niu Solutions

At niu Solutions we make technology work harder for your business, delivering the full potential of converged IT, voice, data and telecoms with solutions that are bespoke built to fit your needs.

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Why cloud computing is good for start-ups

Starting up a new business is exciting – but there can be so many daunting decisions to make!

One of the essential things to get right is the technology. With customer details to store and data protection legislation to comply to, you need to be assured that your technology is secure and reliable. But with many new businesses working to tight budgets, the system you choose needs to be cost effective, too.

Cloud technology allows businesses and individuals to store their data remotely, or on the service provider’s computer ‘cloud’. This is instead of the traditional way of storing information on a computer or laptop, or on the business’ own server, and allows it to be accessed from any device at any time. Cloud computing is ideal for start-ups, and here are some reasons why!

It’s affordable

You pay only for the amount of storage you need, which means you can keep costs low while your business gets off the ground. Also, the fact that many new start-ups and small to medium-sized business can pool resources means that technology you might not be able to otherwise afford is now within your means.

It’s flexible

You have the option to increase capacity as and when you need it, so you can start off small and increase capacity as your business grows. Some cloud packages even allow you to rent storage by the hour, meaning you can hire more in peak times and less during quieter periods.

It can save you time

… which is a precious commodity when you are starting up a new business! Many entrepreneurs find themselves either in the position of having to ‘do it all’, even though their talents might not lie in IT, or outsource things like installing and maintaining software to experts. Using cloud technology removes the need for this, leaving you and your business partners free to focus on your talents.

Cloud storage can offer increased back up

If you are relying on one server, your business could be brought to a complete standstill if it fails. With the cloud, data can be stored on a network of remote servers, reducing your chances of losing all your customers’ details, orders and records if you encounter technical problems.

You can shape your own cloud!

A bespoke package taking your own particular business circumstances into account can be created just for you, meeting all your internal IT requirements whilst ensuring you comply to external rules.

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The sky’s the limit for Big Data

Ever feel like you’re getting way too much information?

We create trillions of bytes of information every day, with social media updates, digital photos and videos and mobile phone GPS signals. The pace of this creation is so fast that 90% of the information in the world has been generated in the last two years. Volumes of data that are so large and so complex to manage have become known as big data, and the phenomenon goes hand in hand with cloud computing.

Cloud computing initially became popular due to its flexibility and, for businesses, its ability to maximise profit. By pooling resources, remote ‘cloud’ servers can bring down overheads, reduce the need for IT maintenance and use less power than traditional local servers. But now a new need for cloud computing has emerged; its ability to handle the sheer volume of data being generated online, day in, day out.

Cloud computing allows us to not only hold big data but to analyse it, and that is leading to breakthroughs in many areas. With the analysis of weather patterns, for example, comes the prediction of potential weather disasters and new ways to use and save resources such as water. Police forces can use big data locally to analyse criminal activity and across force boundaries to break up criminal networks. Big corporations can investigate fraud by investigating how employees communicate with their contacts in the outside world whilst, in healthcare, huge advances can be made by using big data in research into rare diseases and illnesses such as cancer.

So what does this mean for business? The Government, local government and companies use big data to glean as much information as possible about clients and service users. For a business, this can be an invaluable tool in focusing priorities, targeting the right audience and streamlining services. Until recently, the mass of information on the internet was just too unwieldy for companies to be able to make even a dent in, but big data is leading to a sea change. The marriage between 

is set to lead to new insights and new business models – and the business could be yours!

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Lessons in the clouds

Cloud technology could be used to allow children in developing countries to teach themselves.

Professor Sugata Mitra’s vision for a ‘School in the Cloud’ was announced as this year’s winner of the 2013 TED prize, a prestigious award for innovative ideas which in the past has been won by Jamie Oliver, Bono and Bill Clinton.

At the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh this month, Prof Mitra spoke about his hopes of building a ‘learning lab’ in a remote village in India with the $1m prize fund. He also hopes to establish further cloud schools in India and the UK, all supported by ‘cloud’ moderators but with pupils largely organising themselves. 

Prof Mitra is the man behind the ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment in 1999 in New Delhi, in which he and his colleagues installed an internet-connected computer in a wall near a slum area and filmed the results with a hidden camera. The computer sparked the curiosity of local children, who quickly learnt how to use the PC and interact online, teaching each other what they learnt.

At the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Prof Mitra outlined his plans to build on that experiment by building the cloud school, a glass pod full of computers and with a large screen to enable moderators to Skype in and support learning. The school will have no curriculum or timetables, and Prof Mitra’s idea is that pupils will organise themselves and their education.

