Appledore’s intrepid U14 pilot gig crew have won the coveted 2017 Lineal Shield.

Sponsored by Lineal, the annual youth competition is just one race among the men’s, women’s and youth events held between local gig clubs as part of the annual North Devon Pilot Gig Club Regatta in Barnstaple. 

This year’s winning youth team had to contend with the hot sunshine of an August Bank holiday on the river Taw, completing the traditional 1-mile sprint race which finishes by Barnstaple’s Longbridge, just outside Lineal’s riverfront offices, at a record pace.

Fans and supporters lined the Barnstaple quayside to cheer on the local gig races, including the winning Appledore boat, the Whitford.

Signalling from the quarterdeck of his event camera-boat the ‘Red Baron’, Lineal’s naval correspondent and Managing Director Mike Matthews congratulated the young team on their success: 

“This is the second year of the Lineal Shield competition, and it was fantastic to see the Appledore team win the trophy in spectacular fashion. It’s important we do everything we can to support youth sport.”

“Congratulations to all the excellent local teams who took part in this year’s brilliant community event. I’m off to the pub.”

Lineal’s foreign correspondent this week travelled to London for the Gamma Roadshow 2017: where a host of Gamma’s most interesting new products and services were showcased to a capacity crowd at the Barbican.

Gamma’s extremely flexible cloud-based telecoms offering has been one of Lineal’s most popular new products, and has taken the wider business telecoms sector by storm: with more than a quarter of a million Gamma Horizon phones now in use across the UK.

As a Accredited Gamma Partner, we were most impressed with:

• Special pricing for the educational and charity sectors – keeping Horizon phone systems competitive in sectors where cost-effectiveness is especially important.

• Cloud compute – Gamma’s partnership with Amazon web services offers the chance for companies who had previously moved their PBX to the cloud to begin virtualising other server assets as well, where the limits of technical knowledge would have held many back. It’s early days for Gamma’s Cloud Compute, but expect this to begin making waves in the IT world.

• New integrator options: the full list of CRM systems which integrate directly with ‘call-to-click’, shared contacts directories and more, is now exhaustive, with Gamma adding TAPI integration – it’s hard to imagine that Horizon won’t fit your existing software.

• Converged – Gamma mobile enters the big leagues, with Gamma Sims that run a ‘roaming in the UK’ system named ‘Multinet’ and using the native dialler of the phone. Without the need for an App, this is true mobility, and your mobile really will be a true extension of your Gamma landline.

• PCI Compliance – the extraordinary flexibility of Gamma Horizon phone systems had only been held back in more sensitive environments by it’s own call recording, which hadn’t been PCI compliant. New tools for PCI compliance change this, and opens up Gamma’s phone systems to payment centres for the first time.

The Gamma Roadshow is a chance for UK Gamma Partners to give feedback and receive news on Gamma’s latest developments – with this year’s roadshow, Gamma have clearly acted on that feedback and their voice, data, mobile and cloud computing platforms are stronger for it.

For communications expertise and support – contact Lineal today.

2017

With data security making national news headlines, 2017 is only likely to put increasing pressure on businesses of all sizes to take sensible precautions.

But with IT moving so fast, what innovations are likely to lead the way through 2017? Exactly what sensible precautions will most tech-savvy companies be taking?

Cloud is good…

The worldwide push for ever more cloud-based systems appears to be unstoppable. A recent report from Synergy Research Group has suggested the global market for cloud computing grew by 25% to September 2016, reaching a staggering $148 billion in value.

It’s hard to see this not continuing, with companies relying on the convenience and automation of stashing growing quantities off-site backups in the cloud – using services like Office 365 as their private vault. As we’ve covered before: holding assets like email in the cloud actually gives you better protection than most people’s private server.

…..But Hybrid Cloud is better still.

But 2017’s smartest will be looking further ahead to Hybrid Cloud systems. As IT Pro recently noted, many companies report using more than 5 backup systems, but have no planning for speed of recovery should that data actually be needed urgently during 2017.

Getting all that data back may present a problem if your organisation is large, meaning hybrid on-site/cloud services like Lineal’s Disaster Recovery Service are likely to become the most flexible middle option. Keeping both a synchronised backup on-site, and a copy with a relatively local cloud service, leaves even the most vulnerable business with the maximum number of options.

Change your passwords

If you don’t already change passwords regularly, the security benefits cannot be overstated. Stolen data can often be circulated on the internet many times, so changing passwords regularly keeps not only your business secure, but helps prevent repeat data theft from being profitable. 

Whilst everyone still has a ‘New Year’ mindset and are prepared to accept a little change, it’s worth updating those passwords company wide. Remember to use a variety of different characters and choose something only you would ever guess.

Have a 2017 Plan A…. and a Plan B

Ransomware increasingly appears to be the organised criminal world’s cyber-weapon of choice and shows no sign of abating; expect to see more big UK high-street names get compromised this year by malicious emails. 

Antivirus companies may include ever more sophisticated heuristics to intercept malicious downloads before they begin encrypting your files, but ultimately only safe backups will ensure you can always restore to a clean set of data. Every firm should have a ‘Plan B’ for how to carry this out.

It’s all about Recovery Time

Expect to see Disaster Recovery (not just back-up and contingency) become a by-word for preparedness, with companies and organisations in every sector being judged not just by their number of backups, but by their costly hours of down-time. 

So if nothing else, start 2017 with an old piece of technology: a pen and paper. Work out what your business’ data recovery plan actually is, and how long it will take –  should the very worst happen.

Lineal can provide a range of IT security and business continuity solutions: contact our team today.