London Data

Full Support Client Restructured Their Business and Doubled in Size

Terry May — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:59:16 +0000

A Full Support client in EC2 London conducted a complete restructuring of their business setup, creating a 2 company structure working closely together, doubling the headcount at their offices. They took the opportunity to boost their IT infrastructure, and asked London Data to identify the key areas where their investment would benefit the most and carry out the required work.

Firstly, a leased line internet connection was installed, providing our client with a dedicated ad stable internet connection, something that is hard to come by in Central London.

Next, a state-of-the-art backup solution was implemented using Microsoft DPM, removing the need for backup tapes and giving full accessibility to files up to 10 versions back and capture and keep emails for a set number of days. This incorporates a failsafe Disaster Recovery solution protecting both companies’ data at all times.

Furthermore, new servers were installed with Windows Server 2008 Standard R2 providing the stability and manageability necessary when a company is reliant on IT. We set up servers for the new company and upgraded the existing company’s servers to ensure the clear division between the companies but at the same time maintaining the interoperability and benefits that come from two companies sharing office space. The setup of the servers included installing and configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SQL Server 2008 Standard and Microsoft Exchange 2010, along with 2 brand new high-speed switches to accommodate the extra network access required.

Lastly, new workstations were set up with Windows 7, Office 2010 and the latest version of Sage Accounts, ensuring optimum compatibility with the servers.

This all-round upgrade took couple of months to complete, ensuring a smooth transition and least possible disruption to the employees. The new hardware has a life expectancy of 3-5 years meaning that our client should have minimal hardware expenditures for the foreseeable future. Our client now has a more manageable and secure IT infrastructure that offers a fast and stabile interface for the end users.

Terry May

Support Manager

Disaster Recovery Planning

Matthew Manning — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:27:10 +0000

Disasters do happen, and we’re not talking about earthquakes or epidimic outbreaks of the plague, we’re talking about your data; your files, emails, and projects that you have spent hours and hours on, and that are essential to your business. They are all on your server, right? well, sometimes servers break, someone spills tea in it, there’s a flooding short circuiting your power supply, and yes, there could be a freak fire destroying your entire building.
If any of these happen, the impact on your business data and your ability to function as a business should be minimal, at least if you have a Disaster Recovery plan like the ones that London Data offers.

Your peace of mind
London Data gives you that peace of mind that your data is safe no matter what, and we can even make sure you can retrieve a single file if it is deleted or altered accidentally.
In short, we’d setup a double backup system, with a backup server in your office, and a backup server in a data centre. These two will work together in backing up your documents every 10 minutes, and your images, videos and sound files every night. The system will keep the ten most recent editions of a document, allowing you to go back in time and retrieve documents if necessary.
The off site backup server will create a complete image of your system, so in case of a fault, fire or frenzy, we can grab the server and get you back to business anywhere in the world within hours.

One setup fee, no maintenance required
Depending on the size of your business, the amount of data you have and how quickly you need a restoration, a Disaster Recovery plan only has a setup fee and can then run for app. three years without the need of maintenance or monthly support fees. If your data amount changes significantly minor adjustments may be required, but otherwise your DR solution should only need a checkup once every three years.

Call us on 0845 0041 600 or email support@london-data.co.uk to hear more.

Karen Bodil Pii Svane

Business Development

Modernised IT Solution for International Charity

Matthew Manning — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:00:07 +0000

The headquarters of a truly international organisation, World Association of Girl Guides andGirl Scouts’ World Bureau in North London, works alongside several international offices to manage global guiding events, promotions and activities. The nature of the organisation underlines the importance of effective communication, filesharing, data security and overall system stability. London Data were invited to implement a modernised, centralised and standardised solution including a dedicated support technician on-site during office hours, as well as 2nd and 3rd line escalation routes.

The concept was to allow the offices access to a centralised store of data for accounting and membership applications to increase productivity and inter-site co-operation. With each network location working differently and with their own security concerns, a global policy needed to be designed and implemented to ensure the level of seamless connectivity and interoperability required by the World Bureau without compromising the integrity of the file system and working model.

