Operational Effectiveness Archives

Ensuring Cloud Compliance: Considerations for Regulatory Requirements

Ensuring Cloud Compliance is simply a necessity for any business to have in the modern world. With so many regulations and acts to protect users and parties from lots of different violations, ensuring that your organisation is aware of the requirements is vital. This is especially true for cloud computing. As businesses turn towards the [...]

Optimising IT Infrastructure: The Key to Scaling Your Business

It’s no secret that running IT within your business can be expensive. With IT costs and spending rising globally, a solid IT strategy that checks every box that a modern business needs is looking to be much more expensive for the average business than ever. Optimising your business’ IT infrastructure can be one of the [...]

WhatsApp: MiFID II compliance for FCA regulated companies

The Risks of Neglecting WhatsApp message archiving The financial services industry operates in a highly regulated environment. This is done to ensure transparency, fair treatment of customers, and the stability of the financial markets. In this context, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) plays a vital role in setting standards for financial [...]

Five ways that Microsoft Azure can make you more efficient

Azure can make you more efficient: Azure is a comprehensive cloud platform that provides over 200 products and cloud services, ranging from databases to virtual desktops, quantum computing, and machine learning applications. For businesses, Azure offers a wide range of benefits, including increased security, centralised management, and most importantly, cost savings. Here are five ways [...]

Record WhatsApp calls in accordance with FCA compliance

How to record WhatsApp Calls in line with MiFID II regulations Introduction and risks Compliant WhatsApp call recording: Over time, many regulated businesses have discovered that customers – and customer facing staff alike are leaning towards sending important information via WhatsApp. Whilst this has its benefits, it opens organisations up to a plethora of FAC [...]

Strategies for FCA Compliant WhatsApp Messages & Call Recording

Businesses need to ensure that their WhatsApp messaging and call recording systems are setup to comply with MiFID II regulations. UK firms need to launch effective strategies for FCA compliant WhatsApp messages and call recording. The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) is a set of regulations that have been put in place to [...]

Technologies to power the modern workplace

The definition of a workplace has changed a lot over recent years. Businesses are now looking at new technologies to power the modern workplace. Almost all industries no longer operate through what was once considered a normal ‘office’ job. Studies show around 50% of employees now work on a hybrid basis. This being, partly from [...]

The Pros and Cons of BYOD Policies

Bring your own device IT policies (often called BYOD policies) are often seen as a way to save money and increase productivity. However, there are both good and bad aspects to this policy. The pros of BYOD policies The pros include the ability for the employee to have more control over the device they use, [...]

Disaster Masterclass at Blenheim Palace: What you missed…

The first of our three exciting Disaster Masterclass events took place at Blenheim Palace last week. We had some amazing speakers from organisations such as Datto and Microsoft (Vuzion). They spoke about the importance of preparing your business against a business disaster! The threat landscape Cybercrime and cyber-fraud is at an all-time-high and will only [...]

Why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is Vital

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is vital. DRBC is the overall process of reducing the likelihood and impact of a disaster on a business. It is a key component for business viability. Business Continuity is the operations side of BCDR. For example, designing and creating policies or procedures that help essential business function during [...]

Can you, and should you monitor staff activity when home working?

Should you monitor staff activity when home working? This is quite a controversial subject with many mixed views, but given that 46% of workers in the UK currently work from home (either permanently or on a hybrid basis), it’s definitely something a lot of businesses are considering. Why you should monitor staff activity The main [...]

5 Steps to Create a Security Ecosystem

Why your business needs a security ecosystem? A security ecosystem is a group of technologies that work together on a platform to provide an outcome that utilises all the technology components effectively. We will be discussing the 5 steps to create a security ecosystem. Having an integrated and reactive system in place that works with [...]

Five Tools to Maximise Your Microsoft 365 Investment and Productivity

Here you will discover the five tools to maximise your Microsoft 365 in investment and productivity. There is more to Microsoft 365 than Word and Excel, which is not surprising. Microsoft has enjoyed 27% year-on-year growth with now nearly 200 million commercial Microsoft 365 users worldwide. Microsoft have therefore heavily invested into 365 – to [...]

