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Importance Of Having An Onsite Engineer Visit Each Month

August 5th, 2011

By Carl White

Whilst The Internet Group’s award-winning remote support is second to none, there are times when you can’t beat a physical presence on site.

With the modern support tools the vast majority of support issues can be tackled more quickly and with less customer disruption via remote support. However there are times when an onsite engineer can prove invaluable.

  • Simple things like a ‘Tidy-up’ which can’t be performed remotely (server room, tidy cables, desk moves etc)
  • Being able to see the engineer can install confidence and make the users feel more secure in the knowledge i.e. there is someone to approach quickly if there is a problem. This is similar to the principle the police try to endorse ‘Bobby on the beat’.
  • By scheduling periodic site visits there is a chance to address those low-level, on-going annoyances that might not typically warrant a support call but which may be costing your business time and money.
  • With an engineer on site out dated or ill-suited equipment and software can be easily identified and rectified. It also promotes sales opportunities.
  • Physical Server inspection – are there any conditions which could impact the servers performance? Is the area unobstructed and safe? Can any improvements be made? Is physical security maintained?
  • Floor Walking, discussing the IT with users and finding out if there are any issues affecting all staff, obtaining feedback from users experience to draw out any areas where improvements can be made and feed back to relevant parties
  • A better understanding of the organisation’s culture to allow better integration and better customer service to the client go forward
  • Identification of any training needs
  • Being able to identify and to empathise with troublesome users and put a positive spin on the situation

Another way to use scheduled engineer time is to set up onsite drop-in workshop sessions. Where users can walk in to get their issues looked at. These can provide your staff with a wide range of benefits: 

  • Helping users with training issues and identifying how they could work more effectively using the technology at hand
  • A regular access point to address simple break/ fix issues
  • A good impression can be conveyed to the customer leading to a better customer service experience and working relationship with the client

While the expenditure and organisation can prohibit companies from constantly wanting to and actually sending out engineers onsite when it is not needed as you can see it can actual be a worthwhile exercise. It is something to definitely consider for any IT company who deems themselves able to operate in a remote world as this is not always the best way to behave and they can be missing out on the benefits an onsite presence would give.

If you would like to discuss opportunities to have an engineer at your site then speak with one of the consultants by simply calling us on 0845 458 0497 or email info@theinternetgroup.com for more information.

Cloud Based Anti-Spam & Anti-Virus Filtering – Why Should I Consider It?

June 30th, 2011

By Alexander Foti

Over the past 5 years, the amount of spam being delivered to email servers around the world has increased dramatically; at this current time over 90% of all emails delivered are spam emails. This means that whilst you may be able to effectively filter the email in house, it will require increased resources, both physical and time, to manage and maintain.

Consider your enterprise receives 20,000 emails per day. That’s 18,000 emails a day that must be analysed and inspected by your anti-spam software, then another system must scan each email and any attachments to ensure that they do not contain malicious software.  At this sort of level, an organisation would start to think about implementing a gateway type anti-spam server on separate hardware to deal with this burden.

Whilst there is nothing wrong with this type of solution, it has its disadvantages. Firstly it’s another piece of hardware to run, cool and keep secure. This server must be licensed and up to date at all times. It also must be monitored and kept under warranty. All of these costs can be avoided by moving to service that filters and delivers your email in the cloud.

Moving these services into the cloud can also have other benefits. In additional to those previously mentioned, cloud anti-spam services can often filter emails with a higher accuracy and lower false positive rate than internal anti-spam systems.

This is due to cloud based systems “learning” from the sheer volume of mail that passes through them, allowing them to provide more accurate filtering. This can be tweaked even further by industry specific filtering, ensuring no emails are falsely blocked.

Whilst moving your services into the cloud can save you money, how can you ensure that they systems are available at all time? Moving this service into the cloud increases availability as the services split between many physical servers in the cloud. In additional to the large amount of redundant hardware, you also have excellent connectivity to the anti-spam services which should never be unavailable.

Whilst you’re anti-spam servers may be able to scan infected emails with updates released 2-3 times a day, cloud based solutions all provide 0-day exploit protection, meaning as soon as a new virus is released, the systems are able to detect and remove it.

