General

Top tips on boosting your WiFi strength

With more time spent at home than in the office and out exploring, and more devices being connected for longer, you may have noticed a drop in the quality of your WiFi connection. Have no fear, the expert team of IT engineers here at Glo have put together their top tips to help improve your WiFi strength. You can always count on our engineers to rescue you from an IT-based headache. Password protection Let’s kick it off with password protection. It is essential to keep your WiFi protected with a password. People can be quick to make use of available and unprotected WiFi signals, which can make your connection an easy target if it has no password barrier. When creating your WiFi password, we recommend against using personal details or creating short or simple codes that are likely to be cracked easily. Router position Now, turn to your router! Find a strategic place for your router, avoiding any spots near metal objects. Metal objects can block the WiFi signal and limit its reach across your home. Placing it on a shelf or cabinet above floor level can also improve your signal ever so slightly by limiting potential blockages in the…

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General

Elevate your business with a Virtual IT Director

In this uncertain climate, it’s more challenging than ever to know what the right thing is for your business and how to make sure you are making decisions that are putting yourselves in the best position for success. More and more businesses are investing in IT Director Services. But, why? What’s the big deal and how does having an external IT Director onboard benefit your business? Investing in the future of your business Investing in IT Director services means you sign up to having an experienced individual from outside of your business join the team on an agreed contract to help channel your IT processes, decision-making and push your business goals forward. Having an external role in your team allows the IT Director to address sensitive issues tactfully in a way ingrained members of the team may feel unable. More so, offering a different perspective on how to approach things and add value to your strategy, based on their experience. In the tough economy that we are in, hiring a full-time internal body can be a huge commitment. Bringing an IT Director in that can offer flexibility as well as bringing a whole wealth of knowledge and real-life experience from…

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General

Goodbye GloHelp & NinjaRMM, Hello Datto!

If you’re an existing Glo customer, you’ll know that we’ve been using GloHelp for logging & managing tickets to resolve your issues. GloHelp was completely custom made by Karl, Glo’s Technical Lead, over 12 years ago. We decided to custom write a helpdesk as we struggled to find a solution that fits our needs. We’ve been keeping a close eye on possible GloHelp replacements for the past couple of years & nothing really WOWed us into making the transitions, until now. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been testing a helpdesk package called Datto. We’re really impressed with it & have decided to migrate from GloHelp to Datto over the next couple of weeks. Datto will also be replacing our Remote Monitoring & Management system that we currently use to monitor & connect to devices, NinjaRMM. At the moment, GloHelp & Ninja are completely separate. But as Datto will be our helpdesk & RMM software, we’ll be able to link tickets to the RMM software which will allow us to be much more efficient in resolving issues. How will this impact our active customers: Over the next couple of weeks, we will begin adding more of our customers to…

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General

How to get the most out of Microsoft Teams

A lot of our customers have recently implemented Microsoft Teams as their go-to solution for communicating as a team remotely. Microsoft will be replacing Skype for Business with Microsoft Teams on 31st July 2021. A lot of people are anxious about moving to Microsoft Teams, but it’s a welcomed upgrade by many, including ourselves. Teams offers much more customization & seamlessly links into other Office365 apps that you may already use. The recent spike in Microsoft Teams interest is likely due to more users working remotely in response to COVID-19. Microsoft Teams has been our primary method of internal communication for around 2 years now at Glo. As such, COVID-19 hasn’t impacted our internal communication whatsoever & we’ve got Teams to thank for that. Here’s a few tips to help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams. Should I run Teams inside or outside an RDS? Many of our customers connect to a Remote Desktop Server to carry out their daily work. However, one thing that an RDS will struggle with is using devices such as webcams & headsets in Microsoft Teams. This is because the data that’s recorded by the devices has to be recorded/processed on your local…

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Cloud

Minimising COVID-19 Disruption with Glo’s Cloud-Based Services

As more & more companies across the world begin to implement remote working policies in response to COVID-19, we thought we’d update our customers on some of the cloud-based solutions that we currently implement that can help minimize the disruption that this may bring. Here at Glo, we’re somewhat seasoned veterans when it comes to remote working. Glo is entirely remote & has been for quite some time. Our team members live all over the UK & one of them even living in Spain! We use remote IT systems, including all of those listed below, every single day to carry out our jobs. So not only do we know how to implement these systems, we know the ins & outs of using them to carry out your daily tasks & what sorts of issues come with this. Remote Desktop Servers Many of our customers are now carrying out their daily work on Remote Desktop Servers that we host at a data center. A Remote Desktop Server is basically a very powerful computer that’s based in an extremely secure building with incredibly fast internet (data center). Users can then click an icon on their machine which then allows them to sign…

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General

Glo becomes a teen!

