To all our customers and friends,
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing friendship and support throughout 2017. We wish you a very merry and safe Christmas, New Year and Holiday Period.
With 2018 being around the corner lets have a quick look with what is happening.
The biggest topics for 2018 in a technology sense include the following:
- Cyber threats were massive in 2017 and stated to get worse in 2018. In 2017 we were confronted with 3 local businesses who had lost vast sums of money let alone reputation issues which were hard to come back from. Local police cannot do anything about these cyber crimes.
- Cyber threats are now the top concern among CEO’s and business owners.
- Microsoft is spending about US$1B on security alone in 2017. Microsoft is becoming a much more secure place to be.
- All our customers are recommended to move across to the Microsoft Office365 Platform if not already done so.
- The march to the Cloud will continue but a lot of businesses have very specific Line of Business or Accounting/ERP solutions in place that will need on-premise servers for the next few years. The Accounting, Real Estate, Medical, Construction and other verticals will still be using on-premise server solutions for a number of years. However, it is inevitable that everything will be Cloud in the future.
- The cost of symmetrical (i.e. 100/100mbps) business fibre continues to drop with faster speeds. Some of our customers in city and commercial suburbs can get 200/200 and up to 500/500 for very reasonable prices.
- The NBN continues to be one big problem which will only get bigger. The list of issues is long and is not a recommended solution for anything other than very small businesses.
- Desktop computers are now very small and can sit on the back of a monitor arm along with the screen. With a wireless keyboard and mouse this cleans up the desktop and looks after your staff ergonomically. The better the workspace the better your productivity.
- Ergonomics is also a trend that is not going to go away. Having screens stuck on top of books etc to get the right height are over. All our customers are recommended to move to monitor arms.
- Office layouts have changed as well. ABW (Activity Based Working) is also a trend that has been in large corp for many a year and now our customers are starting to change their office layouts based on this concept. Basically, this is where you create zones in the office. Admin and internal staff have their desks with ergonomic options included. Sales people are moving to a hot desk environment. You then have collaboration zones be they meeting rooms, conference rooms, chill out zones with coffee and tea facilities. It is well proven that offering the team a better environment gets you a better result and a better team.
- Workers who move around a lot are opting for 2-in-1 style devices which are Notebook and Tablets. Quite often these are fitted with a sim card for connectivity from anywhere. These type of sim plans are very cost effective and stop the need to hooking into WiFI hot spots, a lot of which cause issues with connectivity and there is also a security risk with hooking into these all the time.
- Mandatory Disclosure of a Data Breach comes into effect for any organisation that does >$3m per annum or any size organisation working in medical which includes fitness of any size. February 22nd 2018 is the date that the legislation becomes effective and there are quite large fines for those that do not comply.
The other major announcement from Go Systems Pty Ltd is the formation of the CEO Cloud Alliance. There are 4 very active companies in this alliance which between us offer everything that you can think of regarding technology including Cloud ERP (NetSuite), Intranets and Application development, plus getting your organisation to be able to migrate off existing systems and going Cloud.
We also have 2 other organisations in the group which will play a larger role and they are a Payment Gateway Specialist and Security Operations Centre.
Have a great break and we look forward to working with you in 2018.