As much as you’d like to buy everyone in your company the latest and greatest laptops, for now, the budget says no. It happens. You need an alternative to expensive new laptops.

Fortunately, there’s the ‘thin client’ model. Yes, it’s been an option for a while, but these days the model has matured into a truly viable way to keep your business up-to-date without breaking the bank.

The fat-free option, please

A ‘thin client’ is a low-cost device that operates Citrix cloud-based software with few applications actually on the device itself. Instead, it provides an end-point for a server-hosted virtual desktop, meaning the computer itself doesn’t need much more than a small amount of storage, graphics and an internet connection.

You can even reuse your current ‘fat’ devices to do the same thing. Purpose-made ‘thin clients’ are comparatively cheap, and recycling your current devices is, well, free.

Why Azure-hosted Citrix VDI is the best diet plan

To do this effectively, you need to invest in cloud infrastructure. Microsoft Azure-hosted Citrix VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a gateway to making your business more:

• Productive – Easy access means no need to wait until you’re back at the right desktop, you can get to your work wherever you are.
• Flexible – You can work from home, from the train, from the beach…
• Efficient – Old hardware won’t hold you back if it’s repurposed as a thin client.
• Secure – No data leaves the cloud, ever.
• Scalable – Azure’s powerful capabilities means you can build the platform to any size.

The question is – how?

Citrix VDI offers the security and simplicity of a centralised system, protected by redundancies, along with the personalisation required for each individual user. It allows for complete mobility, as employees can access their virtual desktop and applications from any device.

Citrix VDI has the power to enhance your company culture. You give your employees the option of flexible working. You enable BYOD (bring your own device) policies with the knowledge that the all sensitive company information is not on the device, but safely in the cloud.

It’s also a long-term solution. You can add as many users as you like to the system. And, it can be custom-fit for your workplace requirements, so you don’t have to compromise on functionality.

To find out more about using thin clients in your business, contact Cloud Direct today.

It’s time to embark on a digital transformation journey. The IT department is crucial to leading that vision. The technology insights that you bring to the table will shape the company’s future, after all. You already have plenty of brilliant ideas, you just need a persuasive plan to implement them. And, you need to let the people know about your technology roadmaps. So here are some tools to help you get your message across.

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“Azure gives us much more flexibility all round, with access in a secure cloud environment.” – Stewart Martin, partner, Edmund Carr

Join the world’s leading public cloud provider. You’ll be in good company – over 90% of Fortune 500 companies are already using the Microsoft Cloud environment.

Data centre modernisation will transform the way you work. But choosing the right cloud provider and delivery partner is equally as important as making the decision to transform in the first place. So why is Microsoft so far ahead of its competitors when it comes to public cloud?

In short its trust. Yes Microsoft has raised its game in the services available but it ultimately comes down to a proven track record of helping businesses truly transform.

Here are just a few of the reasons businesses are using Azure for their data centre modernisation.

Improve ROI

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to analyse the economic impact of Azure on its customers. They developed a representative business model which reported a 466% ROI, achieved through a combination of:

• Drastically reduced data centre costs – through consolidation and footprint reduction.
• Reduced IT outsourcing costs – efficiency driven services drive down costs
• Process re-engineering – save time better spent on strategic planning
• Increased sales and profits – achieve new and larger customer sales

“Without Azure, we would need to build out dozens of data centres to provide the same service and meet client requirements that we can with Azure.” – VP of product development, US services and hosting firm

Achieve truly agile infrastructure

Increase your data centres agility with on demand, near limitless cloud scalability with Azure. Reach new markets using Microsoft’s global hyper-scale infrastructure of more than 100 data centres across 36 regions worldwide. Twice those of AWS and 6 times Google’s data centre regions.

“Azure makes it a lot easier for us to deliver on our vision without getting stuck on the individual IT components. We can focus on our end solution and delivering real value to customers rather than on managing the infrastructure.” – Richard Beesley, Rolls-Royce

Future proof your business

In the future business landscape every company will be a software company. Industry disruptors such as Airbnb, Uber and Netflix have already proved that businesses need to rapidly innovate and remain flexible to compete in the future marketplace. Modernising your data centre with Azure allows you to achieve new levels of agility. Be proactive in the face of disruptive competitors.

“[With Azure] It’s all about making sure we’re ready for the future.” – Stephen Court, IT supervisor, Crondall Energy

We are proud to announce Cloud Direct is now a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP), one of only a handful of UK partners to achieve this new recognition of excellence.

The Azure Expert MSP program is a new global initiative from Microsoft to highlight and promote only the most capable partners and to make their services and expertise discoverable.

