PrintIT Reseller - issue 67

01732 759725 4 BULLETIN Avoidable IT outages According to a new report, IT Outage Impact Study 2019 from LogicMonitor, 97% of UK businesses have experienced IT outages and brownouts. Yet according to the provider of a SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for enterprise IT and IT service providers, more than half (53%) of these are avoidable. The report found that the most common causes of disruptive downtime are network failure, software malfunction, usage spikes/ surges, third-party provider outages, human error and configuration error. LogicMonitor suggests that many of these incidents could be avoided by identifying when critical hardware or software performance is trending steadily downwards or when usage is trending towards a danger level (e.g. when there is more traffic than the network can efficiently handle or when a primary storage share is running out of space). www.logicmonitor.com VPN for security The latest VPN usage survey carried out by NordVPN shows that the majority of VPN service subscribers use the tool for their security online. 46% of respondents said they use a VPN when connecting to public Wi-Fi (hotels, coffee shops, airports, etc.). Another 46% have their VPN turned on when trying to access sensitive or private content online and 33% said they use a VPN whenever they are online. According to the research, over half (52%) of respondents use their VPN on three or more devices (9% of them protect five to six gadgets). Less than half (48%) mentioned they use a VPN on their mobile devices in comparison to 85% of those who use it on desktop. www.nordvpn.com On cloud nine Businesses are wasting £8.8 million a year on unused cloud services, equating to over £24,000 a day, claims IT services provider Insight. A survey of 1,000 European enterprises for the 2019 European Insight Intelligent Technology Index reveals that businesses in Europe are spending £29.48 million on cloud services, 30% of which they never use. www.uk.insight.com Working on the edge The use of Edge Computing to push applications, data and services away from centralised nodes to the logical extremes of a network is on the rise. While some organisations are struggling to even understand the concept and its applications, others are steaming ahead in terms of implementing the newest technology transforming business processes and decisions, according to Y Soft. Chief Technology Strategist Ondrej Kracijek, says that encouraged by the dawn of ubiquitous connectivity, delivered by emerging standards, such as Wi-Fi 6, 5G or long range / low energy networks and the availability of a wide range of applications, it’s clear that this technology is here to stay and is set to have a dramatic impact on all industries. “From healthcare and manufacturing to legal and the public sector the technology enables businesses of all sizes to enable autonomous operational decisions to be made while providing savings on bandwidth volume and costs. Latency and issues such as poor or unreliable networks no longer impact business processes.” Edge Computing offers a new model for running apps outside of the cloud. “With near real-time speeds and having the data and processing close, we can reclaim the user experience and make it bearable again, without suffering from long round trip times between user devices and the cloud,” Kracijek added. www.ysoft.com Automation raises productivity A survey of 400 IT professionals found that currently 85% of new employees don’t have all the resources they need to be productive on day one, with 27% of IT professionals saying it can take a week or more to give them everything they need to do their job. That’s one of the findings of a new report from Ivanti which highlights the productivity benefits of automation within employee onboarding/offboarding. The report also highlights the security weaknesses of predominantly manual processes, with 52% of IT professionals claiming to know someone who still has access to a former employer’s applications and data. One in four respondents said it can take more than a week to fully deprovision an employee. www.ivanti.com Inefficient incident response Inefficient incident response to email attacks is costing businesses billions in losses every year. For many organisations, finding, identifying and removing email threats is a slow and manual process that takes too long and uses too many resources. As a result, attacks often have time to spread and cause more damage. In a recent survey, Barracuda researchers found that, on average, a business takes three and a half hours (212 minutes) to remediate an attack. In fact, 11% of organisations spend more than six hours on investigation and remediation. www.barracuda.com Manchester named top city for IT Manchester is the best city in the UK for IT jobs, reveals analysis by IT trade association CompTIA. Its inaugural Tech Town Index ranks 200 UK cities on a number of factors such as availability of IT jobs, opportunities for career progression, salaries and cost of living. Manchester emerges as the best place in the UK for IT pros, just ahead of Bristol and Leeds. They are followed (in order) by Birmingham, London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bath, Basingstoke and Reading. www.comptia.org