eKourier Jan 2019

FEATURE

What The Tech!!!

Information Technolgy Team: Juan Moran Diaz - ICT Support Analyst, Sean Bradley - ICT Manager, Jeff Xanthos - Chief Information Officer, Conor Kennedy - Desktop Support Engineer, Chris Bailey - Infrastructure Engineer

Y ou know that the Technology Team strive to provide support to your technical issues, but what you may not know is that we’re constantly working in the background to provide better systems and services as the technology landscape changes. We have a roadmap of initiatives planned that extends well into 2019 and I’d like to share some of that with you. Firstly, you would already know about the launch of the new Intranet. This is a key step in the removal of the legacy KOSMO intranet, which served Kennards well, but is not scalable for meeting the needs of the future. The Technology Team is working with an external organisation to put the finishing touches on the new system and you’ll be seeing the result very soon. Having a reliable Disaster Recovery Plan is an important undertaking for any organisation’s Technology Department and ours is no different. Historically, we kept our own disaster recovery infrastructure at THQ. As this infrastructure aged, it increasingly

the way we deploy and re-image PC’s as well as the way we install and update applications. The project is in our design and build phases, but we’ll be talking to some centres soon about a pilot phase. In order to support this, we’ll be retiring some of the older computer hardware currently deployed within the business with a view to managing the computer fleet under a typical organisational life cycle plan in future. Communications is a big part of what we do. There’s some interesting changes on the horizon in that field as well. We’re talking to our provider about software- defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) and IP Telephony technologies, which will provide increased network reliability and empower improved call handling capabili- ties. We hope to be in a position to set up some “Next Generation Infrastructure” pilot sites early this year. Unfortunately, we’ve seen more phishing scams getting through our email filters recently. We will be looking at better ways to prevent the email getting through, but ultimately there is no system

lacked support from software vendors and became a quite expensive capital spend to bring up to date. There’s a transition currently taking place to move the majority of our disaster recovery function to a cloud platform, which will provide us with functionality benefits and reduce long term costs. The last line of defence against the worst spam of the Internet is you! Microsoft ends their support for Windows 7 and Office 2010 in 2020. Amongst other things, this means that they stop making security patches for it. We plan to have a new Windows 10 operating system platform rolled out to the organisation before then and we’re working with the organisation that built the platform for our sister company (or should that be “brother company”), Kennards Hire. This will modernise ‘

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that catches 100% of spam and scam. The last line of

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7 Kennards Kourier Jan 2019