We all know that e-mail is the primary channel for business communication, and it will be for many years to come. Most users spend a significant amount of time using email to fulfil their day to day duties. In-fact a recent study  found that 46% of email users spend more than two hours each day doing something in their mail box. The same study found that 75% of a company’s IP is stored in a company’s messaging systems! I don’t think I can really disagree with those figures based on my experience.

Business is done with email,  a business is responsible for it’s communications, 

I was recently asked a number of questions by a journalist, revolving around whether VDI was the answer to the current management challenges facing traditional PC based environments. The questions/answers are shown below :-

What are the challenges facing people trying to manage desktops today?

• Hardware failures are still a pain in an environment when they occur, it’s difficult to avoid though as PC’s are still electrical devices and have moving parts that do fail.
• Patch management has eased but is still a bit of a pain, as are general 

INTRODUCTION

The objective of this brief paper is to give the owner, managing director or finance director of an SME (10 – 500 employees) some thoughts about how to maximise the value from their Information Technology and Communications (ITC) investment. Many SMEs outsource ITC because they do not have or want the expensive in house resources required to support an ITC infrastructure. In many cases this is done through local providers as the major players in the ITC outsourcing market tend to focus on large corporate or governmental agencies. In principle this is a good strategy i.e. 

I’ve walked into many smaller organisations (up to 10 servers) with my new business hat on  (cough (Ive never got a true sales head on)) and the IT team will moan about the performance of their virtualised environment. I’d say that 40% of those complaining of speed issues are running their VMs off cheap rack mount NAS devices running SATA. Another 40% have a SAN configured with at least one RAID 6 array. The other 20% have issues related to other issues.

I’ll ask them the  question of how many IOPS there virtualised servers demand and they’ll stare 

Well, we are all in 2011 now and I think it should be an interesting year for business in general, particularly where IT is concerned. I believe that this will be the year that IT really shines again, especially the Small and Mid-Market operations. It’s going to be the businesses that embrace IT and invest it who are going to be in the strongest competitive position in the coming years. The world is rapidly changing and it’s IT that will deliver the edge.

Below I’ve just put a few high-level points that should be considered as an absolute minimum this coming year -

Look