Ranked number 23 in the world!

Posted on 12/02/2010 by Matthew O`Neill
Awards, Lab News, Lab Tech

We have succeeded in making it into the 2010 MSP Mentor top 100 list, which highlights IT service providers that are excelling in the realm of managed services.

The Background

Managed Services and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are increasingly important to modern day IT support providers like ourselves. They enable the majority of our services to be improved and automated through the use of advanced management technology. For example, we use the revolutionary Kaseya technology as the centrepiece of our IT Automation philosophy. It means we can:

• Monitor and report on clients networks in real time
• Resolve issues before they occur
• Automated routine checks
• Fix 80% of issues remotely
• Deploy software autmatically and remotely
• Much more!

Who are MSP Mentor?

They are a media outift designed to be the ultimate guide to managed services, and are the leading global destination for MSP's. They've made it their mission to ignore all gossip, speculation, and vendor hype to deliver in-depth and entirely factual analysis of the evolving managed services provider industry.

One of their well known efforts is the annual Top 100 list. This ranks MSP's from all over the world not just on their managed services based revenue, but also the way in which they use managed services and technology to improve both their offering and customer experience.

Where did we come?

Not only have we made it into the list this year, but we've come in at number 23! It's a fantastic result and great recognition of the progress we're making.

Check out the full list here.

Virus costs Council £1 Million

Posted on 4/09/2009 by David Couzens
Lab Tech, Security

A shocking article published on the wire recently tells of how it is going to cost Ealing Council up to £1 million when repair caused by a Conficker Virus infection, and to protect against future attacks.  It was unknowingly introduced to their network by a user’s USB memory stick. Check out the article from ITPRO here.

The threat that Conficker and other viruses pose, along with the common security vulnerabilities present in networks, are an all together very real threat for many businesses.

We use our managed services platform, Kaseya, to automatically scan and patch all of our clients’ workstations and servers on a regular basis. It’s scan detects Conficker in particular, and the patches required to prevent it. In addition, we ensure water tight end user security using Symantec’s Endpoint Protection threat prevention system.  It automatically scans any external media connected to a workstation to ensure it doesn’t contain any harmful viruses.

These are important technologies to consider in leveraging an appropriate level of defence for your business.

Internet Explorer 8 is the safest browser!

Posted on 26/08/2009 by Matthew O`Neill
Internet Explorer 8, Lab Tech, Microsoft, Security

In a series of recent studies undertaken by NSS Labs, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 web browser has outperformed the competition in its ability to detect and prevent malware, phishing and other common internet based threats. The competition being the latest versions of Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera.

With the huge increase in regular internet use, potential cyber based dangers have grown. The most common and highest impact of these are socially engineered malware (websites or pop-ups actively attempting to coerce users into downloading viruses/malware) and phishing (websites or online communications pretending to be from a official source to try to steal user information such as usernames, passwords, etc)

Whilst you may prefer some of the alternative browsers, it is important business users consider the security implications. It may well be best to stick to IE8 to avoid potential threats and reduce your support overheads.

Check out the overview results here, and the detailed reports here.

Windows 7 vs Windows XP on a Netbook.

Posted on 30/07/2009 by Matthew O`Neill
Lab Tech, Microsoft, Netbooks, Windows 7

Netbooks have become all the rage over the past few years due to their wallet friendly price, and their ability to provide both an ultra portable laptop PC whilst still maintaining a fairly solid home/work performance. However, this ultra portability comes at the expense of reduced hardware specifications such as smaller processors, disk drives and memory. This means that their performance can often be limited.

The guys over at Legit Reviews have just completed a full performance comparison between Windows 7 and Windows XP on a Asus Eee PC Netbook, with Windows 7 matching XP or coming out on top in most of the results. This is good news for manufactures, who will be able to comfortably ship Windows 7 on low-end netbooks without fear of large-scale performance issues. It also means people get to enjoy a newer operating system without the hassle, and with most manufacturers offering a free Windows 7 upgrade voucher, why not?

Read the full review here.

Griffin announce 40Mb/s trials

Posted on 29/07/2009 by Matthew O`Neill
Internet, Lab News, Lab Tech

Griffin Internet, one of IT Lab’s preferred internet service providers has recently announced its selection to participate in BT Wholesale’s first fibre-to-the-cabinet trials this month. This trial will be testing 40Mb/s download and 2Mb/s upload broadband lines, rather fast indeed! As if this wasn’t enough they have added a fourth 622Mb/s interconnect into the BT21CN network and are planning on doubling their 10Gb/s metro fibre capacity.

Griffin has enjoyed a long standing relationship with BT since they developed the UK’s first managed broadband platform for them back in 2003 so its no surprise that they are heavily involved in BT’s 21st Century Network project that is steadily sweeping across the country.

Having Griffin at the front line allows us to enjoy these benefits as one of their partners and in turn enables us to pass them onto our clients in providing better internet services, the future of broadband looks promising!

You can read all about the BT 21st Century Network here.