eastQuayIT team up with veryPC to help reduce business costs and save the planet!
eastQuayIT have recently teamed up with Sheffield based VeryPC to provide low energy computing equipment to businesses across the North East of England. Replacing 10 [...]
Stay savvy and secure in banking
Check out the thoughts of eastQuayIT director Giles Wright on the subject of online banking security: Giles Wright, founder of Newcastle disaster recovery and back-up [...]
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eastQuayIT team up with veryPC to help reduce business costs and save the planet!
August 5th, 2011 | 
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eastQuayIT have recently teamed up with Sheffield based VeryPC to provide low energy computing equipment to businesses across the North East of England.
Replacing 10 regular PCs in an office with low-energy BroadLeaf PCs can save a business up to £1000 per year in energy costs, as well as reducing the amount of Carbon Dioxide your business produces.
The current typical desktop PC on the consumes an average of around 115 watts. BroadLeaf PCs use as little as 25 watts of electricity on average – a huge reduction.
Energy-Efficiency Financing from the Carbon Trust and Siemens Financial Services is a cost effective way to replace or upgrade your existing equipment with a more energy efficient version.
VeryPC are a recognised supplier of the Energy Efficiency Financing scheme from the Carbon Trust and Siemens Financial Services. Financing can be arranged for amounts as little as £1,000 upwards and, assuming your proposed Energy Efficiency Financing project passes the energy saving assessment by Carbon Trust Implementation Services, there are potentially no upper limits.
Your business could also be eligible for a rebate on it’s corporation tax relating to a project to reduce it’s carbon footprint.
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Stay savvy and secure in banking
Check out the thoughts of eastQuayIT director Giles Wright on the subject of online banking security:
Giles Wright, founder of Newcastle disaster recovery and back-up firm Brownsman IT Solutions and Director of eastQuayIT, offered a list of tips to reduce the risk to mobiles, including not having Bluetooth constantly activated, not connecting to insecure wireless networks, logging out after use, erasing data after selling a phone, and being aware of who is around you when using online banking in public. Wright spent several years working with compliance and security departments at banks while in London. He says it is “a constant arms race” between hackers and those developing secure computer systems, but that devices such as iPhones may have benefits in terms of security.
He says: “The App Store model that Apple uses to control what is installed on an iPhone prevents users from installing unauthorised software on their phones. In many ways this makes the iPhone a more secure method of carrying out online banking than on a potentially compromised laptop or PC.
“On a regular Windows computer there are few restrictions on what a user with admin rights can install and run. There is therefore a much greater chance of inadvertently downloading and activating malicious software like a virus or Trojan on such a device.
“You definitely run the risk of falling victim to cyber crime if carrying out internet banking on a device compromised by malicious software. The vast majority of security issues relating to the iPhone are to users that have jailbroken their iPhones to give them more control over it and potentially opened up their phones to the threat of attack.”
The North East – A great place for digital and creative media businesses to grow
Created by One North East, the University of Teesside and Middlesbrough Council, Digital City has the aim of generating and sustaining a fast growing, high level economic base in the creative and digital sector for the Teesside area.
Digital City essentially consists of two main elements, The Institute of Digital Innovation and the Boho Zone. The Institute of Digital Innovation is located within the Phoenix Centre. It aims to provide support to digital academics allowing them to develop into successful entrepreneurs.
The Boho Zone provides space for new creative and digital businesses to “grow, network and do business”. According to their website, “Everything we do is geared to making North East the best place to develop your digital media, digital technology or creative business. Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a business idea, an established business looking to expand, a start up, one that’s looking to relocate or an organisation needing product development or finance, we’d love to work with you.”
Sunderland Software city has similar aims to “Digital City” in Teesside, with more emphasis on software development rather than the creative digital media. There aim is to ‘…inspire and encourage the growth of the Software Industry in the North East of England, and to make the area an attractive location of choice for software businesses..” They are a public-private partnership of the City of Sunderland, the University of Sunderland, the North East Business and Innovation Centre, One NorthEast, Codeworks Connect and the private sector software industry.
Sunderland Software City currently operates out of a number of buildings across the city, but are looking to create a new state of the art environment at the heart of the city centre.
The Ouseburn area to the West of Newcastle city centre was the cradle of the industrial revolution in Newcastle. For a long time it has also been the home to some of the most creative businesses in Newcastle and was the former home to the world famous Maling Pottery. In recent more digital and creative businesses have been moving into the area, and a variety of developments have sprung up to support them. Three of the more prominent developments include The Media Exchange, Hoults Yard and Maling Court.
“Mere Mortals” are a fine example of a world renowned digital media company that has made this are of Newcastle it’s home.
With these digital and creative media companies comes a high volume of digital data that needs to stored, manipulated and transferred. For this to be carried out effectively requires investment in systems and networks that are up to the task of dealing with such high volumes of data.
Over the next few years it is hoped that the telecoms companies will be rolling out an extension of the fibre optic network in the region which will allow for easier and faster transfer of files between facilities. In the mean time it is still possible for businesses working in the creative and digital media sector in the north east to take advantage of cloud based services as a method of storing their data, backing it up and transferring it to and from clients and partners.
For more details of our services and how we can help your business, contact brownsman on 0845 862 4410 or email us at info@eastquayit.com.
What’s wrong with Tape Backups?
For the past 50 years the principal method of backing up your data offsite has been to use magnetic tape which is then manually taken to a remote location and stored. We wouldn’t consider purchasing or storing music on tape anymore, yet we still seem happy to trust it with our mission critical business data?
There are a number of common complaints from those using tape to backup and store their data:
- Tapes Fail. They are a fragile media and are prone to degrading and breaking.
- Tape Drives Fail
- Backups will often outgrow the tape and need to spanned across many tapes.
- Restoring an entire system from tape can be difficult and time consuming
- There can sometimes be errors on restore. The consistency of the backup is not always tested.
- Open files sometimes not backed up
- Retrieving a single file from backup can often also be difficult and time consuming.
- Offsite Tape Rotation a pain – time consuming and unreliable
Most companies today understand the need to maintain an offsite backup of their data, allowing them to continue functioning in the event of a disaster. They may have set up a Technology Recovery Action Plan some time ago when tape was the only real solution to the need for offsite backup. Now that high-speed broadband is readily available to businesses across the country, the option to backup your data safely, securely and easily online has become the most practical and cost-effective option.
Businesses that haven’t seen an online backup system in action are often surprised at how easy, fast and manageable it is when compared to their existing method of backing up to tape.
Financial organisations that are required by the FSA to keep several years worth of data offsite have also used tape until quite recently. Now that the technology has moved on and become more reliable, these organisations, which are often slow to react to new movements in technology, are all moving away from tape to disk based backup storage.
There is good reason for companies like this to be making this move. In The Cost of Lost Data (2003), Dr. David Smith estimates the average cost of irrecoverably lost data at more than £5000 per megabyte. If the data is business transaction data and key to your company’s regulatory compliance, the costs involved can greatly increase. Just a small section of data become corrupted due degradation in tape, the costs involved to a company can be very significant, both financially and in terms of loss of reputation.
If you are currently using tape for offsite storage and would like to discuss how we can help implement a more secure and reliable offsite storage system, then call us on 0845 862 4410 or email info@eastquayit.com.