The Southwark Business Excellence Awards

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We are delighted to announce that Cloudscape IT are now FINALISTS in Southwark Business Excellence Awards – Tech and Innovation category

The Southwark Business Excellence Awards Tech & Innovation

Southwark has a thriving and dynamic business community and the Southwark Business Excellence Awards in association with Lewisham Southwark College will celebrate its many successes and achievements.

BEST BUSINESS FOR TECH & INNOVATION CATEGORY

 

Companies who put technology and innovation to the forefront of their business are future proofing their business and the local economy.

Awarded to the organisation achieving the most stand-out accomplishment of the year in new technology, for innovative new hardware or software products, or generally-available IT services, which make the biggest contribution to business – or life in general!

This award recognises achievement in the development, implementation and sales of new technologies.

THE JUDGES ARE LOOKING FOR A BUSINESS WITH:

  • Innovation within the business and market differentiation of the product or service
  • Demonstrable commercial success of the product or service
  • Evidence of customers satisfaction
  • Clear benefits of product to end-user
  • Tangible commercial benefit.

The Awards winners  – including the overall Southwark Business of the Year – will announced exclusively at a glittering, black tie Gala Awards Dinner in a prestigious venue in June.

More information

GDPR Compliance

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Are you Ready for GDPR?

Preparing For GDPR and Data Protection Reform

Data privacy laws have been consistently intensifying in the last few decades as technology has advanced and the reach of some companies has continued to expand. In the EU, the big news is that GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is going to be enforced as of May 25th, 2018.

Data Privacy Laws

GDPR is planned to bring all the data privacy laws across Europe into harmony so there is less confusion about how to protect the information of consumers. With this, there will be significant complications for businesses in the short-run, as they work to adjust their policies to be accordance with regulations.

Key GDPR Changes

The three key changes to past privacy regulations are around the increased territorial scope, the penalties levied, and the conditions for consent.

  • Scope – The most important thing to realise about GDPR is that it doesn’t just pertain to EU businesses, it pertains to any businesses that provide services to and collect data on EU data subjects. This puts nearly every business under the microscope, since it is difficult to completely avoid customers from the EU.
  • Penalties – The penalties can be harmful with fines up to 4% of annual global turnover. The highest fines are taken when a company does something egregious like failing to gain customer consent to process data. It is important to realize this applies to both data processors and data controllers, so “cloud” companies won’t be able to escape unscathed.
  • Consent – Prior to GDPR, it would be possible to gain the consent of subjects by using hard to decipher terms or advanced legalese to confuse the consumer into acquiescing. Now, consent must be based on clear and plain language, so no confusion can result, and withdrawing consent must be as easy as it is to supply it.

Other major changes involve the mandatory notification of a breach pertaining to a consumers’ data, data portability, and the right to be forgotten. These will all require their own processes to be put in place for when a consumer makes a specific request. Additionally, companies will now require the consent of parents if the consumer in question is under the age of 16.

Preparing for GDPR

To prepare for GDPR, it is important to assess which aspects of these regulations your company is not currently in compliance with, and take measures to remediate them. Key points of interest are regarding children, consent, data breaches, subject access requests, and the international aspect of all these points. Additionally, public institutions and companies meeting other conditions will be required to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO), who would be in charge of addressing all these points.

GDPR Going Forward

Individuals have data rights, and the EU regulators are beginning to get very aggressive around their desire to protect these rights. Every organisation that processes personal data must be compliant with new GDPR rules on 25 May 2018 and this includes charities and voluntary organisations. Your senior staff should be aware that the law is changing and take appropriate action. If you don’t know what personal data you hold and where it came from you will need to organise an audit of your different systems and departments to find out.

Let us help you navigate the GDPR rules and ensure your company is ready

Atera Transforms the Way Cloudscape Does Business

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Atera Empowers Cloudscape to Automate Processes and Profitably Grow.

Atera

Utilizing Atera’s award-winning IT management platform, Cloudscape was able to access the tools needed to automate and scale business

practices with greater efficiency

 

The Problem

Cloudscape is a growing IT support company based in London. The company focuses on providing IT services to small and medium-sized businesses in London’s West End serving financial services, professional services, and retail businesses, and design agencies. Contracts typically cover a wide range of IT-related services as Cloudscape’s clients tend to outsource the majority of their IT requirements, including desktop support, management of mobile devices, network and server maintenance, hosting, and cloud projects.

With more than 50 contract clients, Cloudscape needed a streamlined way of managing each client’s individual requirements, recording billable hours, and handling day-to-day support tasks.

As company director, Mike Casey explained:

“ We were using several disjointed systems at the time, and were tracking time spent on client projects through Outlook, manually syncing hours at the end of every day. It was very clunky. ”

The solutions

Atera Transforms the Way Coudscape Does Business

Gartner found that “many business and IT leaders see the customer experience as a sustainable source of competitive differentiation.” It became clear to Cloudscape that they needed to improve processes to ensure the company was providing a best-in-class experience to clients.

Mike turned to Atera for help improving their processes and systems, that would in-turn offer a better experience to their customers.

Installing Atera’s MSP platform has completely transformed the way the Cloudscape team works.

Benefits

An all-in-one, Centralised Platform

Atera opened the door to truly transformational tools and resources that have helped Cloudscape thrive.

Remote access for support purposes, online backups and monitoring, time recording, and ticketing are now all centralised via the Atera platform. Mike believes the system saves him an estimated 14 hours each month just on preparing the timesheets. Pleased with these time and cost savings, he is also leveraging the Quickbooks integration, which replaced his accounting and invoicing system.

“With our increasing number of clients, the platform definitely makes all the overhead tasks easier as it automates so many processes and stops mistakes from happening,” he explained.

Mike continued: “ We have new people joining our team soon and we will start them on Atera straight away. With the platform in place, Cloudscape is well prepared for further growth. ”

Atera has helped us streamline our processes to become more operationally efficient

 

Mike Casey, Managing Director at Cloudscape

Read the full Atera Cloudscape case study