blue sky connect magazine issue 2

Dot London domains coming soon

Ensuring quality for

Blue Sky Customers

Are you ready for the end of Windows

Server 2003?

The Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

cloud | mail | hosting | data

www.bluesky.co.uk | t: @blueskyhosting f: BlueSkyHosting e: [email protected]

How First Great Western’s website

coped with the Storms

THE MAGAZINE FOR BLUE SKY CUSTOMERS | ISSUE NUMBER 2

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2 www.bluesky.co.uk | t: @blueskyhosting f: BlueSkyHosting e: [email protected] p: 0207183 5854

Issue Number 2

‘.Dot London Domains

Coming Soon

Is it right for your business?

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If you are a London based organisation, you may wish to consider registering for a ‘.London’ domain. This is a top level domain service and is an alternative to domains registered using .co.uk, .com, .biz and so on.

With Google aware of where users are and trying to deliver results that are more pertinent to their location, dot London domains may be a worthwhile investment, especially if you are focused on providing products or services to the city. If your

Get in touch to talk to us about registering your dot London domain name: [email protected]

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organisation is working to bring people to London from other regions or overseas, again a dot London domain may give your website focus in search engine results.

If you would like to know more contact our sales team at [email protected] or give us a call on +44 (0)20 7183 5854

3 cloud | mail | hosting | data

Connect | The Magazine for Blue Sky Customers Issue Number 2

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Ensuring Quality For a technical business such as ours, it’s vital that we ensure that there is a systematic approach to managing the deployment of services for our customers. We also have procedures for dealing with customers’ requests, problems and changes to ensure that they are correctly managed. This improves accountability and service to our customers.

Quality Objectives To ensure our obligation to ISO 9001, Blue Sky has implemented a series of quality standards that our services and staff must meet:

Setting the standard for quality Blue Sky’s Operations Director, Jackie Argent, explains how our customer service is supported by a rigorous standard of quality assurance

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• Deliver services on time • Deliver services to specification • Deliver services at price quoted • Maintain service level agreements • Provide adequate on-going technical

support to our clients • Ensure that our employees are kept up to

date with new technologies and receive sufficient training to meet their needs

• Ensure that our employees adhere to our processes and procedures with regards to service provision

• Review our processes and procedures on a regular basis


Issue Number 2

Blue Sky is ISO Compliant Blue Sky Is ISO 9001 and 27001 certified. We work with Government agencies such as the NHS, DEFRA, The Department for International Development, Bromley Council and many others. If ISO certification is a requirement for your IT project, talk to us today: [email protected] or call 020 7183 5854

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• Conduct customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis

The Management Team is responsible for ensuring that all staff:

• Are aware of the policies and objectives of the organisation.

• Are committed to implementing Blue Sky's Quality Management System.

• Understand client service requirements.

• Create positive internal and external communications.

• Have an understanding of the organisation's processes and procedures.

• Have an understanding of how statutory and regulatory requirements impact on the organisation and service clients.

• Understand their area of responsibility.

• Use time and resources efficiently. • Reduce wastage. • Contribute to high levels of morale

and motivation within the organisation.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Blue Sky is committed to ensuring that our services meet the needs of our customers. To this end we conduct an annual survey to assess:

• Quality of Service • Diversity of Service • Server Performance

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• Responsive Support Staff • Technical Knowledge of Support Staff • Escalation Procedure • Product Service/Communication

The results of the Customer Satisfaction Surveys are analysed and any action points will be followed up.

Post Deployment Surveys: We also conduct Post Deployment Surveys after we have provisioned a service to ensure timely delivery and to check if there were any issues.



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Blue Sky Hosting has gained the nationally accredited Investors in People Standard award for its development, support and motivation of people within the company.

Investors in People The Investors in People framework has helped the business demonstrate its commitment to the ongoing development of staff who enable the organisation to provide a high level of technical expertise and customer support that customers rely on.

Matthew McCloskey, Commercial Director of Blue Sky said: “We have always maintained a plan of continual review and training of our team. By implementing the Investors in People framework we have improved our development of planning and strategy, and by looking at how plans are deployed we now have a better view of what support our people need to be able to achieve our business goals.”

According to other organisations that have achieved Investors in People Standard they generally have seen lower staff turnover,

Blue Sky awarded ‘Investors in People’ Award

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reduced sickness rates, and increased employee engagement and productivity.

