How to put IT sustainability into action

IT sustainability remains a concept as opposed to a concrete action in many organisations.

New technology can seem like the best or only option, but this endless desire for the newest product creates enormous amounts of waste. For decades, the IT industry has built economies on the principle of ever faster turnover, harnessing the power of marketing to encourage consumers to believe that the sooner they replace their devices, the better.

Today we are waking up to the fact that this approach, which applies to almost every piece of technology we consume, is no longer viable. It’s time to look for a more sustainable model that is better for businesses, end-users and the planet.

Read this whitepaper from our partners Circular Computing to find out more about how your organisation can put IT on the sustainability agenda while delivering on your core objectives.

Want to learn more?

As Circular Computing Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits, provide demonstration models, and offer special monthly pricing.

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

Best backup for SMB. Powerful. Easy-to-use. Affordable

Operating a small business can be overwhelming. You’re managing your own IT with limited time, smaller budgets, and fewer resources. You’re forced to do more with less. This is why you need a backup solution that just works and can save you valuable time and money.

Veeam and Complete IT Systems offer a single platform for cloud, virtual and physical backup that is:
  • Powerful, offering reliable backup and fast restores to protect you against data loss and downtime.
  • Easy-to-use, making installation simple and easy day-to-day management means you don’t need a massive IT team to manage your data.
  • Affordable, giving you the ability to maximize your budget with special pricing for small businesses.
The following packages are available for small businesses:
  • Veeam Backup Essentials: Single platform for backup and recovery, data management and cloud mobility of virtual, physical and cloud-native workloads
  • Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure or Google Cloud: Standalone cloud-native backup and recovery modules
  • Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365: Standalone protection of Office 365 data
Overcome the “3C” Backup Problem

You can overcome the “3C” Backup Problem – lack of Capabilities, Complexity and Cost – with the best backup solution for small business.

Find out more in this short deep dive video:

 

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 .

 

Bad bots, broken APIs, and supply chain attacks put business data at risk

Barracuda Networks recently surveyed a group of IT professionals worldwide to find out their challenges, opinions, and priorities associated to application security and compiled the results into an insightful market report.

Read “The state of application security in 2021” to delve into top application security vulnerabilities, data breaches, and the most important product capabilities needed to defend against multi-vector application attacks.

Read the report to find out:

  • The recent data breaches, top application security vulnerabilities, and how businesses are dealing with them.
  • The most important product capabilities needed to defend against multi-vector application attacks.
  • The security solutions decision makers plan to deploy in the next 12 months to protect against top threats.

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.

Complete IT Systems becomes official sponsor of Burnley FC

It’s Premier League time for Complete IT Systems, as the Bradford-based IT services provider energises its sponsorship strategy, and is proud to partner with Burnley FC for the 2021-22 season.

One of the most famous old clubs in English football, Burnley’s “Hold to the Truth” motto fits well with Complete IT Systems values of providing trusted IT and technology advice to customers across the UK and overseas.

Building on their shared values, Complete IT Systems and Burnley FC will use the partnership to create combined values for our customers.

The deal will see Complete IT Systems’ logo in lights inside and outside Turf Moor on matchdays throughout the season, including the external corner screen and advertising hoardings. Networking events and hospitality will also enable the Yorkshire-based IT experts to host customers and prospects to enjoy some time away from the office.

Ben Gregg, Sales Director at Complete IT Systems had this to say about the new sponsorship. “I am a big football fan myself, so naturally I am excited we will be involved in the Premier League for the coming season. Burnley is a great club, and it has worked wonders to become an established top-flight team in recent years. We are proud to be associated with Burnley FC, and we wish the club the best of luck for the season ahead!”.

In a separate arrangement, Complete IT Systems also sponsored the Burnley FC Esports team’s end of season awards last season.

Building business resilience with print – top tips

Building business resilience with print is front-of-mind for management teams. This is especially true as they step down from crisis stations and find the headspace to plan for the future.

It’s a focus that’s already seeping into IT procurement decisions. Firms want to harness solutions that can offset the impact of future disruption following a year of overcoming challenges.

We spoke to Sara Diggle, Head of SMB print business unit at Brother UK. She told us what decision makers need on their checklists when searching for new print systems with the end-goal of building resilience.

