img not found!

Tag cloud

Uncategorized

Closing our Data Centre

Data Centre – The End of an Era

We recently decommissioned our data centre. For the last 15 years we have been hosting customers’ workloads on our own equipment. This started in Docklands, London and then we moved to various locations in Manchester. The system hosted line-of-business applications, dedicated virtual machines, Windows and Linux website hosting servers, VoIP servers, VPN servers, mail filters and a variety of other little services. We had five 1Gbit/s Internet feeds from three different backbone providers with our own BGP routers and IP allocation.

This solution served us well for many, many years but it was time for a refresh, so we had to take a long hard look at what we were doing. Replacing a six-node virtualisation cluster with 10Gbit/s storage is a costly exercise. Having our own equipment and facility means that monthly costs are fixed but the initial outlay is high. The facility also gets old over time and eventually needs to be replaced again.

So, how about using a public cloud?…
  • Let someone else worry about disk crashes, connectivity issues, firewalling, upgrades, etc
  • Just pay each month for what we consume
  • No expensive capital costs
  • Advanced features like AI, IoT, replication and multiple regions
But what about doing it ourselves?…
  • Costs of our own facility are fixed, so profits are good if we have many customers
  • Being the ‘master of our own ship’ means we can fix problems ourselves and not be reliant on an external provider
  • Offer interesting, unique services
  • Differentiate ourselves from other IT providers

In the end, factoring-in the capital expense, the power and flexibility of the cloud and not wanting to worry anymore about equipment failures, we opted to migrate to the cloud.

As a certified Microsoft Partner, we had already worked with their general-purpose public cloud, Microsoft Azure, so that was the natural choice.

Over a period of months, we migrated customers’ VMs and LoB applications to Azure in London. They all benefited immediately from modern infrastructure, especially noticeable was the performance increase afforded by using SSD-based virtual machines. Their VMs are now up-to-date Windows Server 2019 installations behind very secure firewalls and access policies.

Our development team also migrated a series of server-based ASP.NET web applications to Azure’s Platform-as-a-Service solution. This means that those services just run inside the Azure cloud, no need to configure servers, upgrade them, protect them, we just let Microsoft do all of that. It is the same for the SQL Server databases, you choose how fast you need the database to go and pay for that service; no expensive ‘per-core’ licensing or performance limitations.

Everything is then backed-up or mirrored to Microsoft’s other UK data centre in Cardiff… this is something that would simply be impossible for us to afford with our own equipment.

The solution has been running for a few months and it is great. Customers are happy with the performance of the applications and VMs. The PaaS platform means that reliability of websites and web apps is 100%; this too would be impossible for our own data centre as hosting machines must be restarted each month for their security updates.

All-in-all, the migration from our DC to Azure has been great. Reliability is up, performance is up, customer satisfaction is up, whilst costs and sleepless nights are down! We are sad that we no-longer have our own servers and solution, but Azure is big, better and more flexible, so we are OK.

The Future

Azure allows us to do things that were previously out-of-reach, such as…

  • AI Solutions – Machine learning in your own DC is basically impossible
  • Multi-site Replication – Replicating VMs between DCs is possible but you need an entire second data centre with a second set of costs
  • Global Reach – Our PaaS services can be positioned near to customers in any part of the world, whereas our data centre was just in Manchester

“Bye bye DC1. We’ll miss you, but your time had passed.”

PS. Special mention must go to HP for making such brilliant hardware. Every server worked beautifully for ten years or more. Splendid work guys!

XenServer-based six node virtualisation cluster using (mostly) HP ProLiant hardware.

Jason Timmins, our Technical Director, stand in the rack that used to house our hosting facility. At his feet are five 1,000Mbit/s Internet connections.

Cloud , Office , Tip

Put your IT in the cloud – not your head!

