Blog

Artificial Intelligence, will it be a help or a threat to your business?

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI is all the talk at the moment, so much so that all of the technology trend analysis for 2026 and the technology roadmaps all list predominantly AI. Gartner, one of the leading technology strategy businesses lists the following ten things to look out for in 2026:

AI-Native Development Platforms
AI Supercomputing Platforms
Confidential Computing
Multiagent Systems
Domain-Specific Language Models
Physical AI
Pre-emptive Cybersecurity
Digital Provenance
AI Security Platforms
Geopatriation

The list is very AI heavy, even where something doesn't specifically have AI in the title, it will most likely either be driven by AI or have elements of AI in the solution.

So...AI is a good thing, right?

Well.... yes and no. Yes, AI can be immensely beneficial to your business but something commonly overlooked is that it's also immensely beneficial to other organisations as well, namely criminal ones. One of the startling things about any new technology is that some of the biggest early adopters are the bad guys, criminals, who often identify how they can exploit the new technology way before commercial organisations have even started looking at the basics.

It is a common theme, where criminals look at ways to utilise new technology to use it to exploit others and benefit from it either financially or transactionally, the bottom line being they will use AI to either gain money, data, control or use it for exploitation such as blackmail or social engineering.

Anyone that has done Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus over the past few years can't but help to have noticed that each year it is becoming more stringent in order to pass, it is no surprise, because as the attacks become more sophisticated, so much the protection and accreditation to prove it.

Fortunately if you look at the Gartner list above, there is a lot of focus around security, AI powered security for both internal and external threats.

AI is being used to target AI attacks, the good guys are training AI to be good to combat the AI trained by the criminals to be bad.

One of the biggest weaknesses in AI is the ability for an AI to role play, which allows a criminal to get around any moral safety nets the AI developers have baked in. For example, if you were to ask AI if it would kill someone, it would say no, it's moral code would not allow it to, even to save itself.

If you ask AI to role play as a villain then ask it to kill someone, it will play along in that role and happily do it, it would kill in the role play scenario that has been set up. The same goes with any of the other moral codes they may try to incorporate in AI to prevent it from being used in a criminal way. All the criminal has to do is just ask it to role play with a certain characteristic and it bypasses any morality that may have been there, AI will then behave badly.

What can you do to combat AI ?

The simple answer is to fight fire with fire. Fortunately cyber security vendors are developing AI powered security protection which is more able to spot AI driven attacks. Think of it like an arms race between good and evil, with us rooting for the goodies and with us being very wary of the baddies because they want to do harm, which will disrupt business.

In order to help protect our client's businesses we have identified and partnered with our chosen suite of vendor platforms. We have chosen different vendors that we use to try to mitigate risk, something that could slip past one vendor could be detected by another, no one is 100%.

Our chosen vendors are

For endpoint protection we use Sophos, which also offers a subscription option of AI powered and human SOC (security operations centre) to deliver the best of both worlds in terms of endpoint security. AI power to spot threats quickly combined with the experience real world human security experts have. AI is good, but it is still learning based on data, the bit it often struggles to mimic is human experience and instinct and being able to think like a criminal.
We couple this with Barracuda, adding another layer of threat detection which is also AI powered and combats threats in email as well as impersonation detection and suspected account take over
All of which sits on top of the Microsoft Defender suite of protection, providing another layer of the security solution.

Think of it like a security onion.

If you would like more information about AI powered security, give us a call to arrange a demo on 01722 411 999

Do you know your single points of failure?

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

IT is so embedded in our lives these days that we don't even notice how much we rely on it, until it stops working. This is true in both our personal and business lives, and it is only when something stops working that we notice how much we either rely on it or simply use it for our day to day activities.

So what is a single point of failure?

A single point of failure is usually a bit of equipment, that when it fails, it can affect an organisation. For example, a business often relies on a computer network, so if a network switch (the bit that allows computers to connect to the wired network) were to fail, all of the devices that connect to it, would lose their network connectivity, so it is often a really good idea to understand all of the single points of failure and work out what you could do to mitigate any failures.

Different failures can have different levels of impact depending on how wide the failure impacts people, the failure can be something that impacts one person, some people or all people.

These are some of the things to consider:

Internet connectivity - Most businesses use cloud based services, relying on internet connectivity to be able to access services. If a business loses its internet connection it would typically impact everyone.
Network connectivity - if you don't have a working network, it has the same impact as losing the internet, this is applicable to both wired and wireless networks.
Power cuts - if there is no power, it is difficult to work with electronic devices
Power surges - if there is inconsistent power, it can damage equipment, resulting in a costly replacement process
Data - loss of critical data that has not been backed up
Security - protecting access to your business and data
Work spaces - if you lose access to your work space, either through flood, fire or evacuation, what is the impact

A lot of these can be mitigated with some simple planning such as:

