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 cases is now a precondi…
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 times are better th…
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 matter of buying enough d…
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 it saves, in lost e…
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 / Open programmes (m…
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 software do the clever p…
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 calculator (6 vs 10).…
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 expensive vendor mis…
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 matter confidentiali…
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: nodes that present…
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