Established following the merger of two housing associations — City South and Eastlands Homes — the newly-formed One Manchester found itself with a complex network of connectivity solutions, which were not only inefficient but unnecessarily expensive.  

Central provides Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBA) - the UK’s first tenant and employee co-owned mutual housing society, with approximately 13,000 properties - with tighter security infrastructure and a robust recovery plan.

Central provides The Sovini Group – a medium-sized registered social landlord with 13,000 homes – with evolved IT infrastructure and a new data centre home.

In today’s climate of rapid change and uncertainty, business challenges are not a possibility – but a reality that organisations of any shape or size will face sooner rather than later.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. By leveraging the learnings of these obstacles, businesses can turn what might have previously been a mediocre IT service into something jam-packed with strategy and resilience.

Whatever your IT requirements, we’ll help you to consider all options. Here at Central, you’ll never be just ‘a ticket’ to us, we make things happen through our passion for problem solving and will help you to make decisions with commercial interests in mind. So, without further ado.

Here’s three reasons why outsourcing your IT support starts with the objectives and challenges of your organisation…

You need to know the lie of the land.

You can't implement 'great IT' if you aren't aware of what the need for the tech is. Looking at the current objectives and challenges of your organisation and evaluating which tech foundations already exist gives you a starting point.

Perhaps you’re looking to set up a new IT network, or transfer your existing one, or you may be considering how best to protect your organisation from cyber-attacks and data breaches —whatever the need is for outsourcing your managed IT support, we’re here to be a trusted partner and help drive your organisation forward.

It helps to solve organisation-wide pain-points.

Tech and operational frustrations are often felt across an entire organisation. If you don't consider your business objectives and challenges and look at your IT set-up in tandem, any solution you implement won't be considered, and likely, not fit for purpose. Here at Central, we’re committed to making IT as seamless as possible, to ensure business continuity as well as supporting your team whenever they need it.

Technical issues may be having more of an impact on your organisation than you once thought, which is why outsourcing your IT needs to a trusted partner can help to increase productivity of your current team, minimise downtime, and significantly reduce the burden of mounting IT pressures.

It gives you a benchmark.

If you're able to evaluate where you are with new tech in comparison to your old tech, it helps to give a measure of how successful its implementation has been — as well as a clearer indicator of ROI. Equally, if you have specific goals in place — whether for staff and/or customers - these need to be established, so you can ensure your tech partner implements a solution that's future-proofed and directly supports where your organisation is heading.

Want to learn more about how objectives and challenges can supercharge your IT? We love to chat! Whether you’re seeking more information on our comprehensive service offering or want to know if we’d be the right fit for your business, contact us below.

Central provides The Regenda Group – a medium-sized Registered Social Housing Provider (RSHP) with 13,000 homes – with multi-level support.

Whether you’re a business or charity organisation, we believe that technology should be at the heart of everything you do. With the increasing complexity of the digital revolution causing businesses to become victim to cyber-attacks and security breaches more frequently than ever, outsourcing your IT to a trusted partner could add real value to your existing team.

Offering reliable assistance that boasts a myriad of efficiencies — from widened access to industry knowledge and expertise, one often overlooked benefit of improved morale and productivity throughout your team — external partners can significantly reduce the burdens of mounting IT pressures.

So, whether you choose to wholly or partially outsource your IT needs, here are some of our top tips on leveraging the powers of professional IT services to grow your organisation…

• Finding a trusted partner: Here at Central, we believe your IT partner should become a true extension of your team — this doesn’t mean that you must take an all-or-nothing approach. By strategically outsourcing the help your business needs, you’re likely to significantly reduce costs, improve the productivity of your in-house team, and solve any technical problems that may have been having a bigger effect on your organisation than you once thought.

• Knowledge sharing: We believe that a great IT partner should integrate seamlessly into your organisation and act as a true extension of your in-house team. It’s important to remember that they should bring real value to your in-house team rather than viewing them as a replacement, after all, many heads make light work. Finding a partner that truly cares about your business and its objectives will help to generate more ideas within your existing team and share best practice. With more professional heads coming together, this is likely to help minimise downtime, increase efficiencies, and act as a catalyst for business growth.

• Ensuring business continuity: One of the most important reasons for outsourcing your IT support is that you should be able to ‘rest easy’, with the knowledge that your IT service provider can support you around the clock, should any disasters — including data breaches, phishing attacks, and nuisance network downtime. At Central, we believe a trusted partner will help to ease the burden and additional pressures of your existing team, so they can concentrate on the more strategic tasks — helping to drive your organisation forward. 

And at Central, we think that service is even more important than the product itself. We always go the extra mile to look after our customers – and we’ve been doing this for 30 years. We’re committed to making IT as seamless as possible and placing people at the heart of everything we do.