The Internet Group’s New Cloud Anti-Spam solution helps protect businesses’ inbound and outbound e-mail from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations. Some of the benefits of this solution over other anti-spam solutions are;

  • Multi-layered, real-time anti-spam protection
  • Helps eliminate threats before they reach the corporate firewall
  • Assists with policy enforcement and meets most compliance requirements
  • Helps keep unwanted email from reaching corporate networks using Active Directory synchronisation

If you would like to discuss this solution with one of the consultants, simply call us on 0845 458 0497 or email info@theinternetgroup.com for more information.

The Benefits of SAN and Virtualisation Technology

May 26th, 2011

By Dave Twilley

You may have heard the terms “Storage” or “SAN” coupled with “Virtualisation”, historically these have been somewhat of a mystery to small and medium businesses. This equation now works thanks to advances in technology and new products targeted at such markets, but what does the technology actually do and how can it help businesses deliver cost effective enterprise functionality? This Blog aims to answer those questions by taking a more in depth look at the technology and demystifying some of the key terminology.
 
What is a SAN?
The acronym “SAN” simply stands for “Storage Area Network”, loosely speaking a SAN is an appliance which is literally filled from top to bottom with hard drives, it will look much the same as a rack mounted server and take up a similar amount of space. Its purpose is to provide centralised scalable storage of data. Typically you will be used to seeing a traditional server with some disks in and acknowledge things like, “that’s my File server, it holds all of my company data”, or “that’s my Exchange server, it holds all of my email”. However when using a SAN, your servers typically won’t have much storage if any at all, the files will be centralised on your SAN which the servers connect to using a separate network infrastructure, which will provide resilient connectivity from the servers to that data to ensure availability. Below is a typical SAN (in this case a Dell EqualLogic PS4000XV with 16 disks).

Dell EqualLogic PS4000XV with 16 disks

SAN Redundancy
The previous section begs a very obvious question, “so if all my data is now in one place are we now at risk from losing a single device which can cripple the entire business should it fail?” The answer is “no”, as SAN technology is designed to be incredibly resilient from failure. Most SANs will incorporate Dual Power Supplies, Dual Network controllers and a vast number of disks using RAID technology (Redundant Array of Independent Disks, which means your data is spread across multiple disks in much the same way you would in a traditional server except more numerous with hot spares ready to jump in and take over should any failure occur). We will come on to more about SAN redundancy later, to discuss what should happen if an entire site was to fail. As you can see from the photo below, the unit is divided in half at the rear with components duplicated for complete redundancy, any power supply or controller module can fail and the unit will continue to operate unaffected.

Dell EqualLogic PS4000XV with 16 disks

SANs and Virtualisation
If we think back to what we spoke about earlier when we said you are used to concepts such as, “that’s my File server, it holds all of my company data”, this raises its own questions, “what happens if this file server fails?” Without a SAN or any other kind of redundancy a single server failure would stop that service dead in its tracks, you would no longer be able to access your files, if it was your email server then you’d no longer be able to access your emails and communicate with your clients, (or you’d have to pick up the phone or send them a regular postal mail for a change!). If your servers were virtualised with your data stored on the SAN then the physical server would merely be providing processing power and memory. In the example below you can see that the servers are no longer critical to the IT service and have been commoditised, server 2 has taken over server 1′s responsibilities and is serving up the data stored on the SAN.

Benefits of SAN and Virtualisation
Following on from the previous example, now that the concept of “a server” is no longer a critical part of providing IT service we discover several benefits:

  • High Availability – Almost all high availability systems requiring high availability will require the use of a SAN. With high availability solutions implemented downtime is reduced or even eradicated under some circumstances enabling IT systems to operate in an ever developing 24/7 world.
  • End of Life Hardware no longer results in system downtime - Typically when a server becomes end of life and needs replacing an organisation would have to start a costly migration project to move services off on to new hardware. With SAN and Virtualisation technology you can simply move services off of the old server at the click of a button, remove it from the environment and reintroduce a new one, then move services back across.
  • Thin Provisioning - Using multiple servers without a SAN typically results in wasted empty storage space dotted around your network, using a SAN enables “thin provisioning”, you can then allocate storage to servers on demand as they require them, making your environment much more scalable and adaptable to the changing needs of the business. This is of significant importance as it means that you are much more likely to utilise the entire hard disk, rather than buying additional costly hardware and servers.
  • Performance Scalability - Traditionally performance of a service would be tied to the performance of the server which it is installed on, so day 1 you would anticipate your email server requiring lots of power so you purchase an all singing and dancing email server, you then spec up a lower end database server as you presently don’t put much demand on your database application. A year later you find that you make more demand on your line of business database and not as much on your email server; in this situation it would be very difficult to swap the hardware around so it is needed where it’s required. However in a virtualised environment you could simply tell the system to swap the services around between servers, when coupled with a SAN, this change could be made live during the day to respond to hour by hour demands, the system can also be setup to automate this process to deliver the performance where it is required. This also gives you the benefit of adding additional servers to the environment in much the same way, once introduced the system will determine the best way to make use of the newly added resource.
  • Storage Scalability – SAN technology will allow your storage system to grow with the needs of your business as well. Additional SAN’s can be added to an environment to extend the existing SAN, making use of this additional storage is much like adding additional server resource in the previous example with little or no downtime.
  • Reduced overhead – By using virtualisation with SAN storage, you may be able to consolidate a large number of servers down to a smaller number of more powerful servers, therefore reducing the cost of your IT Infrastructure.

