to sidestep IT policies. Power users (especially developers and system administrators) often know how to circumvent security tools. They may also be local administrators because of a technical need, which makes disabling software and changing settings even easier.

Combatting this is tough because these users often assume that they are “too smart” to be a security risk. What they fail to realize is that the modern crop of security threats do not require the user to make a mistake, like going to an obviously suspect Web site or downloading pirated software. Every Acrobat file, for example, is a potential plague rat at this point. Start looking for unusual trends, like large amounts of consistent traffic to an IP address and use centralized tools to ensure that settings are at the right levels and are reset periodically. Also, take any unnecessary local administration rights and firewall entire groups onto their own network segment to limit damage if those groups have a legitimate need for lower security.

Source: Tech Republic

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Spanish banking giant BBVA is switching its 110,000 staff to use Google's range of enterprise software.

The deal is the biggest that the search giant has signed with one company for its cloud-computing services, where software is offered as a service via the internet.

The bank told the BBC it will use Google's tools only for internal communication.

But the deal could be seen as a breakthrough in corporate adoption.

Banking - with its high security needs and strict regulations - was always considered to be one of the last industries to accept cloud-computing.

BBVA's director of innovation, Carmen Herranz, stressed that all customer data and other key banking systems would "stay in our own data centres" and be completely separate from the cloud solution.

The bank would use Google applications like email, calendar, docs, chat, video conferencing and other collaboration tools to "achieve a cultural change" and get "the whole company working together" across the 26 countries where BBVA is based.

Ms Herranz said the project - with roll-out across all employees to be complete by the end of the year - was not about saving cost.

"The main goal is to promote innovation and making decisions and increase productivity. We are in a challenging market and need to make faster and more accurate decisions... and eliminate duplication," Ms Herranz told the BBC.

Also driving the change was the increasing mobility of the bank's workforce. A lot of the bank's computing needs had moved to smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers at home, she said.

Jose Olalla, chief information officer at BBVA, said because workers now had "access [to] the information they need at any time from any internet-connected device, anywhere in the world, [they] will be able to be more flexible and mobile".

BBVA is one of Spain's largest banks.

It is also the largest provider of financial services in Mexico, and has a large presence in the south of the United States.

'Largest ever deal'

Traditionally, companies have done all their computing on their own premises, to keep their data secure and to stay in control.

However, most enterprises leave some 80% of their computing power idle, and find themselves spending more than two thirds of their information technology budget on maintenance and software upgrades.

Cloud computing tends to be much more efficient, with firms like Amazon Web Services running their servers at more than 90% of capacity. That cuts cost and also helps the environment.

The man in charge of Google Enterprise apps in Europe, Sebastien Marotte, said that his corporate customers on average achieved cost savings of between 50% and 70%.

But the deal with BBVA, argues Mr Marotte, is important not only "because it is the largest ever agreement we have signed with an organisation, it is important because it is a very large financial company, it shows that now even banks are moving to the cloud".

BBVA's data would not reside on dedicated servers - a solution known as private cloud - but would sit distributed across the public cloud of Google's data centres. Both Mr Marotte and Ms Herranz stressed this would meet the demands of banking regulators and data protection officials, and be as secure as any solution on the bank's premises.

A bigger worry will be whether BBVA's computer network will be able to cope with the sharp rise in network traffic that cloud-computing solutions demand.

A pilot with 7,000 staff had not seen any issues, but the bank would closely monitor for any increases in network load. "Our biggest worry is around video conferencing," said Ms Herranz.

Network issues were blamed on serious performance problems when several years ago Google apps were introduced by the city of Los Angeles.

'Starting from scratch'

The biggest challenge for BBVA and other firms switching to cloud computing could indeed be cultural issues.

The bank says it has a training programme in place - including personalised guides - to prepare their staff for the move from their tried and trusted email solution and other tools to the new browser-based online world.

However, the bank encourages its employees to leave all their old email and data in those legacy systems. They will be accessible if necessary, but, says Ms Herranz, but we "want to start from scratch... don't want to carry across old behaviours".

"To move to the future, you have to leave the past in a box," said Ms Herranz.

Source: BBC

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Applications will soon open for new top-level domains in the biggest change to the system in over two decades.

From Thursday it will be possible to register almost any word as a web address suffix.

Familiar endings like .com and .org could potentially be joined by the likes of .pepsi, .virgin or .itv.

The proposals are controversial but Icann, the organisation which regulates domain names, says the change increases choice and competition.

In December, the US Federal Trade Commission wrote to Icann warning that the expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) "has the potential to magnify both the abuse of the domain name system and the corresponding challenges we encounter in tracking down Internet fraudsters."

And in the US, the Association of National Advertisers, whose members include some of America's biggest companies, have also opposed the changes.

Not cheap

But Peter Dengate Thrush, a former chairman of Icann's board of directors, said the change was necessary.

"It's badly in need of overhaul," he told the BBC.

"No-one would design a domain name system now for several billion users just using a couple of names that we started the system with in 1985."

Mr Dengate Thrush is currently chairman of Top Level Domains Holdings, a company developing registry services for top level domains.

At a cost of $185,000 (£120,000) just to apply, obtaining one of the new names is a serious financial commitment.

"Probably you are closer to half a million dollars to get it off the ground," said Jonathan Robinson, a non-executive director of Afilias, a registry operator which manages extensions like .mobi and .info.

The cost has lead to concern among some non-profit organisations that they will have to spend considerable sums defending themselves from cyber squatters.

Last month, the Reuters agency reported that the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and 26 other international organisations wrote to Icann asking it to protect suffixes like .imf from cyber squatters.

Deadline approaching

In spite of the cost there has been significant interest in applying for the new general top-level domains before the deadline for applications closes in April, according to companies advising on registrations.

"We're already working on over 100 applications - we're expecting that to increase," said Stuart Durham of Melbourne IT DBS.

He said around 25% of those had been "from Fortune 500 companies", with the majority of interest from the retail and financial services sectors.

As well as brand names, Mr Durham said there is likely to be a lively interest in place names.

"A lot of the geographic extensions that are being discussed like .london or .nyc will have a very good solid business case," he said.

"We've recently had extensions like .cat for the Catalan community that's done very well as well."

However, Mr Dengate Thrush worried this could lead to some conflict issues with places like Wellington, capital of his native country New Zealand, which shares its name with other places around the world.

"I think there are about 20 or 30 other cities called Wellington." However, he believed the systems set in place by Icann will ensure these issues can be successfully negotiated.

Cyber squatting

Even those who support the change foresee some issues.

"I would say it's almost certainly a good thing," Afilia's Mr Robinson told the BBC.

However, he says "you open up a whole new second tier of real estate that could be cyber squatted".

But Mr Durham thinks that there's very little that could be done to eradicate malicious squatters and others seeking to exploit the system.

"Cockroaches would survive a nuclear attack," he said.

"Some cyber squatters and infringers would too."

Source: BBC

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Mobile operator O2 is to provide free internet to "millions" of residents and visitors in central London by launching Europe's largest free wi-fi zone.

The service will be rolled out across the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea in 2012.

It will be powered by a system installed on street furniture.

O2 said the deal, which will have no cost to the taxpayer, will enable visitors to "make the most of what London has to offer".

