As the global economy begins its recovery and with costs being more analysed and managed than ever before, every organisation is being asked to deliver more, with less resources and for lower costs. A real differentiator is the quality of service and support and if these can be more automated and efficient, the business benefits can make the difference between success and failure as Cherwell managing director Tony Probert explains.
The financial crisis in the public sector has highlighted how best practice and innovative use of ITSM tools are helping managers to find creative ways to reduce cost. Patrick Bolger, chief marketing officer at Hornbill Systems explains how Government policy is driving investment in technology.
In the last decade, strategic initiatives like e-Government set a progressive agenda for technology in Government, with the mission, as described by Tony Blair, of “ensuring that IT supports the business transformation of government itself so that we can provide better, more efficient, public services.”
Andy Ross, CEO of Northgate Managed Services, takes a retrospective look at the challenges faced by IT managed services in 2009 and the prospects for the sector and predictions for the market in 2010.
As the economic downturn continues to drive a reduction in discretionary spend across UK businesses, we have seen a significant shift away from the use of IT for organisational transformation and innovation, to the greater need to improve efficiency and cut costs. The shortage of capital has resulted in large-scale projects which would usually account for up to 20 percent additional spend on top of annual service agreements, being replaced with strategies to support and extend the shelf-life of existing IT infrastructure.
Following the first ever online only live streaming of the England football team’s 1-0 defeat against Ukraine, Blue Coat’s EMEA marketing VP Nigel Hawthorn, looks into the implications that live online video streaming events could have on an organisation’s network infrastructure ahead of this summer’s World Cup.
The 2010 World Cup in South Africa promises worldwide coverage like never before, with the BBC Sport website offering live video streaming of all matches. Though a small number of matches were shown online in 2006, this time the number of matches available across the web includes all matches that the BBC has the rights to. Probably more importantly, the success of iPlayer and YouTube has led to an assumption on the part of users that the quality will be good to the desktop.
IT industry blogger Dominic Monkhouse tells us what issues need to be considered to make using cloud computing a viable option.
Cloud computing has been hailed as the future of IT, a way to cut-out the cost of hardware and maintenance, allowing employees to access applications from any location and so on. It can already fulfil much of this promise, and indeed small and medium sized businesses are already using the cloud with great benefit. However, there are equally some issues that need to be considered when a business decides when and where cloud is a viable option.
In these tough economic times, though it’s tempting to include service in the many cutbacks being made across the breadth of an organisation, it is important to remember that it’s precisely service that will keep your current customers and will continue to attract new ones, which is essential in surviving the downturn. The gap in [...]
Avoiding USB risk exposure, John Jefferis, vice president of Ironkey on how to define and enforce an effective USB security strategy.
USB drives, or memory sticks as they are sometimes referred to, are immensely popular and increasingly selected as the weapon of choice by employees looking for flexibility in their working environment. Having proved invaluable in [...]
A strategic IT initiative with many benefits, Phil Van Etten, chief executive of Azaleos outlines why many organisations are waking up to the potential of unified communications.
A couple of years ago the concept of unified communications (UC) was more a vision and hype of the vendor community than reality. Today this vision is slowly maturing [...]
As the world’s largest privately held commercial real estate firm, Cushman & Wakefield recognises the need to create a consolidated service desk. However, five years ago, the situation was very different. As Steve Kennedy, associate director of Cushman & Wakefield recalls.
“The IT service desk was little more than a basic call-logging system, and, even then, [...]
Forrester study shows 108% ROI 
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