The office spaces have been set up to interconnect through VPNs between local networks and remote workers can connect from all over the world to servers and workstations via terminal services. Guest computer terminals on site have been segregated and locked down to prevent un-witting guest users from compromising mission critical data and services. We implemented a standardised security structure for users, passwords and access rights, and furthermore a centralised system for management of operating system maintenance and virus/malware protection from our central London location, affording the organisation the comfort of a well-managed and supported IT environment.

Karen Bodil Pii Svane

Business Development

Data Restoration

Matthew Manning — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:49:56 +0000

Civil Society Media, formerly Plaza Publishing, is a specialist publishing house that produces magazines, websites and bespoke research projects within the civil society – charity sector.After dramatic hardware failure (a failed hard disk controller) left their communications, application sand therefore their business crippled, London Data were asked to get the company’s IT back on its feet after previous oversights in disaster recovery management meant that there were significant gaps in the restoration plan. After eventually restoring and recreating the servers and network to full working order we were asked to managetheir systems and ensure this never happened again.

Working within the budget of the organisation, the accepted proposal was precise and efficient without sacrificing the security of the data or stability and viability of the IT system. The existing network was not out-dated or under specification and in fact only small changes to the server hardware was required.The final solution was multifaceted, including creating multiple state of the art back-up sets in order to simplify and accelerate any necessary restoration in the future. Automatic fail-safes have been employed such as disk mirroring and the setting up of secondary servers to handle DNS and DHCP, so in the event of primary services being unreachable the system behind kicks in.

A second internet connection has also been installed to allow users to access WAN resources independently of the exchange connection, and hot spares of critical server components have been made available and are kept on site so that they can be installed within a few moments.Implementation of remote monitoring tools enables us to keep track of how much hard disk space is available or how fast the internet connections are and target individual services and applications to provide London Data with an early warning system so granular that we can detect a problem and even fix it before Civil Society notices.

Karen Bodil Pii Svane

Business Development

Cloud Computing

Paul Appleby — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:07:35 +0000

IT network diagrams often include a symbol for the internet, a fluffy cloud. Just like it’s natural namesake, ‘The Cloud’ as an application service delivery model is a mysterious, organic, opaque and immeasurable entity and just as likely to show a silver lining as conceal then release a malicious electrical storm. As a customer of a Cloud service provider you place your data into a system that deliberately, in the name of commercial confidentiality and security, reveals nothing about it’s internal workings. Sure there are reassurances and even guarantees but watch out for the caveats; in the same way insurance companies disclaim with force majeure, The Cloud service provider will only guarantee what he can directly control and IT history tells us that’s very little.
One could, and is near forced to, blindly trust the provider -relying on your perceptions that they are an honourable company, who know what they are doing and that they can be trusted to protect your data come what may. From a security point of view (not to mention matters of operational, privacy or compliance) the concept of blind faith has a difficult place in an organisation’s business.
Once signed up to a cloud service you and likeminded peers are close together, sharing the service and it’s resources but where in nature there can be safety in numbers. In technology, if part of the service is under attack, there’s a fair chance you’ll be caught up in the collateral damage and suffer along with the intended target. So a question for the service vendor is ‘am I sited anywhere near a prolific, controversial or combative organisation’?
One counter argument could that these companies have excellent reputations, that nothing so far has ever compromised a client’s data security and that they make every possible effort to keep it that way. The service provider will give assurances that you and any other organisation are electronically separated by a large margin and that they have an infrastructure resilient to power outages, theft of hardware, theft of intellectual property (data), single point of failures and digital attack or denial of service. They will say they perform x number of penetration tests per year. But it will always be in your mind; you may have hired the IT equivalent of an unknown person looking after the kids overnight.
Keeping your servers and it’s data locked up in your own office or server room, with your own internet connection or two (which is wise) paying your own power bills, making sure your antiviri and system security patches are up to date, making sure when employees leave they don’t leave with the accounts or the master client list, means you are master of your own security and system availability.
If you don’t trust yourself to do this properly, there is the option is offload these IT functions to a cloud service provider out there, in the internet, amongst many others. Better, get to know and a trustworthy and proven IT solution provider but keep the data and it’s dependencies under your lock and key.

