What is “Cloud Computing”?

You see it everywhere and hear about “it” at every IT conference. Cloud computing is all the rage in IT trade publications, but what is cloud computing and how do you apply this to your business to save money?

The term "cloud" when combined with computing is a description of the internet. Cloud computing is offering a series of services over the internet. As a customer and consumer of IT services, no one needs to impress upon you the value of saving time and resources by receiving timely and accurate service when you need it most.

When your network goes down, the printer jams, or a new employee needs assistance with the latest security download your company is loosing valuable productivity time and revenue. Free your employees up and outsource these services to an IT provider who can offer you superior service and 24/7/365 availability for less than you would have to pay a part time employee.

There are several accepted forms for cloud (hosted internet) offerings available to customers from their IT providers today:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and,
• Hardware-as- a-Service (HaaS)

How you purchase the services is up to you. You can be charged any number of ways: on the minutes used, based on the hours used, based on the number of users in a group; well you get the idea. You can also change these services as it suits your business and as it suits your growing needs. The great thing about virtual offerings is they are scalable.

With scalable offerings come a variety of the options available to your customers. You can choose from a practical a la carte menu of items that your IT provider offers. What works for you financially today may not be the most complete offering, but can grow with you as your business grows. This allows you to optimize your investments without paying for services you do not use.

At Sagari, Ltd we provide our customers with seamless integration when it comes to hardware, software, VOIP or technical support services.

Ready to learn more or receive detailed information on how Sagari and Cloud Computing can help your company? Contact steve.john@sagari.co.uk today to assist you with your network and IT needs.

Is Your Company “On The Air”?”

With the advent of the internet and growing web applications, every company should be aware of where their customers are looking for information. It is not enough to just offer a basic web page or be listed with a directory service.

Today, companies are looking to reach their audience through new web offerings. The following relates to Fortune 500 companies:

• Presence on Twitter : 54%
• Corporate Blog : 32%
• Facebook Fan Page : 29%

Many years ago, Faberge Organic Shampoos launched a commercial with the tag line “I told my friends and they told two friends, and so on and so on…” The idea being the product was so fantastic that it was being sold by word of mouth.

Today, many people may not remember Faberge shampoo but they do remember the tag line. If you are still wondering how important social networking is to your business you need only to understand that the internet is how friends tell friends and so on and so on.

Social networking brings in the fifth P of marketing. You already know product, price, placement and promotion but none of that matters without people. Many businesses continue to operate under the assumption that a simple web site, a basic product offering and great fliers can bring profits and revenue to their bank accounts.

Unfortunately this is not so. Even an amazing promotion of “free products” cannot drive customers to you in today’s market if you do not have the right blend of offerings for people.

Consider adding these people friendly applications to your business:

• A company blog. Blogs allow you to communicate in an informal environment. It also allows you to set your company as the expert in your field.

• YouTube videos. Everyone wants to put a face with the product or services. YouTube gives you an inexpensive outlet to share your humorous or serious side An easy link from your site to the video will drive additional people friendly interactions.

• A Facebook fan page: Over 200 million users are on Facebook. Your customers are already there and many users want to share what businesses they are fans of and include their comments and pictures. Worried about what your customers may post? You are in complete control and can delete information as easily as it is added. Although if you had negative postings it is time for you to take a look at why.

Nothing will ever replace the old fashioned hand shake, a lunch, or even that phone call to just check in. Keeping your customers – the people – in the front of your business strategy planning will always return high profits and revenue than a strategy built around products customers don’t want.

Many Thanks

Steven John
www.sagari.co.uk

The Profit in Security

How secure is your company’s data? The internet is a powerful tool, but also opens your company’s data to anyone who can get access to your network.

Over 55 percent of online users report that they have been infected with spyware. Annually, businesses loose £6.6B to malware. Further, it is estimated by leading internet security experts that webpages are infected every 4.5 seconds. As a business owner you could dedicate a team of your employees to securing your network.

A team of employees is very expensive. This is where you need an expert in security and data management, allowing you the freedom to run your business and focus on profit while your IT provider is monitoring, guarding and securing your networks and business critical information.

The following facts are overwhelming to the small and medium business owner:

• Over 97 percent of email received today is SPAM
• The cost of recovering a lost data file (just one) is £80.7
• The average business spends over 20 percent of their total business on IT security

In a 2009 survey undertaken by a leading networking company, it was reported over 65 percent of companies spent “little to no time” managing their security systems (anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering, VPN, intrusion detection and web usage and bandwidth policies) and of those in the survey, nearly 15 percent spent less than 30 minutes per week managing their IT security. Yet, over 60 percent of all companies in 2008 were victims of phishing, virus attacks or critical data breaches.