Councillor Philippa Roe, cabinet member for strategic finance at Westminster City Council, said: "Westminster welcomes over a million tourists a day, is home to 250,000 residents, employs over half a million people and sees 4,000 business starts-ups each year.

"Visitors to London will easily be able to share their pictures and updates of the Olympic events across social networking sites."

O2 will begin installing the Metro wireless network across Westminster this month, initially being available in limited areas before being rolled out across both boroughs.

'High quality connectivity'

London is catching up with other major cities. In Paris, several hundred individual wi-fi zones offer free connections in public parks and municipal spaces.

New York also offers free wi-fi in parks and last year began to install wireless internet access at several of its subway stations.

London's service will be powered by equipment attached to lamp-posts and other existing structures on London's streets, and should be completed by March.

"This ground-breaking deal... will see us deliver high-quality connectivity across London in time for London 2012," said Derek McManus, chief operating officer for O2.

"Our longer-term aim is to expand our footprint of O2 wi-fi, which is open to everyone, and also intelligently enhance our services at street level, where people need the network the most."

John Hunt, from independent broadband review site thinkbroadband.com, said the service would be very popular, particularly for overseas tourists worried about expensive mobile costs.

"Obviously, free wireless is a good thing. It allows people to get online cheaper," he told the BBC.

"Whether it will be able to handle the Olympics is going to be their main issue."

Underground trial

Mr Hunt added that London is becoming a well-connected city for residents and tourists desperate to be online while on the move.

"There are other networks as well, such as The Cloud and BT Openzone, and a lot more places like coffee shops are getting people online," he said.

However, he said residents living in the free wi-fi areas should not be considering ditching their home connection.

"The problem you will have is that the wireless may not be fast enough to support everything you want to do.

"I don't think it will necessarily replace home broadband - it's more a complementing service."

In November 2010, Charing Cross became the first Underground station to offer wireless connectivity as part of a six-month trial.

A spokeswoman for Transport for London told the BBC that it hopes to install the service in up to 120 stations on the network in time for the Olympics.

Another trial, sponsored by Finnish firm Nokia, involved 26 free wi-fi hotspots in locations across the city.

The firm said it planned to make it a fully-fledged service in 2012.

Source: BBC

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If there is one safe prediction for 2012, it's that mobile devices and apps will become increasingly mainstream, table-stakes technology for small businesses.  

A recent survey by consulting firm SMB Group showed that small- and medium-sized businesses plan to significantly increase spending on mobile in 2012, with firms in the five-to-49-employee range leading the way.

Nielsen, meanwhile, reported that almost half of American cell phone users now have smartphones -- 44 percent as of October 2011. And IDC reported that 18.1 million tablets shipped in 3Q alone, a 23.9 percent jump from the previous quarter, 264.5 percent from the same period in 2010.

The mobile revolution is real, but how specifically will it affect small businesses in 2012?

We put this question to two keen observers of the small business market: SMB Group partner Laurie McCabe, and Mark Tauschek, lead research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group Inc.

Mobile Payment

McCabe and Tauschek agree on at least one key trend for 2012: small businesses will begin to adopt mobile payment -- using smartphones or tablets with add-on card readers and low-cost online credit card processing services such as Square and Intuit GoPayment.

"A lot of very small businesses especially haven't really had a mechanism for accepting credit card payment," Tauschek said. "Now they do, with a simple hardware add-on and an app for their iPhone or iPod touch."

Mobile POS (point of sale) terminals could be used on retail sales floors to relieve congestion at fixed cash points, or in more purely mobile environments such as craft and farmers markets, or where a mobile provider delivers a service to a homeowner or business and needs to take payment on the spot.

"This is a huge thing," McCabe said. "Especially as retailers don't have to spend any money [on the service] and the readers are fairly cheap or free. It makes it very easy when you're on the go, and some small businesses are always on the go."

Some retailers may adopt mobile payment simply to make themselves appear more leading edge. For example, Apple's own uber-cool stores were mobile payment pioneers.

Most small business owners can't afford to switch just because it's the cool thing to do, McCabe said, and most won't. But new businesses or those with outdated equipment should consider mobile payment for the business advantages it offers.

Small Business Mobile Becomes the Norm

Small businesses that learned early to use mobile technology to make them more accessible and more responsive to customers have enjoyed a decided competitive advantage, Tauschek said, but that advantage may not last much longer.

He believes that with the huge growth in the installed base of smart mobile devices and the ubiquity of broadband wireless connectivity, 2012 will be the year in which being super-accessible and instantly responsive from anywhere will become an expectation, the norm.

This applies to businesses of all sizes, Tauschek said, but it's especially important for small businesses to be proactive and exploit their nimbleness to gain the advantage over bigger competitors.

"It will no longer be adequate to respond, ‘Yeah, I got your email and I'll get back to you in a couple of days.' Now, you have to be able to say, ‘I'm going to interact with you immediately, over whichever channel you prefer -- instant messaging, social media, voice.'"

Moving Beyond Email

A key prediction from SMB Group for 2012 is that, in the mobile realm, small businesses will start to move beyond basic communications and Web browsing applications.

Many are now looking at adopting time management, field service, customer relationship management (CRM) and even enterprise resource management (ERP) apps, McCabe said, as well as vertical, industry-specific apps in fields such as health care.

"Now they can check on the inventory status of a product or enter time spent on a project -- anywhere, anytime," she said. "It streamlines the way they do a lot of things, and helps them be more responsive to customers. And that is good for business."

Many small business owners may even prefer using mobile versions of popular business applications originally developed for the PC. "This is just anecdotal, but I've had small business people telling me they prefer to use these applications on their smartphones," McCabe said. "In a lot of cases, it's because the mobile interface is so nice and clean."

Is 2012 the Year of the App?

The increasing ease-of-use of maturing mobile apps is, in fact, one of "the key building blocks" that will make 2012 a "breakout year for apps" in the business world, Tauschek said.

Part of that comes from mainstream software developers paying increased attention to mobile. Some now design or upgrade applications from the ground up with mobile in mind. "Mobile is now the first design point for a lot of vendors," McCabe said.

Part of it, too, is that many developers have realized they don't have to put everything-but-the-kitchen-sink into their mobile apps. Some are producing multiple apps with bite-size chunks of functionality.

SAP, a small-medium enterprise ERP vendor, is the most obvious case in point. SAP offers many mobile apps, including some as specific as one for capturing travel receipts and sending the data back to SAP servers.

"They've made very elegant interfaces," McCabe said of the mature mobile business apps now appearing. "And they've given users only what they need, without cluttering [the app] up with [all the functionality] of a full-fledged Web client."

Not every small business will adopt applications as sophisticated as SAP in 2012, but Tauschek says the year will see more mainstream business apps such as Dropbox and Boxnet -- two companies that provide mobile access to online file storage and synchronization services -- "increasingly permeate small businesses."

Accessing the Mobile Cloud

Increased adoption of cloud services and applications (like Dropbox and Boxnet) is another mobile trend to watch in 2012, Tauschek believes. But it goes beyond online storage, already a well established mobile cloud app.

Lots of other cloud-based mobile apps are already available, including two from cloud pioneer SalesForce.com. These include the company's flagship CRM application and its Chatter collaboration tool. More will come, Tauschek said.