Site Redundancy
A key benefit which deserves dealing with in isolation is how simple site redundancy becomes once an environment is virtualised using a SAN. As the data is stored in a single place on the SAN system, it can be duplicated at a very low level to another SAN in another site (or a shared facility such as a data centre). This feature would protect all of your data and server configuration which could then be live on another ready for your users to access within minutes. Clearly this has major advantages over tape backup where recovery time would include having to restore the data to a new environment and configure it. This feature could also be used should an office be inaccessible for any reason such as flood or evacuation, regardless of whether the hardware has failed or not.
 
Conclusion
With high-availability, disaster recovery, lower cost of ownership, enhanced scalability and performance, SAN technology is definitely something worth considering for businesses of all sizes, especially in a world which is demanding round the clock activity.

Key technology vendors have acknowledged the requirements of these markets, with Dell acquiring EqualLogic back in 2008 and more recently acquiring Compellent earlier this year, there is a clear market response to the requirements of businesses of all sizes.

As you can see, SAN’s and Virtualisation technology open up a variety of possibilities which should be considered and evaluated against your needs.

To find out more about using SAN and Virtualisation within your IT Infrastructure, visit http://www.theinternetgroup.com or give us a call on +44 (0)800 007 5797.

References
Dell acquisition of EqualLogic – Press Release
Dell acquisition of Compellent – Press Release

Making a Case for IT Outsourcing

May 18th, 2011

Making the decision to outsource either some or all of an internal IT function is a complex and involved procedure. It will often involve detailed research and analysis, a budget, HR review and a thorough understanding of bottom line impact. But for all of this analytical soul searching, this is just a single question to answer: can IT outsourcing help to make the business more efficient whilst reducing cost?

IT outsourcing involves handing over responsibility for all or part of your IT function to an external IT service provider. This means that activities that would have previously been carried out internally are instead undertaken by the aforementioned provider, which provides the client with services of an agreed extent for an approved charge, fully in-line with a service-level agreement. This process may or may not result in a workforce downsizing as the need for existing IT support staff will depend on the scope of the projects to be outsourced. Many medium and large enterprises outsourcing specific IT responsibilities also maintain an in house IT team to provide other IT support services internally.

With every business seeking to become more streamlined with its overheads and maximise both productivity and efficiency, IT outsourcing is an increasingly attractive prospect. But, what are the potential benefits that it offers and how can your own firm make a case for it?

Weighing Up the Need for IT Outsourcing
Developing a business case for outsourcing any internal procedure requires a logical, detailed and impartial approach. The analysis for IT outsourcing should be led by the Board, and it is typically owned by the Finance Director.

General Outsourcing Considerations:
Before even looking at the implications for IT management and IT support internally, the business case should factor in a few outsourcing basics:

  • A three to seven year approach is used as standard when any aspect of a business is being considered for outsourcing
  • A comparison of internal vs external costs must be included and should reference both on going and expected adhoc costs 
  • A savings target as a result of outsourcing must be included. Typically, targets will be chosen from within a 10-30% threshold
  • Any savings projections included in the report should be verified by the Finance team
  • Internal costings should be based on current costs, not expected costs in 3 – 7 years time. Comparing current costs with costs from three years ago provides a realistic picture of annual increases throughout the life of the project

What are the business benefits of IT outsourcing?
Any business considering IT outsourcing will be familiar with at least some of the benefits it is said to offer – advantages such as massively reduced internal IT costs, access to the best vendors and simply being able to allocate IT responsibilities to trained experts capable of minimising company downtime are just a few of the most prevalent.

