The Intrepid Team were challenged in our most recent social event to climb the O2 Academy in North Greenwich, London introducing some of our newer additions to Intrepid. As the team grows, these monthly socials are an important part of life at Intrepid, ensuring new members are able to build rapport with the rest of the team. The team often work away on client sites or remotely during the week and so these regular meet-ups allow the team to collaborate effectively, improving communication and productivity. Past events have included Poker nights, Ping Pong bars and Escape Rooms.

Intrepid have successfully resolved over 10,000 tickets through our Intrepid Service Desk which provides a SLA backed, cloud based IT support, service desk, Infrastructure solutions and planning. Since launching the service 2 years ago Intrepid have onboarded a variety of clients including a branch office of a large multinational bank, an educational institution and several technology start ups. The types of tickets resolved include incident resolutions, infrastructure change requests and user support.

If you browse online you for sure must have come access banners and articles about GDPR. Let us break down quickly to what it actually is: GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation – it’s a European Union driven initiative that will define how are you to deal with data related to EU citizens. The regulation will come into force on 25th of May 2018.

A CPU level flaw has been highlighted by Google Project Zero that affects many of the devices that we all use every day. Without going into all the technical detail (as it's still emerging) we wanted to put together checklist to help you tell if you are vulnerable and how to patch your system or application if you are. The vulnerability can be exploited by an application on your system or a webpage loaded in your browser, so the attack surface is significant.

Our article contains a checklist to see if you are protected on the most common devices and platforms.

Come and join us on for breakfast at 8am on Wednesday 18th October 2017 for our Business Evolved presentation! It will be an informative overview of the wide range of modern technologies available to businesses today to ensure that they reduce business risks and improve productivity. We’ll introduce you to practical solutions, technologies and visualisation tools which will help you to reduce costs, increase your ROI, optimise your network, improve security, scale efficiently and spend wisely. Sound good? Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/business-evolved-tickets-37919369856

We were very excited that our Managing Director, Alexander Preston had his first article published in European Business Magazine last month. For those that are interested, the full text of the article is below:

Technology is becoming more advanced every day. Not only can technology improve our personal lives, but also the way we operate our businesses. Due to the numerous benefits of business process automation (BPA), more and more businesses are choosing to automate internal and client facing processes.

With an ambitious goal of releasing a fully autonomous car by the end 2017, Tesla have certainly shaken things up in the automotive industry. What can we learn about business process automation from the way Tesla approached their autonomous car?

Microsoft has released an exciting new cloud based product suite that brings together your favourite desktop apps like Word and Excel, online services such as Skype for Business, Exchange email and apps like Microsoft Bookings and Outlook Customer Manager together with security and management enhancement of Windows 10 Pro and mobile devices.

Business owners have a range of decisions to make about how they manage their businesses - and how they organise their IT is a critical part of that.
 
One of the decisions you will have to make as your business grows is how to manage the growing burden of technology. IT doesn't seem to be a complication when you are small - but introduce new team members, a variety of devices and services, and the range of software and apps you need to run your business - and you have some choices to make. And you want to be focusing on success, not worrying about server upgrades, security keys or password resets. You certainly don't have time to worry about future proofing your set-up.
 

In recent years, office life has become a lot more fluid as software enables many companies to offer a remote working option. If you don’t currently offer a remote working option, how can you build a system that allows staff to work remotely if they can’t make it into the office?

In a traditional office environment, employees would come to the office on time everyday, work a full day and leave at the end of the day. However, with a growth in commuting distances, and the impact that accidents and travel delays can have, as well as unpredictable events like child sickness or doctor's appointments, attendance in the office is not always possible. Add to that fairly long-term disruptions like the Waterloo station closure, and a certain train line potentially leaving your staff stranded due to strikes, your business can lose a lot of productive hours due to lateness and stress. Offering a remote option can not only allow your employees to keep working when these situations occur, but research suggests they may also be more productive.

Software projects that go wrong are a project manager’s (and CEO’s!) nightmare. The famous analogy of the differences between what the customer wanted, what was scoped, designed and then finally delivered are legendary. Whilst we all laugh at the cartoons, when software projects go wrong it can be both painful and expensive – for all concerned.

So how to complete the perfect project? Here at Intrepid we’ve used our extensive experience and in-house processes to design steps that can help to smooth the road in software project delivery. By stepping through these processes in turn, or just using one of them to help clear issues, you can enable much more successful delivery.

Intrepid celebrated another great social last night – collecting crystals at the iconic ‘Crystal Maze’ live experience in London. 12 crystals won! These monthly socials are an important part of life at Intrepid, as most of the team are often working away on client site for much of the week. Getting everyone together as a team means that we can all work together more effectively, especially important when we often have a virtual team working on a project. Past events have included Crazy Golf, board games at London bar ‘Draughts’ and bowling.

News this week has been full of the latest ‘crypto’ attack, with big corporations and government agencies reporting that operations have been disrupted by the hackers. Following on the heels of the much reporting ‘Wannacry’ ransomware attack last month, companies really need to consider the impact that such an attack would have on their businesses, as the likelihood of being targeted increases.

It's easy to panic when the news is full of cyber attacks targeting big corporations such as the NHS and major airports. But there are few simple steps that anyone can take to keep your machines safe and users protected.