Splitsec are pleased to announce that we have been shortlisted for the Bradford Means Business Awards 2012!

The previous 12 months has seen Splitsec go from strength to strength once again and for this success be recognised by The Bradford Chamber of Commerce and The Telegraph & Argus is something we’re very proud of. Managing Director Alex Mordey had this to say of the nomination:

“Since our expansion and move to Shipley in 2009 we’ve worked hard to establish ourselves as an important business within Bradford. This nomination just serves to show that the effort has been worthwhile and we look forward to continuing our upward trend into 2012 and beyond.”

The overall winners of the Bradford Means Business Awards 2012 are announced at a special event on Saturday May 26^th.

http://www.bradfordchamber.co.uk/news.asp?id=1&newsid=1543

Training has begun in earnest and the team are aiming to leave Liverpool on Friday June 8^th to start the estimated 113 mile journey back to Splitsec’s head office which has pride of place alongside the Shipley Marina.

We’ll be working with our staff and customers to raise as much money as we can for ‘The Sick Childrens Trust‘ to give them every incentive they need to peddle! One of the main sponsorship incentives for you the sponsor will be your logo/companies name on Team Splitsec’s cycling jerseys.

Sponsorship space is being sold on a best bid basis (minimum bid £150). The highest bids will receive prime position on our shirts, so dig deep and ensure your company has pride of place. We have also set up a just giving
page for those who want to make smaller contributions. We will also be running a raffle featuring some exclusive ‘money can’t buy prizes’.

A barbecue and party will be hosted for all our sponsors and to welcome our intrepid team home on the Saturday 5pm onwards at Saltaire Brewery. the raffle will also be drawn at the brewery.

Please contact us for more information.

If you would like to join us for some or the whole of the cycling event please contact Rob Fearnley on our main number.

 Shirt Sponsors so far (in order of donation amount)

Out with the old.

The site has been developed over the last 4 months entirely by Splitsec. you can see the new site here and old one by clicking the links.

In with the new!

If you would like to benefit from Splitsec’s Online presence and e-commerce services, please contact us and we would be happy to provide you with our site portfolio and a no obligation quote.

The answer comes on three layers. First, you can manually back it up or you could take a plunge into the cloud.

That’s fine and good for something like a simple hardware failure, but what about the case of catastrophic failure such as flood or a fire? Most of the talk has revolved around cloud storage.

Cloud backup has it’s pluses and it’s minuses. First of all, it’s slow. Even with today’s broadband capabilities found in many households, upload speeds are still relatively slow. According to ofcom the national average upload speed is a mere 230kbps.

Second, it can be costly and have recurring fees. I have all of my family photos stored online and pay around £4/month in storage and monthly access fees. I can’t even imagine how expensive it would be to also store all of my music and videos there (or how long it would take to transfer).

Third, many people take issue with storing personal data in the cloud, sure the data is encrypted, but it’s still stored on someone else’s system. Who knows when the day will come that some hacker breaks in and looks at photos of me drunk at a party. I don’t see this happening any time soon, but some people do. Of course, I don’t think the moon landing was fake and some people do (you know who you are).

Alex

The gospel of disk has been preached for so long now that disk seems to be the inevitable choice for backup technology. But insiders throughout the tech world say there still are plenty of reasons to backup with tape.

Mainly this is for security and how well each form factor can ultimately survive while being moved around. The USB disk should perhaps be the most concerning, ultimately a basic USB disk, if lost can be plugged into anyones PC and restored. A tape on the other hand requires the same drive, and the password to restore. As far as portability goes, a tape is inert, has no electronics in side and can survive a harsher life than its USB hard disk counterpart.

Fragile disk inside, NOT FOR PORTABLE USE

You need to ask what you are actually protecting against,

said Frank Westerheim, president of a technology services company.

Maybe a small business is backing up data ‘just-in-case,’ keeping files locked in a vault or taking off site as part of a daily backup routine on the off chance they might be needed down the road, Westerheim explained. Or a business might virtually mirror a whole system every night in order to restore data and applications immediately in case of disaster.

Two Different Needs, Two Different Solutions

Suppose a small business wants to protect its data and intellectual property. The company may never look at these archived items again, but they still need to keep them just in case. Tape is still the way to go for this kind of deep archiving. It’s cheap, easy to handle, secure, inert, and it can be stored safely in a vault off premises.

Backing up to hard disk, on the other hand, fulfills a different need.