In practice, IT outsourcing can be said to minimise the amount of money a small, medium or large company needs to spend on its IT infrastructure. Savings are generated by eliminating the need for internal staff and resources.

Choosing to place responsibility for IT support, IT management and other IT functions with an experienced company gives certainty about IT spend and allows the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your IT is budgeted for and taken care of. Employees can concentrate on their core responsibilities and monetary resources better allocated to other areas.

A professional IT outsourcing company will offer a range of packages, allowing for complete flexibility and the freedom to work alongside an existing in-house team depending on precise requirements.

Popular IT service packages include consultancy services such as compliance checks, disaster recovery and network audits. The latter can be undertaken to establish IT outsourcing needs before a more extensive agreement for such services is agreed with the provider. This depth of knowledge is received from experts specialising in particular IT fields, giving best of breed information that may not be realistically achieved in-house.

Are there common misconceptions about IT outsourcing?

There are several common misconceptions about IT outsourcing. The most widely held belief is that the cost of such an activity is prohibitive, making it cheaper to employ a team than outsource to a secondary supplier. In reality, it is often more economical and more effective to outsource. Consider, for example, the amount of money needed for the recruitment, training, holidays and ongoing salary for one in-house IT person. To employ such a person over the course of the year, a salary of £40,000, holiday cover of £5,000, training costs of £3,000, sickness costs of £2,500, National Insurance of £5,000 and pension costs of £1000 are accrued. That is a huge £54,500 per annum for ONE member of staff. By investing in IT outsourcing from a professional supplier such as The Internet Group, there is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year access to experienced support, highly skilled engineers and a fast response time. Although actual costs vary, an average saving of around £30,000 per year are achievable.

An average of 99% of incidents logged by The Internet Group outsourcing team are fixed remotely, using the correct technical tools, with effective incident management. This, combined with a First Contact Resolution time of 70%, has resulted in extremely high month-by-month scores for year satisfaction – demonstrating that in most cases, an external supplier can work more efficiently than internal teams.

To find out more about IT outsourcing, visit http://www.theinternetgroup.com

5 Ways to Make Your IT Infrastructure Greener

May 9th, 2011

By Phillip Moore

These days, the environment seems to be the hot topic, as well as preserving our planet for future generations, conserving resources and energy, you can lower your overheads and make real financial savings for your business. Let your IT infrastructure save the earth, not cost you the earth.

  1. Switching things off. I know it’s a cliché but you can really make significant financial savings and save a lot of electricity by switching off you PC at the end of each day and other the weekends. Shutting down at the end of each day is also better for the reliability of your desktop and improves the security of the Network. 

    Modern Computers have special power saving features, that when enabled, switches unused parts of the device off, such as hard drive and monitor. These policies can be configured centrally, ensuring your organisation isn’t wasting valuable resources. The same can be done for most printers and multifunctional devices, to automatically switch off overnight for them to resume before you start again in the morning.

  2. Virtualise it.  From Server to Storage to Application Virtualisation, all these technologies enable you to use less hardware to do more processing. Less physical equipment means less power usage. Not only do you get the benefits of using less electricity (and therefore lowering your utility bills), but you are also reducing the amount of carbon produced by manufacturing, packing and transporting those extra servers to your business.

    VMware offers an Advanced Power Management capability that shuts down the excess capacity of your network when it’s not being used, only powering on the extra capacity when needed. A VMware Environment can reduce energy cost by 80% over a physical solution.

    Using a product like Microsoft’s App-V or RDS RemoteApp to provide application virtualisation, you can move the processing from your desktop estate to the servers. This allows a longer lifecycle for the desktop equipment meaning it can be used for much longer whilst still using the latest software.  This can also be used with Thin Clients. These are mini PCs with no moving parts, lower power requirements, and longer product life cycles.  A Thin Client draws an average of 10watts where an average PC can draw as much as 70 watts, so their use can promote significant energy savings.