Remote learning is nothing new, with online platform edX already working in partnership with the highest-profile universities to offer classes from world-class professors. EdX was founded by Professor Anant Agarwal, who saw the potential of technology to potentially transform education. He also spoke at TEDGlobal about his vision of bringing education to some of the poorest parts of the world and how the traditional method of classroom learning starting at 9am each morning simply doesn’t work everywhere.

Cloud technology is also becoming popular in schools in the UK, with some moving away from systems where users pay for a licence towards open source free platforms. This is partly as a means of saving much-needed resources and also due to the flexibility that cloud computing can bring.

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What Cloud Computing Can do for Your Business

These days, having your head in the clouds is a good thing. The new buzzword in the Internet evolution, cloud computing is transforming the way many businesses operate – no wonder its popularity is sky-high!

You might only have a vague idea of what the cloud is or you might never have heard of it – yet there’s a good chance you're already using the technology. If you have an email account such as Hotmail or Gmail, cloud computing is already part of your daily life. The premise is simple; rather than being stored on your computer or phone, data is stored remotely, or on the service’s computer ‘cloud’. The data can therefore be accessed whenever and wherever you need it, from any device.

For businesses, cloud computing can reduce overheads and enhance productivity. Traditionally, a business has to buy the relevant hardware and install software on each computer, relying on a local server to hold and process the data. But with cloud computing, the business only has to load one application, with workers logging on to the web-based service and accessing all the programmes they need to do their job. The information is stored on a network of remote servers, increasing the capacity available to the business without the need to add infrastructure or to licence new software.

The benefits of cloud computing are numerous, with costs, time and power reduced. Extremely flexible, the cloud enables processing power to be rented by the hour, allowing clients to pay as they go but giving them the backup of extra power during surges in demand.

Cloud computing is great news for SMEs, as pooled resources allow them to access technology that they might not otherwise be able to afford. Larger businesses are also investing in the technology as a way of reducing resources, cutting maintenance and seeing a better return on investments. And it’s good news for individuals too. Previously, if your computer broke down or you lost your mobile phone, all data would be lost unless backed up on an external device. But when stored on a cloud, it’s easily retrievable.

Concerns have been expressed about potential drawbacks to cloud technology, such as remote servers going down or being hacked. There is a tendency with new trends to think that one size fits all, so perhaps it’s not surprising that there can be problems with one particular system used by businesses of varying sizes and with differing needs. But a bespoke package can ensure that cloud computing is tailored to the suit the client, complementing internal IT whilst conforming to compliance and security requirements.

Cloud technology has surged to the forefront of computing, allowing business to expand and enabling them to survive IT catastrophes. If you haven't yet joined the revolution, isn't it time for a little blue sky thinking?

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Niu joins IBM’s Cloud Club

niu Solutions are delighted to announce that we are approved as a member of IBM’s Cloud Club. Due to go live in the New Year, working within the Cloud Club enhances revenue opportunities by providing access to new markets, new partners, new geographies, new technologies, new applications and new customers. IBM designed the Cloud Club specifically to address the business requirements and challenges of Managed Service Providers (MSP’s) and Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and with up to 60 members the IBM Cloud Club itself is a fresh source for information, training, innovation and opportunity.

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Exclusive Networks Win

niu has just won the contract to manage Exclusive Networks’ collaboration platform, the European wide consolidation of legacy email into a single Private Cloud hosted platform, using IBM X3650. Bringing infrastructures from all across Europe into 1 central hub, hosted in niu’s datacentres. Exclusive will also receive full IBM disaster recovery, backup and storage. Key factors in the win were improved resilience and availability, 24x7 skills to manage the service and long term cost efficiency. 

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niu Gain IBM Cloud Accreditations in SCE+ Offering

As part of its ongoing commitment to IBM’s GTS Cloud strategy, niu is in the process of formally accrediting all of its IBM focused sales resources in the SCE+ Sales Mastery exam, within the Partnerworld framework. Early scores are promising, with average exam results of over 95% to date. Discussions around partner models and sales engagement approaches are continuing with the GTS Offerings and BPO teams to ensure, when available, SCE+ is a core part of the niu engagement model going into 2013.

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Device and Cloud Provider Proliferation

As a Cloud and Hosting Service Provider, niu is acutely aware of the pace at which end clients are looking to adopt cloud services, and deploy them universally within their estates. As things stand today, with cloud solutions still being in relatively ‘early adopter’ mode, people are seeing the benefits of application lead cloud deployment, sourcing individual applications from specialist vendors and providing those applications to their end users in a utility model.

Interestingly though, we think, niu is already investigating solutions to a problem that we feel is a bit further down the line, the convergence of two very powerful forces in the market today – device proliferation and ‘cloud provider’ proliferation.