One game-changer is Apple's Siri, an artificial intelligence- and speech recognition-based "personal Web assistant" that will help iPhone users perform all kinds of functions, including finding stuff on the Web -- thus challenging Google's search engine.

The key to Siri's power, Tauschek said, is that it leverages ubiquitous broadband wireless capacity to access sophisticated capabilities residing on Apple Web servers rather than relying only on program code on the device.

Siri is so far available on the latest iPhone 4S model, but is expected eventually to be available on other iPhones and possibly the iPad.

Mobile Intelligence

Siri is an exemplar of another trend to watch: artificial intelligence (AI) built into mobile devices. Tauschek admitted it's hard to predict the impact of increased use of AI, a loosely defined set of capabilities that allow computer systems to learn and automatically adapt to circumstances and users.

"Think about this from the small business perspective," Tauschek suggested. "If you can turn your smart phone or tablet into a truly intelligent personal assistant, how will that improve all your touch points with clients?"

Android Ascendant

Apple may still have disproportionate mind share, but Google's Android mobile platform is on the rise, Tauschek said. 

"In the tablet market especially, the iPad has really been the only game in town," he said. "But that's changing. And while it might seem to be changing slowly, it's actually happening quite rapidly now. You have to remember that everything [in the Android world] is lagging about year-and-a-half behind Apple." 

With the rapid expansion of the number of available Android apps, and the fact that the latest version of the Android operating system works equally well on smartphones and tablets – as does Apple's iOS -- Google's mobile platform is finally catching up. 

That may make it more attractive to small businesses, but it cuts two ways, Tauschek said. The fact that apps available in the Android Market are not vetted by Google or anyone else -- unlike apps in the Apple App Store which must all pass stringent vetting by Apple -- means security of Android apps could be a concern, he cautioned.

The Year Ahead

What else will 2012 bring? McCabe believes small businesses -- and businesses of all sizes -- will start to make more use of text messaging. Many customers may not want to receive unsolicited marketing messages via text, she said, but they might welcome alerts and other kinds of messages. 

And she expects to see cross-platform services emerge to simplify data backup, recovery and security on both mobile devices and laptops and desktop computers. 

And 2012 could mark the beginning of a consolidation phase in the mobile industry, which may or may not affect small businesses. AT&T is making a play for T-Mobile, for example. There have been rumors of various suitors for ailing Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry.

RIM's declining fortunes may be a cause for concern among enterprises that invested heavily in inhouse BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES), Tauschek said. But small businesses that use the Web-based BlackBerry solution need not worry. If they're nervous and want to jump ship, they can do so with minimal disruption, he said.

Will 2012 be a breakout year for mobile in small business? We think so. The sheer mass of devices -- those purchased by companies and the personal tablets and smartphones that employees bring to work -- create opportunities just too important to ignore.

Source: Small Business Computing

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The use of mobile devices to surf the web reached an all-time high in December, accounting for 7.7 percent of browser usage according to Net Applications's measurements of daily visits to its network of 40,000 websites.

1: Use a fast browser

Not all browsers are created equal. Some are simply faster than others. The top speed you will find, in the current crop of browsers, belongs to Google Chrome. If you’ve grown accustomed to Internet Explorer or Firefox, you’ll notice a dramatic increase in rendering time using Google Chrome. Of all the ways you can speed up your browsing experience, this is by far the best. Google Chrome also helps speed things up by allowing you to enter search strings in the URL address bar. With this feature, you don’t have to add yet another toolbar, thereby slowing down the browser even further.

2: Disable Flash

Flash pretty much saturates Web sites now. It’s almost impossible to get away from this technology. Problem is, Flash can be slow, so it directly affects the speed of your browsing experience. You can have Flash turned off by default and then re-enable it to view what you need to view. The biggest problem with this is that some browsers require an add-on to block Flash. For Chrome, you need the extension Flashblock. There’s also a Flashblock extension for Firefox. Internet Explorer has a built-in tool you can access by clicking Tools | Manage Add-ons. In the Manage Add-ons dialog box, double-click Shockwave Flash Object. Then, click the Remove All Sites button. This will disable Flash for all sites.

3: Save your temporary Web files on a RAM disk

I wrote an article awhile back on using a RAM disk to help speed up disk-intensive applications. Since the RAM disk will be much faster than your standard hard drive, using it to save all your browsers temporary files will create a faster environment for your browser. However, this solution is not for the newbie, and you will need to use a third-party to better achieve this task.

4: Get rid of all those toolbars

You’ve seen them in the wild: browsers so filled with toolbars they take up the majority of real estate in the browser window. Most users don’t realize those toolbars tend to slow down the browser in many ways. Some toolbars simply take up precious computer memory, while others eat away at bandwidth by sending and receiving data in the background. The math here is quite simple: The more toolbars you have, the slower your browser will run. Some of those toolbars might seem essential. But if speed is really your top priority, you will want to jettison that extra baggage for the speed you will gain.

5: Use tabs, not windows

Too many tabs can cause problems, but they’re still your best bet for browsing efficiency. How do tabs speed up your experience? A couple of ways. The first is all about organization. With multiple tabs in a single window, it becomes quite a bit faster to locate the page you need to work on. You don’t have to maximize a window, discover that it’s not the right one, minimize it, maximize a new window… until you find the correct one. A single window open with multiple tabs is far easier to search. This is not the only way tabs can help you. Browsers like Chrome treat each tab as an individual process (instead of a child process of a parent). So when a Web site causes a tab to crash, you can close that one tab and not lose all the other tabs. This behavior is not a standard at the moment, so you’ll need to switch over to the Chrome browser to take advantage of it.

Source:TechRepublic

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Net Applications' December data shows that Apple devices accounted for more than half of all mobile Web browsing for the month. The iPhone and iPad together accounted for 52.1 percent of all mobile Web traffic. Second place went to Java ME with 21.3 percent market share.

Google's Android platform finished in third with a paltry 16.2 percent. Symbian (5.8 percent) and BlackBerry (3.5 percent) rounded out the top five.

Source: Internet News

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1. Flipboard

Flipboard is a 21st-century newsreader based on your social graph. It displays news stories based on what's being shared by your friends on Twitter or Facebook and auto-formats them in a newspaper-like column format. You can scan the headlines and first couple paragraphs and then click through to the site to the open the full story right in the built-in web browser in the app.

2. Amazon Kindle

The best way to read books on the iPad is the Amazon Kindle app, mostly because it has a large selection of titles available and it does the best job of syncing between multiple devices — iPad, iPhone, Android phone, PC, Mac and more. Of course, there are also strong alternatives such as Barnes & Noble's Nook app and Apple's iBooks app.

3. Documents to Go

The best way to collect, manage and read business documents on the iPad is with Dataviz Documents to Go, which not only allows you to sync local files from your computer but also to connect to cloud services such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, SugarSync and iDisk.

4. Things

Tablets are great for people who spend most of their days in meetings. For that crowd and everyone else who needs a task list and project planner, the best app I've found is Things.

It's a little expensive, but I've tried cheaper solutions and none of them are as easy to figure out and as powerful to use as Things. It has a few limitations (syncing between multiple devices), but it does a great job of getting the process out of the way and helping you effectively track and organise your to-do items.

