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ICUK has beefed up its security play with the introduction of Two Factor Authentication (2FA) as part of version 15.1, providing an additional layer of security as a password is no longer enough.

2FA also allows control panel users to make use of a 'multitude' of third party applications to generate unique and time sensitive codes.

"We're not using proprietary code generators, we provide 2FA users the ability to pick between using an app on their smart phone or built into their browser," said Paul Barnett, Director of ICUK.

"No longer is it good enough to have knowledge of a password, you must now have physical access to the users phone or computer to achieve access to our portal."

2FA is being made available as an option for all reseller control panels, as well as to end user interfaces.

Resellers can choose to enforce this as standard, or leave for their client to choose.

"We hope that the introduction of 2FA leads to proactive thinking about portal security for our resellers, and brings increased awareness of just how sensitive the data can be in the wrong hands, or the implications of a compromise," added Barnett.

"As consumer awareness of online security increases this can hopefully be a feature which makes its way into sales processes to instil confidence."

Channel sales veteran Jim Sewell is masterminding a new sports challenge which he hopes will become 'The London Marathon for schoolchildren'.

Sewell, former sales director at Alternative Networks, has launched the first schools triathlon event which will take place on April 17th at the Royal Russell School in Croydon. It's all in aid of the London based charity Restless Development, where Sewell now works as a trustee.

"There is nothing better than combining competitive and fun sport with fundraising for young people around the world who need our support. The children taking part are really excited about taking part in a triathlon, many for the first time, but they are also really proud about raising money to help others. We see the RestlessTriathlon becoming the kids' equivalent of the London Marathon."

The inaugural triathlon at the Royal Russell school will see children compete in teams of four at running, swimming and cycling.  Each competitor has to fundraise between £50 to £100.

 "This is first of two RestlessTriathlons that are taking place in 2016. The other is at Bradfield College in Reading on May 8th. We are planning to add many more triathlons over the next few years and hope to raise £1m by our fifth year," added Sewell.

Anyone interested in sponsoring a RestlessTriathlon should contact jim@restlessdevelopment.org

Logicalis has collected the award for Service Partner of the Year at the Cisco Partner Summit UK & Ireland (UK&I).

Richard Alexander, Solutions Director of Logicalis UK, commented: "To be named Service Partner of the Year is a great testament to the vision and commitment of the whole UK team.

"Our long and successful partnership with Cisco sees us working with more organisations than ever before to digitally enable and evolve their infrastructure to support new applications and services.

"Logicalis has invested heavily into SMART services as part of a forward-looking go to market offering, focused on helping our clients build a digitally enabled infrastructure to forge a new relationship between IT and the business.

"We see our continued innovation in Cisco technology propositions as vital to enabling CIOs with the power to offer the choice of services their organisations need at the speed of business."

European storage is a tough market and, with even more competition in the flash side of the business, is seeing a continued fall in traditional storage using hard drives.

The total EMEA external storage systems value fell 7.5% year over year to $2.08bn in the fourth quarter of 2015 (4Q15), according to IDC's EMEA Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, 4Q15. For the full year 2015, the external storage systems value in EMEA fell 8.5% to just over $7bn, from $7.66bn in 2014.

The traditional hard disk array (HDD) segment in the region continued its double-digit decline in 4Q15, falling 26.2% in user value to take the annual decline in the HDD segment in 2015 to 25.9% to $3.4 billion, from $4.6 billion in 2014.

The flash market, on the other hand, recorded huge growth, with the all-flash array (AFA) segment growing 151% annually in 4Q15. Hybrid flash arrays (HFAs) were almost flat in the quarter, with a 0.7% drop yr/yr. For the full year, AFA systems recorded strong triple-digit growth of 158%, while hybrid arrays grew by 5% yr/yr.

"Considering 2015 as a whole, unfavourable exchange rates had a major impact on performance in EMEA, with year-on-year trends determined by which currency rate was used - there was an 8.5% drop in value in dollars, for example, but a 9.2% increase in euros.

But 2015 will mainly be remembered for being the tipping point in the data centre transformation toward a more agile, cost-effective infrastructure, ready to support third Platform applications and emerging workloads," said Silvia Cosso, senior analyst, European Storage Research, IDC.

"The adoption of flash was remarkably quick during the year, with flash systems, both HFA and AFA, overtaking HDD-only systems and representing 51% of total value shipped in 2015 versus 40% in 2014.

Cloud was also a strong driver of growth, especially in sales of commodity white boxes for public cloud applications, as seen by the 32% year-on-year growth of ODM and converged systems in the enterprise space."

The Western European external storage market fell 5% yr/yr in user value to $1.5bn in 4Q15. For the full year, it fell 7.7% to $5.1bn from $5.56bn in 2014. The flash storage segment remained the bright spot in Western Europe, with AFAs growing by almost 162% yr/yr and HFAs growing by 6.9% in user value for the full year. The all-flash segment grew 173.7% yr/yr, while the hybrid flash market was relatively flat with a 0.6% decline. The HDD segment, meanwhile, fell 25.2% in 4Q15.

By country, the decline in the total external storage market in the U.K. and Germany continued in 4Q15, largely due to the drop in the HDD segment (15.3% in the UK and 23.7% in Germany), especially with some traditionally strong segments such as financial services slowing down investments in traditional storage infrastructures.

On the other hand, France continued to defy this trend by recording another positive quarter in 4Q15, steadily returning to growth after a long run of negative quarters. This was propelled by strong growth in flash storage segments, with 258.7% growth in AFAs and 30% growth in HFAs.

The last quarter of 2015 was marked by another poor performance in the Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) external storage market, reflected in a 13% year-on-year decline in user value to $586.6m.