As all IT professionals will have noticed, more and more end users are demanding their own style of devices to get access to their business applications. This breeds issues with data loss and user security, as well as asset control (if owned by the business) and user / asset administration.

As an isolated trend, this could be very easily managed. However, if you transpose this device hungry drive in the marketplace with the expanding need to manage multiple cloud application providers, and all associated costs/bills, userids and accounts, security, SLAs etc., your IT estate becomes an incredibly complex management overhead, that will require very slick processes in order to keep under control.

Imagine a new starter who has an iPad, a laptop and a smartphone (that’s three devices), all of which need to be business application enabled. This same new starter needs Cloud delivered Office Products, Cloud delivered CRM, Cloud delivered Email, and Cloud delivered Analytics functions (all from different Cloud Providers). This is when the new starter process becomes a convoluted implementation and configuration nightmare.

Issuing requests to vendors for new devices and application logons, configured securely and consistently across all devices, with an understanding of the process for wiping business data, and closing those accounts should the same user eventually leave the company.  Cloud and Device Management together is going to be the next big headache for all IT Departments.

At niu Solutions we are integrating a range of tools and techniques to overcome these problems, which we’ll be productising and launching in the New Year. 

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What Do Integrator-MSPs Do For Their Customers?

What are the key competencies when considering outsourcing, right-sourcing, integrating new technology or finding a service provider?  In his latest report, Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director at Quocirca, provides a checklist for mid-market organisations seeking to evaluate the latest breed of outsourcer – the integrator-MSP. From IT delivery, SLAs and measurement to scalability and vendor relationships, find out for yourself here what an integrator-MSP should do for its customers.

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niu Oil and Gas Client Win

niu has recently implemented a global IT Service for a large consulting client in the On and Offshore Oil and Gas sector. As part of this transaction, the client procured over $500k of IBM Hardware, Software and Services.

The solution comprises a centrally hosted IT service, managed from our UK Data Centres, with specific applications replicating out to local branch offices in Asia, South America, Middle East and Eastern Europe.

niu’s responsibility integrated the design and specification of the end-to-end service, ranging from infrastructure through to Wide Area Networking, ongoing management and security process and policy implementation. As ever, niu led with an IBM based technology solution, and overcame stiff competition from other partners representing alternative offerings.

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LSP - Attracting Investment Through Technology

Liverpool Science Park is a provider of high specification lab-compatible office space for science and knowledge based companies. So obviously it needs a robust infrastructure to facilitate tenants requirements of high speed broadband to support high-tech applications utilised on a day-to-day basis.

The company selected niu to manage voice and data services for up to 800 users, affording LSP the flexibility and agility to quickly bring new tenants onto the network, provide 24/7 ICT maintenance, and ensure maximum network resilience. We’ve removed the headache of supporting multiple tenants at LSP, and the company now only has one supplier to manage and one number to ring in any eventuality – us! See here for full story.

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A Blueprint for Global Structure

You may have heard that this year we opened two new Data Centres in the United States to support customer workloads located within the country. These facilities are providing niu with the capability to provide fully managed services from our UK Data Centre operations, with data physically residing within the US borders.

Having a capability such as this allows clients to navigate some of the complexities of multi-country data protection and compliance regulation, without having to compromise on items such as Patriot Act, Sarbanes Oxley or other compliance requirements.

Allowing solutions to be quickly delivered “on-net” to niu’s UK operations, this model is easily replicable to allow us to open other international sites and provide clients with a true global infrastructure, managed from a single set of service management principles and tools. View the full story on our niu developments page.

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Compliance & Security in Practice

Darren Pitman, our residential security knowhow man and head of business assurance at niu, stepped in front of the camera to answer your all important compliance and security questions.

Looking at everything from why you should even care about compliance and its impact on business operations, to thinking beyond the ‘ticking boxes’ mindset and to that all important how to kick-start a programme that works for your business. You can check out his videos on our YouTube site:

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Banking on IT

An interesting bank doing something interesting? That would be MetroBank. As a new entrant to the banking sector, Metro Bank needed a highly innovative and resilient ICT platform to support its unique customer service differentiators.

In it’s own words, its customer-focused retail business ‘reinvents the rules of retail banking, making every effort to remove all stupid bank rules from our day to day services to offer simpler and more convenient banking to you.’ 

An approach that needed the right ICT support to help make it happen. Craig Donaldson, CEO of Metro Bank, said, "We wanted a provider who could do everything, so our people can focus on the customers" – and so following the same pattern.

So, prior to the bank’s commercial launch, iit teamed up with niu. Of course, its ICT infrastructure also needed to meet regulatory guidelines required to comply with its banking licence terms. Here’s how they did it.