Paul Appleby

Director

head of the family since 2003

Full Support

Matthew Manning — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:43:41 +0000

The essential element of an IT department, the helpdesk is responsible for helping end users and to manage issues through to completion. We believe friendliness is one of the core qualities of effective IT support personnel. London Data’s support encourages users to maintain one-to-one communications with a support agent ensuring continuity throughout.

Thorough – Our support agents are heavily trained in customer service and take ownership of issues to ensure delivery. Users do not get passed from department to department and you always know who you’re talking to. Technicians are required to keep the end user in the loop at all times with consistent progress reports and notices of completion. We constantly poll the users for satisfaction ratings and ask for honest feedback to ensure our service levels are as high as possible providing the business with a dynamic, efficient and complete support package.

Understanding – All London Data support staff understand the concerns a system’s users can face and it’s this understanding that enables us to position our services to be more efficient and effective in dealing with an organisation’s technical and sometimes non-technical issues. Our agents are polite, friendly and communicate in plain English without patronising the user, which is why our help desk is constantly applauded by our clients.

User and System Support – London Data user support is delivered by a dedicated team of service engineers, providing telephone and remote support via secure support tools. The team is augmented by a highly qualified team of field engineers who visit client sites as or on demand.

Being proactive, looking for trouble – Well maintained systems run securely, reliably and perform at their optimum. One of the key reasons for our success is our constant proactive work to ensure the whole IT infrastructure is operating at its best, supporting the business which relies on it.

Human checks – Each day our maintenance staff manually check each and every managed infrastructure device for errors. Workstations and printers are automatically monitored for trouble.

Escalation – On discovery of an issue, an escalation process is run where the event is evaluated against criteria for its impact on a user, users or the system as a whole and if necessary assigned to a 2nd line engineer for action.

Remedy – Post-action the issue is rechecked and if appropriate further work will follow to ensure the issue is completely dealt with. Further close checks are made over subsequent intervals to ensure no re occurrence.

Automatic checks – 120 times per hour our central monitoring servers check each and every client’s core system metrics and compares these to well-tuned trigger levels for first stage warning, second stage alert or third stage alarm and then to a process of escalation, inspection and remedy.

Planned maintenance – Planned maintenance is a very important part of our service. All hardware and software manufacturers regularly update their products and these must be implemented in a tested, managed process but not so it inconveniences the users or affects day-to-day business. We routinely perform this work out of hours by dedicated staff, escalating and programming remedial work as necessary.

Reporting – Support, maintenance and monitoring staff log incidents and generate management reports to help with strategy, training and risk management. This info is fed back to the client to insure transparency and the best practice management.

Strategy – Technology alone will not provide any benefit to a business or organisation, it is only a means to an end. A strategy that connects the needs of a business to complex but enabling technologies delivers a solution that allows a business to operate with best practice, efficiency and performance but still manages risk, compliance and HR requirements.

Typical drivers in our technical strategic plans include commercial objectives, operational structure, sector or industry considerations and the individual needs and wants of the client.

Some clients retain us to look after their entire IT requirements via our Full Service, All-Inclusive model. For these clients, we commonly strategise on an on-going basis. Complementary Service clients retain us to augment in-house IT and strategy is often a service delivered from our portfolio of options. As a full service provider with a wide range of industry partners, we not only advise on the best options for our clients but can also implement and manage the solutions we recommend.

Complementary Support

Matthew Manning — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:42:26 +0000

Infrastructure – involves infrastructure audits and reviews, infrastructure support & maintenance, infrastructure design & implementation, user support and user training.

Security – involves intrusion detection, layered anti-malware, email screening, internet filtering, user access control and penetration testing.

Availability – involves clustered applications, failover networking, server cloning and off site data streaming.

Communications – involves email delivery, IP reputation, private instant messaging, site to site voice and video, remote user voice and video.

Disaster recovery and continuity – involves data back-up, back-up testing, multilevel storage, DR planning and testing.

Strategy – involves network expansion, contraction, merger, multi-office connectivity, consolidation, virtualisation, remote working, home working and international VoIP telephony.

Compliance and legal – involves email archiving, access management, acceptable use policies, call recording and email filtering.

Clients are free to cherry-pick which elements they need to fulfil their technology infrastructure work in partnership with incumbent resources for the best benefit of your business.