Consider the following security options available today:

• Backup and recovery
• System monitoring and patch maintenance
• SPAM reduction
• User security (limited access to non-business sites)

There are many more options available and you do not need to invest in training, certification or new employees to secure and protect your data. By teaming with Sagari, Ltd you can have a trusted security specialist overnight. Using the latest technology and hosted applications Sagari, LTD let us focus on the security of your network while you focus on bottom line profits. Learn more today at IT Security Solutions or contact us today.

Many Thanks

Steven John
www.sagari.co.uk

How to Create Compelling PowerPoint Presentations in Seconds

Hi All,

We promised to deliver you our new training video sessions on helping small - medium sized businesses and we have not failed you.

Today we have posted our first video which is on how to create compelling vibrant PowerPoint Presentations in seconds rather than hours or days. Microsoft have taken the leg work out of creating slide shows as we have kind of outgrown the typical slide shows and with the older versions of PowerPoint you had to be reasonably creative and skilled at PowerPoint to produce a slide show which was a work of art!

If you are someone who has to deliver a lot of presentations and slides then you can understand the time and energy it takes to produce a presentation right?

Well you would be pleased to know that in PowerPoint 2007 they have a tool called Smart art which allows you to create exciting and engaging slide shows in seconds.

Now I don't know about you but I have been wanting something like this for a long time as it takes all the hassle out of building and crafting a show that I am happy with and that will keep my audience engaged throughout my entire speech.

Smart Art is built to allow you to craft your own presentation so you can easily change it to how you want and gives you many options to choose from, colour, backgrounds, shapes... The flexibility of this tools is worth the upgrade alone!

We have created a video demonstration so you can see for yourself how easy it is to produce your own presentation with little or no skill


Click here to see how to create exciting PowerPoint Slide shows in seconds

US Legal Decisions on Microsod could mean the end for Microsoft Word

Sales of Microsoft could be in serious trouble due to ann unresolved legal dispute in the US.

Microsoft are well known for copying infringements but a new patent infringement case against Microsoft has resulted in a $290 million fine - That's about 175 million pounds for us in pounds sterling.

It has also meant a ban on all sales of MS Word in the states. Microsoft have claimed that this could force them to stop the selling of the Microsoft Office suite altogether.

Although Microsoft say they have not infringed any patent and have filed a motion with the Court of Appeals the stopping of sales could spread to the UK next

Kevin Kutz a spokesman for Microsoft states these filings are not unusual in patent cases - They believe the evidence demonstrates that Microsoft do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid.

The problem was raised when Microsoft incorporated XML, which was originally developed by Canadian company i4i and is used to control embedded tags, into the 2003 and 2007 version of Word.

A Texas court rules that by doing so, Microsoft had violated i4i's patent and called for a halt to sales until a final judgement can be reached.

At Sagari we personally hope that the patent will be lifted for Microsoft as we think the MS Office package is an excellent one that we have all used and supported for many years and hope to be still supporting this for many more years to come..

Best regards

Steven John

Owner of Sagari Ltd

www.itmanagedsupportservices.co.uk

How to stop SPAM dead

Evening all,

We thought we would discuss the age old problem which we have to address for many customers that we provide outsourced IT support to.... SPAM!!!

We want to start by addressing the many options you have to stop receiving SPAM for a small or medium sized business so you have a clearer understanding and can make your choice.

The list we will be covering but not all today are as follows:

• Affordable ways for small/medium sized businesses to prevent SPAM
• Cost-effective ways to prevent SPAM even ever hitting your network
  
• Free ways to prevent SPAM
• Hardware and Software SPAM solutions

OK let’s get started....

SPAM is one of those extremely annoying things that you can't get away from as it doesn’t matter how many email addresses you create the SPAM always seems to find you and before you know it, you are siphoning through your emails to find one which are actually relevant to you and your business... So frustrating I think you would agree.

So I want you to imagine your new IT system has gone in and your email exchange has been installed. The IT support guy has just set-up all your emails and you’re ready to start sending and receiving emails to and from the world. At this exact point the SPAMMER does not know your email exists and would find it extremely difficult, if not impossible to find you!

So how to you keep it this way..

Well that is a good question. Basically SPAMMERS use automated software on the web continuously looking for email addresses which it can lift off. Put in a database and then is either sold or used themselves to target you for the usual crap we never asked for like Viagra, Watches, pumps of the enlarging variety!!!! You get the picture

Back to what to do...If you are at the point now that you have your new email addresses, then you need to take stringent measures to keep this email address away from places which will make you an easy target.