“We are delighted to be one of the first Microsoft Gold Platform partners globally to receive this recognition. It’s a stunning endorsement of what we offer our customers and means they can have the confidence to make more use of the cloud technologies that will help them grow.” – Brett Raynes, CEO at Cloud Direct

What is an Azure Expert MSP?

 

For starters, there are just 32 globally. Becoming an Azure Expert MSP is no easy feat. The requirements are the most stringent of any Microsoft program. Partners need to validate their skills, their customer success, an ability to scale and a commitment to providing next-generation managed service offerings.

Put simply, it’s a lot of hoops to jump through.

But jump we did. And while it’s taken us a lot of hard work, patience and dedication to achieve, we know it’s going to be worth it. For us this is more than a title. It’s so that we can do the best for our customers.

“For our business to realise the benefits of Microsoft Azure, we needed the security of a supplier who can guide us along our cloud journey. Cloud Direct’s Azure managed services have allowed us to focus on delivering outcomes for the business, not managing infrastructure.” – Jason Moon, Head of IT at Simarco International Ltd

What does being an Azure Expert MSP mean for our customers?

We’ve always been about empowering businesses to achieve ‘Fearless Growth’. We want to help ambitious organisations adopt the cloud and reap all its benefits. As an Azure Expert MSP, we can do so much more for you.

• Better service. It’s simple, really: when you work with an expert, you get expert-level service. Microsoft has made it easier to verify the best partners by awarding this rigorous accreditation to a select few top performing partners. Every service that we offer, every customer interaction, is held to a higher standard. We love raising the bar because it makes us up our game and hop right over it.
• Broader offerings. Whatever your business needs, we can deliver it. Keen on IaaS, PaaS or SaaS? We can advise you. Ready to adopt mobile working or the Internet of Things? We know all about it. Need help with app migration, security or compliance? We have experts in all areas.
• Closer partnerships. Being one of the few Azure Expert MSPs in the UK brings us much closer to Microsoft. Our already close partnership is now much stronger, and all the benefits that come our way get passed directly on to you, our customers. Picture this: Microsoft’s capabilities and software paired with our expertise and skills, all working to better your business. The possibilities are endless.

“We are pleased to recognize Cloud Direct as an Azure Expert MSP. This new recognition offers our customers certainty that an organization provides excellent services on Azure.” – Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner at Microsoft Corp

We couldn’t do it without you

We are nothing without our customers. And we certainly wouldn’t have reached Azure Expert MSP status without our customers pushing us to deliver ‘Fearless Growth’. This has been an incredible journey for all of us at Cloud Direct, but it’s only the beginning. We want you to come with us for the rest of the ride.

Keep pushing us. Keep demanding more. Keep reaching for the next goal. It’s what has made us great, and what will make you great, too.

Don’t get caught with your pants down in an unnecessary data breach. Find out how cloud IT protects and secures your data so you can maintain compliant with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

Let’s start by looking at five key areas you can action today. Need a recap on all the business and IT changes required for GDPR? Check out this blog: GDPR countdown: 11 things you must do now.

Five things you can do to stay GDPR compliant today

Ready for some hard facts?

• 19 percent of UK businesses take between 1 week and 1 month to recover from a data breach
• 52 percent of small businesses and 66% of medium businesses experienced a breach in the last 12 months
• 15 percent of businesses experience a breach at least once a month

The numbers don’t lie. Chances are, if you haven’t recently experienced data loss, you soon could. Here are five tips for a fast, secure response.

1. Write a robust business continuity plan

Many industries must adhere to strict regulations regarding their data management. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) imposes strict rules on financial services companies. Everyone gets swooped into the net when it comes to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and its enforcement of the Data Protection Act – no one fancies a £500,000 fine. And maybe you’ve heard about this GDPR going around?

Creating a more robust business continuity plan will:

• Reduce the length of downtime and business disruption
• Keep data loss to a minimum, helping protect your reputation
• Ease the way for speedy set-up, testing and recovery of your business

Check out this government document for more information: Cyber security guidance for business

2. Make sure you have secure, online data backup

According to technology analysts Gartner, two out of five businesses that suffer data loss fail within two years. Robust online backup is a must, if you want to stay strong, secure and competitive.

A worrying 60% of small-to-medium businesses admit they don’t routinely back up their data. This is despite statistics from The British Chambers of Commerce that say that 93% of businesses that suffer major data loss for more than 10 days file for bankruptcy within one year. 50% do so immediately.

For unparalleled security, your online data backup solution (and provider) should be fully compliant with global certification standard ISO 27001.

3. Keep your employees vigilant; change passwords often

Complacency is a business killer. Make sure your employees change their passwords often and that they keep them confidential. No one enjoys this task but it is crucial so try to get them onboard. Educate them about cyber risks, such as email phishing attacks and storing sensitive data on their mobile devices. Make security a part of your culture and you’ll see a big difference.

