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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General

Do you have an effective IT security policy?

Most businesses are aware of possible threats to their IT security from external sources. They understand the need for antivirus software, they know how to treat suspicious emails, and they appreciate the importance of keeping their servers and PCs up to date. However, often little attention is given to possible internal threats. It’s important to protect your company’s IT infrastructure, as internal threats are often as dangerous as external. Threats to your business’s IT systems could come from a variety of sources—an individual with malicious intent, an ex-employee, or an employee who didn’t intend to compromise security. Such threats can be avoided by implementing a set of policies which must be adhered to by individuals who have access to your company’s assets and resources. An effective internal IT security policy is one that is tailored to a company’s existing cultural and structural framework to support the daily functions of the business and not impede on its organisation and goals. We’ve defined five possible threats to your internal IT security, along with five policy suggestions that can help mitigate them.    1. Password sharing Would you share your credit card PIN or bank password? The answer is no—and it should be…

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General

The Processor Bugs of 2018 (aka Meltdown and Spectre) – What you need to...

You may have heard about a pair of security flaws (aka Meltdown and Spectre) that have been found in almost all recent processors that will require updates to Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS (iPhones, iPads, etc.), Android, FreeBSD …. Basically everything. We’ve compiled a short list of questions that will hopefully help our customers understand what’s going on and how we’re approaching things. If you have more questions, or just want to talk please either raise a support ticket or give us a ring. So what does this all mean, exactly? You can get full information from meltdownattack.com (it’s really well designed and well written, we encourage you to take a look), however the simple version is that both flaws allows programs and virtual machines to access areas of memory that they shouldn’t. This allows data to potentially get stolen. One attack (Meltdown) affects just Intel processors. The second attack (Spectre) affects at least Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. Is this just theoretically possible? How likely is it really? People have demonstrated stealing things like passwords and reading memory from virtual server hosts using specifically designed exploits already, so it is serious and not just theoretical. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon…

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Disaster recovery

Why you need a disaster recovery plan

Most companies rely heavily on their internet connections. The impact of an outage can be detrimental to infrastructure and applications, which makes operations struggle to continue. In 2016, 72% of businesses experienced an internet failure. This downtime cost UK companies around £12 billion in lost productivity and extra overtime. It’s vital to have a quality disaster and recovery system in place, as the failure to recover from a prolonged IT outage could put you out of business. What is a disaster recovery plan? A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a crucial part of any business continuity strategy. It’s a documented set of procedures to protect and recover a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. The step-by-step plan consists of detailed precautions to minimise the impact of any disaster on the company. Disaster can strike due to a number of reasons, such as natural disaster, technological failures, human error, terrorism or intentional sabotage by hackers. According to the ”ESG Research Review Data Protection Survey” from Enterprise Strategy Group, 53% of businesses can tolerate less than an hour of downtime. With an effective disaster recovery plan in place, data should be secure and accessible to all employees. This means…

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