New Thinking

Kevin Linsell explores the potential merits of desktop as a service for the consumer.

Jim Farley explains the complexity of PCI DSS and why it's not for everyone

Kevin Linsell provides guidance on how to prioritise and plan your infrastructure initiatives.

Jim Farley gets under the bonnet of business’ systems and infrastructure.

You work for a forward-thinking organisation that has embraced ‘the Cloud’. So what’s next?

Kevin Linsell meets the IT Director who has it all...

There has never been a more compelling time to look for a service provider. A unique set of events have coincided to create a perfect storm of opportunity for small and medium sized businesses.

Our Head of Architecture answers common questions of IT Managers when looking to implement a DR and BC strategy.

Desktop virtualisation is on the verge of becoming mainstream. IT Managers now feel duty bound to at least consider it as an option when performing a hardware refresh.

It is widely accepted that when it comes to outsourcing IT, performance and reliability are the most sought after end-user attributes. However, in looking for a high-speed solution that also offers the highest level of availability, many businesses end up having to compromise one for the other, or must purchase expensive additional services to satisfy the requirement for both. Customers looking for 99.999 percent (the ‘five nines’) availability or higher may need to invest in additional disaster recovery infrastructure, paying associated support and licensing costs as a result.

As the popularity of IaaS grows, organisations typically select from 3 main options:

1. self-managed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),
2. self-managed Iaas with hand over of routine operational tasks or
3. more complex hosted solutions, where all infrastructure, underlying web content and applications are outsourced.

But how do you differentiate between the types of customers that demand each?

As organisations store increasingly large amounts of data, and more applications are placed in the cloud, the need for data centre space has increased significantly. As a result, many businesses today are left wondering how best to satisfy these needs.

You know when you're in the middle of a hype cycle: when every product arrives against a backdrop of blue sky and fluffy clouds, you have to seriously question whether this is really contributing to our understanding of the subject.

The power and cooling available today to support fully fitted space is in short supply but sites on the periphery of major metropolitan centres have better access to critical power supply and may be the best option for many, explains Mike Hills, director of products and services at Adapt.

As the global economic climate worsens, it's clear that this recession won't be a short blip and the effects of the credit crunch will be long lasting and severe. As a consequence, organisations need to slash their overheads while continuing to serve their customers and keep an eye on positioning themselves for the upturn - eventually. Such strategies need to be put in place now so savings and efficiency gains can be achieved instantly.