A survey by the insurance company Zurich found that 53 per cent of SMEs were spending more time on their risk management strategy than before the financial crisis. No doubt some of that developed from a feeling of ‘once bitten’, but from talking to customers there’s definitely a sense that organisations are now more aware of how much they rely on technology in their day-to-day operations.

At a top level, Commvault delivers services ranging from data protection and archiving to data indexing and end user search recovery, from a single platform across all of your enterprise resources – be it on premise, in the cloud or distributed on your endpoint devices. 

That’s a compelling message that resonates whether your focus is on business or IT. The latter benefits because their job is made easier. Commvault’s single codebase delivers a consistent experience in multiple use cases of content indexing. As a result, IT teams have more time and resources to add value elsewhere in their organisation (a theme I’ll return to in a future blog post). The business also benefits because of the cost savings, so it’s a win-win.

To meet these twin challenges, SureSkills is hosting a complimentary briefing for business and IT decision makers who will be directly affected by the implications of EU GDPR. Together with our partners Commvault and Microsoft, attendees will hear how to manage and protect critical data while staying on the right side of the forthcoming regulations.

Like most technology providers, we naturally have partnerships because we’ve always believed it’s better to have evaluated vendors on behalf of our customers, rather than presenting a bewildering array of options to pick from – especially if those customers don’t have the time or breadth of technical experience to judge for themselves and relied on us for guidance. 

(The reason for this is, most large organisations and especially financial intuitions’ internal staff are only exposed to their own environment – and sometimes only small sections of that. The restrictions and regulations on changing the environment limit their chance to carry out these tasks.)

Now that the ‘as a service’ model for IT has become mainstream, my advice for the year ahead is to be smarter about cloud procurement in order to maximise the benefit it brings to your business. 

Many organisations still consume cloud services like traditional technology stacks, buying more than they actually need. Unlike the IT of old, the cloud’s rental model means you can adjust your service spend from month to month. The key is to make your provider work for you and your business. Most cloud platforms have granular metrics about application usage, so you can see patterns and take action accordingly through adjustments, training or enablement to maximise usage of the technology.