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Since public cloud services first emerged, businesses have seen their potential to reduce cost and increase flexibility. But as they looked to capitalise on cloud, the desire to quickly unlock benefits often leads to hurried decisions and a lack of thought as to whether cloud was genuinely the best choice. As a result, those organisations that rushed to the cloud are now finding that the benefits sought are not being delivered as expected. This has led to a growing trend of cloud repatriation across organisations of all sizes.

There are few businesses that aren’t touched by a Microsoft product in some way. Last year alone, more than 210,000 UK companies were confirmed as Microsoft 365 users.

2022 has been another year of transformation for businesses of all sizes. There were plenty of innovative technologies that emerged throughout the year that changed the way businesses worked, delivered new efficiencies, and protected valuable assets from emerging cyber threats. But as we prepare for the new year, 2023 looks set to be another 12 months of change. It is important to start thinking about your strategy now to get ahead of the game and prepare for the IT challenges that will shape your business in the new year.

For many, the festive period presents a rare chance to switch-off from work and spend quality time celebrating with friends and family. Many businesses will close their doors completely for several days. But while this brings some day-to-day activities to a halt, those tasked with protecting your organisation from cybersecurity threats – whether that’s the business owner, IT lead, or security specialist – will continue to carry the responsibility for securing your users and data.

Cybersecurity has always been a key focus for many organisations – and it’s perhaps never been as critical to get your defence right. As cyberattacks continue to grow in both frequency and complexity, businesses must understand the current cybersecurity landscape, and how they can capitalise on emerging innovations as part of strategies to keep them ahead of bad actors. One such innovation is artificial intelligence (AI), where insights and intelligence from previous breaches and the latest attack vectors are used to get ahead of threats, reduce the burden on IT teams, and help mitigate the damage done by a security breach.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at the increasing prominence of AI-driven technology in cyber security – the factors that have led to its expanded role, how it can be applied, and why it’s proving a valuable tool as businesses arm themselves against cybercrime.

Evolving employee expectations have turned a new spotlight on workplace flexibility. Deploying effective hybrid work capability is now a business-critical requirement, rather than an attractive optional extra.

This new demand has seen many businesses explore virtual desktop infrastructure, but while these solutions can suitably support a virtualised PC environment, the level of expertise needed to deploy and manage this technology, coupled with the overall costs, is an obvious blocker for small and medium sized business.

It’s for this reason that Microsoft, having already capitalised on this shift with Azure Virtual Desktop, released an alternative solution built for SMEs – Windows 365 Cloud PC.

An attractive fit for an important business need, Windows 365 has already proved to be a popular solution. In fact, Microsoft initially had to suspend the release of trial accounts as demand was so high. Now, over a year on from its release, Microsoft has announced a group of new features that further enhances its simplified Cloud PC offering.

Microsoft Teams is already regarded as a business-critical tool for many. Over 270 million users worldwide currently use the platform, making it the world’s leading business collaboration tool. That level of adoption is no surprise, given Teams’ potential to drastically boost productivity and communication across the workforce, whether users are office-based, working from home, or making the most of a hybrid working model.

At their recent Inspire 2022 event, Microsoft unveiled a suite of new Teams features that will start entering public availability within the coming month – here’s some of the new additions we’re most excited for, and our thoughts on how they can boost productivity across your organisation.

Back in 2019 HPE CEO Antonio Neri made a bold and public commitment at the company’s Discover event. By 2022, every element of the HPE portfolio would be available as-a-Service.

3 years on, as HPE hosted its first large-scale, in-person Discover event for over 2 years, it was very evident that this transformation is now complete.

Cybersecurity is never far from the top of the agenda for IT teams, and social engineering presents a growing and evolving risk. 98% of all cyberattacks now use some form of social engineering, with phishing attacks regularly deployed in an effort to manipulate unsuspecting users.

It’s a couple of years since we covered the emergence of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and it’s easy to see why they’ve since emerged as a popular alternative to traditional three-tier infrastructure models. HCI offers businesses a flexible, scalable way to collapse all three tiers of their existing infrastructure – compute, storage and network – into a single converged appliance, unlocking a number of commercial and operational benefits in the process.