Internet - having a secondary internet connection using mobile or satellite data that can be used if your primary connection fails.
Network - factor in some additional capacity into your network infrastructure, have more than one network switch with enough capacity that if one switch fails there is enough capacity in the remaining switches to move the connections to it until a replacement device can be installed.
Power cuts and power surges - these can be mitigated with individual UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) which have built in surge protection, this can provide enough time for data to be saved and computers to be shut down in the event of a long power outage. Alternately, more robust, building wide power solutions could be implemented to keep the office running in the event of a power outage, using the ability to generate power using a generator to power the battery backup powering the building.
Data - a lot of data is business critical, but a lot of businesses find out too late that a lot of what is critical, is not protected or protected sufficiently. Cloud storage is not a backup, it is just using someone else's storage infrastructure elsewhere, it doesn't mean data is backed up so if the cloud provider has an incident, your data is not typically backed up so you could lose it, unless you have a separate dedicated backup.
Security - this is both physical and logical, utilising physical measures such as locks and access controls and logical, using tools like anti-virus, anti-ransomeware, user access controls, multi-factor authentication and role based access controls, granting staff access only to what they need.
Work space - one thing that Covid resulted in was businesses adopting work from anywhere allowing the majority of businesses to continue to function even remotely, however this is not always the case, especially with work spaces that are used for manufacturing, and alternate locations in the event of an incident that prevents access should be identified.

The above list is just a few things to consider for starters. We have a vast wealth of experience, having helped businesses plan for unforeseen issues, mitigating against single points of technology failure and business continuity planning (BCP) and disaster recovery (DR). If you would like more information, please call us on 01722 411 999 and we would be happy to help.

Protect yourself from accidentally sending an email before you are ready in "New Outlook"

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever hit "Send" either intentionally or accidentally on an email and instantly wished for a magical rewind button to roll back time. Maybe you spot a typo, or in hindsight think your message sounds a bit too blunt, or remember you forgot to add an important attachment just a second too late.

It might be you meant to send the email to Bob Smith at Company A but when you type Bob in the To field it picks Bob Jones from Company B and you don't notice it and you are about to send the email to the wrong recipient.

We’ve all been there where rushed emails can quickly snowball into confusion, awkward moments, or result in a flurry of follow-ups and subsequent mistakes compounding the issue.

That’s why giving yourself a digital safety net with delayed or scheduled sending is like having a secret safety net.

It buys you those precious extra moments to double-check content, polish the message, or just make sure your email lands at the perfect time like not in the middle of someone’s lunch break or protect you from an accidental data security breach.

In the previous version of Outlook there was an option of Delayed Send which helped prevent this by placing the email in the Outbox, but this option is missing in New Outlook, instead there is the option to schedule sending, here is how to use it:

How to build in your email safety net in New Outlook

When you start your email put in the recipient and subject
Create your email as per usual
When you are ready to send
Click on the Options tab
Choose Schedule Send and then set the specific date and time if you want your email to be sent

This then sends the email to the Drafts folder where you can go on to re-read or edit the email or check it has the correct attachment before it sends it.

Give it a go. Alternately, if you use Microsoft 365 and have fewer than 200 users, you can speak to us 01722 411 999 about how Microsoft Exchange can be configured and setup to stop an email being sent and instead ask the sender to double check the email and authorise the email being sent as an additional check of the email content before sending.

How to get more out of AI

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of hype around AI at the moment, with people getting inundated with how it will be changing our lives, yet often the lived experience of today is often poles apart from what we are told the future will be, and to be honest here is why.

When first working with AI, think of it along the lines of a brand-new employee, and just like someone new in any business, AI can do basic tasks but ask it to do more complicated tasks, and it can start to fail. All because it doesn't have enough information.

Probably the best way to think of initially working with AI is to think of asking an average teenager to do a task. To get the best results you need:

To be specific with your instructions
Either provide all of the information needed to do the job or tell the AI where it can get the information it needs to do the job
Provide context to the instruction
When you get the first results back, add more details or instructions to distil the results
Regenerate the results and give feedback to the AI tool
Check the output, don't trust it to be correct, AI is not always accurate and it may be using inaccurate sources, it is not infallible

If you got a new employee it takes them a while to get up to speed in the business, the same goes with AI when you first start working with it.

One of the words that often leaves people scratching their heads is that AI needs training, which sometimes conjures up images of an AI tool being told to sit, stay, roll over. But the reality is that AI does need some training, just like a new employee does. You don't expect a new employee to know where all the company data is, they need to be told or trained. The other thing with a new employee is that you need to provide them with feedback on what they are doing, they don't know if they are doing their job right, they assume they are, or they may be looking for guidelines to ensure they are doing what is expected.

The same goes with your chosen AI tool, it needs to get feedback, it needs to learn what you expect from it, in order to improve. which is why it is imperative you stick with your chosen AI tool and work with it to help it learn what you are are looking for so it can become more useful to you.

The more you do the, the more accurate the AI tool becomes, the more useful it is to you and the more accurate the output each time.

If you would like more information about how AI could help your business, contact us on 01722 411 999 and we will show you AI in action.

Technology to keep an eye on in 2026

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2026 is expected to see these continued technology trends grow. These trends include artificial intelligence that will develop using agents and an increase in small language model AI. We also expect to see growth in sustainable IT as well as AI powered proactive cyber security to combat ever changing threats. But today we will focus on the growth trend in edge computing

What is "edge computing" and why is it growing?