Agility

Cloud and the internet of things enabled print technology is allowing systems to be more decentralised. This means maintenance and support needs to be available wherever a device may be.

Managed print services (MPS) can easily be rolled out across a businesses’ network of offices, or even among home workers. This should still allow for full oversight by IT managers. Solutions like Brother’s remote panel, offers quick diagnosis and problem solving without the need to send out an engineer.

Security

Modern print devices offer end-to-end encryption. Manufacturers like Brother provide regular firmware updates that help end-users to stay one step ahead of hackers.

But sensitive information printed by devices can also fall into the wrong hands. Brother’s Secure Print+ solution offers easy-to-manage card-based user authentication. This ensures documents are only printed when they’re ready to collect from the printer.

Reliability

Remote diagnostics available through MPS can spot issues for end-users before problems arise. This keeps device uptime high. Meanwhile, Brother’s Request Help solution helps to ensure any problems are resolved quickly. This means users can contact an engineer via a printer’s interface.

Predictability

Predicting costs is central to building resilience. Setting monthly fees for MPS programmes helps businesses forecast costs. This is easier than managing in-house costs with potential repair and breakdown costs to factor in. Supplies replenishment also ensures that end-users don’t have to order in inks and toners. This avoids waiting for them to arrive if they run out, causing downtime.

COVID-secure

While the vaccine rollout picks up pace, we’re likely to be living with COVID-19 for some time. This means IT decision makers need to ensure that shared devices can be used safely.

A decentralised approach to print can be a safer choice for businesses. This means using tailored devices located across an office, rather than having a central multifunction device where users have to queue for use.

Scalability

While additional devices can easily be added to an MPS programme, devices themselves can build scalability. Brother’s flagship devices can be equipped with additional print trays, mailbox trays and automatic stapling. This boosts capacity when needed for fast-growing offices.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

Is your print solution enhancing your business’s resilience?

Following a year no one could have anticipated, many businesses are operating in a vastly different environment to the one they faced little over 12 months ago.

While this period has seen enormous digital transformation, as the pace of change begins to relent, now is the time for IT managers and decision makers to reflect on the technologies they have in place and turn their focus to the future to ensure it is enabling them to operate agilely, safely and flexibly.

We spoke to Sara Diggle, Head of SMB print business unit at Brother UK about how the right print solution can enhance business resilience in any environment and what businesses should be looking for.

With more and more employees adopting hybrid working practices, it’s vital that any print solution is optimised to perform in every environment. Ensuring employees can continue working effectively and efficiently from anywhere keeps productivity levels high and simplifies working practices, helping businesses to remain agile and able to cope with whatever challenges they face.

Supporting business resilience

Here are five key things that your print solution should be providing if it’s designed to support business resilience:

1. Comprehensive device options

Any print solution that is truly going to deliver for every environment needs to offer a comprehensive range of device options that are designed to support the employee whether they are working from home, office, a co-working space or a blend of all three.

Brother’s industry-leading devices range from scalable, robust SMB laser printers for the office to compact multifunction desktop devices for the home, enabling reliable, simple and secure printing and scanning everywhere.

2. Remote support

With a seemingly ever-expanding network of devices and locations, managing technical issues and providing support is becoming increasingly challenging for IT managers and their teams.

Solutions such as Brother’s remote panel, give service providers the means of quickly diagnosing and solving printer problems without the need to send out an engineer, easing pressures on the team and ensuring minimal disruption to employees.

3. Managed print service (MPS)

Implementing an MPS is one of the most impactful ways IT teams can transform how they manage their print network.

Managed print services can easily be rolled out across a business’s network of offices, as well as among home workers, while still allowing full oversight by IT managers. Not only does an MPS enable easy remote management, it also improves reliability of the network and productivity of employees by ensuring every office and employee has an up-to-date device with the latest software and can reduce costs and downtime with the automated delivery of toner and ink cartridges.

4. Enhanced security

A security breach compromises a business and often halts all activity, putting it in a potentially precarious position. According to research from Quocirca in 2019, more than one in ten of all security incidents that affected a business involved a printer, 59 per cent of which resulted in data being lost.