Did you know Glo have recently begun our thirteenth year in business? The company is now officially a teenager, and as you might expect we’re going through some changes, but thankfully without the hormonal mood swings. In this blog, we’re going to spotlight some of the new stuff we’ve done this year. We’ve helped customers escape from profiteering phone companies. We now provide and manage 17 new FTTC connections and 3 leased lines for our customers. Some customers are paying over £1000 less each year for a significantly faster internet connection (up to 10x faster). Our phone systems are also saving our customers money without tying them to a contract. In the past 12 months, we’ve installed 9 new VOIP setups, with upwards of 70% monthly cost reductions achieved by some customers. We’re using Ninja tactics to stealthily improve our support. The deployment of our new Ninja RMM agent was completed at the beginning of the year. This tool now helps us to proactively monitor and manage over 900 devices. The increase to the Glo teams efficiency afforded by this has contributed to fewer support tickets being raised (down 3%). This is in spite of a 16% increase in our…

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General

Glo’s Recent NPS Survey

Recently we carried out an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey to ensure that we are providing excellent service to our customers. We would like to thank everyone for taking the time out of their hectic schedules to fill out this survey for us, we really do appreciate it! An NPS score is a universal measurement that businesses use to measure customer satisfaction & business growth. The survey is very simple, just one simple question that you’ve probably seen before from other NPS surveys. “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”, with a scale of 1-10 to answer with. We can then use these results to see issues that may go unseen without the aid of this survey. Overall, we are very happy with our results with a score of 59 from 39 responses (68% response rate). For reference, any score above 0 is considered to be “good”, above 50 is “Excellent” & 70 or above is “World Class”.  According to a 2014 study conducted by TemkinGroup, the average NPS score for the Technology/Software/Hardware industry is 30. An NPS score of 59 is quite an achievement & we are very proud to hit…

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General

Phone System Changes

If you are an existing Glo customer you may have noticed some changes to our phone systems if you’ve had to call us lately. To fulfill our ongoing commitment to excellent communication with our customers, we have made the decision to remove the menu from our phone system. So now when you give us a call on 0330 2230 033 you will receive a short welcome message to Glo, just to make sure you’re calling the right people for the job, then you will be on the phone to one of our engineers to solve your IT problems ASAP! We have gone in this direction as we understand more than anyone else that the last thing you want when trying to resolve an issue, is to be stuck in a menu & not actually getting any closer to resolving the issue at hand. It’s not just us that thinks this way, a Consumer Report from 2015 reported that 75% of people described the process of waiting to talk to a human being when calling a phone number as “Highly annoying” & a further 57% of people said that they have hung up before speaking to anyone out of frustration with…

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General

How to protect your business against email phishing scams

What is a phishing scam?   A phishing scam is any attempt to fraudulently obtain personal information or bank details, and involves a cyber criminal posing as a trustworthy entity or company. These online scams are often carried out over email, and nearly always have malicious intent behind them. Cyber criminals deceive the email receiver with empty threats, harmful links, and often act as well-known companies. They can then steal your business’ sensitive information, or make unauthorised payments with your details – leaving your business in an undesirable situation. A phishing scam email will look something like this:   Netflix phishing scam Late 2017, Netflix subscribers were targeted by a phishing scam. Users were hit with an email trying to trick them into thinking that their accounts were going to be suspended. The targeted and personalised emails told users that they’d need to update their billing information, and must ‘restart their membership’, if they wanted their subscription to continue. The deceptive email also had a link to a fake Netflix site, which it urged users to click on. Netflix has over 109 million worldwide subscribers, all of which were in danger of having their credit card details stolen.   Qatar…

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