Riverbank It management

Would you like lunch or dinner for two at Le Manoir, with the compliments of Riverbank? That’s our reward to you if you introduce a new client to Riverbank.

Growing Riverbank’s business is important to us, and a lot of our new clients come via referrals. It is important to us to make the most of that goodwill. So if you know of someone whose IT support isn’t as good as it should be, please tell them about Riverbank. As soon as they sign up for a Riverbank support contract, the reward is yours.

Choose from any of the following rewards:
• Five-course lunch or dinner for two at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons
• Fortnum and Mason hamper
• Half a case of champagne

There is plenty of hype around cloud computing, but are companies actually doing it? Many large firms are apparently holding back from making a drastic change to their IT systems, preferring to wait until others have gone before them and made their mistakes. Many smaller businesses are hesitant about making their entire business dependent on a single Internet connection. They are also worried about security – why would they place their intellectual property in an environment where they have little or no control?

  

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing delivers an entire business’s IT via the Internet. Drivers pushing companies towards cloud computing include the need to reduce capital expenditure and the desire to cut out complex IT installations from their offices. There is an undeniable attraction in never having to buy another server, and instead just paying a single monthly fee for a guaranteed IT service.

Others companies might adopt cloud computing for the flexibility it offers. If they have a seasonal or variable business it makes a lot of sense to use a service that can be turned up and down as required.

Every cloud has a silver lining, so they say, and if there is to be a double-dip recession we’d all better start looking hard for that lining.

If your customers are feeling cautious they are likely to want to avoid large capital expenditure. Can you help them with this? In Riverbank we can provide hardware and software as a service so there is zero capital cost. This even applies to traditional high-cost items like servers. It’s proving to be an attractive option for clients.

Can you offer flexible payment options for your customers? If you provide a service, offering an option for monthly payments might make it easier for them, or conversely they might choose to pay for a year in advance to get the attractive discount you offer. Either way, you offer flexibility and you offer choice to your customer making it easier for them to say “yes”.

If the words “dot leader” don’t mean anything to you it’s time to get up to speed with using tabs in Microsoft Word. Other symptoms that you need tabs include struggling to line things up and adding spaces here and there until things do line up correctly.

Like so many aspects of word processing the ‘tab’ dates back to the days of typewriters. It was a mechanical stopping point along the carriage that enabled you to tabulate, ie to line up columns of text. It does exactly the same job, and more, in today’s word processing software.

 

Kyle Allard, one of our recent recruits, has been featured in a Facebook profile by CompTIA. CompTIA is a non-profit organisation promoting standards and education for the IT industry.

 

Find out more about Kyle here.

We look forward to seeing you at Venturefest next Tuesday, 22 June, at the Kassam Stadium in Oxford.

If you have any IT issues you would like to discuss book a half-hour IT clinic with us at Venturefest. Are you thinking about cloud computing? Have you heard about SharePoint and wondering if it could help your business? Or maybe you just want all your IT to run smoothly and your current IT provider doesn't do that for you. Whatever your issue we would be happy to advise. Contact us now at help@riverbank.co.uk.

This week three of our customers' servers suffered disk failures. But no-one was affected. The reason was that we are monitoring their networks - the monitoring software gave us advance warning of problems so we could take preventative action.

Disks fail more or less at random so having three in one week is like the old joke about waiting for a bus - you spend ages waiting for one then three come along together. But it's a good illustration of the way that IT support is changing, and indeed the way it should be. Your support partner works hard in the background, almost unnoticed, to maximise the reliability of your IT system.

Maximium reliability of your IT delivers maximum uptime for you so you don't even notice your IT. It's just there at the heart of your business helping you do your work.

Today's second security alert concerns fake Twitter e-mails. Several Riverbank clients have received them this week.

Be alert for messages like this:

"Hi, You have 2 unread message from Twitter. Please click on the link below:"

If you receive an e-mail that doesn't seem quite right, do not open it. Even if it's from someone you know.

Last weekend an employee at one Riverbank client had her Yahoo account hacked. The hacker sent out messages to everyone in her address list. The e-mail led to a fake anti-virus warning. For the unwary who clicked on the link it disabled the computer's anti-virus software and installed malicious software on the computer.

Have you got a private e-mail account? Is the password a word that could be found in a dictionary or is somebody's name? If so, it's time to change it. Make sure it contains a mixture of upper and lower case and that it contains numbers and/or non-alphabetic characters.

My Dell mini 10 netbook has arrived and with it my paper-free future, perhaps. First impressions are great. It runs the latest Windows 7 operating system and has 120GB of disk space. The ten inch screen is bright and easy to read, the keyboard is an ok size and it should run for ages on its battery. And most important of all it received the "cool" accolade from my children. All that for around £250 plus VAT.

I'll report back on how it works out in practice and what others think of it. If you are a Riverbank client and you'd like to borrow it just let me know (e-mail me at malcolm@riverbank.co.uk).