The fundamental question is: What are your restore or recovery objectives?

said Barry Hammond, Director of sales and marketing at a Data Protection Solution company.

“All a tape does is store data, whereas a virtualised backup can take a complete image of your OS, your settings and your applications,” Hammond said. Provided the company has invested in the software to take virtual snapshots or ‘virtualise’ in the first place then a disk fills this kind of backup need. And there’s no reason these different types of backup can’t coexist.

There is also the question of speed, Many small companies have cheap off the shelf portable USB hard drives designed for single personal us, not for Enterprise backup.

Using this type of media has speed and throughput implications.

Hammond said. Do you want your backup to complete in one night? Tape drives have evolved to become very fast; for example, the recently released LTO-5 is capable of writing at 280 MBps (assuming 2:1 compression) which will outperform disk by a long way, particularly as cheaper lower-tier disk such as USB/SATA is normally chosen for backup. They will also hold more. LTO5 Has a native capacity of 1.5tb and a compressed maximum of 3tb. And with LTO 6, 7 & 8 planned with a total backup capacity of 12.8tb or 32tb at 2.5:1 compressed its certainly not going away.

Welcome, then, to the same old balancing act. The pundits may have promised that disk storage would solve all your problems, but nothing’s ever that simple — especially technology. Tape and disk both have their respective virtues, and depending on your needs it is entirely possible that you’ll ultimately find that an tape based archive is the start and progressing to disk based snapshots when budget allows.

Source from Engadget.com

In an apparent attempt to solidify its standing in the corporate world, RIM has unveiled a new platform that allows IT specialists to more tightly manage company devices — even those from rival manufacturers like Apple and Android. With the BlackBerry Mobile Fusion software, announced this morning, companies will be able to set up rules governing employee passwords apps and other software across a variety of smartphones and tablets, including the iPhone, iPad and Android handsets. 

The system also allows managers to remotely wipe and lock any devices that go missing or stolen, potentially bringing enhanced security to a workplace that’s become increasingly fragmented. “Our customers have been saying, ‘We’re moving to these different adoption models, and we’d like you on board with that,’” said Alan Panezic, vice president for enterprise product management, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Slated to launch during the first quarter of next year, Mobile Fusion represents RIM’s first foray into the multi-platform management market, and may expand even further to encompass Windows Phone devices, as well. Compatible with BlackBerry OS and BBX, Mobile Fusion will also allow users to remotely manage PlayBooks from BlackBerry handsets, though that won’t happen until February, when the tablet finally receives a software update. No word yet on pricing, but Panezic says it will be “competitive” with the market.

Splitsec currently provides software, hardware, and I.T. services to many public and private schools around the UK. This award from VMware places Splitsec as one of only a handful of resellers to receive this status and allows for a higher satisfaction to all current and future academic clients.

Further, effective August 16, 2011, academic clients must ONLY come to resellers with VMware’s Academic Specialisation in order to receive access to Academic SKUs and pricing.

Splitsec is pleased to have received this status and looks forward to providing an even higher level of service to its academic customers with this new VMware Academic Specialisation. For more information regarding how Splitsec might help your academic program please contact us.

Almost three-quarters of firms and public sector organisations across nine European countries may not fully recover their computer systems or data after an IT failure, a survey suggests.

The report by IT group EMC said 74% were “not very confident” they could fully restore their networks.

It also found that 54% admitted they had lost data or suffered systems downtime in the past 12 months.

A total 1,750 IT bosses in countries including the UK were questioned.

The other countries covered in the survey were Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Russia.

EMC said firms needed to put more focus on backup and recovery systems.

Its report found that the most common cause of data loss and downtime was hardware failure, followed by power outage and software malfunction.

Source – BBC News -http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15866885

A perfect reason to take our free onsite consultancy and system health check with a view to ongoing support and Business Continuity planning.

Splitsec introduce business web hosting to our customers. Fully managed by ourselves or self managed via your own Cpanel Interface. Hosting includes everything you need and nothing you dont. Simple and effective.

Call today for a no obligation quote.

Ask to speak to David.

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In the blog we’ll aim to tell you about the people that make Splitsec successful, exciting developments on the salesfloor and notable successes throughout the company.

Added to this we’d like to make the blog as interactive as possible so if you’ve got anything you want to know about Splitsec, a suggestion for the website or blog or you’d simply like to say hello then we’d love to hear from you.

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Best Wishes

Rob Fearnley