Thursday 27 July 2017

The 6 Steps to a Decluttered Desk


Desks! Love them or hate them, let’s start with a truth that might hit a bit hard: you probably spend more time at your desk than you do in your living room at home. With that out of the way, the good news is that they’re a lot easier to declutter and tidy than a living room is. How, you ask?

Wednesday 26 July 2017

HP Elitebook x360 Product Spotlight: Technology meets wizardry























It’s easy to get lost in a labyrinth of options when it comes to finding the perfect laptops for a workforce. Great news then that HP have offered a novel solution to the quagmire of laptop shopping by putting everything you could possibly want into one premium product. Meet the Elitebook x360.

For the purpose of clarity, ‘premium’ in this instance doesn’t mean that the x360 is made from shiny bits of metal that will shatter when you hit the space key a few too many times. That’s because HP have created a sturdy, versatile device that just begs to be used in all of its different forms, but more on that later. Despite the luxury appearance, this isn’t an ornament.

Tuesday 25 July 2017

Arista - The Master of One

By David Anthony






















HPE’s partnership with Arista is the latest stage in the rebalancing of their switching portfolio. Arista’s products focus exclusively on ultra-low latency and software defined data centre switching, ideal for financial services and service provider networks. This is the perfect complement to HPE’s Comware operating system switch range for the traditional, on premise, data centre and Aruba at the ever-evolving intelligent edge.

What makes Arista stand out in these sectors? It concentrates exclusively on that end of the market, focussing all its resources there. Arista has never tried to be a Jack-Of-All-Trades, it just masters one. Arista switches use two specific features to achieve this, EOS and SysDB.

Thursday 20 July 2017

Introducing Westcoast's New Cloud Development Programme

By Tom Marwood






















When Westcoast first started the journey into supplying Cloud products, we promised ourselves that we would do as much as possible to make our partners feel like the most important part of our business. For a long time, the relationship between the Distributor and Reseller has been far too robotic, and with CSP this approach needed to be changed in order for both parties to succeed.

Over the last two years, Westcoast have been driven to make this dream as close to reality as possible, and we'd like to think that, with our hands on approach and award winning service both on the sales and support front, we've delivered on our promise. This doesn't mean that we're going to rest on our laurels however, and we've spent the last few months coming up with something new and exciting which we can now share with you!

Tuesday 18 July 2017

5 Key Learnings from Microsoft Inspire

By Michael Freeman






















2017 has been an incredible year for the technology industry. This was displayed with Microsoft holding their largest Partner Conference to date; the attendee numbers were through the roof and we saw the highest number of female delegates than ever before, showing promise that our industry is ever moving onwards and upwards.

The location was Washington DC, one of the most iconic cities in the world and home of the United States congress. This was the perfect setting for many of Microsoft's hard working and innovative partners to gather and share their knowledge and wisdom. I personally met some truly inspirational people who are doing both important and incredible work on Microsoft's platform and beyond.

HPE Gen 10 - A New Compute Experience





















HPE’s annual Discover event is often the platform from which new ideas and innovations are launched, and Las Vegas saw a pretty important one this year as, with much trumpeting and fanfare the latest iteration of their market defining server series was introduced to a waiting world.

You can very often tell how excited a vendor is about a new product, solution or innovation by the focus it is given at every opportunity, and if that holds true then HPE are very excited indeed about Gen 10 and everything it has to offer, and in truth they have every right to be excited.

Thursday 6 July 2017

Looking ahead to 2020 – IT trends in the Banking Sector

By Loren Stow

The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts global IT spend will exceed £2tn by 2020, and while PC, tablet and smartphone sales show signs of plateauing, the market’s 3.3 percent upward trajectory over the next four years will be sustained by the digital transformation found on third-party cloud and mobility platforms.

Healthcare will remain the fastest growing sector in the run-up to 2020 with a projected 5.7 percent rise in IT spending, followed by the banking, media and professional services sectors at 4.9 percent each. So where are the opportunities in each of these sectors? Where do their technological challenges lie? And, what technology-specific solutions will each sector look for as 2020 looms large on the horizon?

In this blog series we take a look at each sector in more detail in the coming weeks, however if you’d like to request a copy of the complete white paper, please click here. In case you missed it, we’ve already taken a look at the Healthcare sector here.

Wednesday 5 July 2017

Would your business be protected from a vicious Petya Malware attack?

By Adam Hartley




















A new variant of the Petya malware family was discovered on Tuesday 27th June 2017. The Petya family of malware is not a new one and was first seen and classified in March 2016. Juniper researchers have previously blogged about this malware in the past. This previous version of the Petya ransomware is available to cybercriminals to purchase as a service (Ransomware-as-a-service or RaaS) rather than developing their own malware.

If you're not quite sure what Petya Malware is, in simple terms it's a vicious computer program that steals your computers information and makes it unreadable to the computer. If your computer cannot read the data then it is lost to you and you will have to pay the creators money to get your data back.