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A Midlands based IT firm has provided a technical solution enabling staff at a local NHS Mental Health Trust to use an application on their iPads saving both time and money.

Micro-Business Maintenance was approached by South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to provide a specific technical solution. As part of its commitment to introduce new technologies to improve working practices and reduce costs, the Trust has recently provided Executive and Non-Executive Directors with iPads. One significant cost saving from the introduction of these iPads has been the reduction in both time and printing costs, as senior staff are now able to make use of digital copies of papers, automatically synchronised with content on the users iPad, whilst in meetings.

The Trust identified an application called GoodReader® for use on iPads which enables users to read and annotate PDFs together with other document formats. In order to distribute copies of necessary documents, the Trust needed a mechanism to allow hosted content in a folder on an external server to be synchronised with specific folders on user’s iPads. Because of the stringent NHS data security requirements the server had to be both encrypted to a high level and located within England, but still enable the upload of data by administrative staff from within the secure NHS network used by the Trust whilst evidencing and providing assurance of high levels of security.

Wombourne based Micro Business Maintenance has been providing IT solutions and support to businesses for over 20 years. Jason Timmins, technical director, explained: “We provided a test environment at no initial cost to establish if the Trust’s requirements could be met and ultimately we provided a solution that worked. After successful testing, the iPads are now being configured by the Trust to enable this secure data synchronisation.”

Pete Kendal, Head of IM&T Development at the Trust explained: “Micro-Business Maintenance provided a good, inexpensive solution and were responsive to our needs. We were particularly impressed with the speed and honesty of their advice and they further helped with another requirement to identify a third party, off-the-shelf product to support the upload of data. We’d certainly approach them again for any bespoke technical support we required relating to this project.”

-ENDS-

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Contacts:
Micro Business Maintenance Limited
Jason Timmins, Technical Director
mbmltd.co.uk
01902 324494

South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Pete Kendal, Head of IM&T Development
01785 258969

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“Micro-Business Maintenance Ltd have been working to provide Strand Europe with mail systems, Internet access and server support since 1997.  The number of issues I have had on their E-mail system makes Microsoft Exchange look like a poor second. They are an excellent team providing clear and relevant communications, tenacity in problem resolution and a level of technical advice both in breadth and depth which I have not seen equalled in organisations 10 times their size.  I am sorry they are not nearer geographically to us.  I heartily recommend them as consultants and providers of relevant solutions to meet business needs.”

Peter Wells – ITC and Information Manager – Strand Europe Limited

Jason – A big, big thank you for pulling out the stops and helping to transfer a website to a new server at incredibly short notice. The transfer process has been extremely smooth and your technical guidance very useful. You’ve helped me keep a valued client happy. Thanks again!

Sharon Kendal, Blue Orange Marketing

From experience it takes 3 – 5 days to buy, setup and restore a customer’s fileserver, network and data after it has been stolen, burnt or had water damage. We know how frustrated customer’s get if their email is down for one hour! We want to stop this happening so please ask yourself this:  Could your business cope without your network, fileserver and data for a week?

Would your business suffer? How much business would you lose? Would your business survive? What would your customers think if you couldn’t process their orders?  Many businesses never recover from a disaster of this sort.

Think about the amount of time it would take you to restore your systems if your key infrastructure failed or became unavailable. Most customers agree that being ‘down’ for 3-5 days is not good enough.

We can get you back up and running in a few hours!

New techniques allow us to take an image of your server and continuously stream updates off-site to our local data centre. At the same time, we are continuously restoring your server as a virtual machine in the data centre. This means that if you suffer a serious failure, we can take your latest server image, marry it up with a loan server and bring it to your site within hours… not days!

This kind of continuous off-site server imaging has only recently been cost effective for small businesses. We are offering you this service from a local data centre so that was can react quickly and get you up and running in a few hours.

We believe our new server disaster recovery offering is a ‘no brainer’ for SMEs who understand the importance of IT to their business.

Remember, your server could crash tonight so give us a call on 01902 324494 if you want to talk about disaster recovery in your company. Or visit our IT continuity and disaster recovery page on our web site.

PS. Why not take a look at our new dedicated IT continuity site, www.ITContinuity.org.uk.

IT COMPANY SETS ITS SIGHTS ON CARBON REDUCTION

A West Midlands IT company is helping their customers with carbon reduction by transferring all their hosting to a carbon neutral data centre. This will help customers meet their carbon reduction targets.

Nigel Mills, managing director of MBM based in Wombourne, explained: “Many companies struggle to meet carbon reduction targets that form part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitment. We’re getting asked more and more about the carbon footprint of IT systems, so when we were looking for a new provider we included this as one of our criteria.”

MBM’s new data centre in Manchester is completely carbon neutral. In 2008 the supplier planted 150 acres of forestry on its farm in Scotland. These trees now carbon neutralise all CO2 emissions emitted from the data centre. In addition, the facilities are energy efficient achieving a power usage efficiency (PUE) rate as low as 1.32 against an average of 2.2.