There are great advantages to cloud computing services and no wonder it is becoming an easy choice for businesses: the minimal upfront costs, pay-as-you-go cost structure, flexible access to software and data, and the fact that the expensive and awkward parts of the IT setup are someone else’s burden!
Cloud services can make applications that were once the preserve of only the largest organisations, like CRM, sales management, contact centre software, call recording – available to any company, from a two-person business to a £20 million turnover organisation.
officeOne of the biggest benefits of Microsoft Office 365 is that it gives you virtually anywhere access to the Microsoft Office tools you know and rely on – your complete office in the cloud.
Some businesses are concerned about exactly how to choose the right cloud applications, how to get the best use from them, and if their data will be secure when it’s up there. To help dispel these doubts, here are the key questions you should ask a cloud service provider before committing.
logo_RGB_squareSo do you know what the cloud is? Simply put, cloud computing is computing on the internet. Rather than installing programs on a computer, for example, people can run applications directly from a website. This principle also applies to storage of data; rather than keeping folders full of important work on your own PC, it can be stored remotely online this gives you data you can access from any computer regardless of where you are
And the reason why you should be using it ?Cloud computing and storage has a huge number of benefits for small businesses – as well as being more efficient, it also gives you a little protection if the worst happens and you lose access to the files on your computer – no real need for an IT disaster recovery plan !
Cloud computing allows you to store as much or as little data as you need to, usually charging on a pay-as-you-go basis. SOSThis means that you don’t need to upgrade your own hardware, and allows you to keep saving and working without worrying about limitations. The vast number of servers involved in a cloud system also means that bandwidth requirements can be increased on demand, so you don’t have to wait around to gain more space.
Would you like to discuss Cloud Computing for your Business? Give MBM a call.

Office , Tip

Build your List – A direct side-effect of house Wifi

We’ve all been in coffee shops, pubs, restaurants, fitness clubs and other public places and tried to log on to a guest wi-fi. Do you take notice of what information you have been asked for ? Date of Birth ? Email address ? Physical address ? – all these items enable the receiving establishment to build a picture of you. The next time you login you may be asked for another piece of information – for instance anniversary or maybe occupation. The time after a different piece of information.

wifi Coffee CupAll this information can be used to build a picture of your visitors and better than that the information can enable some targeted marketing to be formulated – for instance special occasion discounts or offers for certain age groups.

By giving something (information) in exchange for something free (Wi-fi) visitors will tell you so much more than you could gain for traditional methods such as surveys or paper based application forms.

At MBM we are experts in information gathering and can manage this operation for you. Interested in finding out more ? Contact us and we will be happy to put you in contact with an Engineer – not a salesman!slidethree

Cloud , Tip

Are you letting Business Walk out of your Door?

How often now do you check if a venue has in-house wi-fi ? From fast food outlets, Pubs, takeaways, shops and even church halls have their own in house platforms for you to login to.

Offering Wi-fi to customers of your business is highly beneficial more so in a retail or leisure/entertainment environment. Businesses can also offer guest wireless access from a private office which is ideal for contractors, visitors or associates working on-site.

wifi Coffee CupIt’s important that your business WiFi is kept separate from guest and visitor WiFi and encrypted to ensure they don’t access your wireless traffic.

Offering Free WiFi will encourage users to take your offering in exchange for their contact details.

MBM can offer you a package solution and are happy to help you implement a solution which will be a perfect fit all around.

Talk to MBM today and join thousands of businesses benefiting from this provision.

Cloud , Tip

Don’t get caught out like celebrities

You’ll no doubt have seen the recent press coverage about personal photos of celebrities being accessed from their cloud storage. Whilst we hope that there aren’t any nude photos of you or your staff in the Cloud, how can you be sure that your cloud data is secure?

TabletCloud services, like so many other online services, are protected by nothing more than an email address and password. Mobile phones are inextricably linked to the Cloud services run by their manufacturers: Apple devices copy data across to iCloud, Windows devices copy to Microsoft OneDrive and so on. This data includes photos, videos, texts, address books, app data and settings. Clearly, this is very useful, but if someone guesses your password, they can have access to all of this from anywhere!

It is thought that a hacker gained access to one celebrity’s Cloud service and downloaded their address book. This then gave them the email addresses of several more high profile celebrities. Once you know a person’s email address, all you need to do is then guess their password.

How can you improve your security?

You can change the settings on your Smartphone so it does not back up to the Cloud. But as it’s a really useful feature, especially if you lose or break your phone, would you really want to disable that functionality?

You can enable a ‘two-factor authentication’ on your cloud services. This means that you need two pieces of information before you can sign in. The first is your regular password and the second is often a code that gets texted to you when you attempt to sign-in. Without both the password and the code from the text message, you can’t again access. Once authenticated, this will keep you connected for a day or so. Apple, Google and Microsoft support two-factor authentication for their Cloud services.

Want to find out more?

