Improving the experience for your customers is a priority for any business. Are you aware how large a part your own infrastructure plays in this? Transforming your IT will transform your customer's business also. In this months guide we take a deep dive into the world of digital transformations.

Introduction Digitalisation can be a gamechanger for SMEs but it needs to be part of a wider strategic plan to develop your business. Choosing the right digital products is key to delivering fast and sustainable results. For today’s SMEs, competition is rife wherever you look. In the start‑up phase, you need to win market share to survive; in the rapid‑growth phase, you need to refine your processes for scalability to beat out established, mass‑market‑ready brands. If you overcome these challenges, then you will typically reach the maturity phase where cost control, optimisation for profitability and innovation become the focus. At every stage, if you don’t make every effort to differentiate yourself from your competitors, you may well fall behind and lose the race to the top. This lifecycle is not new. But what is atypical is the pace at which market conditions are changing, forcing SMEs to respond—and quickly.

Embarking on a business transformation through technology requires a good understanding of these 10 questions. Question 1 Could IT make new competitors more agile and gain more market share? There’s no doubt about it—technology is a competitive weapon. Companies can use it to solve critical problems, slash time-to-market, build barriers to competitor entry and even, sometimes, to completely reinvent the way business is done in an industry. From grooming (Dollar Shave Club) to bookselling (Amazon), the restaurant industry (Deliveroo) to banking (Starling, Revolut), traditional players have had to catch up or die. Where are your competitors in the race to innovation?

You use the cloud and don't even know it. Do you go to Amazon and create a wishlist? Do you have an email account with Google's Gmail or Outlook? That is cloud computing. All your emails are stored on Yahoo servers somewhere. They are on physical servers, of course, but they aren't on your laptop. The advantage is that when you spill your coffee onto the laptop keyboard, you haven't lost all your emails even if you never backed up your hard drive. (If you haven't, shame on you, by the way.)

There has been a large increase in remote working recently. Many employers have had to adjust rapidly to a new way of working with large numbers of traditionally office bound staff being despatched to an underequipped home office. Since the increase in remote working we have noticed frustration creeping in with certain aspects of this shift away from the fully equipped office. One of the main frustrations is no longer having the full functionality of the company phone system.

Major websites across the globe suffered an outage when a configuration error at cloud computing giant Fastly was deployed to all of its POPs (Points of Presence) globally.

Working in the Cloud is superb. There are literally thousands of different platforms and operators of Cloud-based services to choose from; providing you with a reliable, adaptable and responsive working environment enabling you to work from anywhere in the world.

Everyone should be aware of the fact that data breaches are serious. It’s not because these firms did not have an appropriate protection system in place that they went under, it’s because they were not prepared to deal with it to begin with.

The hacking campaign makes use of previously known vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins. Some of the vulnerable plugins exploited include the ‘CP Contact Form with PayPal’ and the ‘Simple Fields’. More than 2000 WordPress sites have been hacked by cybercriminals for a scam campaign that redirects visitors to several scam sites.

A group of ransomware actors have threatened to publish data stolen from a German automotive supplier. Another group announced that they are going to release 9.5GB of data of a healthcare firm. Source: https://cyware.com/news/ransomware-operators-turn-evil-for-late-reposnders-and-non-paying-victims-de65c7c1