Working from home can at times be compared to Marmite - you either love it or hate it. You have people that regularly work from home and find themselv...
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Over the last week, school leaders have risen to the challenges of the current crisis.It is a reminder of the responsiveness and resilience of our education system, and for those that are living on another planet (or wish they were at the moment!), the government is closing schools as of today to the vast majority of students. Children of key (critical) workers are still able to attend to ensure medical and transport staff can remain at work, but what does this mean for the other students?
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With the current global situation, the past week has shown the importance of being able to create the Digital Workspace to provide flexible working solutions for your workforce.
I decided to write a blog around how Microsoft's Teams, a Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solution, has enabled my productivity to not slip despite the whole of my team now having to work from home thanks to Coronavirus.
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Over the last week, school leaders have risen to the challenges of the current crisis.It is a reminder of the responsiveness and resilience of our education system, and for those that are living on another planet (or wish they were at the moment!), the government is closing schools as of today to the vast majority of students. Children of key (critical) workers are still able to attend to ensure medical and transport staff can remain at work, but what does this mean for the other students?
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The government recently sent letters to more than 65,000 retired doctors and nurses in England and Wales asking them to return to work to help the NHS cope with the coronavirus outbreak. Since then, 7,563 clinical staff have applied to come back to work, including 5,633 nurses and midwives, and 1,930 doctors to help support the hero frontline NHS workers caring for Covid-19 patients.
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Now more than ever, digital security is a team effort, with staff at all levels of an organisation having an active part to play in keeping critical b...
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In recent weeks, companies across the UK have found themselves transitioning to a remote workforce with little to no choice, despite the approach prev...
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Organisations around the world are moving closer and closer to establishing a new standard of best practice for remote working, with new tools and pro...
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Over the course of the past year, the contact centre has been changed forever, with social distancing requirements meaning that familiar methods of face-to-face contact are now unavailable. In light of these shifts, social media, video and email contact are now regularly utilised as the primary channels for customer queries – a trend that we have seen on the rise for some years now. Between March and November 2020, we saw a significant update in the use of online channels, with 54% of organisations reporting an increase in email contact, 52% reporting an increase in social media, and 65% reporting an increase in the use of web chat.
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Four months into 2020, and there's no doubt that home working is here to stay. Even before our current pandemic, we saw the number of people working from home more than double between 2008 and 2018[1]. Nonetheless, in the COVID-19 era, everyone has been thrust into what has often been called the "modern workplace". In spite of our early successes, this is still very much a work in progress, as both organisations and employees establish whole new approaches to the way we work, and new tools and processes arising in response to the challenges we face. But thinking exclusively in terms of the workplace is arguably ignoring the bigger picture. We're not just seeing a shift in how we work, but a large-scale transformation of how we connect and interact with each other.
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Amidst all the stress of lockdown, it's been heartening to see some of the ways in which people have pulled together to support each other, and the work charities all over the UK have been doing to ensure the vulnerable are protected and the NHS receives the support it needs. However, as with many other sectors, COVID-19 has pushed many charities' IT infrastructures to their limit, as they are not only forced to adapt to the Government's remote working requirements, but also rethink their approach to fundraising.
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The past few months have certainly been challenging for businesses all over the UK - from start-ups to established industry leaders. Organisations have found themselves adapting to the demands of a remote workforce virtually overnight, deploying communications solutions to enable their teams to engage with both each other and their customers. While it's true that this technology has been available for a while now, it has never been deployed at this scale before. This has presented a range of challenges when it comes to infrastructure, but these are only part of the picture.
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Cloud adoption has been rising year by year for some time now, with Gartner predicting this trend to accelerate beyond 2020. It has long moved on from its earliest days, where it was largely regarded as an intriguing concept but unsuitable for enterprise-level applications. Now, with a wide range of options available - including Public, Private and Hybrid solutions - it has become a highly attractive prospect for organisations at all levels, especially against the backdrop of COVID-19 and the resulting advancement of remote working. While these trends are very much the latest stage in a long process of transformation, the pandemic has undoubtedly been the catalyst behind much recent Cloud adoption, as organisations accelerate their journeys towards a distributed workforce.
So, where does that leave us in terms of the biggest question: "Is Cloud right for my organisation?"
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Throughout the past few months, we have seen organisations' internal teams forced to adapt their processes, infrastructure and strategies in ways that would previously have been inconceivable. Key to the success of this process has been the support of external service providers, who have complemented companies' internal expertise and freed IT teams to focus their attention where it is most needed. As it becomes clear that the distributed workforce is here to stay, such partnerships are going to be more important than ever moving forward.
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Our lives are more interconnected than ever, with everything from televisions to fridges, kettles, cars and even doors and windows now able to be linked together over the internet. Having long since moved on from being just an intriguing concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) is very much here to stay, with devices like Bluetooth headphones and the Amazon Alexa now omnipresent in many people's lives. But while these 'smart' devices are often convenient and fun, they do present a number of concerns regarding security.
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We see over and over again how COVID-19 is transforming the way we work and connect with each other. Employees across virtually every industry are now working effectively from home, even if such an arrangement would have been unthinkable at the start of this year. It's been extremely heartening to see the range of innovations that have been embraced in response to the crisis, but it's important not to forget the foundations of your IT infrastructure as you explore these solutions. For example, consider how you are backing up and storing the lifeblood of your organisation: your data.
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With research from the IDC estimating that 80% of the data created by 2025 will be unstructured [1], businesses need to ensure they have an affordable storage solution for such high volumes of data. A simple, cost-effective solution that businesses can utilise to this effect is Cloud Object Storage, which stores petabytes of data in the Cloud as 'objects'.
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Virtually every sector has been impacted by COVID-19, but the higher and further education sector has been hit especially hard, with staff, students and administrative staff feeling its effects. Institutes of learning are still exploring the ways technology can open up new channels of learning and engagement for students. This will not only futureproof their establishments, but do so in a cost-effective way that provides them with the agility to swiftly adapt to any future economic changes, including the likes of a COVID-scale crisis.
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The past decade has been a challenging one for the Retail sector, to say the least. Much has already been written about the impact of online shopping and streaming services on the high street, and the rise of COVID-19 and recent supply chain disruptions have only compounded the challenges facing even the most established brick-and-mortar retailers.
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The public sector's relationship with technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate, as familiar legacy systems are increasingly phased out in favour of leading-edge digital infrastructure that offers levels of scalability, sustainability, and operational resilience that would previously have been dismissed as impossible.
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