5. Analytics HD

One of the great ways to take advantage of the iPad as a viewer is to use it for quick glances at business dashboard metrics. This even translates to the simple task of checking traffic metrics and user info for your website. If you use Google Analytics, the Analytics HD app is a great way to view site data from the iPad. (Also see QlikView, SAP Business Objects Explorer and Roambi.)

6. Evernote

The iPad is a surprisingly good note-taker. The keyboard is about 80 percent as good as a laptop keyboard but the convenience of a more portable device is valuable as well. Evernote is a great note-taking companion for the iPad, since it can auto-sync your meeting notes back to your PCs or smartphones. Just keep in mind that it's an online service and so be careful that you don't use it for any business-sensitive data. For that stuff, you can use locally controlled files with Apple's built-in Notes app, for example.

7. Penultimate

Now that we've talked about the value of using the iPad for note taking, there are ways to do it that go beyond just typing things out. You can use an app like Penultimate to jot down handwritten notes and sketch out pictures and diagrams.

There are several apps that can do this (such as Adobe Ideas, Ideate and Idea Boards) but I think Penultimate is the most effective. If you get tired of using your finger as the writing device, you can get an iPad stylus like the Bamboo Stylus or the Griffin Stylus. In addition to using it for notes, I've even used Penultimate to sketch out an idea for a colleague in a meeting. It works great as a mini whiteboard in a coffee shop or a taxi cab. 

8. Twitter

Twitter's official iPad app is the best way to access Twitter and is an example of the kind of imaginative new UIs that good developers will attempt once they get grounded in touch-based tablets like the iPad.

Check out the way the Twitter app exposes more or less info by sliding left and right. (Other useful Twitter apps include Osfoora and Twitterific.) The bottom line is that Twitter is an amazing real-time news aggregator, as long as you follow the right people.

9. TED Talks

By far, the most inspiring app on the iPad is the TED Talks app. TED is a series of events featuring some of society's most fascinating and innovative ideas and most influential thinkers. You'll definitely disagree with some of them, because there's a large diversity of opinions. But there are a lot of talks worth listening to and they're all free. Many of the talks are short and succinct, somewhere between five and 20 minutes.

10. Pulse

Pulse is another iPad news aggregator like Flipboard, only instead of building its sections based on social feeds it uses RSS feeds. Like Flipboard, it presents the info in a visually compelling format using images from the articles that it is linking to.

11. SkyGrid

Yet another great news aggregator for the iPad is SkyGrid, but its speciality is pulling together news on hot trends in real time. It's not nearly as visual as Flipboard or Pulse, but SkyGrid helps fill in the gaps by surfacing hot news and articles that might have been missed by your favourite RSS sources and your social network.

12. ProPublica

ProPublica, a non-profit publication of investigative reporters, is doing some of the most important work in journalism today — the work that has increasingly been cut out of the profit-driven newsrooms. Plus, they have an excellent iPad app.

The three column layout gives you the latest stories from ProPublica (most of which don't make the mainstream news), the middle column links to good investigative news pieces from the mainstream media (many of the stories are buried), and the third column has ProPublica's 'Projects' or groups of stories where you can stay up to date on on-going issues. Keep in mind that ProPublica is non-profit and funded completely by donations.

13. NPR

Another great app from a media organization is the NPR app. It lets you quickly skim top stories, read related text articles, and quickly add radio/audio stories to a playlist that you can then listen to all at once.

14. The Guardian Eyewitness

A real diamond in the rough among iPad apps is The Guardian Eyewitness, which features amazing photojournalism from around the world from the popular UK news publication. The photos look fantastic on the iPad screen and provide a great way to scan through some of the most important current events on the planet.

15. The Big Picture

Another great world news photo app is the Big Picture from Boston.com, a site that has had some of the web's best news photographs and slideshows for a long time. While The Guardian Eyewitness app lets you scan world events, the Big Picture app lets you dive into them as there are full sets of photos from each event. The two apps compliment each other well and are great for visual storytelling of important news stories.

16. Rosetta Stone

The popular language software Rosetta Stone has an excellent iPad app called TOTALe HD. Unlike the Rosetta Stone iPhone app, which simply serves as a review for your full lessons on a PC or a Mac, the iPad app has basically all of the same content from the PC/Mac and delivers it in a multitouch experience.

The app also syncs back to the Rosetta Stone servers (for Version 4 of the software) so you can pick up right where you left off when you get back to your computer. You have to have a full licence of a Rosetta Stone language pack and an online account set up in order to use the iPad app. You can't just buy language modules directly for the iPad app.

17. iA Writer

If you want to use the iPad for note taking or writing, then iA Writer offers a very simple solution for writing and managing your files. It is a completely bare bones word processor that can save your stuff directly to your Dropbox. Another similar program is WriteRoom and there's always Apple's own Pages, but at 69p you can't beat the price and basic capabilities of iA Writer.

18. The Weather Channel

Unlike the iPhone, the iPad does not come with a built-in weather app. However, The Weather Channel has filled the void with an excellent app that takes advantage of the tablet interface. I've never been a big fan of The Weather Channel's desktop PC widgets, but they've done a great job with the iPad app.

19. Nasa

Let's face it, most of us geeks love space. The iPad itself was, in part, inspired by science fiction such as Star Trek. Nasa has a strong tradition of sharing its space exploration advances and research and it has continued that tradition in multitouch style with an excellent iPad app that lets you explore photography from satellites, see Nasa's launch schedules, research historical information about missions, and watch Nasa TV live.

20. Scrabble

I've been a Scrabble fan for a long time but hadn't pulled out a board in a while when the game suddenly saw a revival in recent years in digital form, including several knock-offs such as Words with Friends.

My favourite way to play digital Scrabble is the Pass'n Play mode on iPad. But the iPad also has an individual learning mode, a local network mode, Party Play (where you can use an iPhone or iPod Touch as a tile rack), and a mode where you can play against a Facebook friend. So, you can have a little fun and expand your vocabulary at the same time.

Source: ZDNet

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The government has named 10 cities eligible to compete for a share of £100m urban broadband funding.

The eligible cities are: Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Manchester and Sheffield, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport announced on Tuesday.

The funding is designed to contribute to broadband infrastructure that will allow people to access the internet at speeds of 80-100 Mbps.

"Transforming communities into super-connected cities will enable them to compete with the world's top digital cities," culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said in a statement. "It will help them attract new jobs and new investment and make the UK a place where digital businesses look to come."

Proposals should include high-speed mobile connectivity, according to the statement.

The government will select six cities to join UK capitals Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and London in receiving funding.

The four capitals will automatically get money, and the amount will be dependent on funding bids. Bidding cities will be expected to pick up the tab for non-capital expenditure such as providing for a local project team. Bids close on 13 February 2012.

Broadband access in the UK is patchy, with large parts of the four countries below even 2Mbps.

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the best communication solution for your business.

Both data and tools to manage it are growing, but taking advantage of it requires planning.

The proliferation of large-scale data sets is just beginning to change business and science around the world, but enterprises need to prepare in order to gain the most advantage from their information, panelists said at a Silicon Valley event this week.

