Riverbank It management

This week we said good-bye to Sarah Hunt, our office manager since 2005. She has done a huge amount for Riverbank and we will miss her. In her place we are delighted to welcome Karen Harris (karen@riverbank.co.uk).

We are also very pleased to welcome Marc Prole back to Riverbank following his return from his round-the-world travels. We're sure he will enjoy being in one place for a while and it's great that he has chosen Riverbank as the place to be. He is contactable at marc.prole@riverbank.co.uk.

Today's security scare is courtesy of the Yorkshire Building Society who lost a laptop that contained "a substantial part of the customer database". Here's what they did wrong:

• The laptop was not encrypted.
• The laptop was not kept in a secure location (it was under a manager's desk).
• Unbelievably the manager had written down the passwords and just to make things easy for themselves kept the password details in the bag with the laptop computer.

The building society has made formal undertaking to the Information Commissioner's Office that it will correct these failings. One illuminating paragraph includes the commitment that "All staff are made aware of the ... policies for the storage and use of personal data and are appropriately trained how to follow those policies".  Are all of your staff appropriately trained in the need for IT security?

The FSA has fined Zurich Insurance £2.275m for a data loss. Not only did they fail to protect their customer data properly, they did not even notice they had lost confidential details of 46,000 customers. The problem was not so much the loss of the data - it was the lack of adequate systems that cost Zurich so dearly.

As a small business you probably aren't running the risk of a £2m fine, but you are running the risk of losing your reputation and your customers. Sensible data protection steps you need to take include:

• Encryption of data and laptops that leave your central system
• Controls over the use of removable devices like USB data sticks
• Policies and staff training to build an awareness of the importance of data security

If you need any help or guidance on data security for your business just ask Riverbank.

At Riverbank we like to be "vendor-neutral" - unbiased in real English - so our Business Development Manager, Chris Jones, happily took his iPhone along on a two-day BlackBerry training course this week. Bad idea.

He has returned a changed man. He is convinced that BlackBerry is the way forward for any serious business. He can tell you why the compression of the BlackBerry e-mail transmissions means lower costs, particularly when roaming. He can tell you how BlackBerry is the most efficient device, delivering more for less power to give you longer battery life.

If you let him, Chris will also explain why the Saudi government is threatening to ban BlackBerry. Unlike other manufacturers, BlackBerry encrypts all its e-mail traffic, making it hard for hackers (or governments) to intercept your e-mail.

Cloud computing is beginning to hit the business radar. So what's the appeal?

The appeal for one Riverbank client is flexibility and scalability. Their staff work a lot from home and from client sites so they need a system that will work well from anywhere. They have ambitions for growth, and they like the idea of only incurring the cost as they grow. With cloud computing they can add one user at a time and know exactly what the additional cost will be. And in these uncertain times they really like the idea of never having to buy another server - no more capital expenditure on IT.

A company that we met yesterday has a different reason for choosing cloud computing. They are a new business with a number of regional offices. Should they buy servers, set up communications links to and from each office and employ their own IT staff to manage it? Or would they like to outsource the whole thing and just pay a regular monthly fee for a fully managed cloud-based service supported by a company like Riverbank? It was an easy decision for them.

We are very pleased to welcome two new people to Riverbank - Kevin Ya and Chris Davis.

Kevin is a recent graduate and is with us for a few months to help with the implementation of our new integrated management software. He lives in Clifton Hampden where his parents run the Plough pub and restaurant (highly recommended by Marc Juffkins).

Chris has joined us as one of our senior technical team. He has eight years of professional experience in IT. Chris has a degree in human biology but when he completed his course at Aston University decided that IT was a more appealing (and more lucrative) career  path. He lives in Thame. He is also learning to speak Russian, a decision not unrelated to the fact that he has a Russian girlfriend.

Did you know that you can now rent software licences from Microsoft instead of purchasing them? Renting often seems like a bad idea - cheap over the short term but expensive over the long term. But we're discovering that rental can make good sense for Riverbank clients.

Take a Microsoft server licence as an example. What we are finding is that over three years the software rental costs are tending to be slightly lower than the price of purchasing the licence. The crossover happens in year four. Given a server life expectancy of around four years it's a hard call to say which is better. But by renting you also avoid the cost of the initial cash investment - and in these post-credit-crunch days that's worth quite a lot.

So if you are thinking about replacement servers think about renting.

You don't like spending money on computers during an economic downturn. I can sympathise with that because we don't like doing that either. But beware of creating a problem for yourself further down the line.

One Riverbank client recently complained that their computers were running slowly. One of the reasons behind this was that many of the machines were over five years old. Because the company doesn't have a programme of regular replacement of ageing computers they have reached a point where they will soon be forced to spend a lot of cash replacing around half of their computers.

You need a policy for computer replacement. A reasonable policy could be a life span of four years for desktops and three years for laptops. If times are hard you can then stretch that by an extra year. But at least you know what you need to budget for every year and you avoid a pile-up of costs.

Since April this year the Information  Commissioner's Office (ICO) has had real teeth. It now has the power to fine companies up to £500,000 for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act.

Common breaches of the Data Protection Act include:

• Loss of laptops, disks and data sticks containing client data.
• Insecure transmission of personal information.

Simple steps that you can take:

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.