Posts about Blogs (2)

Ask any GP practice manager about their biggest operational headache and you'll usually hear something about peak-time call volumes, the 8am rush being the most familiar example. Phones ringing off the hook the moment reception opens, patients redialling in frustration or stuck in a queue for long periods, and a reception team trying to triage, book and reassure all at once.

Bringing networking and security together into a single, converged platform is a serious undertaking. According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology's Cyber Security Skills in the UK Labour Market 2025 report, nearly half of UK businesses (49%) report a basic cyber security skills gap, struggling with fundamentals such as firewall configuration and malware detection. Almost a third (31%) already outsource part of their cyber security function as a result.

The UK's old analogue phone network, the PSTN, is being switched off on 31 January 2027. While the switch-off is already underway, Openreach estimates around 1.5 million lines nationwide, including roughly 350,000 business premises, are still running on it. For transport and logistics operators, that figure matters more than it might first appear, since so much of the sector's day-to-day infrastructure quietly depends on the same old copper lines.

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.