Posts by Wavenet

Did you know that the manufacturing industry was the most targeted sector for ransomware anywhere in the world in 2025, with incidents up 56% year on year, and it remains the most targeted sector into 2026 thus far. If you run IT for a manufacturer, that statistic isn't background noise, it's a description of the environment you're already operating in.

Microsoft 365 licensing optimisation means reviewing what you're actually paying for against what your business genuinely uses, then adjusting licences, security settings and renewal timing to close the gap. We’re noticing that for many customers, that gap is bigger than expected. Unused seats, duplicate subscriptions and licences still assigned to people who left months ago all quietly inflate the bill every month.

Completing a disaster recovery (DR) test can provide valuable reassurance that your recovery plans work as expected. But in modern IT environments, testing isn't the finish line. It's a point-in-time validation.

What is disaster recovery testing? Disaster recovery (DR) testing is the process of validating that systems, applications, data, and recovery procedures can be restored successfully following a disruption. Testing helps organisations assess whether recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), and business continuity requirements can be achieved during a real-world incident.

When something goes wrong such as a ransomware attack, a server failure, a flood, a power cut, most businesses reach for two terms in the same breath, disaster recovery and business continuity. They're closely related, but they're not interchangeable and knowing the difference matters when you're deciding what to plan, test and invest in.

Most financial services firms didn't choose their current IT infrastructure so much as grow into it. Systems get added, data centres age and a setup that once worked perfectly well starts to demand more time just to keep it running. That time comes at a cost: every hour your IT team spends patching, maintaining or firefighting is an hour not spent on the digital services your customers now expect as standard.

Historically, IT support has often been viewed as a reactive function. A user experiences an issue, a ticket is raised and the problem is resolved. While this approach remains important, the demands placed on modern IT environments mean that fixing problems after they've occurred is no longer enough.

Financial services firms hold some of the most sensitive data any organisation manages: account details, transaction histories, personal and financial records that customers trust you to protect. Your customers also expect multi-channel, real-time access to their money and information, around the clock. When something goes wrong with the systems behind that, whether it's a hardware failure, a cyber incident or something as ordinary as a failed upgrade, the gap between a well-tested recovery plan and an untested one becomes very visible, very quickly.

The UK's PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) switch-off is the biggest change in business telecommunications in three decades and it is now approaching rapidly, with a deadline of January 2027. For housing providers, this represents a pivotal turning point that demands immediate attention.