Call us on 01902 32 44 94 for a chat about Cloud or visit https://www.mbmltd.co.uk/Cloud-Services-Overview.asp

Cloud , Office , Online Backup

Why you should choose Office 365

If you’re looking to upgrade, you have to decide whether the traditional desktop version of Office is the way to go, or if Office 365 is a better fit for your needs.

officeThere are a few compelling arguments in favour of Office 365. Let’s take a look at three reasons Office 365 might be the right choice:

1. Cost

Office 365 plans start on per month basis. Small businesses can get access to Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync in addition to the core Office productivity applications for only a little more per month. Larger businesses that want to take advantage of Active Directory integration can do so again for a small additional cost per user per month.

Breaking those down, it takes more than three years to reach the levels of a traditional off the shelf desktop version.

2. Updates and Maintenance

What else do you get with your Office 365 subscription? An IT department. Sure, you can set up your own Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Lync infrastructure. You can manage and maintain the desktop Microsoft Office software, and install the patches and updates every month yourself. How much will that cost?

Consider that implementing the same capabilities in-house requires servers, and network infrastructure, and IT personnel to install, manage, update, and maintain it all. Plus, you still have to buy and maintain the Office software itself.

With Office 365, Microsoft takes care of all the dirty work so you don’t have to. Updates, patches, and upgrades just happen in the background without you needing to worry about it. When the server crashes, its Microsoft’s problem. When a hard drive needs to be replaced, Microsoft will handle it. You get the benefits of using Office without any of the headaches of updating and maintaining it all.

NIgel_Mills_MBM3. Accessibility

Office 365 lives in the cloud. That means you have access to Word, Excel, Outlook, and other Microsoft Office tools from anywhere you can get a Web connection, and from virtually any device–Windows or Mac desktops and laptops, Android devices, iPhones, iPads, and other smartphones and tablets. Office Web Apps provide basic features and functions for free.

This isn’t quite the selling point it once was for a couple reasons. First, even with the desktop Office 2013 suite Microsoft is pushing users to save files to the cloud-based SkyDrive, or to a SharePoint server by default. So, there’s no reason the data can’t be accessible regardless of whether you choose Office 2013 or Office 365.

The second reason it may not be all that compelling is that Office Web Apps are already available for free from the SkyDrive site. So, even without Office 365 users can create, view, and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files from the Web.

For businesses, though, SharePoint, Active Directory, and other elements of Office 365 that go beyond simply creating and editing Office documents still make Office 365 a better value.

Your mileage will vary of course. There are a number of factors involved in calculating the cost of purchasing, installing, configuring, updating, and maintaining Microsoft Office and the accompanying back-end services versus the ongoing subscription costs associated with Office 365. Office 365 is a solid service providing tremendous bang for the buck, though, so it won’t be easy to beat the value it brings to the table.

Need help with Office 365? Choose MBM.

Data Backup , Tip

Why is Malware written?

Carrying on from last weeks Blog the answer to the “what is malware?” question cannot be complete without exploring the ‘why’ of its creation. By now, you should have a pretty clear idea of what type of damage can be done as a result of malware, but you might be wondering – why do programmers create malware in the first place?
Student Hackers and Cyber-crooks

MBM_42Emails_Blog_smallIn the early days of software, programmers wrote malware mostly to prank one another, or to show off their technical skills. These programmers, who were usually students had a great sense of humour but did not have much business sense. These students eventually graduated and got jobs. Their new motivation was now money, and how to make more of it using their skills. Some of these programmers learned that they can make thousands a day if they successfully exploit malware to their advantage.

These people went on to become cyber-crooks, defrauding individuals and organizations for financial gain. These criminals steal personal banking information to transfer money out of users’ bank accounts and into their own. They also launch distributed denial of service attacks against corporations and ask for money in exchange for an end to the attack.

Worms, zombies and distributed denial of service attacks are a good way to inflict mass damage on a global scale and are therefore very appealing to cyber-activists. These people want to get a message across and are ready to do so by utilizing any means necessary and this includes writing malware that causes damage, gets them noticed, and enables them to announce their messages and beliefs to a large audience.

Governments are also part of the game. A cyber-war between countries is raging. Some countries such as China, Syria, and America are rumoured to be state-sponsoring cyber-gangs whose only purpose is to research and develop new malware techniques capable of infiltrating government agencies and infrastructures. Malware has recently been spotted in the wild that was designed to infect SCADA systems with the scope of shutting down nuclear reactors. Some reports suggest that this worm, which might have been created by the Americans, was successful in shutting down several Iranian nuclear power plant coolers.