The number of entry points hackers can use to access company networks has grown exponentially and home printing can increase network vulnerability. Businesses need a print solution that proactively tackles these security blind spots at home and the office.

Remote management can help ensure home devices remain up to date with the latest software reducing risk, while solutions such as Brother’s Secure Print+ can protect devices in the office, with access to devices and the network limited to the authenticated user.

5. Touch free printing

Employee safety in the office is an ongoing concern and while the focus for many will be social distancing through one-way systems and re-worked seating plans, the shared usage of office technology will also present a challenge.

Decentralising print and the balanced deployment of machines will help reduce the need for users to move around the office to retrieve documents and limit the number of people congregating at devices. Additionally, to ensure people don’t need to physically engage with a device, solutions such as Brother’s Secure Print+ enables touch-free printing, using card-based authentication.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

The implications of cyber attacks on backup data

Cybercriminals are desperate to collect their ransoms and are finding stealthy ways to corrupt backup data that are often missed by detection tools. This causes prolonged downtimes, financial hardships, and loss of consumer trust.

Veeam backups stored locally on Microsoft environments lack any native immutability for Veeam Backup and Disaster Recovery volumes.

Blocky for Veeam solves this problem by locking backup volumes to any process other than fingerprinted Veeam Software application executables.

In addition, any unauthorised attempts to access backup volumes are notified by Blocky for Veeam providing valuable intelligence that could provide warning of an active cyber attack.

Read more

In this article for Toolbox for IT, see why organisations should strive for data resiliency using a 3-prong approach that combines isolation, immutability, and intelligence.

Want to learn more?

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer FREE trials.

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

blocky for veeam

Ten emerging fintech trends to watch in 2021 – and beyond

The way we interact with our money changed forever in 2020.

One of the social and technological transformations caused – or at least accelerated – by the Covid-19 pandemic was the unprecedented growth in the use of financial technology.

This surge in demand meant the fintech industry had to step up and scale fast, creating new solutions for consumers and businesses that worked for the online world, and that will go on to thrive in the new normality.

Many fintech trends were already well underway; they simply moved further along their growth curve during the pandemic.

Since then, a wave of new financial services providers has stepped in to fill that space and acquire an ever-growing market share.

Further Investment

The June 2020 AI in Fintech Market – Growth, Trends, Forecasts (2020-2025) from Research and Markets valued the global AI-in-fintech market at around £4.8 billion in 2019 and expected it to grow to over £16 billion by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate of 23.37% (2020-2025).

Initially, the small matter of a global pandemic acted a bit of a speedbump to these growth projections.

It quickly bounced back, though. According to a KPMG industry report, fintech investment doubled in H1’20 to H2’20 from £24 billion to nearly £52 billion, with global fintech-focused VC investment reaching over £30 billion in 2020.

Traditional brick-and-mortar banks as we know them may be withering (see below), but some of the institutions behind them are quietly investing in fintech: developing new brands, often through an internal startup approach, emulating the agility of the new upstart competitors in the challenger and neo banking world.

As well as acting as VCs to their internal projects, some are joining broader industry consortia to pursue more ambitious long-term goals and tackle legal and compliance issues.

Growth of Digital-only Banks

Trust in traditional financial institutions and banks never really recovered from the 2008 financial crisis.

Thanks to fintech, traditional banking is in serious decline, as a new generation of digitally native customers are turning their backs on their parents’ trusted choices.

Instead, they’re seeking solutions to their unique situations, such as a mortgage lender who understands the realities of a gig worker’s income.

Rather than turning to a big ‘high street’ bank for future services, smart consumers increasingly shop around for the best fit, because these days that can be as simple as downloading a new app.

A Boston Consulting Group survey across 15 countries showed that 44 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds had enrolled in online banking for the first time during the early weeks of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

And they’re borrowing too, from peer-to-peer micro-loans in developing nations to streamlined mortgage applications in the US.

Going Mainstream – Accessing Untapped Markets

Startups in fintech are unbundling offerings to create niche new markets, addressing inclusion issues, and often cutting costs for users through efficient use of technology.

By offering services to formerly unbanked or underbanked populations around the world, they’re growing the pie for all providers.