4. Install and use effective malware protection

Are you ready for this? In 2017, 669.95 million new variants of malware were detected. A quarter of IT specialists consider vulnerabilities in installed applications as the most common internal cause of data loss. Make sure you address this with malware protection that meets your particular business requirements.

5. Use high-level encryption

Encryption prevents data being readable and is key in storing and transferring data safely. Make sure you encrypt any devices or specific sensitive data that could be accessed by cyber criminals. This particularly applies to mobile devices, which are a lot more vulnerable to theft or loss. Depending on your particular business requirements, when backing up you can use 128-bit AES, 256-bit AES or 3DES, making the encryption level compliant with FIPS140-2 guidelines.

Check out why your disaster recovery solution needs cloud services.

A recent survey has revealed a large percentage of SMBs feel vulnerable to cyber-attack. It’s important to ask yourself: what is your business is doing to protect itself against faceless hackers? For those of you who may have already fallen victim to a cyber-attack, I am sure you will agree, prevention is better than a cure.

“71% of SMBs recently surveyed feel vulnerable to a cyber-attack”

– (Microsoft, 2018).

Microsoft recently announced additional security enhancements to Microsoft 365, so you can be sure your business has a strong defence against cyber-attacks. Microsoft 365, in a nutshell, combines all the collaboration tools of Office 365 with enhanced security. It’s an affordable, solution for enabling workplace modernisation and safeguarding your business against the cyber criminals of the world.

So, what prevention strategies do the new Microsoft 365 updates have in store?

Employee protection against phishing and ransomware

Cybercriminals favour phishing and ransomware to encourage employees to unwittingly give out sensitive information. The results are catastrophic for SMBs, from a loss of customer trust to financial turmoil. You only need to look at the WannaCry ransomware attack to realise that prevention is your best bet.

Microsoft 365’s security updates work to prevent phishing and ransomware attacks through:

• Sophisticated attachment scanning and AI-powered analysis to detect and discard dangerous messages;
• Automatic link checks in emails, quickly assessing if they’re part of a phishing scheme to prevent employees accessing unsafe websites;
• Device protection to prevent devices from interacting with ransomware and other malicious web locations.

Prevent the unintentional leak of sensitive business data

Most SMBs handle sensitive information. Over half collect and store National Security Numbers and 29% handle bank account details (Microsoft, 2018). The real challenge for SMBs like yours is, how to prevent the leakage of this sensitive data.

The new security features of Microsoft 365 rise to this challenge by:

• Providing policies to prevent data loss by identifying, monitoring, and protecting sensitive information like National Security Numbers and credit card numbers;
• Empowering employees to access manage emails in Outlook, to protect sensitive information;
• Email archiving and preservation policies to help ensure data is properly retained through continuous data backup and compliance;
• BitLocker device encryption on all Windows devices to help protect against data theft or exposure if a protected device is lost or stolen.

All the updates contribute to comprehensive protection in a single subscription that will help to prevent cyber-attacks on your business.

For more information about why Microsoft 365 is the complete solution for Workplace Modernisation, security and device management for your SMB book a FREE consultation.

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The only constant is change, so said Greek philosopher Heraclitus, which is true of the ever-growing team here at Cloud Direct. This month we’re excited to welcome Kay Gilbert into the fold. With glowing experience in the retail & hospitality industries in sales & marketing, doubling year-on-year Christmas sales in her previous role, Kay will mostly be managing our key accounts in these markets.

What attracted you to Cloud Direct?

Kay: Having sold new technology into retail and hospitality companies for many years, I’d become very focussed on lead generating and wanted to get back into account management. So, I spent the last 2 years learning a lot about the hard face of retail as National Account Manager at greeting cards company, Ling Design. But I missed the tech industry and was ready for a new challenge.

I knew Brett (Cloud Direct CEO) through mutual friends and started to learn more about what he was doing at Cloud Direct. I was immediately impressed by the energy and ethos at Cloud Direct and I could see Brett was running the company in such a cool way.

You have a wealth of experience in the retail industry, where did it all start?

Kay: Well, I started my retail career folding jumpers in Primark as a Saturday girl, back when it was terminally un-cool. But post university I worked in retail digital shelf space management during the very early days. Back then, using digital images of products for planograms for the first time was transforming trade marketing and the way in which suppliers could partner with retailers.

The company had been acquired by Nielsen and grew fast; I travelled a lot as Marketing Co-ordinator for 18 international offices and gained an understanding of international retail.

Why did you move from marketing to sales?

Kay: After working in marketing for years and being told disparagingly by a colleague “What do you know about sales?”. I realised I didn’t know much, which made me hungry to develop my career more into sales.