John Telfer, Managing Director of Investors in People South, said: “Blue Sky Hosting should be congratulated for the way in which management and staff have come together to produce real results. I hope other organisations in the industry will look to them as a great example of what can be achieved”

Inspiring Business Performance Used in more than 35,000 organisations in over 50 countries, from start-up to multi-national businesses, Investors in People is a framework for business performance improvement through people.

For more information on Investors in People visit www.iip-south.co.uk


Issue Number 2

Keeping your field sales and office teams connected and working smarter with Microsoft Office 365...

Always be up-to-date with the latest version of Microsoft’s Office suite and provide your in-house and mobile staff email, shared calendar and document management. With Lync save money on calls made overseas and make conferencing and collaborating easier.

Find out more at www.bluesky.co.uk/move

Getting the most out of

your ERP and Business critical

systems... Blue Sky uses VMware’s virtualisation

technology to run critical services such as ERP, accounting, file and application systems for a range of business sectors. The benefit to this is that these systems are given protection from hardware failure, can be easily upgraded during operation and be maintained remotely by support teams. This saves time and saves money whilst providing a more flexible solution.

By migrating your ERP and Accounting services to hosted virtualised servers can reduce the cost of hardware, software licensing, increase data security and integrity and securely open up business services to other company locations.

Virtualising your server infrastructure means that the development of new projects can utilise spare capacity when needed and can be shut down when the project has reached its end. If your business needs more capacity for storage or processing power, or if the server needs to be setup somewhere else, a virtualised service can be quickly copied and deployed.



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UK National Rail Operator, First Great Western urgently needed to have their website reviewed and ready for the Christmas 2013 rush of visitors.

Working together with ClerksWell, Blue Sky provided a seamless transition from the old service providers and delivered a high availability hosting solution for the new Sitecore website at www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk.

ClerksWell were given the task to maintain and update the First Great Western website. It needed to be refreshed and optimised and ready for the Christmas season. It also required a multi-server configuration of a number of front and back-end servers. Fifteen servers were needed, so Blue Sky’s team developed a rapid setup and deployment plan.

First Great Western’s main Sitecore website takes the strain during the storms

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The site had to be able to withstand a surge in traffic at certain periods of the day and particularly in the run up to Christmas where people wanted to check train times, ticket information and booking.

“We were delighted to be able to both work with ClerksWell and deploy a system for First Great Western", explains Matthew McCloskey, Commercial Director for Blue Sky. “But it was a tight timescale and we knew we had to keep to it”.

“We had to be very focused on what the needs of the Sitecore system were as well as what was required in terms of hardware. Thankfully we have a good team and good communication with our colleagues over at ClerksWell and it all came together on time and on budget and it’s working nicely – coping well with the higher surge in traffic at the moment”.


Issue Number 2

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“The site’s fast and it makes a great example of how well Sitecore can run as a high-demand website content management system as well as how we work as a cross company team at Blue Sky and ClerksWell.

“We’re very grateful to First Great Western to give us the opportunity to prove our metal"

The Solution The hosting solution required a configuration of clustered, load balanced front-end web servers, supported by clustered MS SQL servers and integrating with Microsoft’s Active Directory. All the servers run Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and they are secured behind two independent firewall systems. There are three groups of servers: a live system, which is supported by two staging systems.

Scalable Hosting Environment

When there is a need to bring more capability online the staging resources can be deployed in a supporting role to provide more capacity to the live environment.

Key to providing this infrastructure was Blue Sky’s expertise in deploying complex server systems within a virtualised environment. Colin Barker, Infrastructure Manager, explained: “The VMware vSphere environment is a technology that we have relied on and found it enables us to maximise the capabilities of both our hardware and our support personnel. We are able to monitor exactly what’s going on

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with resources and using the management system within our vSphere environment we can quickly adjust or track down any issues there may be with code execution and database performance.”

Blue Sky is a VMware Enterprise Service Provider and a Professional Solution Provider. This saves time in deployment and guarantees a high level of skill and understanding for our customers. For more information about our VMware Virtualisation services visit our website or talk to one of our team at [email protected].

Understanding Sitecore’s needs for rapid deployment

Working closely with ClerksWell, Blue Sky was able to define a core system, configure the Sitecore environment, then allow ClerksWell to establish the Sitecore website. This could then become a server template. The other images could be quickly setup within the hosting environment and tied into the load balancing systems.

Taking the load under high demand

The Christmas period and the first quarter of 2014 saw a sudden surge in visitor numbers especially simultaneous connections. Using real-time monitoring and analysis of data, the Blue Sky support team could see how the system was reacting to demand and ensured that performance was maintained.

