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News
February 1st 2010
New Year – New Products! We think 2010 will see increased interest
in network security and particularly on threat management at the point of
network access. This is traditionally provided on a firewall at the site, but
with the capital costs and the need to upgrade with changes to the business,
plus the management overhead of having staff trained in all the firewall
variants, clients are increasingly looking to have this provided as part of a
managed service. Smart-Secure is our new network-based security service where all
the threat management is provided within the network. When delivered with say a
leased line, Smart-Connect service or even a basic broadband connection the
public IP is retained within our network and the service delivered to your site
is provided on your private LAN IP addresses. In essence the LAN port on your
firewall is now the network service. Link Connect manage the firewall
functionality for you, or you can have Administrator access and complete this
yourself. All the usual functionality like VPN connections, anti-virus, content
management and port forwarding can be configured as before but now much of the
traffic managed by the firewall no longer runs on your access circuit, making
it much more efficient. There are options suitable for just a few
users to thousands and all available now. If you are
considering upgrading your firewalls at any site call the Sales Team at Link
Connect and see how a combined access circuit and Smart-Secure could
save you time and money. 15th January 2010 2009 – Good or Bad? Well it was hard work that is certain.
There was no free lunch available and all our staff worked hard to achieve our
sales growth and meet our high standards of customer service. The growth in our Smart-Connect product
has again shown how important it is to have reliable and scalable connectivity
in today's business environment and how, for many customers there are few
alternatives. We doubled installations of Smart-Connect in 2009 against the
previous year. Quite an achievement in todays straightened times. However,
maybe we should not be surprised as Smart-Connect represent’s very good value
for money, and in many cases we have saved customers several thousand pounds
against their original connectivity. Basic failures during the bad weather of
February 2009 and again in December and this January had little or no impact on
our Smart-Connect customers, with only one experiencing any outage due to line
problems. Our overall availability across our network service is very close to
five 9s, representing an average unavailable time for all customers of less
than five minutes in the year. This was achieved through careful deployment of
our network, aggressive management of our partners and the use of continuous
monitoring to predict likely points of failure correcting early. We were even
able to diagnose a likely memory fault in an access device and have it
exchanged before it failed. With customers
increasingly relying on access the need for high bandwidth, high availability
and simple delivery has never been greater. 25th December 2009 Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year to all our customers from everyone at Link-Connect! 12th December 2009 Building a Digital Britain Link-Connect were interviewed for
the upcoming “Building a Digital Britain” film for The Business Channel, and
due to be broadcast on Sky and Freesat early in 2010. The film, also to be available on
the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the Confederation of British Industry
(CBI) websites examines a number of key issues surrounding the deployment of
next generation networks in the UK as part of the government’s Building a
Digital Britain” campaign. Martin Alexander (MD) and David Amos (Director,
Sales & Marketing) made the case for Bonded ADSL and other services to
supplement the infrastructure where the next generation technologies will not
be available for several years. Video of the interviews will be available on
the Link-Connect website and here on 3rd December 2009 Keep in touch! A
new study has revealed that the average UK adult spends 68 hours online and
over 7 hours using their mobile phone every month. This equates to over a month
(34 days) a year online and three and a half days per year on the phone. |