Central can help to understand and implement your business’s digital transformation needs. To discuss your requirements with one of our specialists or for more advice on growing your organisation with professional IT services, Contact us.

And don’t forget, you can also find news updates from the Central team over on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Despite the integral role email plays in maintaining consistent communication in both professional and personal use, many of us take default email privacy and security features for granted.

No matter the size or scope of your organisation – or the status of your individual profile – email hacks and data theft remain some of the most prolific cyber-attacks amongst perpetrators across the globe, with the primary motive being to turn a profit.

And with over 319 billion emails sent and received worldwide in 2021 – each containing personal data – protecting your inbox from tragedy is crucial, especially as companies work to bolster our digital strategies throughout 2022 and beyond.

From ransomware and phishing to fraud and identity theft, there are a whole host of cybercrime categories in circulation to target vulnerabilities. The good news is, there are lots of tips and procedures that can remove both you and your organisation from the firing line, and help mitigate the nuisance and chaos caused as a result of malicious email attacks.

To spearhead your journey towards safeguarding your inbox, here are seven tips from the team here at Central…

1. Get to know your service provider’s Terms of Service

The first step in any digital privacy and security strategy is getting to know your email provider’s Terms of Service – only by knowing and understanding what the gaps are, can you fill them effectively.

While you might – rightfully – assume that your email provider shares the same values as you when it comes to data protection, this isn’t always the case. Take Google as a key reminder. If you’re not careful about who you grant permissions to, third-party developers could be trawling through your inbox. You can see an exhaustive list of those with access, by going to myaccount.google.com and going to ‘security’. 

2. Adopt and maintain regular training protocols

Your employees are your first line of defence in any threat. Ensuring full compliance throughout your organisation is essential in reducing the likelihood of compromise, Furthermore, undertaking regular tests will allow you to evaluate understanding of best practice within your firm to better inform future privacy and security decisions.

For example, company-wide phishing exercises can uncover whether or not your employees could successfully identify a malicious email – with a notification being triggered from clicking a masked link. Alternatively, you could regularly quiz your staff on different scenarios, to see whether their approach to a security threat would be correct.

3. Download anti-virus software

Anti-virus software is self-explanatory – it protects your device against viruses. And with cyber-attacks becoming increasingly sophisticated, these programs are becoming increasingly accustomed to tackling a diverse range of threats – including using behaviour monitoring and machine learning to scope out threats before they even exist.

Not only does anti-virus software scan inbound email attachments for potential dangers, but it also monitors outbound communications to prevent spam emails or corrupted files from being distributed to your network and ruining your credibility.

4. Use multi-factor authentication

While weak passwords are an obvious risk to security, strong passwords aren’t always enough to keep cybercriminals out of your account. Hackers are often either sophisticated enough to guess your login credentials, or have powerful insight into information on the dark web.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) offers additional inbox protection by relying on more than just a password to gain entry. Such measures include one-time passwords, responding to an SMS prompt, biometric scanning, or even diverting your login attempt to a pre-listed, alternative device.

5. Create custom email filters

Cyber criminals are coming up with innovative ways of evading your spam filter every day, but configuring your email account with tailored filters can help to catch those that slip through the net.

Involving both inbound and outbound proactive email monitoring, email filtering services classify messages into different categories to mark them as safe – protecting both you and your network. By partnering with security and data protection leader, Barracuda, Central Networks offers a complete email management solution – with powerful and customisable governing of messages – to ensure productivity isn’t impacted throughout your business.

6. Encrypt your connections

To prevent private and personal information from being intercepted by data thieves, it’s important to encrypt the connection between your device and your email server. You’ll know if a site is encrypted because it will begin with https://.

While some email service providers encrypt your connection automatically, others require you to actively alter your account settings. Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) offers peace of mind that your emails are secure, by routing traffic through a separate server and making your online movements less trackable.

Alternatively, you can encrypt individual emails through designated apps that make private messages impossible to decipher, unless you are explicitly authorised to access them – even in cases where your inbox might be compromised.

7. Lock your device in public spaces

Whether you’re stepping away from your device for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, never leave your email account visible for others to read at a glance or – even worse – go in and access. Not only could they retrieve sensitive data from your inbox, they could also change your log-in information to prevent you from accessing it for good.

To temporarily lock your desktop, simply press Windows+L on a Windows device, or Command+Control+A on a Mac. Then, once you’re ready to go again, re-enter your password and see your tabs re-open as before.

Whilst specific requirements will differ from one organisation – and person – to another, these tips provide a great foundation for everyone to bolster their email privacy and security strategies even further.

So, whether you’ve fallen victim to an email attack or are simply concerned about your current level of protection, it’s important to explore what your options are. To hear further advice from our team of cyber security experts, or to learn more about the value we can add to your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. 

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