Jason Timmins, technical director at MBM, said: “We host many customers’ servers in our internet data centre and, even with advances in power management, these machines consume a lot of electricity. A medium-sized web server that’s busy running your e-commerce web site could easily consume 500W of power all day, every day. Clearly, reducing the environmental impact of that is important. Our customers understand that servers consume plenty of electricity and, under pressure from demanding carbon reduction targets, they asked us to examine the power that is consumed on their behalf.”

He added: “We believe we have sourced an affordable hosting solution for businesses that neutralises its carbon footprint and provides all the technology, security and industry leading service level agreements that is fit for today’s business environment.”

-ENDS-

Contact:
Nigel Mills or Jason Timmins
https://www.mbmltd.co.uk
01902 324494

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a way of outsourcing all or part of your IT system to suppliers on the Internet. Cloud services are usually paid for on a monthly OPEX basis rather than large one-off CAPEX costs to implement similar in-house solutions.

For instance, Email is a classic example of a cloud service. You can, if you choose, buy an expensive server, install Microsoft Exchange and run your Email in-house. However, you could let Microsoft or Google run your Email mailboxes for you in their data centres and simply pay each month for each user that you have. You are thereby removing the capital expenditure of a new mail server but replacing it with an operational expenditure fee each month that is closely matched to what you actually use, rather like a pay-as-you-go mobile phone.

Increasingly, you can place more than just your Email services into the cloud. You can, for instance, buy cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems or online accounts systems or online versions of your favourite Office software. Everything is stored in the cloud so there’s no on-site hardware, software, maintenance or support.

It can be a very cost effective approach for certain organisations…

·         Very Small – If there are only a few of you in your business then cloud services can work very well. It means that you don’t have to buy a server to hold all your data centrally.

·         Medium-sized and larger – The costs of deploying important services such as Email, CRM, collaboration and line-of-business applications in larger organisations can be very expensive. It is seen as a better option to let a cloud services supplier deal with all the technicalities of purchasing, implementing, managing and supporting these solutions and for the company to simply purchase what it needs on a monthly basis. No big CAPEX spend, no extra in-house IT support and in-house technicians and a simple monthly fee.

·         Highly Distributed/Mobile Businesses – If your staff work at different locations or travel extensively and your organisation has no major head office, cloud services work very well because they can be accessed from anywhere using the Internet.

·         Start-up Businesses – Often new businesses choose not to spend their precious start-up capital on expensive in-house IT infrastructure and choose instead to buy cloud services, paying for them on a monthly basis and increasing them as their businesses grow.

Each organisation needs to look carefully at both the cloud and in-house (also called ‘on-premise’) options to understand which is best for them. Some businesses, like banks and financial organisations, are bound by regulation to keep their customers’ data in their own data centres and so will never use public cloud services. Some businesses might just prefer to spend a large amount of money initially and not have to keep paying during the life of the service. These kinds of decisions are as much down to the financial director as they are to the IT director.

What About Small Businesses?

Whether cloud services are right for small businesses is a tricky question. A traditional, single-site small business can buy a Hewlett Packard server running Microsoft Small Business

Server for relatively little money. This will give them everything they need to run their business for five years or more. However, a similar set of cloud services will cost them the same amount as the in-house server in two years. It doesn’t quite add-up. Unless you are one of the type of organisations mentioned above (very small, highly distributed or a start-up) you might as well buy a new server and look at the cloud services only when that server needs to be replaced.

Naturally, we have been providing small business servers for 20 years and are well place to help with your server requirements.

Different Types of Cloud Services

For companies looking for cloud services, here are the broad offerings that we supply…

·         Public Cloud – We are a Microsoft Cloud Essentials partner and as such are certified to supply Microsoft’s wide range of cloud solutions.

·         Private Cloud – We run our own cloud in our Manchester data centre so can offer highly customised Windows cloud services for those organisations who don’t want to use a public cloud.

·         Software-as-a-Service – We can offer Microsoft range of SaaS packages including Office 365, Exchange Online, Dynamics CRM and Azure infrastructure services.

Why Choose MBM for your Cloud Services?

Most of our customers see the benefits of cloud services but are wary of sending their critical data to a faceless public cloud provider. They much prefer to work with people they know and trust so, more often than not, we build a small private cloud solution in our data centre and they continue to deal with us. Our prices are similar to the well-known public cloud providers and the customer receives the same friendly, knowledgeable service they are used to.

How to Sign-up?

If you like what you see and want to know more, just call us. We don’t have any sales people so you’ll speak to a technician, you can explain the problem and we’ll give you a price. Our prices are cost effective, realistic and appropriate for the task in-hand.

So, why not give us a call on 01902 324494 or Email us on sales@mbmltd.co.uk or visit out cloud computing homepage and let us solve your cloud computing dilemmas for you?

