Swansea set for new office

As Complete IT Systems continue our expansion plans, we are proud to announce the opening of our office in Swansea.

“South Wales has become an important market for us, and we want to be able to serve our customers with all their IT requirements. With our new basecamp in the area, we’ll be able to do exactly that” said Philip Hovestadt, Team Manager for Swansea. “I am very much looking forward to leading the charge to add more value to our existing customers here, and to win some new customers looking for trusted, friendly help with their business IT”.

The new Swansea office comes as the business continues to grow successfully, and Philip and the team are already recruiting to fill some exciting new sales roles.

“South Wales is a thriving market, and I am excited to bring more value to our customers in the area” said Ben Gregg, Sales Director and co-owner of Complete IT Systems. “Phil and the team will make a success of this, and look forward to being a positive influence in the local community in the same way we are in our other locations.”

About Complete IT Systems

Founded in 2007 by Paul Spence and Ben Gregg, Complete IT Systems grew to a £16.6 million turnover in 2017 and currently employs over 60 staff. Headquartered in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and with offices in Glasgow and Leicester, the profit share scheme has returned 10% of all net profits to its staff in recognition of their valuable contributions.

The company is also well known for building strong relations with the local community having sponsored Bradford City FC, been crowned the Fastest growing Midsize Business in Yorkshire, playing a local role in Chamber of Commerce activities and supporting a number of local charities and educational initiatives. On a national level it has also been recognised by the London Stock Exchange Group as one of the 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain. This award took into account Complete IT Systems’ role in generating net new employment and in making a dynamic contribution to the overall positive influence of SMEs on the country’s economy.

The business model is built on strong vendor relationships and technical skills that have been cultivated over the past 15 years, with over 20 strategic partnerships and numerous other alliances being skilfully supported by our professional services and technical teams. The commitment to achieving formal accreditations for the likes of Microsoft, Datto, Lenovo, Brother, Barracuda and many others underline the commitment to obtaining the very best expertise for customers.

2013 saw the business expand further, with a new Glasgow office opening its doors to focus on the vibrant Scottish market, and to replicate what the company has achieved in Bradford. Four years on from its opening the office continues to go from strength to strength.

Our Swansea office address is:

SUITE 1, 5TH FLOOR
Alexandra House
Alexandra Road Swansea
Wales
SA1 5ED

Switch your cybersecurity provider with a 24-month buyout

To help our customers become more resilient to face up to more sophisticated cyber threats, Bitdefender has launched a special promotion. With it, you can switch from Kaspersky, Sophos, or other competing vendors to Bitdefender, and have the remainder of your legacy contract bought out!

Available until 30 April, 2022

Take advantage of a special end-user promotion to make the switch to Bitdefender. Here’s the nuts and bolts:

  • Bitdefender will buy out up to 24 of the remaining months on your Kaspersky contract, or other competing cybersecurity vendor.
  • Anything between 1 and 24 months can be bought out
  • Get up to 36 months of protection when paying for 12 months for an upto 24-month buyout
Why Bitdefender?

Bitdefender offers solutions for organisations of all sizes, industries, and differing requirements.

GravityZone Business Security Enterprise combines the world’s most effective endpoint protection platform with Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) capabilities. This helps organisations defend endpoint infrastructure (workstations, servers, and containers) across the threat lifecycle, with high efficacy and efficiency.

The cross-endpoint event correlation takes threat detection and visibility to a new level combining the granularity and rich security context of EDR with the infrastructure-wide analytics of XDR (eXtended Detection and Response).

By incorporating Risk Analytics (for endpoint and user-generated risks) and hardening innovations natively, we minimize the endpoint attack surface, making it more difficult for attackers to penetrate.

The smallprint
  • The promotion is only valid for new Bitdefender customers
  • Must be net new customer opportunity generated by the Partner – Each opportunity must be closed and invoiced during
    the promotional timeframe
  • Renewals, upgrades, upsells, cross-sells, or add-ons with existing Bitdefender customers are not eligible
  • No minimum or maximum on the number of endpoints
  • Eligible Bitdefender products include GravityZone Business Security, GravityZone Elite, or GravityZone Ultra only
  • The promotion can be combined with standard margins, NOR / deal registration, and the Competitive Upgrade order type.
  • Partner must provide copy of Kaspersky invoice and/or other paperwork (e.g., console screenshot, attestation on customer letterhead) indicating name of customer, product used, number of seats / endpoints and remaining term
  • Invoice generated upon contract execution, standard payment terms apply
Want to find out more?

As Bitdefender Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

 

Passwords are a weak point > here’s how to close the gap

Weak passwords are a factor in many cyber security breaches. When they are trying to be productive, users sometimes use easy passwords such as ‘password’, ‘123password’, childrens’ names, dates of birth and so on.

This is not sloppiness on the part of the user, but is simply a case of ‘password fatigue’ to be able to access systems as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that means hackers can too.

What’s the solution?

Password Manager Pro from ManageEngine is a secure vault for storing and managing shared sensitive information such as passwords, documents, and the digital identities of organisations.

With Password Manager Pro, you get the following benefits:

  • Eliminate password fatigue and security lapses
  • Use of a secure, centralised vault for password storage and access – all under IT’s control
  • Improved IT productivity by automating frequent password changes required in critical systems
  • Provide preventive & detective security controls through approval workflows & real-time alerts on password access
  • Meet security audits and regulatory compliance requirements

Want to find out more?

As ManageEngine Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Cyber Essentials Certification ✔️

Following a comprehensive project to review its cyber security processes and policies, Complete IT Systems has achieved the UK Government-backed Cyber Essentials Certification.