Edge computing is where data is processed at the edge or periphery of a network rather than sending any data that has been collect by a device to a centralised data centre for processing. The idea being that data is processed as close to the source rather than increasing the latency of processing the data further away in a data centre.

Examples of edge compute are:

Smart cameras processing images locally without needing to send the data away for processing for data analysis such as foot fall or generating an alarm
Autonomous self driving cars
Smart home connected devices like Amazon Alexa and Nest
Smart watches tracking health data
Manufacturing controls such as monitoring quality
Video conferencing technology such as Teams and Zoom
Retail inventory tracking and stock control system

Edge compute devices have the power to process the data they collect locally rather than being a dumb device that relies on a centralised data centre to compute the data. So instead of collecting raw data and sending it over a network to a centralised location, an edge compute device can process the data in situ. This reduces the time it takes for certain actions to take place.

The increase in rollout of 5G and the ongoing development of 6G networks is seeing more and more devices that are always on, always connected and always able to share processed data with back end systems.

However edge compute devices are not independent, they are still reliant on additional infrastructure to help process, collate and store information, but they help offload a lot of the processing that was traditionally all done centrally, increasing productivity whilst simultaneously reducing the reliance on expensive central compute power in data centres.

As 2026 continues, we will see more and more interconnected edge compute devices with the ability to process data locally, providing more functionality and interaction with the user, coupled with legislative changes allowing it to be used more widely.

Christmas IT Jokes that are so bad even the cracker factory didn't want them!

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We thought we would change it up slightly this week in the run up to Christmas with some really bad, no, woefully bad IT Jokes just to make you appreciate the ones you get out of Christmas Crackers even more!

Buckle up, here goes....

_____________________________________________________

Q. How many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None - it's a hardware fault

_____________________________________________________

Q. Why did the keyboard maker get sacked in the run up to Christmas?
A. He kept forgetting to put in his "Shifts"

_____________________________________________________

Q. What is the difference between an ordinary computer keyboard and a Christmas computer keyboard?
A. Not much really apart from the Christmas keyboard has "No L"

_____________________________________________________

A network engineer finds himself shipwrecked on a desert island, not knowing what to do, he decides to take a quick inventory of what he has with him.
He has a pocket knife, a candy bar and a reel of network fibre cable.
While he ponders his fate, he uses the pocket knife to cut a bit off the candy bar and comes up with a plan.
He digs a trench, buries the cable, then waits....
30 minutes later, a utility companies turns up, and true to form, digs up the exact same spot on the ground severing the fibre.
The engineer got his rescue.

_____________________________________________________

A programmer is going to the shops so his wife says to him "can you get a loaf of bread, and if they have eggs, can you get a dozen."
About 2 hours later, the programmer comes back with 12 loaves of bread.
His wife says "why did you get so much bread?"
He says, "because the shop had eggs."

_____________________________________________________

A man is flying in a hot air balloon when realizes he has no idea where he is.
He lets out some hot air from the balloon to reduce altitude until he is low enough to be withing shouting distance of a man on the ground.
He leans over the edge of the basket and shouts "Hello, you down there, can you tell me where I am?"
The man on the ground says, "Yes, of course. You're in a hot air balloon, about 20 feet above me, flying over a field"
The man in the balloon replies "You must work in IT"
"I do", says the man on the ground, who then goes on to say "How did you work that out?"
The man in the balloon replies "whilst what you told me is technically correct, it's of no use to man nor beast"
The man on the ground thinks for a bit then replies "You must be a Business Manager."
"I am" replies the astonished man in the balloon, who replies "tell me, how did you know?"
"Well", says the man on the ground, "you don't know where you are, OR where you are going, BUT you expect me to be able to answer your questions. You're still in the same position you were before we met, but now it's all my fault."

_____________________________________________________

Q. How can you tell if a programmer is an extrovert?
A. He stares at your shoes when he talks to you.

_____________________________________________________

Q. What does an HTML coder and a spider have in common?
A. They both make web sites

_____________________________________________________

Q. Why was Microsoft Outlook wearing reading glasses?
A. Because it lost its contacts

_____________________________________________________

A customer rings up their IT support company saying "Help, for some reason my computer keeps on singing the theme song to Skyfall"
The IT engineer replies "Don't worry, that's normal for A Dell"

_____________________________________________________

Q. What is a hackers favourite hobby?
A. Going Phishing

_____________________________________________________

Q. Why are the mummies from the pyramids insecure?
A. Because they were unencrypted

_____________________________________________________

Q. How did the hacker escape when being chased by the police?
A. He Ransomware

_____________________________________________________

Q. Why are email security gateways so lonely?
A. They are afraid of attachment(s)

_____________________________________________________

Q. Why did the programmer leave his visit to the countryside early?
A. He found too many bugs

_____________________________________________________

There are 10 types of people in this world... those who understand binary and those that don't

_____________________________________________________

Q. How do computer nerds start a speed dating session?
A. "Singles, sign on"

_____________________________________________________

Stop groaning, I said at the start they were awful!!

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year. To see our office opening hours over Christmas click here

We will be in touch with our customers in the new year with some exciting offers and ways to save money, helping your budget go even further!