So here are the rules that you should follow to seriously reduce your email being taken by the SPAMMER and being enlisted to a lifelong stream of untargeted, unrelated, unwanted and annoying SPAM

Rule 1 - Only use your work email address with people/companies you know such as other business people, vendors you know. This sounds simple but the amount of places people use their work email address always astounds us at Sagari!

Rule 2 - Do not use your work email address to purchase from sites on-line that you are unsure about and couldn’t be confident what they would do with your email address afterwards. It is not worth the risk. Create another email address and use that.

Rule 3 - Read the website privacy statements to ensure they will not share your email address with other companies for marketing purposes

Rule 4 - Create separate email addresses for every type of need. For example you could have a procurement@companyname.com for all you’re purchasing. This will stop your personal business address from being used and if this email address for some reason got targeted you could delete this email address and create another one.

Rule 5 - Create your own free email address which has no relationship to your business email address. There are many free email accounts you can setup such as Gmail from Google, Yahoo or Hotmail from Microsoft. You can then use this email address to purchase from unreliable sites, subscribe to newsletters, subscribe to RSS feeds, or use it generally when it is not work related

Rule 6 -Do not have you personal business email address on your website as SPAMMERS have special software which searches all the websites out there looking for email addresses and then lifts them off your website and puts them in a database ready to sell off, or SPAM to you themselves. Instead have your website designer build a form such as the one below which will have your email address embedded where it cannot be taken. If you must have an email address on our website then have your website designer put this on as an image rather than normal text as this will ensure it can't be lifted off the website using automated software.

It is very difficult to stop all SPAM by using these methods alone especially if you are an enterprise with quite a few staff using email every day. What you can do is educate your staff the methods that will reduce your business from being heavily targeted and to look to implementing an email policy AKA a User Acceptance Policy. Although we are not discussing this topic in detail today, this is a policy you can have created which will outline your email procedures on what your staff can and can't do. It is then signed by then making it almost a binding contract that they have to adhere to otherwise disciplinary actions can be taken against them!

Well we have covered the best ways to stop SPAM happening in the first place but we now need to be looking at software or hardware which will then be your next layer of protection against SPAM.

Software is the least expensive form of protection and has pro's and con's for managing SPAM.

Some of the pro's are as follows

• Very cheap option if not free if you use SPAM fighter standard which allow you to install the software directly onto your machine
• Very easy to install and get started without much configuration
• Is a good solution for businesses with up to 6 staff

Some of the Con's are as follows:

• Increased traffic on the bandwidth of your broadband/DSL line as the emails still enter your system but are blocked at this point. This will in turn slow down your network
• Does not block all SPAM and you will still receive a level of SPAM
• Is not a viable solution for companies with 6 + staff
• Does not have much reporting facilities
• You will be managing your SPAM system yourself

So as you can see it is a choice which for a new business start-up. A solution such as SPAM fighter will allow you to stop your SPAM for free until it is viable to scale up to a business class solution which we will discuss next.

We will be back to run through Hardware SPAM filters that are on-site at your business site and relaying your emails through a third-party supplier next time to give you an idea of other solutions to give you an informed choice for what will best suite you.

Please remember at Sagari Ltd we are always happy to discuss your requirements free of charge with one of our highly skilled engineers. There is no obligation but just a way of helping you make the right choices for you

Best Regards,

Steven John

Owner of Sagari Ltd

http://www.itmanagedsupportservices.co.uk/

We will now be doing video training

We have been asked many times by our clients about training videos that they can use to help improve them with day-to-day IT... Ways to use IT to help manage time better... Way to save money with IT... Ways to monitor their staff and productivity using IT... and lots more...

We have decided at Sagari that we need to always try and give our clients what they desire so we will soon be launching our training videos which we will post not just to our paying clients but to the public as well.

They will be easy to follow and will not take up too much of your time but will ensure to help you in all aspects of IT Services from outsourced IT Support, backup and Disaster Recovery down to using MS Office properly

We will also allow you to follow us on twitter for recommendation that you would like us to train on so you get a say on what you want as well. Our twitter name is sagariLtd

Furthermore, remember to stay tuned to our Blog as we will be researching much more on new technologies on ways to help you and small to medium sized businesses. We will be offering pilot schemes for many services such as IT Security and Email Content management down to SPAM filtering and virtual services.

We will focus on specific businesses such as Estate Agents and Financial Services to see how we can help improve your business using leading technology services.

We have a lot of techies at sagari eager to start researching and helping all the many people out their improve their businesses through the use of IT.

We are an Outsourced IT Support company with a lot of experience and passion so look out for all the free training videos, resources, offers and more coming soon!

Furthermore you can always contact us o 01273 465526 / 08448845851 or contact us from our website at www.itmanagedsupportservices.co.uk

Thanks

Steven
Sagari Ltd
www.sagari.co.uk