Across our offices in Bradford, Leicester, Glasgow and now Swansea, the certification underlines Complete IT Systems’ commitment to provide the very best cyber security practices to meet modern challenges. It enables us to:

  • Demonstrate robust cyber security practices across all our sites
  • Commitment to ‘practice what we preach’ with our cyber security processes
  • Be best placed to share these experiences with our customers

As part of the process, we evaluated our firewalls, application assets, patch management policies, user access controls, anti-malware protocols, and remote device management.

Cyber Essentials will help Complete IT Systems to guard against the most common cyber threats and demonstrate our commitment to cyber security. With this knowledge we will help our customers do the same.

Upgrade outdated and failing printers with a single solution

Complete IT Systems Managed Print services in partnership with Apogee recently joined forces to provide our customer, a national security company, with a total managed and secure workplace solution.

The service has allowed the customer to:
  • Upgrade outdated and failing printers to release workload strain on the IT department.
  • Alleviate further strain on IT department caused by attending to issues with failing printer toner and restocking toner.
  • Remove poor service and response times which are hampering and affecting business.
  • Future upgrade path to be included in the contract to support IT department.

Find out more

As Apogee partners, Complete IT Systems have the skills and resources to help your business with printing solutions for the modern workplace. For more information on how Complete IT Systems and Apogee can help, call 01274 396 213 or email .

Is your business mobile contract good value?📱

The way we communicate is changing. Could you be getting more value from, and/or spending less on your business mobile contract, unified communications, connectivity and cloud services for your organisation?

The specialist team at our sister company Complete Voice and Data works with its customers to get maximum value all business communication needs.

If you would be interested in seeing if they can help your business save on its voice and data requirements, fill in this short survey to give us some key information, and a specialist will contact you.

📢[Webcast]: 2022 Data Protection: Strategies and Initiatives

With data volumes soaring and the demand for modern business applications growing, IT teams need to get to grips with multiple silos of data.

Based on Veeam’s 2022 Data Protection Trends Report that surveyed around 3,400 IT professionals around the world, this session will cover the most common strategic initiatives that drive changes in data protection.

Check out this recent webcast from Veeam to learn more about:

  • Business requirements and how to align to data protection methodologies
  • How digital transformation or IT modernisation initiatives can be impeded or accelerated through modern data protection
  • Cloud‑first ramifications for both production and protection
  • Cyber preparedness alignment with business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) within a broader data protection initiative

 

Find out more

As Veeam Silver partners, Complete IT Systems have the skills and resources to help your business. For more information on how Complete IT Systems and Veeam can help, call 01274 396 213 or email .

 

 

8 reasons to choose an independent business mobile provider

Business mobile plans are one of those operational costs that most companies know can be reduced, either through alternative quotes from another supplier that may be linked to specific networks, or even going direct to the networks themselves. Both options take time and have disadvantages.

Because of this, sticking with an incumbent is usually the path of least resistance. The result is that your business could be losing out on significant savings every month.

To start making some quick savings, our partners Complete Voice and Data have put together a short article outlining 8 reasons to choose an independent business mobile provider.

Securing applications – an expert perspective

The need for securing applications hits the headlines every day. New cybersecurity breaches, ransom attacks and hackers breaching organisations’ critical systems are all commonplace. Applications are a common weakness that malicious actors exploit to gain access into IT infrastructure, and access sensitive data.

Protecting against attacks

To successfully protect against attacks, IT professionals need to be on top of recent data breaches, the main application security vulnerabilities, and how other businesses are dealing with them. They also need to understand the most important product capabilities needed to defend against multi-vector application attacks. From there, plans can be formulated for securing applications and protecting against those top threats.

As part of its recent report entitled “The state of application security in 2021”,  Barracuda Networks surveyed a group of IT professionals worldwide to find out their challenges, opinions, and priorities associated with application security and compiled the results into an insightful market report.

In this insightful webinar, an expert team from Barracuda and Christian Jackson, Platform Manager at the Natural History Museum discuss the report and delve further into its findings.

Want to learn more?

Complete IT Systems have a team of Barracuda specialists on hand to demo the solution, discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.

Cloud-to-cloud backup – why you should backup Microsoft 365 data

What is the use case for cloud-to-cloud backup? Despite the misconception to the contrary, Microsoft 365 is not a backup tool. Instead, it should be thought of as providing availability for users to conveniently access documents – but not a secure backup archive.

Microsoft’s own user agreement confirms that it actually provides extremely limited data protection by retaining deleted items in site collection bins. These are very similar to the recycle bin on Windows Desktops. However, files are only retained for a maximum of 93 days. The retention of files in Microsoft Teams can be even more limited, with Teams channels only protected for 21 days.

The implications for IT

Restoring entire users’ folders or mailboxes can be a tedious, manual process. If the data is mission-critical, this will inevitably mean that widespread disruption can be caused.

Because of this, Microsoft itself recommends that you its customers use third-party backup for data hosted in Office 365.

What is the solution?

Cloud-to-Cloud Backup provides comprehensive, cost-effective, scalable protection for your organisation’s 365 data.

Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup offers fast backups, highly granular restore capabilities, and unmatched ease of use. It automatically backs up all data from email, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Groups, and Teams data to the Barracuda Cloud.

The service is provided as a complete Software as a Service (SaaS) offering so no hardware or software to deploy or manage, and when time is of the essence, restoring what you need takes just a few clicks.

Find out how to go from signing up to running your first backup within 5 minutes in this short video!

Want to learn more?

Complete IT Systems have a team of Barracuda specialists on hand to demo the solution, discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.