Email Spam Overview

Email spam is a real problem for most businesses. You probably know all too well why spam is such a problem but here are common issues

1.       Lost ProductivityIf your staff have to deal with an Inbox full of junk Email each morning (and as a continuous stream throughout the day), that’s wasted time.

2.       Spam Content – Some of the content in spam Emails is inappropriate for the workplace. The last thing you need are staff members complaining to you (or their union representative) about inappropriate pictures appearing in their Inbox all the time.

3.       IT Infrastructure Costs – Each spam Email you receive consumes a piece of your IT infrastructure; a piece of disk space, processing time on your Email server and, of-course, capacity on your Internet connection.

Any of these issues on their own should be enough for you to install a good anti spam service but combined it’s no contest; you must tackle the spam problem… issue 1 costs you money, issue 2 opens you to legal problems and issue 3 slows down your IT systems! Call us to talk through how we can resolve these problems with our Filtered Email services or read on to hear more about these issues. Call on 01902 324494 or Email sales@mbmltd.co.uk

A Bit More Detail

“Why do I get spam?” We get asked this all the time. You receive unsolicited commercial Emails (to give spam its full title) because you have a working Email address and senders think you might buy things from them. They got hold of your address in any number of ways; here are a few possibilities…

1.       They guessed your address – Domain names are listed on the Internet so getting hold of the bit of your address after the ‘@’ is easy, guessing the bit before the ‘@’ is more difficult. The spammers often use a brute force approach; believe it or not, they send Emails to every name in the dictionary ‘@’ your domain so that if your addresses are like this, ‘john@mycompany.co.uk’ they’ll get your address straight away. You can’t easily change your Email addresses so there’s relatively little you can do about this. For new addresses, you might consider including the surname, for instance ‘john.stroszajn@mycompany.co.uk’ would be almost impossible to guess.

2.       Your address is on your web site – Spammers use programs that ‘crawl’ the web looking for Email addresses. If yours is on your web site then they will find it eventually. Again, there’s relatively little you can do about this because you want people who look at your site to be able to Email you.

3.       Someone gave the spammer your address – You give out your Email address all the time, this can be when you register on a web site, sign-up for a newsletter or even when you hand out your business card. It’s what people do with your address that’s important to you. Some web site owners sell your address on to spammers. It’s understandable, if you run (say) a popular scuba diving web site with 50,000 members, perhaps you run it for free or maybe make a little bit of money from on-site advertising and then a spammer offers you a load of money for your Email address list, you might be tempted to sell him the list. Other people aren’t as careful with your address as you are. Your Email address is a valuable commodity so be careful where you use it, especially your business Email address.

“How do I stop spam?” By subscribing to our service!  Once your address is on a spammer’s list you will never get off that list. You can’t Email them asking them politely to be removed, these people are criminals and don’t care about you at all. The best you can do is to choose a good spam blocking service (like ours) that will filter-out the vast majority of this junk Email before it gets anywhere near you, your staff or your IT systems.

“Can you block ALL spam?” Simple answer… no… no-one can. It’s not possible to block all spam because it’s a very subjective process; one man’s spam is another man’s informative newsletter. Our service uses every possible method to identify spam and block it but no mechanism is perfect. We provide industry-leading levels of protection.

“Don’t spams have viruses too?” Sometimes spam Emails include viruses too but we filter-out infected Emails as well.

How our spam blocker works

Firstly, we have built our Filtered Email service ourselves and we run it ourselves. It’s not a franchise; we’re not reselling someone else’s service… we run this service for our customers. It means that we control everything and can work closely with you. Spam filtering is a moving feast, techniques and practices are constantly evolving and we are able to adapt quickly to this changing landscape.

Secondly, we block spam out on the Internet not on-site at your business. This means that we remove the spam from your Email flow prior to it reaching your network giving a number of benefits…

1.       There’s no complicated software on your computers.

2.       No spam Emails clog-up your Email server or Internet connection.

3.       Our filters are on different continents on different networks and are extremely reliable. Your real Emails will always get through.

This last item is critical, there’s no point having a spam filter if it’s unreliable or it delays your important Emails. Our services generally, and this service in particular, are built around reliability. Yes spam is a problem but not getting your Email at all is a REAL PROBLEM.

Thirdly, we provide proper, real-world support. We are an IT services company; we have been looking after the IT support needs of businesses like yours for over 20 years. We understand what companies want from IT support so if you have a problem you call us and we’ll sort it out; no ticketing system, no overseas calls centre, no second or third line support, just skilled friendly people on the end of the phone who can fix your problem right away.

How to sign up

If you like what you see and want to know more, just call us. We don’t have any sales people so you’ll speak to a technician, you can explain the problem and we’ll give you a price. Our prices are cost effective, realistic and appropriate for the task in-hand. The pricing scheme is based on the number of Email users that you have; simply, that’s the number of individuals who will benefit from the service, not the number of domain names or the number of Email addresses… the number of people.

So, why not give us a call on 01902 324494 and let us solve this spam problem for you?