So-called "big data" is both a challenge to manage and a tool for competitive advantage, according to speakers at a Churchill Club event on Wednesday night in Mountain View, California. The discussion at the Computer History Museum followed the launch of EMC Greenplum's Unified Analytics Platform, which lets business and IT staffs analyse both structured and unstructured data.

New networked devices and applications are collecting more data than ever and more organisations are holding on to it, creating huge demands for storage. In the second quarter of this year, storage companies shipped 5,429 petabytes of disk capacity, up 30.7 percent from last year's second quarter, IDC reported last week.

"Data growth is already faster than both Moore's Law and ... network growth," said Anand Rajaraman, senior vice president of Walmart Global E-Commerce and head of @WalmartLabs. His lab has developed tools for Walmart to take advantage of the new types of data being generated, including applications that collect and analyse information from sources such as Twitter and Facebook to gauge trends and individual consumer preferences.

Great benefits to science

The benefits of big data stretch beyond business to earth sciences, biology, psychology and other fields, Rajaraman said.

"Science has become more and more about collecting large amounts of data and doing analysis," he said.

Big data can be any volume of data that requires new tools to analyse, said Luke Lonergan, chief technology officer and co-founder of Greenplum, which EMC acquired last year. For example, it would take 27 hours to run a logistic regression algorithm, which can be used to predict the probability of an event, on 30G bytes of data, Lonergan said. If run on 32 computers, the process takes 60 seconds, he said.

"'Bigger than previous-generation, non-parallel infrastructure could handle' might be a useful definition. Anything that blows you out of the old way of doing things," Lonergan said.

Analysing data also has gotten harder not only because there is more of it but because it comes from new sources, panelists said. Blogs, Web comments and other information comes in the form of unstructured data, which can't be crunched the way relational databases are. The need to mine different types of content has led to new data analysis platforms, most notably the open-source Hadoop framework that was pioneered by Google and Facebook.

The market for new tools to manage and exploit big data is still growing, said Ping Li, who heads the Big Data Fund at venture capital company Accel Partners.

Understand the implications

"A lot of the applications that ride on top of these new data platforms have yet to be invented," Li said. Traditional business intelligence and ERP (enterprise resource planning) platforms are being adapted to deal with big data, but what's needed are native applications developed specifically for the new world, he said.

Developing countries are active participants in this process, sometimes because companies there have skipped over legacy systems that are ingrained in first-world enterprises, Li said.

Trying to get value out of big data today is like creating an online store in the early days of e-commerce, said Walmart's Rajaraman, who helped develop Amazon.com's marketplace business. Amazon had to invent its own systems for payment, fraud detection and other tasks, each of which later spawned independent vendors that specialise in each area, he said.

It's important for an enterprise to understand the implications of big data and how the new tools work before embarking on a big-data initiative, panelists warned.

"Those who are just standing up Hadoop as is, with no management framework, writing directly to it ... there's going to be some real disillusionment there," said Keith Collins, senior vice president and chief technology officer of SAS.

Big-data tools such as Hadoop can't create value out of information by themselves, Collins warned in an interview at the event. Enterprises have to know what they want to find out from their data and then deal with how to get that out of their data. "The data issues come after the question," he said.

Source: ComputerWorld UK

Converge IT have partnered with IBM to deliver business analytics software to aid the interpretation of key data. Contact us for more information.

Do you know what your employees are doing on the web? At a minimum, they're probably goofing off watching YouTube videos. At worst, they could be steering your company toward financial ruin. In this quick guide, I'll show you how to keep an eye on employee Internet use and monitor just about everything else they do with their PCs.

I can already hear the groans of disgruntled readers as I type these words (and if you're worried about privacy at work, you have ways to stop your boss from spying on you). But gone are the days when PC monitoring was an optional, draconian security measure practiced only by especially vigilant organisations. Today, more than three quarters of US companies monitor employee Internet use. If your business doesn't do so, you're probably overdue for a policy change.

Why you should monitor

Everything your team does on company time, and on company resources, matters. Time spent on frivolous websites can seriously hamper productivity, and visiting objectionable sites on company PCs can subject your business to serious legal risks, including costly harassment suits from staffers who may be exposed to offensive content.

Other consequences may be far worse than mere productivity loss or a little legal hot water. Either unintentionally or maliciously, employees can reveal proprietary information, jeopardising business strategy, customer confidentiality, data integrity and more.

And, of course, unchecked web activity can expose your network and systems to dangers from malware and other intrusions. Even something as simple as a worker's failure to keep up with Windows patches can be a threat to your business, so don't think of monitoring as merely snooping.

Monitoring software

Employee monitoring is just one facet of a larger discipline known as endpoint security, which includes everything from malware protection to policy enforcement and asset tracking. Large enterprise computing environments demand comprehensive endpoint security systems, consisting of server software coupled with client software on each user's machine, that can handle many of these functions at once. These systems tend to be complex enough to require the expertise of a trained IT pro. But in this guide, I'll be looking primarily at simpler tools designed for smaller organisations.

For a small business, you have several good ways to achieve endpoint security. You can install a web-hosted system that combines software on the PC with remote monitoring services to protect your computers and enforce compliance with company policies. You can combine a few complementary tools, such as a desktop security suite and professional tracking software. Or, if your company is very small and your budget is tight, you can adopt free tools à la carte.

The most secure way to monitor PC use is to deploy a system that consists of a host, server or appliance together with client-installed software. Unless you have a dedicated IT staff or the budget to bring someone in on a regular basis to check on things, a cloud-based service such as Symantec.cloud or Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security is probably the best choice.

These services are relatively inexpensive and easy to set up compared with server offerings, and they give you the flexibility to set and monitor compliance with acceptable use policies from a single management interface. They also deploy system security updates automatically, block malware and protect sensitive files to prevent data from leaking out of your company. Better still, these hosted systems effectively protect laptops that frequently leave the office.

The cost for a hosted endpoint security service is generally very low: A five client licence for Trend Micro Worry-Free will set you back less than $300 for two years.

If you're not up for a total security overhaul and you just want to track user activity on a few systems, you have several affordable ways to go about it. Packages such as Interguard Sonar can monitor all email and IM sessions, track and filter web usage, log users' keystrokes and program use, and capture screenshots on command for as little as $87 per user.

If you're really on a shoestring budget, plenty of free and open source tools can log PC and web use. A freebie called ActivTrak, for instance, can keep tabs on which applications your staffers are using and which sites they're visiting, complete with simple reports that give you a pretty clear idea as to how employees are spending their time on their PCs.

A word of caution on standalone tools, though: Some antimalware utilities can quickly identify and disable standalone monitoring tools, so you may need to create an exception in your malware protection settings to ensure that ActivTrak can work properly on your systems.

Best practices

It should go without saying that employee monitoring ought to be just one small component in a comprehensive strategy to protect your business and maintain productivity. Once you've made the choice to monitor, you should follow these general guidelines to ensure your success.

Be forthright: Nobody likes being spied on unwittingly. Unless you think someone on your team poses a serious threat that requires covert monitoring, it's best to be up front with staffers about what you track and why. Many companies accomplish this with a simple statement in the employee handbook telling workers plainly that everything they do on company computers, including individual keystrokes, can and will be tracked. Letting employees know that their behaviour is being monitored can serve as a powerful deterrent against unwanted online activity.

