Archive for the ‘Pharmaceutical and biotech’ Category
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Quite often, business continuity planning is thought to be the domain of very large enterprises, like large financial institutions, who need to continue trading even in the event of major global disaster. But as we mentioned in our article on the impact of snow-related transport issues on businesses, “Small companies, especially ones without dedicated IT staff are the most vulnerable to loss of productivity due to weather-related staff shortages. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, this could translate to an estimated 1.2 billion pounds lost in a day because of the disruption, with one-fifth of the UK workforce unable to make it into work.”
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Tags: best practice, business continuity, colocation, disaster recovery, service improvement, strategy
Posted in AWIC Desktop, Charity and education, Film/TV, Media, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT Strategy, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech, ProStream, Resourcing and recruiting, SMB | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Good capacity planning is worth the effort
The benefits of an effective capacity management programme are well known to most IT departments. Proper capacity management allows you to:
- Reduce infrastructure costs by sweating your assets
- Meet agreed service levels by avoiding capacity-related outages
- Accurately budget for infrastructure growth by projecting future requirements
- Avoid project delays by having appropriate resources on-hand
And, by now, most IT departments have some form of capacity planning tool implemented which can give them fairly accurate reports on current and past usage.
But what are you doing with those reports? Who attends your capacity planning meetings? And do you have a dedicated capacity planning manager?
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Tags: best practice, budgeting, business alignment, capacity planning, ITIL
Posted in Financial Services, IT Strategy, LevelBase, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech | No Comments »
It happens more than you’d think.
Picture this: you’re about to login to your company’s online banking software to make sure those cheques got paid in, and the page won’t load. A few clicks, and then a reboot of your computer….and before long, you’re on the phone to your ISP. Ten days – and several heated phone calls – later, the ISP finally admits that one of their engineers clipped a cable up near the Tesco Express and they’re ever so sorry that you’ve been without internet service all this time.
It may sound far-fetched, but that’s a true story. What would you do if your business was without the internet for 10 days? How could you cope?
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Tags: business continuity, disaster recovery, innovation
Posted in Film/TV, Media, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT Strategy, KeyControl, LevelBase, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech, SMB | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Over the past 18 months, IT budgets have shrunk dramatically, meaning that most companies have shelved the idea of replacing old kit. But as the economy starts to pick up, many companies are opening up to the idea that now is a good time for a hardware refresh.
The average lifetime of a pc is 3 years. How old are your company’s computers? Are they ready for the scrap heap?
If so, do you really need to replace your traditional desktops with more of the same? What about the alternatives?
Have you considered the switch to thin client technology?
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Tags: cloud, green IT, thin client
Posted in Film/TV, Media, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT Strategy, InfraSwitch, Pharmaceutical and biotech, Uncategorized | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Many enterprise infrastructure groups consider follow-the-sun support to be the holy grail of the IT operations service. The aim is to provide customers with a seamless, and truly global, support service. Simply dial a single number or create a single support ticket, and the request will be handled in a timely manner, no matter where in the world the user is located.
But how is this implemented when you currently have silo’d regional support teams?
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Tags: best practice, global teams, managed service, offshoring, service improvement, strategy, support
Posted in Financial Services, LevelBase, Pharmaceutical and biotech, ProStream, SafeShore, Uncategorized | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
Many companies already have some form of change management in place, but how stringent is yours?
Organisations often put change management to one side, citing the need for flexibility and rapid releases. While it’s true that change management can slow down the rate of change, this is often of benefit to the business in the long run. Think about the business impact of pushing through an unstructured change which causes an interruption to your service. Have you stopped to calculate the loss to the business of your last change-related outage? Even if it was only the loss of business opportunity, it can add up significantly.
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Tags: best practice, change control, service improvement
Posted in AWIC Services, Financial Services, KeyControl, LevelBase, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech | No Comments »
by Ivan Zidek, Director at AWIC
In the first of a series on remote teams, we take a look at some best practices for recruiting remotely and what to consider when building a remote technology team.
The scenario
Take one London-based investment banking technology organisation, the need for more system administrators to support three thousand high-end servers, budgets being slashed faster than tuna in a sushi shop and what do you get? The move to a new breed of remote system administrator.
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Tags: best practice, offshoring, remote teams, strategy
Posted in AWIC Services, Financial Services, IT Strategy, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech, SafeShore | No Comments »
As more and more companies journey down the path to virtualisation, AWI takes a look at some of the best practices that could make the difference between a successful implementation and a more chaotic rollout.
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Tags: best practice, strategy, virtualisation
Posted in AWIC Services, Film/TV, Media, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT Strategy, InfraSwitch, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech | No Comments »
by Amanda Dahl, Director at AWIC
One of the advantages of virtualising your server estate is that VMware will run on a wide range of hardware, allowing you to recycle your older kit and make the most of the hardware you already own. This can be very useful if you are not in a position to make significant capital expenditures — something effecting many IT managers in the current economic climate.
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Tags: capex, savings, virtualisation
Posted in AWIC Services, Film/TV, Media, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT Strategy, InfraSwitch, Oil and gas, Pharmaceutical and biotech | No Comments »
