eKourier Jan 2020

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

to provide you with the current “Best Practice” solution. There’s been a few teething issues with the emerging technologies, but overall it has been beneficial, providing us with: • A streamlined customer call journey, with customer calls ringing on counter phones and centre mobiles simultaneously; • Improved ability to access information on call statistics; You’ll be aware from earlier announce- ments that we’ve implemented a new email security system. This has been very successful, reducing the amount of undesirable email that gets through and consequently, the amount of risk exposure and security incidents. Of course no system is 100% foolproof and we will continue our efforts to strengthen user awareness, which is still our best defence. To this end we are commencing a security awareness campaign to reinforce our messages about password security, email security, credit card security, social media awareness, etc. We continue to chip away at the various legacy systems in Kosmo and replace them with alternatives. One of the systems that we’re looking at replacing very early in 2020 is the Help and Support Portal. We’ve examined several alternative options and have selected a modern, cloud-based service manage- ment solution that will provide the organisation with an enormous amount of capabilities that Kosmo cannot. This will improve the management, record- keeping and reporting capabilities of the Technology Team, as well as the accessibility, submission channels and service features available to Team Members. Watch this space! “Somethings Man was never meant to know. For everything else, there’s Google.” • Generally improved audio quality; • Reduced costs on call redirections.

The Technology Team always have a lot of projects of varying scale and complexity either being planned or underway at any point in time. Last year at about this time, I gave you a snapshot of what that looked like. Here’s an update on what’s going on.

Conor Kennedy, Vadim Guralnyk, Sean Bradley, Jeff Xanthos, Jesse Dux and Juan Moran

A ll sites have now been updated to StorLogix version 5, which was a prerequisite for the Windows 10 rollout. The Windows 10 rollout is well under way, with over 50% of sites now converted. This rollout has been performed in conjunc- tion with a hardware refresh that has seen us dispose of over one hundred older, slower computers. This project has also seen us make advances in software deployment, patch manage- ment, security considerations and data resiliency and recovery. If we haven’t gotten to your site yet, we will in the next few months. Medius is moving to the Cloud! We’re working with Medius in December to

move the “workflow engine” component of the system to the Cloud. This is the part of the system that you access through the web interface to view and approve invoices. This will provide all of the benefits of running this system in the Cloud, including anytime, anywhere accessibility to authorised users, authentication through our Single Sign On system (the same one you login to Atlas with), and other less visible benefits, such as a reduction in resource requirements in our own data centre. We’ve been trialling a Unified Communication system at several sites with mostly positive results. This is underpinned by network technolo- gies that we’re still experimenting with

Sean Bradley ICT Manager

13 Kennards Kourier Jan 2020