1. 2 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 3
IT’s a Personal Thing
Manager 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.