  3. Get a Green Data Centre.  Servers generate a lot of heat and a badly configured data centre cooling system is inefficient and wastes large amount of energy.  Some Managed Data centres use heat exchangers for most of the year, only switching to active air conditioning during the hottest part of the summer months. These use the cold climate that we have been blessed with here in the UK to cool the computer equipment.  The Internet Group’s Hosted Data centres already use this technology amongst others to ensure they are as environmentally friendly as possible.
  4. Telecommute. Work from home, using your car is the single biggest contributor to releasing Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere.  Using Remote Access Tools such as Microsoft Remote Desktop Services can provide a working experience comparable to working in the office. These solutions perform all the processing and storage on the server, only what is displayed on the screen, keyboard and mouse movement is securely sent over the internet.
  5. Print Smart. Excess printing can cause a lot of clutter in the office as well as producing an excessive amount of waste. Doing simple things like enabling double sided printing can save huge numbers of trees over the course of just a year. Using a managed print service over numerous desktop printers can also be beneficial too as the printers are more energy efficient, and often have extra capabilities such as scanning and copying. The Internet Group can audit your print services to give you an insight into your print usage, costs and provide you will options to ensure you are getting the best value out of your print services.

To find out more about using green IT to provide you with an efficient IT Infrastructure,  visit http://www.theinternetgroup.com  or give us a call on +44 (0)800 007 5797.

 

Mobile Data – Changing The Way That We Work

May 3rd, 2011

What is mobile data; in a nutshell it is wireless connectivity. That is, it is a way of connecting mobile devices such as Smart Phones like the Blackberry, iPhone or Windows Mobile devices, laptops, netbooks and tablet computers such as the iPad, to the Internet, Wireless LANs and work- place networks without wires.

There are several different technologies available to facilitate this including WiFi, 3G, GPRS and High Speed Downlink Packet Access.

What do people use mobile networks for now?
Gone are the days when the mobile networks just provided a service for making calls, now people use them for phone services, Email, Internet and mobile computing.

What benefits are there?
Over and above the social use, it would mean increased efficiency for your workforce that are on the move, no more wasted hours traveling between meetings, avoid wasted time when last minute changes need to be made. Or never missing a deadline as you couldn’t get back to the office in time.

What business tools could be used on the go?
The obvious one is email, and over the past few years we have become used to being able to read our emails on the go from our smartphones however a host of business tools that could also be used on the go, such as CRM’s and other collaborative working tools such as Microsoft SharePoint or even access to your business’ own databases can now all be available ‘on-the-go’.

Remote access 
This is one of the simplest ways to allow your work force to benefit from mobile working; however it is important to consult with a professional IT company before opening up your systems to allow for a work from anywhere solution. It is imperative that you consider who can access, what they can access and other security issues.

In order to get the most benefit, what you need is full, secure access to all your business data, applications, and resources so that you are able to access them from anywhere, on any computer, mobile phone or laptop and at any time.

As your users begin to use the facilities more, there will be a natural increase in their use of your company’s IT support services, and this is where it may be worth considering the services of an IT Managed Services Provider. They will be best placed to provide round-the-clock monitoring of the systems and provide that all important support as and when your users need it.

Once your workforce are able to securely connect to the office it does not matter whether they are working from home, on site with clients, or working from the airport before they board a flight. Work from anywhere solutions create an opportunity for your workforce to use their time far more productively.

In addition to being able to work more effectively on a day-to-day basis, access from anywhere can form part of your Disaster Recovery plan, as it means that if your offices are not accessible it does not mean that work has to come to a halt.

Being out of the office is no longer a barrier to working efficiently and increasing productivity.

What would it mean for your workforce?
No more waiting until you get to the office or home to sit down and reply to urgent emails or to update your meeting notes on the CRM whilst they are fresh in your mind.

Is it worth the investment just for those that have access to mobile data?
Any of the workforce that are in a Wi-Fi enabled area can also benefit and since Wi-Fi is now available in a multitude of locations from the cafe’s, hotels and airport lounges that we are used to, to a host of new locations such as Taxi’s, Aeroplanes, there are also plans going ahead at the moment to extend Wi-Fi coverage to include Tube platforms and even some new cars can be specified with Wi-Fi.

To find out more about using IT to increasing your staff’s work efficiency and productivity, visit http://www.theinternetgroup.com  or give us a call on +44 (0)800 007 5797.

Amazon: Some data won’t be recovered after cloud outage

April 28th, 2011

Oh dear! Not a good sign. So this cloud does not have a silver lining! Read the full article by linking the link above.

Posted In: IT NewsIT Rants & Raves

Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts

April 28th, 2011

Companies are expected to reassess backup and recovery after the interruption at Amazon Web Services. Click the above link to read more.

