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In recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented businesses with a number of challenges. Throughout this period, we’ve found that those who have been able to action a comprehensive and well thought out continuity plan have fared best. Having the appropriate processes and technology in place has enabled them to act decisively and preserve business performance while minimising the impact of any upheaval.

On April 21st of this year, Microsoft made the big decision to turn its beloved brand Office 365 into Microsoft 365. This name change accompanies a recent shift in user behaviour, which has seen Microsoft’s collaboration services grow in popularity as digital and remote working increasingly becomes the norm. Where the original Office 365 suite was loved for email and the usual productivity apps, now services like Teams and tools for mobility and security are the reason businesses are looking to Microsoft to stay productive and connected.

The unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic has caught a lot of businesses off-guard. If managing your organisation’s IT estate was difficult before the outbreak, it’s certainly become a lot more complicated since. Undoubtably, the change in circumstances has had a big impact on your critical infrastructure, especially if most of your workforce is now working from home and need remote access to the apps and data hosted in your data centre.

For decades, virtualisation has been the go-to method for organisations to streamline and consolidate their workloads. By decoupling apps and services from their hardware, going virtual saves businesses physical capacity, hours of orchestration time, and considerable CAPEX costs. But as is the case with all technology over time, this winning approach is now being challenged by fresh thinking.

The current contender for virtualisation’s long-running title is containerisation.

Basic data centre infrastructure design has followed the same basic recipe almost forever. Compute, storage, network and more recently the hypervisor are treated as discrete components to be individually managed, albeit with the same ends in mind.

However, a wave of new applications and a need for greater levels of performance has driven a need for a different approach, one which delivers better response times, more flexibility and freedom to scale quickly to better meet changing business demands.

Skype for business has become a much relied on business communication tool. It allows you to easily call colleagues, arrange large conference calls and even broker wider discussions with colleagues or customers from across the globe.

That’s why it came as a surprise to many when Microsoft announced towards the end of last year that it was putting in place an End of Life plan for Skype for Business, setting a July 31st 2021 deadline for closure of the application.

Analyst IDC has forecasted that an astonishing 175 zettabytes of data will be generated by 2025. Compared with Deloitte’s prediction that the total amount of data generated in 2020 would hit 44 zettabytes, it’s clear that data growth is increasing at an astronomical rate, and doesn’t show any sign of slowing.

It’s therefore unsurprising that many businesses all over the world are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data they’re having to store and manage on a daily basis. Increasingly difficult to keep on top of, a lot of this data gets seen, stored, and then forgotten about, eventually becoming “dark”.

Most IT infrastructures have been built around the core principle of centralising data, largely so it can be better protected from the security of a data centre.  However, with powerful mobile devices increasingly operating at the edge of your network, greater business demands for speed and productivity, plus new digital initiatives, old school thinking is being called into question.

Pushing data backwards and forwards over your network naturally creates latency that hampers the performance of applications, especially those harnessing information in real-time, which is increasingly the case.  Consequently, many businesses are now choosing to re-examine the role and architecture of their networks to better service the operational reality they now face and the opportunities they wish to capture.

There’s less than one month to go until Microsoft ends support for Windows 7, one of the world’s most popular operating systems (OS).  Although the 14th January 2020 deadline has been in the public domain for some time, there are still countless organisations functioning with this decade-old operating system.  In fact, recent reports have even suggested that half of the NHS is still running on Windows 7, evidence of the scale of the issue facing many IT professionals across the globe.

With time running out, those still using Windows 7 are faced with a choice between upgrading to a supported alternative or continuing with an unsupported operating system after the deadline.  It’s vital, therefore, that those tasked with making this decision understand the possible implications, as well as the different options available to them.

For those starting a new business, your IT estate is both an essential business requirement and an added complication.  Whatever industry you’re working in, you’ll rely on your IT to not just support your business from day one, but help you create outward value, whether that’s how you enable your people to collaborate, how you streamline important businesses processes or how you protect your data.  At the beginning, it’s unlikely you will be able to commit the time and resources required to set this up yourself, or perhaps even have the know-how to do so.

Naturally, your time is better spent growing your emerging business, which is why assistance from an experienced IT partner is an appealing solution.  That said, choosing the wrong partner can be costly, leaving you facing the prospect of unexpected expenditure and unwanted delays and downtime.