COMPANYNAME Blog

How do you manage systems you can’t see or don’t know about?  Where is your customer data stored or used – on your servers or in the cloud? Confident you are abiding by compliance requirements?

The social housing market continues to be under huge pressure from all sides to provide more for tenants with very little in the way of incremental resources.  Set against the backdrop of a digital revolution and an intimidating rise in cybercrime, few social housing organisations have sufficient security skills in-house to keep tenant data and services safe.

While every organisation has their own particular challenges at different times, conversations with our customers in this sector tend to fall into the following areas;

Laura Henry is a service desk engineer who has been with Novosco for two years. When not overseeing the technical side of Novosco's managed services, she dreams of living in a hobbit-home, in Tolkein's The Shire, or failing that, New Zealand.

Question: Laura, describe a typical working day for you in Novosco?

Are you using Office 365? Do you know where your data is stored?

For UK companies that have specific data residency requirements, Microsoft have provided a window to request that your data is moved to UK datacentres. The deadline to request this move is 15^th September 2017. 

Karen Shearer is the Financial Director for Novosco; she is a member of the Chartered Institute of Directors, and when not overseeing all-things-Novosco, she likes sunshine, walking, gardens and gin.

Question: Karen, you’re our Finance Director, what does that actually mean?

July’s Let’s Talk webinar saw cloud expert, amateur chef, and webinar host Mal Toner delve deep into the mysteries of Software Defined Networking. However, unlike conventional mysteries such as those you might find on TV, this one doesn’t involve a cliff-hanger ending.

42,000 metres, or 137795 feet. That’s how far Team Novosco aimed for in the Bowel Cancer UK Row a Marathon fundraising event. And achieve it we did, and then some!

We teamed up with Edwards & Co to bring together 14 other companies from across Northern Ireland; all pulling towards the same goal of raising £15,000.

Eamon McNally is a Senior Infrastructure Consultant with Novosco. He has spent over 15 years working with Microsoft and Citrix technologies including Metaframe XP, XenApp, Netscaler, Active Directory, and Exchange, amongst others. 

Eamon is an expert in the design, migration, deployment, and support of remote desktop services, and loves almost nothing as much as he loves a good cup of coffee.

Following the event of the successful and large scale ransomware attack, and a very busy weekend for a lot of Managed Service Providers, we wanted to inform you and your organisations what actions you can take now, and in future, to assist in reducing the exposure and risk from these types of cyberattacks. 

Myles Gray is a cloud technologist at Novosco, primarily focussing on public cloud R&D, designing customer platforms and services, and utilising automation for both self-hosted and private customer clouds. He is also a: VMware vEXPERT 2016-2017 (NSX, vSAN), VCIX-NV, VCAP-DCV and a Veeam Vanguard.

You can find him blogging at blah.cloud and climbing the occasional mountain.

Question: What do you do, and what do you love about it?

Myles: Essentially, I get to design, tweak, improve-upon, and play with really cool technologies!

Malware used to be about hackers being disruptive and causing an inconvenience - random or politically motivated groups making a point.  Not so any more.  Now it’s a serious, almost professional activity directed at doing real harm and making real money.  

Cisco’s Annual Security Report 2016 documented the statistics of the Angler exploit kit targeting up to 90,000 victims per day and reaping a staggering $34m annual revenue for the hackers.

Multi Layered Network Security describes a series of strategies that collectively build a security protection plan to prevent malicious attacks from entering an environment and compromising systems and data.

There are five key network areas to consider when developing an infrastructure security posture:

Recent years have seen increased pressure on IT to be flexible and agile, requiring investment in different technologies and processes to deliver IT services in new ways.  All too often, human resources have become the limiting factor, with recruitment cycles potentially lasting several months; innovation is curbed and productivity limited by the lack of the right technology skills.

There are lots of reasons why an IT department may not have the resources on hand, such as;

It's been an eventful first few months of 2017 for all of us at Novosco - literally! A whole range of events, across the UK & Ireland, maybe we've seen you at some of them, if not then we hope to see you at some in the future!

Our security mantra is “Prevent, detect, respond”, but if we’re honest, the main focus should really be on preventing cyber attacks first and foremost. 

The first important point is that detection has now become a form of prevention and a significant rethink is required to really stay on top of security.  The current onslaught of ransomware and malware has proven that signature-based antivirus and next generation firewalls do not offer as much protection as might be hoped.

Why is this?

With our acquisition of NetDef last year, Novosco now has an additional team of security experts in house. Cloud security is of vital importance so in our blogs over the coming months we’ll start looking at security in more detail and what it means for your business.  

If you’re planning to be at Cloud Expo Europe next month, you can catch Dave Beesley discussing these issues – more details here

Recently there have been some very public and serious security breaches, putting cybersecurity on the front pages.  Cybercrime is big news for organisations of all shapes and sizes in every sector, so every manager and board member has reason to want to understand how their organisation is protected.  However, it can seem like a labyrinth of complex jargon and technical terminology to those not already initiated into the world of network infrastructure and IT. So, we've put together a quick guide on what you need to know.

Is your phone supplier costing your business time and money?

Have you been using the same old phone system for years now, without thinking too much about it?

Hey, it works, so what’s wrong with that?! Well stop and think about it for a minute… does it really work in a way that is most cost effective for your business?

You’ve probably been tied into an ISDN contract for years with your current phone provider. Maybe you’ve got your own PBX, and you’re also managing your own telephony infrastructure, which can be expensive and time consuming to maintain and operate.

Well now is the time to think about making a change that is better for your business and could save you money and increase efficiency.

Microsoft Office 365 is arguably one of the most powerful tools you can equip your business or organisation with right now; when it comes to the enterprise IT environment, it’s state-of-the-art;  giving your business the tools it needs to lead the way in terms of productivity, efficiency, security and practicality.

But why would you make the move to Office 365 when what you have works?

Cloud Migration: 5 points to remember

It’s that time of year when you are starting to formulate plans and think about how you’re going to grow and develop your business in the coming year and beyond.

Migrating your IT solutions and applications to the cloud may help you achieve your business goals. But with such a range of cloud options and a wide variety of managed service providers, it’s important that you take time and consider your options before leaping forward.

Public and private clouds are not interchangeable but can co-exist

The move to the cloud is inevitable – that much we know. All the experts agree, even if their figures vary somewhat. The question is – is it possible to move to the cloud too fast?