Filter proactively: Most good endpoint security tools include web and email content filters that can block inappropriate sites and prevent users from sending or receiving files that can jeopardise your business. Use them. By limiting the ways your staffers can get into trouble, you can prevent problems up front.

Check reports regularly: There's little point in generating usage reports if you're not going to look at them. Take the time to at least spot-check the reports that your monitoring software generates so that you can identify potential problems early and take remedial action.

Whatever you discover, whether it's a time wasting website that everyone is watching this week or a single person who is addicted to solitaire, you can often fix problems with a simple email that tells your team you know what's up: "Just a reminder, people: Chatroulette is not an appropriate use of company time."

Source: ComputerWorld UK

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the best monitoring solution for your business.

IDC says 18.1 million media tablets were shipped in this year's third quarter, an increase of 264.5 percent compared with last year, and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 23.9 percent. Shipments fell short of IDC's original forecast of 19.2 million units, but the research company sees "strong demand" for this year's fourth quarter, thanks partly to shipments of Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook Color. IDC has therefore increased its forecast for 2011 slightly, from 62.5 million to 63.3 million units.

The forecasts cover media tablet shipments to channels, not sales to consumers.

Apple was the market leader, shipping 11.1 million units in this year's third quarter compared with 9.3 million units last time. Its market share slipped slightly from 63.3 percent to 61.5 percent. Samsung took a distant second place with a 5.6 percent market share. Hewlett-Packard was third with a 5.6 percent market share, followed by Barnes & Noble (4.4 percent) and Asus (4.0 percent).

HP entered and left the market during the quarter, shifting 903,354 units of its TouchPad, mostly at fire-sale prices. Barnes & Noble shipped 805,458 units, according to IDC. RIM did not make the Top 5 table, having seen its shipments reportedly tumble from 500,000 units in this year's first quarter to 200,000 in Q2 and 150,000 in Q3 (when, thanks to price reductions, it sold more PlayBooks than it shipped).

The media tablet market is still small enough to be changed dramatically by individual product launches. IDC says in a statement:

"After ceding share in 3Q11 (down to 32.4 percent from 33.2 percent the previous quarter), IDC expects Android to make dramatic share gains in 4Q11 growing to 40.3 percent. That increase is due mostly to the entrance of Amazon's Kindle Fire, and to a lesser extent the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, into the market. The share increase comes at the expense of Blackberry (slipping from 1.1 percent to 0.7 percent), iOS (slipping from 61.5 percent to 59.0 percent), and webOS (slipping from 5 percent to 0 percent). Despite HP's announcement last week that it would contribute webOS to the Open Source community, IDC does not believe the operating system will reappear in the media tablet market in any meaningful way going forward."

The media tablet category is somewhat arbitrary. IDC used to count all of Barnes & Noble's products in the eReader category, which is dominated by the Amazon Kindle range. Also, IDC may find it difficult to track sales of the Kindle Fire separately, since Amazon does not publish sales figures.

Separately, Amazon announced yesterday that "that Kindle devices remain the hottest products this holiday season – for the third week in a row, customers are purchasing well over 1 million Kindle devices per week, and Kindle Fire remains the #1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since its introduction 11 weeks ago."

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the how tablets can be an integral part of yourbusiness IT strategy.

The Countryside Alliance has launched a broadside against the government for not properly supporting rural broadband pilot schemes, but the councils and development agencies running those pilots say everything is on track.

The alliance, which campaigns on rural issues, said on Friday that the North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Herefordshire, and Highlands and Islands pilots are "still nowhere over a year since being named by the chancellor".

The group submitted a Freedom of Information request to each local authority in October, and said the results were "underwhelming", showing no one had gone past the procurement stage.

"Local authorities are struggling to turn Whitehall's promises into reality," Countryside Alliance chief Alice Barnard said in a statement. "It has been over a year since these pilots were set up and the people who live in areas with no or unreliable broadband coverage haven't seen any improvement."

In a separate statement, alliance policy chief Sarah Lee said the government was "leaving the councils high and dry with no idea of how to get the projects moving".

Pilots 'on schedule'

However, ZDNet UK spoke to the councils and development agencies involved on Friday and found all four reporting that their pilots were on schedule and going well.

All are in the procurement stage at the moment, and North Yorkshire County Council said it expects the service rollout to begin in June 2012. Highlands and Islands Enterprise, which said the process was "running on schedule", said its deployment should begin within a year from now.

"It is currently anticipated that a contract will be awarded around the end of August 2012. The project will be delivered in phases and confirmation of the rollout plan will be known soon after the contract is awarded," a Highlands and Islands Enterprise spokesperson said.

Herefordshire County Council said it expected to award its super-fast broadband contract in spring 2012, with the deployment to follow soon after. "Despite claims made today that plans to bring fast broadband to rural areas have 'stalled', plans for the two counties [Herefordshire and Gloucestershire] are progressing well and are on target," the council said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Cumbria County Council said that project should have a contract in place in spring 2012, and was also on track.

"The reality is that addressing the historical lack of super-fast broadband provision for an area like Cumbria will take time and effort, so despite some expectations it does not happen overnight," the spokesperson said. "Multimillion-pound EU procurement exercises, which we have significant experience of dealing with, take time, and need to be done well as we are dealing with taxpayers' money."

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) also said things were on track, and denied leaving the councils and development agencies high and dry.

"Lessons have been learnt from the pilots as they have developed their plans and this has informed how we help roll out broadband in other areas," a DCMS spokesperson said. "We have now allocated funding for each county in England and the devolved nations and are working with them to develop broadband plans.

"We expect there to be a steady flow of plans being approved and beginning procurement in the coming months," the DCMS spokesperson added.

Funds not released

Responding to these reports of the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) process going as planned rather than being delayed, a Countryside Alliance spokesperson said the councils and development agencies "may say it's going swimmingly but a lot of this money hasn't been released yet".

"A lot of our members are saying, 'Where is it? Let's have a schedule [of] when people on the ground can expect this in their house'," the spokesperson said.

According to John Moore, the head of finance and central services at North Yorkshire County Council, the procurement process would be moving more swiftly if it were not for regulations.

"I agree in principle that progress is frustrating [but] county councils did not invent the procurement, telecoms and European state aid regulations," Moore told ZDNet UK. "We couldn't for example just ring BT up and say 'by the way, the government has given us £17m, can you start next week?' The regulations simply do not allow that to happen."

"I recognise the frustration with the regulations but to be fair the BDUK guys have been excellent with us," Moore said. "I might be critical of the government's regulations and their approach to state aid [though]. I can't get European money into North Yorkshire without the London civil servants agreeing a particular interpretation of 'state aid' that we've already agreed with Brussels."

Malcolm Corbett, the chief executive of the Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA), said it was more important to get rural broadband right than to get it rolled out as quickly as possible.

"At the moment, a lot of the [smaller ISPs] are concerned that the landscape favours BT too much," Corbett said. "Fixing some of those concerns does take time. For example, with passive infrastructure... Ofcom is taking a few months to decide policy on this.

"This is a critical national infrastructure which is going to last us well into the future and we really need to get it right. We don't want to find ourselves in five years' time having done half the job and having to spend more."

Source: ZDNet

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on the best broadband option for your business.

