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IT’s a Personal ThingManager Paul Kollnig

Insight

How, when and

M2 Computing was founded in 2000 by Greg Roffe, who honed his skills in IT working for major

blue chip corporations like IBM and Bausch and Lomb. Greg saw a niche in the market to make corporation calibre IT affordable to smaller businesses. He used the skills and experience he gained from managing multinational networks to develop scalable, best-practice solutions and services for SMEs. M2 Computing essentially helps businesses harness technology to become more productive, more resilient and ultimately more competitive.

The expectations surrounding disaster recovery have steadily increased to a point where customers, suppliers and partners expect you to be able to recover from a catastrophic failure of your IT infrastructure pretty much instantly. In the past, before virtualisation in the days when everyone backed up to tape, the

outside world was a lot more sympathetic to IT disasters and it was widely accepted that recovery could take days and full recovery potentially even weeks. Now any extended service outages will seriously damage an organisation’s credibility and undoubtedly result in lost sales. Disasters are inevitable and organisations are

The switch from CAPEX to OPEX

which some businesses have struggled to embrace. IT used to be a resource that you owned, however, over recent years it has become a lot more service orientated. As Internet connections improved, businesses were able to realise the potential of the cloud and migrate traditional on-premise solutions like

self-evident, but some businesses are reluctant to relinquish ownership. The

meant businesses were able to postpone IT investments and eke more life out of their capital investment. But this strategy transforms IT from a business enabler to a cost, a false economy which undermines productivity and development.

Virtual Desktop technology has been around for a while, but has largely evaded the reach of small businesses due to the bandwidth requirements… until now. Large internet connections have become affordable and more readily available due to increased competition, which has brought Virtual Desktop mainstream. But what is the elusive Virtual Desktop everyone talks about? In layman’s terms, the desktop a user experiences on their laptop or workstation is hosted centrally on a server, including all of the applications, data and personal settings. The workstation or laptop effectively becomes a thin client, serving no other purpose than to provide access to the

most problems can be resolved from the server.

workstation or laptop to the Virtual Desktop negating the need to upgrade local hardware to meet the latest OS and minimum hardware requirements.

restricted to a device and/ or location and no data is stored locally.

from anywhere and on any device including mobile phones and tablets

access.Virtual Desktop providers offer

the service on a cost per user per month basis, whereby typically the user count can be increased instantly and decreased with 30 days’ notice.

very appealing, particularly to small businesses, because you only pay for what you use. The costs are based on the number of users (and the associated economies of scale) and the software and storage requirements.

At M2 Computing we have helped many businesses migrate to Virtual Desktop. As the Virtual Desktop is hosted externally, it requires an adequate and reliable Internet connection to provide the optimum user experience. Businesses will also need to invest in a secondary or failover internet connection for resilience. On the whole, processor intensive applications e.g. media and design related applications like Photoshop and AutoCAD, can’t be virtualised, in which case businesses might need to consider a hybrid approach. Finding a provider that suits

tricky and therefore it is important to conduct ample due diligence to select a resilient and reliable solution. Among the

A good provider will deliver a secure and seamless user experience, allowing your employees to work uninhibited and leave you safe in the knowledge that your data is secure.

and databases remains your property at all times. The Virtual Desktop provider should not withhold physical access to the data (assuming there are no outstanding payments). This is typically done by copying data to an encrypted USB hard drive in the data centre. Even

though your data is backed up in the cloud, it is good practice to implement a supplementary backup strategy to back up your data to another location.

Switching providers is a relatively seamless process, almost like changing current accounts. Your environment is

your data is transferred and your users log into the new platform and continue to work as normal.

Our aim is to promote IT from a back

vendor agnostic, we are best placed to act as an impartial trusted advisor on all things technology, thereby enabling us to recommend, design, implement and support the best solutions for our customers. We harness technology to increase productivity and improve competitiveness, which involves more than delivery. It is a partnership based on trust and a comprehensive understanding of the needs and objectives of our clients. Our customers choose us because they know we can take care of all of their IT requirements and provide an attentive responsive service, a combination they

Business Development Manager Paul Kollnig

Comprehensive IT Support Service for Du Boulay Contracts

“We have used many different IT support companies over the years and without hesitation would say that M2 Computing provides the most comprehensive service of them all.” David Budd, Financial Director

Three years ago, Du Boulay experienced a full server failure, which took over a week to recover from. The downtime caused by this failure, had a negative impact on suppliers, contractors and clients. To avoid this situation arising in the future, M2 Computing recommended the ‘Blaze back up and disaster recovery product’. The Blaze solution uses virtualisation to create a complete disk image of all software and systems, and this ensures that should the server fail again or

systems in under an hour.