And with interest rates for savers so low everywhere, the perks and bonuses on offer are more attractive as a result: why wouldn’t you choose a credit or debit card with cashback or discounts at your favorite store?

Closer Regulator Scrutiny

While legislative change always lags behind technological advances, regulators are taking a growing interest in many fintech hotspots such as blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies.

Globally the response is fragmented, with smaller and nimbler jurisdictions moving faster, while others are setting up sandboxes to test scenarios and encourage innovation.

Lawmakers are taking a keen interest in the lending side too, with growing concerns over consumer credit apps, which may encourage shoppers to spread the cost of fast fashion items over a longer period than the lifetime of the garment itself.

Embedded Finance

Powered by the Open Banking movement, embedded finance is already radically reforming the way businesses generate revenue and interact with consumers.

The ‘buy-now-pay-later’ shopping trend is obviously the most visible of these embedded finance developments. But the possibilities for disruption – and revenue generation – are virtually limitless.

Other examples range from e-wallets and instant merchant payments, to services that allow landlords and their would-be tenants to agree upon and close deals, and purchase and insurance funding in the automotive industry… to name but a few.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning cut costs, accelerate administration, and assist fraud prevention, all of which remove friction from each transaction.

The growth of technologies such as natural language processing and self-service for financial products can improve financial awareness and control for informed consumers. But it can equally be used to target naïve stock traders or reckless bargain hunters.

Autonomous Finance & the Opening Up of Financial Services

Beyond developments in embedded finance, fintech startups continue their tendency to democratise accessibility to typically gate-kept financial services, like day trading and forex.

Today, consumers around the world are now trading stocks, exchanging currencies, sending remittances, and contracting for retirement investments, all without involving traditional financial institutions in any way.

In parts of the world suffering financial crises – from credit crunches to hyperinflation – these tools are already providing a lifeline to tech-savvy consumers.

In more financially privileged environments, furloughed workers get to dabble in new things to do with their stimulus payments.

For better or worse, we will doubtless see further Gamestop scenarios playing out, as fintech puts powerful financial tools in the hands of every smartphone holder.

The rise of RPA

As with so many other developing areas of technology, robotic process automation (to give it its full name) is set to bring root and branch disruption to fintech in the coming years.

Whether it’s customer onboarding, data entry or reporting, or even insurance claim checks or processing an individual’s suitability for a loan application, if it’s a task that’s repetitive in nature, then the chances are that RPA will be stepping into the breach before too long.

The Central Role of Cybersecurity

With far-reaching disruption and ever-increasing digitalisation – from machine learning and AI to 5G and IoT – cybersecurity threats have never been greater.

As a result, the cybersecurity market is projected to grow from £118bn in 2021 to over £266bn in 2028.

Central Bank Digital Currencies

Contactless payments exploded in 2020, moving out of the e-commerce realm into face-to-face transactions for all generations, as everyone tried not to touch anything.

This cash decline coincides not only with all-time highs for bitcoin, but also a high level of interest in central bank digital currencies, and other far more ‘alternative’ digital options.

With its digitalisation of the renminbi in April 2021, China was the first of the major global economies to break cover and make the jump into the unknown world of CBDCs.

One thing’s for sure: it certainly won’t be the last – particularly as there’s already excited talk of the move hastening the “decline of the dollar’s dominance as the world’s leading reserve currency”.

The End of Cash?

The way we pay for things has irreversibly changed, and fintechs are jumping on this trend, again responding to changes in the social environment.

Even as far back as 2018, Pew Research found that just over a third of US adults under the age of 50 made no weekly cash purchases.

More recently, the National Retail Federation and Forrester Research indicated 19% of US consumers made a contactless digital payment for the first time in May 2020.

Usage of apps like PayPal, Square and Apple Pay has surged as consumers increasingly looked to reduce their cash usage in the wake of COVID-19.

Combined with further mainstream uptake of decentralised cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the rise of CBDCs (see above), it’s fair to say that the writing’s on the wall for cash.

Now we just need smartphone facial recognition technology that recognises you through a face mask when you get to the checkout… but that will come soon.

In Conclusion

So as with almost everything else the present and future of finance – in 2021 and beyond – is tech.