The malware problem is huge and is growing fast. By the end of 2010 the counter for unique malware programs stood at 14 million, with a staggering 60,000 pieces of new malicious code detected every day. Recently a worm called Koobface — which targeted people on social networks — netted its creators over 2 million dollars in just 12 months. Another worm, the Mariposa is said to have created the biggest network of zombie machines in the world. Experts could never determine its exact size, but estimated that over 12 million computers were infected. This worm dropped spyware capable of stealing sensitive information from victims, such as bank account numbers and credit card details. All this was created by a single hacker in Spain who fortunately made a mistake which exposed him and got him arrested.

The industry is fighting back. Numerous security solutions are available from many vendors that help stop malware infections. The threat however is a moving target. Hackers keep finding new ways to write bigger and better malware, the incentives are all there and the waging war is showing no signs of slowing down.

Worried that you might be exposed ? Speak to MBM

Cloud , Tip

Microsoft action interupts innocent users

Microsoft has obtained a court order to halt traffic to servers in order to halt the Cyber-criminal activity of some users. This has had the effect of interupting millions of innocent users. The giant has been accused of being’heavy-handed as in stopping the criminals it also interupted data to legitimate sites.

In a blogpost, Microsoft lawyer Richard Boscovich said it had taken the action against domain administration firm No-IP.com for its “roles in creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software”.

He said No-IP’s infrastructure had been used to spread the Bladabindi and Jenxcus family of malicious programs in 93% of the cases it had seen. Over the past 12 months, he said, Microsoft had detected variants of the two viruses more than 7.4 million times.

The thieves behind the malware could steal data from infected machines, record keystrokes and listen to any sounds taking place around a computer, he said.

officeMicrosoft had taken the legal step of making itself the controller of the 23 domains because No-IP had not done enough to police them, wrote Mr Boscovich. A federal court in Nevada granted Microsoft the right to take over the No-IP domains.

Once it had had control of the suspect domains, he said, Microsoft had applied filters so only “clean” data had got through and that helping the malware spread had been caught and discarded.

In response, No-IP said Microsoft’s action had been “draconian” and had wrongly “affected millions of innocent internet users”.

No-IP speculated that Microsoft had underestimated the amount of data traffic flowing towards the domains it was now administering, which had caused service disruptions for many legitimate customers.

“Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors,” wrote No-IP in a statement posted on its site.

Having problems – Call us at MBM and we will be happy to take a look

Cloud , Office , Tip

Are you aware what the withdrawal of XP really means ?

You are probably aware by now that very soon (just over a fortnight) Microsoft will withdraw support of their XP product. However what does that really mean for you and your business ? Well lets spell things out

officeIt means that there will be no security updates or patches brought out for windows XP not only that but there will also be no support provided either – yes this is a big deal. This will mean any machine or business that still runs on XP by the time that support is terminated will have their security greatly compromised, it will also most likely be a breach of security standards.

There will also be no third party application support for windows XP, meaning that it is more likely that third party applications will not run on windows XP.

There is a solution and we can help you get there but you really cant afford to leave it any longer – make no bones about it not acting could cost you your business. A cloud solution is just a phonecall away – call the goto guys for more info on Microsoft 365.

Cloud , Data Backup , Office

Why your business shouldnt wait any longer for 365 migration

Still companies are waiting before migrating to Office 365 – We can only deduce that they are crossing their fingers that their systems will cope following the withdrawal of support for Windows XP next month. At MBM we can offer you a managed cloud solution on Windows 365 and will support you through the migration process.

As well as being a replacement for XP there are several benefits for your business in upgrading.

office

Top Benefits of Microsoft Office 365 for Small Businesses

  • Saves time and money.
  • Anytime, Anywhere Access.
  • Professional Face for Your Business.
  • Easily Communicate and Collaborate Inside and Outside Your Organization.
  • Simple to Learn, Straightforward to Use.
  • Email, Collaboration, and Online Meeting Solutions.
  • Safety and Security.
  • 99.9-Percent Availability, Money-Back Guarantee
  • Flexibility for Your Business.

Need help ? Call for a no obligation chat – our friendly team are always happy to talk you through your future IT  plans

 

Our Office Hours

Our Location

contact

Do you have any questions?