The 4.2 Trillion Dollar Gravy Train

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s leading research organisations, has published some startling figures about business on the Internet. If the Internet were an economy, its business would be the fifth largest economy in the world, behind only the United States, China, India and Japan. It is no less startling in the UK, where Internet business is already the fifth largest economic sector, already ahead of healthcare, construction and education. But BCG makes clear that this is just the beginning. The UK web economy is growing at 10.9%; well ahead of the 8.1% average for other G20 economies. In 2010, more than 12.5% of all UK retail trade was conducted on the Internet. By 2016 this is expected to grow to 23%. (more…)

Considerations when moving your data centre

Moving your data centre from in-house to a colocation provider makes increasing economic sense. The economies of scale provided by a specialist environment, particularly with rising costs in energy and 24/7 support and security, can no longer be ignored. But despite the logic and clear advantages, the actual commitment can be daunting. Uprooting the IT infrastructure on which your business depends and transferring it to a different location is worrying, to say the least.

But it needn’t be. The solution is in detailed planning and strict project management, coupled with the experience to see it through. To help companies considering just such a move, but perhaps a bit worried about the unknown, we’ve compiled a checklist of what’s entailed.  (more…)

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…)