It’s a fragmented, competitive, and not always well-regulated world of alternatives, where consumers will have more choice to navigate a fast-changing fintech landscape.

In the process, they’ll be equipped to take charge of their money management like never before.

About the Author:

As a market research veteran and founder of NYC-based B2B market research consultancy firm, Adience, Chris Wells has worked with hundreds of fintech companies over the years.

Links:

https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2021/02/pulse-of-fintech-h2-2020.pdf

https://www.bcg.com/en-es/publications/2020/covid-19-causes-a-new-outlook-on-pricing-and-revenue-for-banks

https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/ai-in-fintech-market

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/12/more-americans-are-making-no-weekly-purchases-with-cash/

https://www.ft.com/content/3fe905e7-8b9b-4782-bf2d-fc4f45496915

https://www.hello-adience.com/fintech/

Veeam named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions 2021

The NEW Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions 2021 has been released, and Veeam has been named as a Magic Quadrant Leader for the fifth time. This award is based on its highest ability to execute and completeness of vision.

The report gives you:

  • A full overview of backup and recovery functionality, technology and market trends
  • Guidance on choosing a vendor, including requirements, pricing, strengths and cautions
  • Ratings of leading backup and recovery vendors

Download the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions 2021 now to find out more.

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 .

 

Top tips for securing Veeam backups – part 1

Keeping all aspects of your IT secure can seem daunting. Even backups are at risk, despite trying to provide a safe haven for your data. This is where Complete IT Systems and Blocky for Veeam can help. By applying a systematic approach to your security, you can protect data-at-rest and data-in-transit.

In a series of articles over the coming weeks, we will outline how to secure your backed-up data, and how to adopt a pragmatic, practical apprach to doing so.

In this article, part one, we look at how to understand cyber criminals’ motivations, the role of backups in limiting the impact of ransom attacks, and how Veeam backup encryption helps.

Knowing your enemy

The first step to knowing how to protect your backups is to understand your enemy. Cyber attackers target backed-up data for two main reasons. First, preventing an organisation from operating means there is no revenue coming in. Customers are uncertain, and this uncertainty almost guarantees some lost income.

Hackers stop businesses from functioning by locking firms out of their own data. They also extract sensitive personal data (PII) which can be a serious problem in the wrong hands.

The role of backups

Backing up data is a funadmental to good business practice. They also offer a good safeguard against ransom attacks by enabling a restore to the most recent point in time prior to an attack. Applying the 3-2-1 principle to backup means that you avoid placing all your eggs in one basket by storing data on different types of storage.

In the event of a ransom attack that encrypts an organisation’s data against them, with good backups in place IT teams can restore to a known point in time before the attack took place. For these reasons, it is not only essential to take regular backups, but to protect the data as it moves between locations and when it is in its final destination.

Encrypting Veeam backups

Encryption is a vital compont of protecting data. It is also a common trick cyber criminals use to lock organisations out of their own data.

With Veeam, you automatically have inbuilt encryption with the Backup & Replication solution. This enables you to switch on encryption on multiple levels:

  • Backup jobs
  • Backup copy jobs
  • VeeamZIP
  • Tapes

But there are some important considerations to keeping your backups completely secure.

If Veeam’s encryption has not been enabled for an existing backup job, the previous chain is not captured in the backup for that job. In other words, Veeam Backup & Replication’s encryption is not applied retrospectively.

To solve this, it is possible to start a new chain to enable the previously unencrypted chain to be siloed and then secured separately. Enabling encryption for an existing job then allows the in-built Veeam solution to create a full backup file.

What about deduplication?

Using a deduplicating storage appliance as the target for backed-up data means encryption can have a negative impact on deduplication ratios.

Since a separate encryption key is used for every job session, blocks that may be the same can appear to be different despite contaning the same data. By disabling data encryption, higher de-duplication rates can be achieved. The downside of this is that security is reduced.

Risk assessments therefore need to be conducted to balance deduplication with security.

Look out for our next blogs where we will go into more detail on this topic.

Find out more

Read more about Blocky for Veeam and view a short introduction video.

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer exclusive 30-day FREE trials.

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

Protect Veeam backups