I was tempted away by an exciting opportunity in a new fast-growing tech company as a sales person. I worked mostly from the office because the technology they had was so innovative that new prospects would happily travel to see us. It was a revolutionary type of lossy image compression based on fractal mathematics. In the days when you could only fit one image on a floppy disc, this tech allowed you to fit a hundred and it was used to compress the images on Microsoft Encarta.

What prompted you to set up your own consultancy?

Kay: I took a career break to have children and consultancy work could fit around looking after my three kids.

I set up Kick-start Sales to help tech companies grow their customer base through targeted telesales and networking. I worked with a range of clients such as a local company using big data analysis for growing e-commerce; a US based research company delivering actionable insights on consumer behaviour to the retail industry, and an e-learning company specialising in the retail & hospitality industries.

Enough about business. How do you spend your time outside of work?

Kay: I love tennis and play as much as I can. Sport is a passion that my children have picked up, all of whom played county sports and my son has gone on to earn a scholarship as a college athlete tennis player in North Carolina.

When I’m not playing I’m watching tennis. I was there when Andy won Wimbledon both times, when he became world No. 1 at the O2 and when GB won the Davis Cup in Ghent.

What will you be doing at Cloud Direct?

Kay: In my role as Key Account Manager, I’ll be mostly looking after our hospitality and retail clients, which is a change in strategy for the business. Cloud Direct is making an investment in the relationship with their existing customers and they saw a real mutual benefit in having an account manager with the expertise in their vertical industries.

Right now, I’m really enjoying upskilling in all things to do with Microsoft Cloud technology. I’m excited to meet the most ambitious IT Directors and teams at forward-thinking hospitality and retail companies looking to get ahead by doing something different and disruptive with this new tech. I’ll be based in the Bath office but I’m happy being out and about. I want to be on the road travelling, meeting new clients as much as possible; gaining a deeper understanding of what they are trying to achieve, so that I can help them to maximise the return on their investment and profit from the expertise within our team here.

90 percent of companies have experienced business IT downtime, and half of enterprise employees report losing access to critical data during outages. Although this sounds scary, disaster-proofing your business isn’t as difficult as it might seem. By deploying a range of cloud-ready tools, you can ensure your team are always online and productive. Even when severe weather conditions or transport strikes mean they’re stuck working from home.

Here are the top three ways to disaster-proof your business IT so you can focus on what matters most: growth.

1. Mitigating a downtime disaster

In 2015, Microsoft reported only 10 hours of downtime, down from 39 hours the year before. In fact, in their SLA for virtual machines, they guarantee external connectivity at least 99.95 percent of the time.

This decreased downtime is a step forward for cloud computing, but how can you make it work in your business?

In 2016, Citrix and Azure teamed up to bring cloud users access to remote desktops. Because virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is hosted on the server and not the computer, it means that if your business experiences an outage like hardware failure, you can locate another machine and load up your desktop as if you were stationed at your own. Same software subscriptions, same applications.

Of course, there are many causes of business IT downtime. Hardware failures are one such case. But Citrix VDI benefits from Azure’s state-of-the-art cloud backup features including geo-replication and failover groups. So, if in the unfortunate event a server goes down, you’ll still have access to up to four readable secondary databases in the same or different data centre locations.

 

 

2. Compliance at every turn

25th May 2018 marks the first day of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and every business must be data compliant. If you’re not, your business can be fined up to four percent of annual global turnover or €20 million (whichever is greater). But if you’re partnering with a cloud vendor like Microsoft Azure, data compliance is built into the tools you use.

Every VDI application and desktop is built from the ground up with compliance, transparency and trustworthiness in mind. Backed by Azure’s trust centre, VDI is shrouded in a matrix of proactive security measures including Active Directory, Enterprise Mobility and multi-factor authentication, all of which are fully compliant and let you manage the safety of your data straight from the source.

3. Lost or stolen devices

More than half of millennial workers want a flexible or alternative working schedule. That means working away from the office during hours that suit them. Prior to cloud development, this would have posed a serious risk to business security. Today, however, this isn’t the case.

VDI gives you full control over your devices straight from the Azure portal. Lock and shut down lost devices using Enterprise Mobility, for example, and keep important company data safe. Other tools like Azure’s Intune comes with enterprise-level mobile security, too, which lets you keep up-to-date on work when your laptop is out of sight.

Stay productive, stay secure

As disastrous as downtime, non-compliance and lost devices can be, cloud computing ensures that your data stays in your hands, and your hands only.

By 2020, half of the UK workforce will be working remotely. Virtual desktops, then, are your ticket to continual business growth. By giving your employees the freedom to work from any location and on any device (while remaining secure), your business can become disaster-proof, meaning you can continue onwards, night and day.