Disaster will strike. It’s not a matter of IF, it’s a matter of WHEN. People often say, “Yeah, I need to plan for that.” But life gets in the way. And when life continues to get in the way, and you’ve failed to prepare for disaster, disaster will take you down. Instead of just sitting around and waiting for it, why not prepare for it? Here are some things you must do to be ready for a disaster.

1: Get a good battery backup

I know, I know… what is a battery backup going to do to help when disaster strikes? Here’s the thing. A good battery backup could mean the difference between getting some data and getting zero data. Let me give you an example. We recently had a client that lost power to their building. Things started to escalate and it looked as if everything was going to get tragic fast. But I was able to remote into the machine and get a backup running immediately. Because of that battery backup, I was able to get in quickly and avert a total loss.

2: Start creating nightly data backups

This goes along with the previous step. Without backups, you are completely lost. No backups, no data. Making regular, reliable backups is the single most important thing you can do to prepare for a disaster,. And you need more than just a backup to an external drive. You need an offsite backup as well. As long as you have data, recovery is always a possibility. Make sure those backups are nightly and make sure they succeed. This is NOT a set it and forget it affair.

3: Start creating weekly full images

Full images are just as crucial as data backups. Why? Some backup products will allow you to take that backup image and load it on dissimilar hardware. (Acronis ABR with Universal Restore is one such product.) That is one of the fastest routes to recovery. Just make sure that you have a recent image (at least weekly) or else restoring that image is only going to land you with an out-of-date system.

4: Document server and client applications

One of the problems with recovery is knowing what software is on what system. Do yourself a huge favor and document all the software that is installed and used on your system. In fact, take this one step further and document the versions of each piece of software. Know as much about your system as possible, and don’t rely on your memory for this.

5: Check the status of RAID arrays

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had clients come in with failing RAID arrays. Their array is on its last drive and that has failed. Simple solution. Had they monitored the status of their array and replaced it, they wouldn’t be in a situation where the array couldn’t be saved. RAID should not be looked at as a backup solution (though some seem to think that’s its purpose). It is crucial that RAID drive status be monitored at all times to prevent disastrous levels of loss.

6: Rotate backups offsite

What good are those backups if they burn up in a building fire? Sure, you can place them in a fireproof safe, but why take any chances? Set up a system for rotating your backups weekly (at least) offsite. In fact, if you really want to be safe, have a set of three external drives. At all times, you’ll have one working, one in a fireproof safe, and one offsite. Although this will require you to rotate them more frequently (to keep each backup from going stale), it will ensure that you always have a backup available.

7: Document the network

Your documentation shouldn’t stop at software on servers and clients. You also need to document your network. Know what you used, how you used what you used, the address schemes, and security measures. With this documentation handy, your network will be much easier to recover. And make sure you do the documentation right. Use diagrams as well as descriptions. Make sure the documentation is clear and thorough enough to enable any network admin to re-create your network as quickly as possible.

8: Have an offsite failover for your Web site

It’s great to have all these backup plans. But if you’re faced with disaster and you depend upon your Web site for revenue, you need an offsite failover so that if your onsite server is out of commission, you can easily switch over to the offsite version. When you set this up, make sure that you have the sites set up to regularly update so you’re not switching over to an out-of-date server.

9: Relocate your software offsite

You have purchased all that software. And unless you’re like me and use only open source software, the cost of that investment is significant. Do yourself a favor and relocate all the installation media offsite. Better yet, burn copies of that data and store the originals offsite. That way, should disaster strike, you won’t have to spend days tracking down all the installation media to get yourself back up and running. While you’re at it, make sure that all install keys are stored with the media.

10: Develop a solid recovery plan

And finally, you must have a plan to go along with disaster. When the inevitable does finally strike, you need to know how to react. Every second you flounder piles onto the disaster. Make sure that you know exactly what to do immediately. And make sure that your plan is laid out, step by step, so that panic doesn’t get a chance to take over.

Source: TechRepublic

Is your business continuity plan in place and does it meet your business needs? Not sure? Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice.

1: Bad backups

When you are desperate to get your operation back online, nothing is worse than the sinking feeling you get when you discover that your backups are no good. In this day and age of 24/7 computing, it is often hard to get good backups. Lots of applications just do not seem to cooperate well with backup software. Sometimes, the backups themselves are stored improperly, which causes all sorts of issues. And of course, there are problems with overly complex backup applications, settings that do not work as expected, and hardware issues. All these factors conspire to produce backups that are not what we need when we need it. By monitoring your backup systems closely and testing them on a regular basis, you ensure that they will work when you need them most. And when they aren’t working, you need to make fixing them a top priority.

2: No way to restore

All the backups in the world aren’t worth a hill of beans if they require you to have a live CD or some other way of bootstrapping the restore process, and you do not have that available. You should, of course, discover this in your dry-runs. But you also need to make sure that the restore system is always handy. Putting a copy of it with the backups is a good idea.

3: Lack of a post-recovery testing plan

Ever restore a system, only to discover days or weeks later that there are continuing problems? I have, and it stinks. In the case of system or application issues, the root cause (like a virus) may be lurking in those backups. After you perform your restoration, you need to perform two major types of tests: those that verify that the general systems and applications are back up to snuff and those that check that the specific issue that triggered a restoration is resolved. The former needs to be put into place, written up, and published and practiced long before it is needed. The latter is typically determined on the fly as the situation warrants.

4: No hardware to recover to

Some people assume (or hope) that the disasters we recover from are software only (viruses, OS meltdowns, etc.). And their hardware purchases reflect it. The fact is, if you do not have a full system to restore to, one that matches the system you need to restore closely enough that a bare metal restore will work, you do not have a full recovery process. You have merely made a large gamble that your hardware never fails!

I understand completely how this happens; hardware is expensive and it is difficult to justify buying two servers when you need one. That’s one reason why I like to buy servers in batches, so I can have one fully redundant spare that can substitute for many others. If I ever suspect that the original hardware is bad, I can transfer it to the spare server quickly to verify that the issue is related to the server hardware. Expensive? Not in comparison to the cost of downtime waiting for new servers or parts to be delivered if I don’t have a spare.

5: Lack of essential components

There are certain essential components you should have on hand, “just in case.” But I’ve seen a number of shops, especially some of the ones with tighter budgets, overlook these in their kit. Basic items you should always have on hand include:

• Spare network cables, at least a few of every length you currently use
• Power cords
• Hard drives of the size and types your servers need
• Spare RAM chips of the size and types your servers need
• Extra drive cables
• Spare drive controller cards, if they are separate from the motherboards in your servers
• Extra keyboard, mouse, and monitor

6: Never did a dry-run

One of the most repeated but least followed pieces of advice is to practice your recovery plan in advance. There are lots of reasons why people skip this, but it usually boils down to a lack of time. The good news is it is not too hard or time-consuming to give your recovery plan a trial, especially if you have spare servers handy. Whatever the holdup is, work through it and test your recovery process.

7: Unable to selectively restore from backups

It is really frustrating to need only one small file from a huge backup but to be forced to restore the entire backup just to pull out that file. As we shift to backing up virtual machines and not raw file systems, this is getting more common, too. Before you feel comfortable with your recovery plan, you should make sure that restoring individual files, even if they are within a virtual machine, will work. Otherwise, you can experience much more downtime than needed.