Posted In: IT NewsIT Rants & Raves

Web chaos as Amazon cloud failure crashes major websites… and Playstation Network goes down AGAIN

April 28th, 2011

Amazon’s much-vaunted cloud network took a big hit yesterday when it crashed, taking a host of web 2.0 companies – including Reddit, Quora, and Hootsuite – down with it.

  • Thousands of businesses and major websites hit by cloud outage
  • 75million gamers affected as Playstation Network drops out, and the problem won’t be fixed for a ‘day or two’

Click on the link above to read the full article.

Posted In: IT NewsIT Rants & Raves

Making the Business Case for Virtualisation

April 27th, 2011

Virtualisation, like cloud computing is an IT buzzword you’ll hear every day in offices up and down the country. In the same way that cloud computing is also used as an umbrella term for a number of technologies, virtualisation is often used to refer to a wide range of applications and processes.

In essence, as its name suggests, virtualisation is simply the act of making something that is physical, virtual. In IT outsourcing and management, virtualisation often sees resources such as hardware platforms, operating systems, storage devices and network resources created virtually, rather than installing them ‘actually’ on every machine in every office.

While virtualisation has relevance across networking, software and applications, it can also be applied to the more technical side of IT management with servers and mainframes using the concept to consolidate, improve efficiency and reduce costs. In fact, the term virtualisation for IT management was coined by IBM mainframe users who adopted the technology as a means of pooling resources back in the 1960s and 70s.

Making something actual, virtual may have started as a way to reduce hardware assets but virtualisation is increasingly a part of IT disaster recovery planning and data security – it allows businesses to recover much more quickly from systems failures, natural disaster and even acts of God than would otherwise be the case.

For businesses, it is easy to reap the costs of virtualisation:

  • Systems can be restored quickly in the event of a failure, reducing business down time. So versatile is virtualisation as a technology that it plays a key role in business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. Put simply, you can use it to encapsulate an operating system, an application and its data into the equivalent of an application running on top of an operating system. The operating system in this case is the virtualisation software which can then easily transmit the encapsulated application to an offsite location, as if it were a data file. This means that it can be on a remote machine for employees to access, potentially slashing downtime from days to hours.
  • Servers can be consolidated, meaning fewer are needed, leading to reduced operating costs. Let’s suppose that you have a perfectly good server that you have been using for many years, but you would like to introduce a new product such as a document management system, CRM package or email archiving product. You may be told that the product isn’t compatible with the server or that the company that provides the product won’t support it if it is placed on the same server as another vendor’s product. With virtualisation, provided that your existing virtualised server has sufficient resources, you have the option of simply sandboxing off an area and directly installing the new system. This avoids the extra cost of purchasing additional servers, which can be prohibitive in the long run. Thus, in a virtualised environment, 10 programs that can’t run together and would have required 10 servers can now run happily on one server.
  • Many virtual machines can run simultaneously, using a single set of hardware to significantly reduce capital costs. Virtualisation means that you don’t have to keep adding servers and paying the costs for their overheads. One of the biggest concerns related to IT management is ensuring that hardware costs don’t spiral out of control.  This can happen so easily, not least as hardware will need to be replaced every few years when it ceases to be fit for purpose. Virtualisation helps to reduce the cost of such refreshes. With virtualisation, you can use the same products and services and upgrade accordingly, but on one server rather than ten, which also significantly reduces your power overheads. Put simply virtualisation can be used to make one individual server do the same function as multiple servers.
  • Space Saving - Nor will you generally need as much space for your IT equipment as dedicated rooms for servers with cooling and sound proofing capabilities are not necessary.
  • Energy Efficiency - Energy consumption is a critical issue for businesses today, whether the goal is to save money, reduce impact on the environment or keep your datacentre running. In the United States alone, datacentres consumed $4.5 billion worth of electricity in 2006. Industry analyst have estimated that over the next 5 years, most enterprise data centres will spend as much on energy (power and cooling) as they do on hardware infrastructure. Virtualisation is one of the ways that companies are reducing energy costs and consumption by as much as 80%, as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility programmes.

Further blog reading read What Is Virtualisation? What Does It Mean To Your Business?

To find out more about virtualisation and IT outsourcing, visit http://www.theinternetgroup.com or give us a call on +44 (0)800 007 5797.

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