Fordway Blog

Technical debt is a common problem. It isn’t a question of using the latest version of a desktop operating system, but rather the gradual building up IT problems that will come back and haunt organisations in the future.

After migrating your IT services to the Cloud, it is easy to assume that you are getting value for money. However, needs change and vendor offers are continually evolving. With the pressure on organisations to reduce expenditure, now is a good time to review your cloud implementation for opportunities to reduce costs.

What do you do at Fordway?

I’m part of our service operations team, where I’m responsible for service continuity. My team are the people who work evenings and weekends providing 24x7 support for our customers. There are six of us in total. I’m the one who’s less of a vampire as I’m actually at work during the day!

With the immense pressure for organisations to get remote working services up and working many SaaS providers are offering free trials which are very tempting. Whilst these services may seem to offer a convenient short-term fix, they could have implications for your governance and compliance.

As enterprise adoption of public cloud increases, accessing the resources and expertise to handle architecture design, security and operations can be daunting. Once live, many organisations experience problems and discover that they aren’t making the cost-savings they anticipated or experience issues such as latency. Optimising cloud post-migration can be complex and costly, so it is crucial  to take time to plan and architect for the desired outcome.

The recent ransomware attack on Travelex is a salutary reminder of the constant security threat we all face. While we don’t know whether or not a ransom was paid in this case, it’s widely understood that some organisations have been willing to pay several times to have their data restored.

Businesses are under more pressure than ever before to harness digital technologies to deliver competitive advantage and growth. The drive for lower costs, faster services, rapid and continuous improvement are just some of the benefits expected from cloud transformation projects and IT investment.

With new cyber threats constantly emerging, we’re often asked for advice on how to stay one step ahead of the hackers and cyber criminals. A good first step is to review your organisation’s cyber security against five key controls set out in the National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Essentials scheme (see our recent blog), and it’s also vital to ensure that everyone in your organisation is prepared in case the worst happens. 

If you were looking for help to improve your business’s cyber security, a good place to start would be the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, whose role is to keep the country secure against cyber attacks. So when they provide free advice, you’d expect most businesses to be rushing to implement it. However, you’d be wrong. The NCSC has developed a security tool to help organisations protect themselves against the most common cyber threats, but although it’s been available for almost five years, less than ten per cent of UK businesses have implemented it.

Azure can bring the benefits of productivity, agility and decreased costs to your organisation, but like many things, realising the dream relies upon the preparation before you take the leap. Learn how to rehost and refactor for the cloud.