IT Projects

Matthew Manning — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:41:31 +0000

Brand new – End-to-end design, planning, procurement and implementation. Data migration, complete interconnectivity, project management and full post project support. Thorough third party liaison and complete end user involvement.

Workstation roll-outs – Replacing or adding multiple workstations at once is a task for an experienced team. As with servers we work out of normal hours to ensure project delivery, utilising leading desktop cloning techniques for efficient and effective rollouts.

Remote working – Where staff work from home or while travelling. Creating and maintaining a managed, secure and available platform for users operating
nationally and internationally.

Remedial work – Where there are existing faults and difficulties with an existing IT system London Data have the necessary expertise and experience to diagnose and repair almost any IT system including legacy in Windows and Linux systems, all to the best practice standards.

Server replacement – Replacing core network servers is a common task. File servers, MS Exchange, SQL and domain servers are replaced and often upgraded, out
of business hours to be live and ready Monday morning.

Network mergers – Companies merge and their individual IT systems must work together, migrating to a single platform and line of business application.

Security projects – We do numerous security projects from managing acceptable internet use to system hardening, mitigating risks and meeting auditory requirements.

Availability upgrades – Using real-time replication, loadbalancing, redundant clustering technologies including storage networking to meet the clients needs.

Consultancy

Matthew Manning — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:39:35 +0000

One Office – For companies with a single office our consultancy and support solutions can greatly benefit a business through cost effective support and maintenance. Single office companies have unique issues with disaster recovery planning and its mitigation.

Two Offices – Companies with two offices have the challenge of shared, synchronised data access for both offices whilst maintaining full security. Where two offices are widely separated issues of affordable connectivity speed becomes a factor. We have several solutions involving multiple VPN connections and inexpensive leased line and DSL deployment.

Multiple offices – Three or more discreet offices present complex problems for effective IT. London Data have designed and built many multi-site wide area networks that deliver a complex inter-connected network and server solutions with excellent performance and 100% availability and redundancy.

International – As with multi-site offices above but with the added complication of time zone and large distance issues, International clients may require ‘follow the sun’ support and local\remote engineer availability which we achieve both within our business and with careful and strategic in-country partnerships.

Windows Recovery Malware

Matthew Manning — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:38:23 +0000

At London Data we have noticed an insurgence of drive-by-downloads of so called antivirus solutions for Windows 7, Vista and XP. These come in many guises but the most common will appear as a pop-up when visiting a website before ‘scanning’ your PC for malicious software. At this point if you are very vigilant and quick you can get out of this process by simply clicking the close button on the window – no harm no foul. However if you are unfortunate enough to have this scan complete and then attempt to remove these ‘malicious’ items (which are in fact nothing more than made up names) this rogue software installs itself on your system and all but cripples your computer.

Symptoms vary from preventing any applications running and warning you again and again that your system is infected to changing all your file attributes to ‘hidden’ so it appears the non-existent plethora of malware that this utility claims to have detected have deleted all of your files. Whatever it tries to do its main goal is to panic you in to buying the software – therefore getting your credit/debit card details. Not good news. Even worse is that these little nasties seem to be very adept at bypassing even the most adept of virus protection suites, it seems that as they do not self-propagate in the way that is expected of modern malware it slips through the net of most zero day threat detection algorithms… sneaky…

However, these can be removed with a little patience and a lot of cunning by simply using the tools that are available to you as standard with Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and 7. You may have noticed your operating system installing something called the Malicious Software Removal Tool once a month, and believe it or not Microsoft really seems to have hit the nail on the head with this one. Called by running the rather comforting ‘mrt’ command from a command prompt it scans your system much like a normal AV system, but like Mr.T seems to do so with much more aggression and success.

In short, if you are hit with one of these viruses the first thing I would recommend trying is a quick boot in to safe mode, clear your startup group and add a shortcut to mrt.exe in to that folder. Reboot in to normal mode and Mr T will run before the malware allowing you to get in there and clean it out before it starts denying you access to your programs. If you still find you are stuck, drop us a line at support@london-data.co.uk and one of our experts will be glad to help.

Matthew Manning

Maintenance & Projects

part of the family since 2009