Cyber insurance discounts: how Cyber Essentials Plus cuts UK SII premiums
UK cyber insurance premiums rose 50-200% across 2022-2024 as ransomware claims escalated. Cyber Essentials Plus increasingly attracts material discount — typically 10-25% off premium — and in some cas…
UK server lead times in 2026: what to expect and how to de-risk delivery
Lead time is the variable that quietly wrecks more infrastructure projects than budget does. A server that is perfect on paper is useless if it lands six weeks after the migration window. In 2026 lead…
Designing a one-petabyte storage server in 2026: a UK reference architecture
A petabyte used to be a data-centre's worth of storage; in 2026 it is a design exercise that fits in a few rack units if you get the architecture right. But assembling a petabyte is not simply a matte…
Should you wait for the next server generation? A 2026 buy-now-vs-hold framework (UK)
There is always a faster server coming, so the temptation to wait one more cycle never goes away. Sometimes holding for the next generation is the right call; far more often it quietly costs more than…
Buying Microsoft licences in the UK: EA vs CSP vs MCA
UK organisations buying Microsoft licences in 2026 navigate four programmes: Enterprise Agreement (EA), Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA-E direct), and the legacy MPSA …
HPE Apollo as a backup repository target: capacity tier vs StoreOnce
When a backup estate outgrows its repository, UK teams face a fork: buy more of a purpose-built deduplication appliance, or build a high-capacity landing zone on a dense server and let the backup soft…
RAID 6 vs RAID 10: capacity vs write performance
RAID 6 maximises capacity and survives any two failures; RAID 10 maximises write performance and rebuilds fastest. The right choice depends on your workload — compare them on your drives in the RAID c…
How to choose your UK IT partner (without vendor bias)
Choosing a UK IT partner has more impact on long-term IT operations than most procurement teams credit. Good resellers compress procurement cycles, get better commercial outcomes, and stop you making …
IT buying playbook for UK law firms 2026
UK law firm IT in 2026 has three priorities most firms underweight at procurement: SRA + Lexcel cyber posture, document management (DMS) modernisation, and hybrid-working infrastructure that protects …
Data lake and lakehouse storage nodes: on-prem hardware for analytics at scale (UK 2026)
The modern data lake is built on object storage, and a lakehouse layers table formats and query engines on top so analytics can run directly against that object layer. On-prem, that means real servers…
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