Our Insight

I want to tell a story to explain the origins of this blog post. It's one that I hear far too often recently. In the early days of working with a customer, some members of the Ideal team were onsite delivering a WAN project. They got chatting to our customer and it came as a massive surprise to them that the customer didn’t have a contact number for their Managed Service Provider. We’re not talking DDI to a dedicated account manager; they didn’t even have a switchboard number!

We know too well that technology is moving at a colossal speed and that demands on technology teams are getting out of control. Teams are expected to keep their skills and knowledge up-to-date with fast evolving technologies whilst doing more than just keeping the lights on. Now IT teams are expected to support the new-era of digital and truly dynamic businesses whilst keeping everything secure, achieving compliance and providing a seamless end-user experience. Oh, and all this needs to be delivered with squeezed resources and under cost scrutinisation!

The latest Cisco Cybersecurity Report makes for interesting reading - and not just for cybersecurity professionals like myself. Among its major findings are that ransomware continues to dominate the malware threats faced by businesses: criminal gangs in particular have realised there's big money to be extorted from organisations desperate to restore access to their data.

You might have seen my recent post about a new managed services client for Ideal. A year in the planning, the first phase of the project spanned 400 devices in 31 sites, scattered across 18 countries. It was a big job, and there's more to come, so it was essential that we could deliver the excellence we expect from ourselves.

At Ideal, we're rightly proud of our managed services, and the team of in-house experts who work to proactively identify and resolve customer network issues before they become business problems. You'll have heard us use the word 'excellence' - it's what we aim for across our business, and it's what helps an SME like us win and retain high-profile clients - but what does it mean in practice? Let me tell you what we're delivering for a distributed global client.

Every business needs to know the status of its IT environment 24*7*365, whether it be on premise, in the cloud or a combination. Monitoring can help you meet some of the key business challenges you are facing: maintaining uptime and reliability of essential services and systems, reducing overheads, assessing vulnerabilities and gaps, safeguarding your reputation and protecting customers, controlling staff activity and protecting data.

I'm a service desk engineer here at Ideal - and one of just seven female members in a team of more than 40 people. As part of our discussion around women in IT, we're interviewing women within and beyond Ideal to ask what they do in their job, what their experience of IT is, and how we can encourage more women into the sector - here are my answers.

I've always been a strong believer in delivering a high quality of service and value to my clients. It's just how I work. Recently I was on the receiving end of the kind of service I like to deliver. It was an educational experience, as I had been questioning myself about service quality and appropriate levels of delivery.

At seven years old, Ideal is still young, but already we've seen the rise and fall of buzzwords, fads, and various other transient ideas. Other shifts - the rise of the cloud, the move to mobile - are here to stay, providing us and our customers with new challenges and opportunities. So what are we looking forward to in 2016? And how are we responding to the ever-changing IT landscape?