Travelling  to meetings with customers and suppliers is becoming ever more expensive and time consuming with increasing fuel costs and seemingly unending traffic jams. So what is the solution?

Lync Online, part of the Office 365 suite,  is an online video conferencing tool that allows users to create, moderate and join pre-planned and on-the-fly audio, video and web meetings with people inside and outside your organisation. You can also enhance your online presentations with screen-sharing and virtual whiteboards.

Lync Online Features

Lync Online is available from £1.30 per user per month, please contact us for more information.

First released in 2001, Windows XP is still a very popular operating system in the business world today with many business owners saying “why change, it works OK for us?” Microsoft applies a product support lifecycle to the software it releases, meaning they will only continue to release updates and service packs for the duration of that lifecycle and with the support lifecycle for Windows XP coming to an end in April 2014, now is the time to start planning your upgrades. I have listed below other reasons for upgrading.

Security- With support for XP ending in 2014 there will be no more updates or service packs so any new loopholes found by hackers can be easily exploited and will not be addressed by Microsoft.

Performance – Unless your PC is very old there is no need to upgrade your current hardware. Windows 7 has key performance improvements to take up less memory and run background services only when needed.

Compatibility – Many hardware vendors have now dropped support for Windows XP, so if a PC replacement becomes necessary you may not be able to run XP and you may be forced into a Windows 7 upgrade.

Productivity – Windows 7 has an improved desktop, with jumplists to provide shortcuts to documents and an improved search facility to help you find the files you need faster.

To avoid high upfront costs Windows 7 Enterprise is available via a low cost monthly subscription service, please contact us for more info.

With traditional IT you would buy hardware such as a server, software licenses such as Microsoft Office and then you pay additional fees for upgrades, repairs and maintenance. With cloud computing you buy your IT as a service, usually via a monthly subscription service and you pay only for the services you use.

How will this benefit your new business?

Reduced IT Costs – Avoid the high upfront costs of new hardware and software and the subsequent costs of renewing and refreshing. What’s more you will not have to pay for cooling, connectivity and maintenance costs associated with traditional on-premise IT.

Always up-to-date – The upgrades will be done at the datacenter meaning you will always be working on the latest and greatest software.

Anywhere Access – All you need to access cloud services is an internet connection.

Budget your IT Expenditure – You pay a predictable monthly fee based on the resources you’ve used.

Business Scalability - You can easily increase your IT resources to meet the needs of your business, so as your business grows your IT can easily grow to meet demands.

Business Continuity – If hardware fails it’ll switch over to working components in the cloud without any downtime to you meaning your business will remain unaffected.

Better Security – Cloud computing platforms are usually provided from a secure data center with high security physical and electronic barriers with top of the range firewalls and intrusion detection systems. This provides security beyond what most small businesses can afford.

Get AHead-IT is a Microsoft Certified Small Business Specialist and a Microsoft cloud partner and recommends Microsoft Office 365 . Get AHead-IT is also a recommended IT supplier of http://www.startups.co.uk.  Please view our Cloud Computing page or Contact Us for more details.

This means that the most popular E3 plan with all of the features below is just £13.25 per user per month.

• Cloud based email using your own domain name
• Unlimited email storage and archiving
• Shared calendars
• Instant messaging, PC to PC calling and video conferencing
• Web-based viewing and editing of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
• SharePoint Intranet site for sharing files and information
• External public website
• Configurable anti-virus & anti-spam filtering
• Office Professional plus desktop suite for up to 5 devices per user
• Active directory synchronisation

View our Cloud Computing page for more details or Contact Us.

What is Cloud Computing?

With cloud computing you plug into the services you need via the internet and you subscribe only to the services you need. This means you don’t need to invest heavily in hardware or software licenses you need for a successful business.

How will cloud computing benefit my business?

There is no need for large financial outlay that goes with having your own in-house servers and none of the associated running and operational costs. Upgrades are done for you as part of the service so you will not need to purchase and install upgrades every 3 years, ensuring you are always running the latest software. The ability to access the services anywhere is key for today’s mobile workforce.

How secure is my data?

Get AHead-IT uses Microsoft Online Services to deliver its cloud services, Microsoft has data centres located in various locations around the globe, each data centre has multiple layers of security and is far more secure than most small businesses could achieve in-house. With Microsoft Online Services you also get Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam included as part of the package.

 What about disaster recovery?

Microsoft has geo-redundant data centres which replicate each other so if one fails another will take over with your data backed up in “real time”. Microsoft European data centres are in Amsterdam and Dublin. Also if there is an issue at your premises such as a fire you can simply log onto the services from another location and continue to work.

Are cloud services really the way IT is going?

At Get AHead-IT we believe it is, and we are not alone, research suggests that almost three quarters of small to medium sized businesses plan to adopt the technology over the next 3 years, half of the businesses questioned said they planned to switch to cloud computing in the next 12 months.

 Why use Get AHead-IT?

We not only recommend Microsoft Online Services to our clients we actually use it ourselves, we don’t have any in-house servers. We offer a complete package of cloud transition services to get you up and running quickly, see our cloud computing page for more details.