8: Lack of depth in backups

Few of us have the unlimited budgets needed for every backup to be a unique snapshot that gets archived permanently. We need to rotate media on some sort of schedule. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the schedule provides us with the depth and redundancy we need.

I keep three days of backups as “nearline” backups on a rotating basis. Once a week, I transfer a nearline backup to disk, and once a month one of those disks goes offsite permanently. In addition, I have the Exchange server do its own backup twice a day, which gets saved in nearline on the same schedule. I also have SQL Server performing its own backups once a day, which get saved nearline and retained for 14 days. This enables my organization to quickly and immediately get back online; we restore the entire VM from a known-good spot and then use the Exchange or SQL Server backups to bring it up to date.

9: Offsite backups are too far offsite

There’s this underlying assumption that if the offsite backups are ever needed, it will take time to be ready to use them anyway, so it does not matter if they can’t be easily accessed. Well, that’s usually true, but not always. Sometimes, you absolutely need those offsite backups, and when you do, you will need them right away. Online backups are a convenient alternative to sending physical media offsite, but just remember that your connection will feel mighty slow if you need to download a massive backup set just to pull a few files out of it. Make sure that whatever you use for offsite backups, you can access them easily.

10: No documentation in print

It’s important to have your restoration process documented. But you know what folks often forget? If your systems are down, you may not be able to access your files! For example, we keep a SharePoint site for all our network documentation. But if the SQL Server is toast, how are we going to get to SharePoint? That’s why you need to keep printed copies of the documentation you might need, preferably near the physical media (along with any live CDs or other restore materials). And you need to keep the printed copies up to date. One reason I like putting this material in SharePoint is that I can subscribe to an RSS feed of the documents list and get notified when any items change.

Source: TechRepublic

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre to discuss how you can design and implement a business continuity plan for your business.

Many companies have made it clear that their end users want applications and data to follow them across any device and any cloud. But failure has been a painful pill to swallow for many talented architects and engineers who have tried to adopt desktop and application virtualization solutions. Many didn’t know what they didn’t know about the “client clash” in the cloud, with rising mobility, solutions that enable consumerization of IT, and the new generation of digital native users.

Over the years, I have spent quite a bit of time with customers trying to deploy thousands of applications across millions of endpoints on both physical and virtual environments from the client to the cloud. Regardless of company size, pilot pool, or environment, it is clear that fundamental changes in people, processes, and technology are needed for successful transformations to occur.

Based on original research from customers large and small who have embarked on this journey, here is some prescriptive guidance for transforming desktops and applications into universal clients in the cloud.

1: Step away from the machine; start with the user and business

Virtualization enables us to not only decouple the layers in the stack (Machine, OS, APPS) but also to separate the user and business from the technology. Before starting any transformation you need to understand:

• The user’s role and impact on the business
• What users are trying to do (content)
• The context in which they are trying to do it (connectivity, environment, risks)

2: Assess the current asset landscape

The easiest way to get from current state to the cloud is to understand the landscape before plotting your course. What technologies are available from the client to the cloud that already work for your environment? What tools are available that will help ease the migration of your current applications and users to the new paradigm? What applications or tools will support a split environment during the transition and migration process from current to cloud? What partnerships or agreements are already in place to avoid duplicate costs, projects, and expense?

3: Identify and diffuse potential political landmines

The fastest way to kill your project is to not include or get buy in from other teams. The more successful projects include all the key stakeholders from the beginning to diffuse any turf wars over who owns the resources and budget. Every aspect of IT is affected, such as desktop, server, network, storage, asset management, and service desk. Many implementations have failed due to lack of cooperation and/or thought to include the other teams. Nothing kills a pilot faster than when the service desk doesn’t know about it and can’t meet service level agreements for key applications or employees that have significant impact on the bottom line.

4: Get your house in order

Automating bad processes is a bad idea. Before planning your new project, make sure you have automated the processes required to successfully launch a universal client project. If you know your software asset management system does not show what was purchased versus deployed, and this is done through a manual process, perhaps you should look for enterprise license optimization tools that complement your current asset system to replace the manual true up. Or if you know your company is implementing a private cloud, make sure you understand what it is replacing and how you can leverage it for this project BEFORE planning your project to see if timelines align.

5: Assess user and environment requirements

Before walking the proverbial plank down one implementation route or another, assess the user and environment requirements. Understanding overall usage of applications and in what context users need to access them is essential. Be sure the solution you pick will not adversely affect the company’s bottom line. For example, if road warriors need to use a specific application on a frequent basis but are often disconnected, a virtual application solution in a disconnected mode may work better than a software as a service solution. Or if the connectivity from the service provider to the user is not very reliable and/or powerful, an offline solution may be in order. An essential first step in the transformation is to rely on user and environment assessment tools to determine actual software usage.

6: Calculate risks — legal, security, and business

Assessing the overall risk to the company is always a good idea. What are acceptable risks and what are not? Are there key regulations that the company must adhere to, such as personal information acts that would affect where and how they access applications and data? What risks would alternative models such as “bring your own desktop” or streaming virtual applications to personal devices have on the company? Do your license contracts allow those types of implementations? What are the restrictions? Before you talk to your vendors, be sure you know how their licenses are being consumed within your organization today. The number of risk requirements and amount of costs can significantly influence your decision. For example, a less secure online word processor in a public cloud might work for a group of students in an English class but would not be advisable for a group of physicians who need to write notes on patients.

7: Create user profiles (categories)

Once you have details about your users’ overall requirements, the environment, and their roles, you should categorize them into their overall role or function. Examples of roles could be Knowledge Worker, Road Warrior, or Task Worker.

8: Assess application usage requirements

After identifying the right category for your users, it is time to identify the application requirements and good candidates to migrate to the new user paradigm. What applications are being used by multiple groups (such as Microsoft Word or Excel)? Which ones are used only by the Road Warriors (Sales)? How often do they use them? Which ones are used by accounting only once or twice a year for audit? Mapping applications and usage back to user category dependencies will help you create the best candidates for a pilot project. It will also help you understand which applications to virtualize or migrate first and in some cases, which ones should not be migrated/virtualized at all.

9: Assess application compatibility requirements

A good application compatibility assessment tool is critical for planning. The determination of whether to implement a specific application virtualization solution over another will vary depending on the user, content, and context. With three application virtualization architectures on the market today, it is difficult to ascertain the right solution for your desktop transformation requirements. The key is to leverage a streamlined Application Readiness tool that can assess all three application virtualization formats and remediate, convert, and work with your existing and new delivery mechanisms to support both current and emerging cloud infrastructures.

10: Map your route to implementation

Now that you understand the user, content, and context, create a route to implementation based on the business and user requirements. Your route can include a variety of technologies, people, and processes. Be sure to create a unified team across the business to help the success of the plan. Top performers always have a roadmap for success, so that if the pilot project takes off in a big way, they are prepared to scale and pull the trigger in a timely manner to move at the “speed of cloud” to reap the highest benefits. Knowing key performance indicators and defining what success is up front are critical to understanding whether the pilot truly achieved desired state. If it didn’t, take the time to assess and adjust routes to implementation based on changing business needs (user, content, and context).

Source: TechRebublic

Contact Converge IT at our Manchester IT Support Centre for advice on moving your business to the Cloud.