How could your connectivity be affected with the Olympics?

The coming year will see major  events in London and with the increased opportunities there may also come certain logistical challenges for the capital’s businesses.  In order to assist our customers to prepare for these events and avoid potential pitfalls, we at BIS have been communicating for some time with our vendors and local authorities to ensure that we can provide you with accurate information on which to base your decisions around operational readiness. (more…)

Microsoft Exchange 2010 – Problems & Solutions

Listed below are some of the problems customers have faced, and the solutions provided by Exchange 2010.

Our mailboxes keep growing organically, which has caused our time restore time for database and mailboxes to break SLA – and our storage growth is costing us a fortune.

With the adoption of Disaster Availability Groups (DAG), Microsoft Exchange 2010 can provide mailbox high availability with no need for a SAN. (more…)

To migrate or not to migrate?

Migration can mean many things to many people; but when it comes to Exchange it usually means: ‘out with the old and in with the new’. Seldom do we see two versions running side by side in any organisation, except during migration. Having said that there is always a concern in upgrading to a new version of any Microsoft product – namely, will it be better? And more importantly, will it be stable? (more…)

Cisco’s new virtual firewall for the multi-tenanted virtualised data centre

“If it takes only one minute to bring up a virtual machine then why should it take a day to get the firewall policies in?” This is the question posed by Rajneesh Chopra, a senior product manager at Cisco, when announcing the new ASA 1000V Cloud Firewall. (more…)

Public Cloud Vs Private Cloud

Attitudes towards cloud computing seem to be changing. Demand for public cloud services will continue to grow, but interest in using the public cloud infrastructure is lessening other than for software development. The driver for this is IT’s increasing desire for more advanced computing capabilities such as virtualisation. (more…)

Research shows that most SMBs have no disaster recovery plans

Just over a week ago, Freeform Dynamics published research suggesting that across Europe 58% of small companies and 20% of medium-sized companies do not have a formal disaster recovery plan. At the time Infosecurity Magazine approached us for our view on these statistics – and you can find the resulting story here. (more…)

Cisco’s UCS: a new architecture for a new data centre

You may wonder why Cisco is competing in the already heavily populated server market. The answer is, they aren’t. The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is not so much a server as a complete integrated data centre: a new architecture that redefines the way we have hitherto used our server systems.  (more…)