Read the full case study on www.bluesky.co.uk/case-studies



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Cloud Computing is now a mainstream concept across the UK market. According to Cloud Industry Forum, 69% of organisations have formally adopted at least one Cloud-based service within their business. The report goes on to point out that satisfaction with those services is at 91%.

Almost a third of organisations that don’t currently use Cloud services say they intend to adopt the first service during the next 12 months.

When it comes to the future of Cloud services, 78% of those surveyed said they are considering whether new or replacement IT infrastructure should be delivered as a Cloud service.

Only 4% of businesses said they did not intend to replace their infrastructure with Cloud technology.

The Cloud is not a golden bullet to all

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business IT needs and it will not see the end of the requirement of on-premises server solutions. However, there is a clear understudying in companies that they need to consider both options to be sure that they are making the most of their budgets whilst ensuring they are taking advantage of the benefits Cloud services can offer.

Hybrid IT thinking gives a flexible approach to infrastructure, computing power, collaboration and productivity without having to compromise on features, security, expansion and overall management.

Sometimes there can be a steep hill to climb when it comes to migration from old services to the Cloud. Legacy applications and processes can mean that there is a need for heavy customisation, change in business process and costs for change and project management can be just simply too high.

The economic case for Cloud can often be weakened by organisations looking simply at transitional costs only. Management teams need to also consider the benefits of

The Benefits of

Hybrid Cloud


Issue Number 2

? Want to know what the Cloud

really is? Blue Sky offer practical advice on new technology and how it can be of a benefit to your business. Get in touch and we can provide you with fact sheets, briefing, strategic planning and service implementation.

Call us on +44 (0)207 183 5854 or email [email protected] to arrange a member of our team

to contact you.

You’re in good company Some great names we service: Amscan International, Carl Kammerling International, Trend Machinery & Cutting Tools, Cath Tate Cards, Kenro, Citizen Watches UK, Crabtree & Evelyn, Petty Wood, Riverford Organic Vegetables, The Economist, United Nations, Associated Press Television News and more.

Find out more about our customers: www.bluesky.co.uk/customers

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reducing ongoing maintenance costs, reducing time to market and increasing agility, not traditionally factors considered when looking at the economics of an organisation’s IT infrastructure. IT is not simply about providing equipment to users or purchasing licenses.

Technology needs to be considered as part of a business mechanism to function in a very competitive global market. Cloud technology now enables companies to process information with unparalleled speed and volume. Workers can collaborate globally and in real-time. Innovation and change happens faster than ever before. Having business critical services infrastructure within hybrid clouds can provide cost savings, flexibility and power.

Talk to a Blue Sky Cloud Consultant to help your business take advantage of Hybrid cloud technology.



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Microsoft will no longer offer any support package or updates to its 2003 server platform offering by July 2015.

This is the termination date for extended support. Service pack updates ended 14th April 2009 and there are sporadic security updates being issued, however, these too stop.

What this means for many businesses is that they need to migrate their applications and data onto a supported Microsoft Server Solution, such as Microsoft Server 2008 r2 and Microsoft Server 2012. It also means that continuing to operate on the old server platform is a security risk.

What are the alternatives? There are a number of options that Blue Sky can assist with to help your organisation plan for, and test your applications and services in Windows Server 2012 or 2008.

We create a tailored migration plan for your organisation Our Microsoft certified engineers can work with your IT department to evaluate the requirements for migration to either a new on-premises Microsoft solution or take advantage of Blue Sky’s hybrid and private cloud services. Our experts can provide a

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migration strategy that will ensure your data and business continuity whilst making the transition.

Cost effective server virtualisation Many servers running Windows 2003 Server are in fact often old, with parts difficult to obtain. With new hardware and virtualisation, we can both reduce your IT costs and improve performance of your business critical systems.

Windows Server 2008/2012 training Depending on your migration requirements, Blue Sky can also provide online or onsite training to help familiarise your IT team with the current versions of Microsoft Sever 2008 and 2012 to maximise your investment and ensure protection.

Don’t panic, there is still time to plan and migrate before the big crunch, just contact our sales team at [email protected] or give us a call on +44 (0)20 7183 5854

Microsoft to discontinue support of Windows 2003

“Didn’t you get the memo?”

Keep in the loop and sign up for the Blue Sky customer email: www.bluesky.co.uk/connect

blue sky connect magazine issue 2

Documents

dot london domains

iso compliant blue sky

blueskyhosting f

blueskyhosting e

level domain service

london based organisation

customer service

quality objectives