Productivity Tools for the Modern Workplace – Microsoft 365

Introducing Microsoft Productivity Tools Let's find out how productivity tools for the modern workplace - Microsoft 365 can work for you. The modern workplace is a distraction - mobile phones, social media and a plethora of other communication tools. It can be a spectator sport just watching colleagues collaborate effectively on the latest project! You may [...]

Should we upgrade to Windows 11?

There may be some issues that you will need to consider around potential downtime if something goes wrong, as well as compatibility with your current hardware: Windows 11 is very new, so hasn't been tried and tested for an extended period. Windows 11 is currently only available to PCs with newer processors – mostly those [...]

An overview of Windows 11

Windows was first introduced in 1985 as an operating system – and Windows 11 is Microsoft’s first major release of the Windows operating system since 2015. The company has announced that it will be available as a free download for anyone who currently owns a Windows 10 device and will be available for purchase as [...]

Is outsourcing just a cost cutting exercise?

With the economy now more uncertain than ever, many organisations are looking into how they can cut costs whilst still delivering their business operations and goals. While outsourcing can deliver substantial savings – this shouldn’t be the only reason for choosing to outsource. If you are considering outsourcing, it’s worth understanding all the elements that [...]

Which should you use? Microsoft Teams or Zoom?

Recently the usage of both Microsoft Teams and Zoom has boomed! With millions of new installations of both Microsoft Teams and Zoom, we thought it would be useful to compare the everyday features. These are features that we believe most businesses would want to use: As the above table clearly shows, the differences between Zoom [...]

Transform Business Process with Microsoft SharePoint

How to transform business process with SharePoint: Cloud-based document management solutions can transform business processes. With Microsoft SharePoint, it is easy to access documents, schedules, and project plans. Additionally, it provides tools for communicating with team members. SharePoint provides all of these features and more, particularly when combined with Office 365. Microsoft's SharePoint enables users [...]

Are you using all the features of Microsoft Teams?

As of now, 200 million people use Microsoft Teams every month, leaving its closest competitor far behind. However, despite its success, many companies are still unfamiliar with the collaborative working tool. Even some of its existing customers have yet to discover the tool's full potential. Microsoft Teams is a component of the Office 365 suite [...]

Using Microsoft Planner to improve workflow and task management

Introducing Microsoft Planner Microsoft Planner is a task management tool which is already included with all Office 365 Business and Enterprise subscriptions. There are many paid applications on the market for task management Comparatively tools like Asana and Trello are very useful but Microsoft’s offering comes ready-integrated into Office 365, an application suite which many [...]

Do you run a business that employees up to 250 staff?

There always seems to be bad news about another massive corporation paying little to no tax, or a senior manager accused of sexual misconduct. But what often doesn't get reported are the GOOD NEWS stories of the economy… News about people running and working in SME businesses that actually keep the UK economy going and [...]

HR and IT – Why this relationship should matter to you

As a director or business owner, you may not immediately see how important it is for your HR & IT teams to work closely together. You may outsource one or both of these functions; businesses usually do this to gain a greater depth of knowledge and better overall continuity whilst saving money. Regardless of how [...]

Is your business disaster ready?

Prevention is better than cure, obviously. Having any level of downtime in any organisation can lead to some serious problems – and downtime can be due to anything, from a power outage to a loss of internet connection – if an application breaks, a cyber-attack happens, or even a natural disaster or fire… 59% of the top FTSE [...]

Why should you read the Terms and Conditions?

Scroll, scroll and scroll some more, look for the ‘Agree’ button and sign your life away. Terms and Conditions are in fact, a contract. They are a contract between you and the company you are using. So, when they are so important… why do most people never read them? The reason is a simple one: they [...]

Microsoft Office 365 could be the answer