The overall 2015 results fell below the $2bn mark due to 10% lower spending than in the previous year. Capacity continued to see double-digit growth, reaching 941.1 petabytes and 2.9 exabytes for the quarter and the year respectively.

The subdued overall market results could be attributed to the gap between the new data centre workload, cost, and efficiency requirements and the prevailing legacy storage systems, coupled with the disruption caused by vendors' ongoing efforts to transform their strategies.

"Looking at the results, 2015 was one of the worst years for the storage hardware market in CEMA in the past five years, as it again failed to reach the levels of 2011," said Marina Kostova, senior research analyst, Storage Systems, IDC CEMA. "Macroeconomic factors, political turbulence, the embargo in Russia, and falling oil prices were largely responsible for this, but they will only have a transitory effect.

"While IDC expects the market to return to more positive performance, the disruption caused by third Platform technologies is changing the storage consumption and competitive landscape for good, highlighting the limitations of the traditional storage market and creating new opportunities for emerging trends and players."

Red Box Recorders has introduced Assure: Daily System Check, a software tool for automated verification of audio recording, which delivers compliance-assurance for recorded communication systems.

The solution has been designed to ensure an organisation is fully compliant with call recording regulations, enabling the verification of its communication infrastructure to ensure it is functioning correctly and recording critical communications.

Globally, financial institutions spend millions of pounds every year manually verifying that they are recording audio to compliance standards.

Assure: Daily System Check reliably conducts scheduled checks on 100% of an organisation's communications devices including trader turrets, soft turrets, Unified Communications and traditional telephony, with reporting for compliance verification.

Assure: Daily System Check also links with the Quantify Insight dashboard to provide an inspection of recording system health, live progress and individual device status. Other features include the ability to verify that exempt users are not being recorded and to replay recordings from any checked device for additional verification.

John Cunningham, CTO at Red Box Recorders said: "Trading floors will be assured of 100% verification of their communications systems. When you also consider the cost-saving benefit it's clear that any organisation with compliance requirements needs to have this technology.

Daily System Check is the first of the 'Assure' range of products and services from Red Box.

There 'ain't no mountain high enough' for Rob Boylett, founder of Business Phones & Networks. In May the Stourbridge based entrepreneur will be joining England rugby hero Jason Leonard in a brave attempt to scale north Africa's highest peak Mount Toubkal.

It's all in aid of the Atlas Foundation, which was founded by some of the world's leading rugby players to identify and support projects that relieve human suffering and disadvantage across the planet.

The challenge will take place over four days from May 6th-9th and the group will be led by highly experienced professional mountaineer, Rhys Jones, supported by a doctor and a number of local expert guides and porters.

"I am renowned for doing mad things quite regularly. Mount Toubkal is the highest peak in North Africa at 14,000 feet and yes I am going to climb it," said Boylett.

"It'll be tough, but sometimes making it hard is the best way to remind ourselves about the suffering others have to endure on a daily basis.

"I'm committed to raising 10k, along with a bunch of guys who have stood up to support Jason Leonard as we endeavour to make a total of £100k."

You can help Rob Boylett in his challenge by donating here https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/robertboylett1

Telecoms World has achieved Gamma Platinum Partner status following a strong performance selling the Horizon IP platform and connectivity solutions.

Gamma's Head of Resale Channel Roan Pratt said: "It is exciting to work with a company that is ambitious and embraces not only our services but also our vision."
 
Telecoms World MD Neil Barrall added: "We have always championed IP telephony and made connectivity a core focus of our business strategy. Becoming a Platinum Partner brings not only a sense of achievement but also opportunity as we work more closely with Gamma to explore new avenues of business."

Pictured: Roan Pratt (left) with Neil Barrall

Elite has launched a new VoIP platform and is offering channel partners free set-up on all hosted seats and trunks, with free call recording for all users, free calls to all internal numbers and use of Elite's presence feature and IM service.

Partners can also request a free SIP trunk trial to test the capability of the system in a real-time environment; while the system admins now have the flexibility to instantly scale up and down as customer requirements change, and can provision new users instantly.

"With the increase of remote working and hot desking, as well as the end of the legacy ISDN network fast approaching, more and more businesses are turning to VoIP as an alternative," said Matthew Rogers, Marketing and Business Development Manager.

"Following a successful beta trial period our new hosted voice and SIP trunking service is now officially taking on new resellers and customers.

"We have had an influx of interest and are servicing a considerable number of businesses across the UK through our network of channel partners."

Zen Internet has been named a Which? Recommended Provider for Broadband Services with a five-star rating for ease of set-up, reliability, clarity of bills, ease of contacting, customer service and technical support.

Which? questioned 3,717 broadband customers about their experiences to identify the best ISP providers in the UK.

The customer score (as a percentage) is based on overall score and the likelihood of users to recommend an ISP to a friend.

Andrew Fryatt, MD of Zen's Small Business & Residential Division, said: "This acknowledges the commitment of the entire team at Zen, especially our Technical Support and Customer Services team who go above and beyond for customers every day."

Which? said: "Zen Internet came top in our survey with the highest customer score of any provider - 98% of customers surveyed said they were satisfied with the service, and 95% would recommend it to a friend."

Simon Lowth is to join BT Group in July as Group Finance Director and an executive board director.

He is known for driving cost transformation and performance improvement programmes, and brings much experience to BT having been CFO and served on the boards of three publicly listed companies - BG Group, AstraZeneca and ScottishPower over the past eleven years.

He has also been non-executive director at Standard Chartered Bank since 2010.

He will replace BT's current Finance Director, Tony Chanmugam, following a handover period.

Chanmugam will then move to focus on integrating the mobile network provider EE into BT for a period of time.

Lowth said: "Having acquired one of the UK's leading mobile operators and with superfast fibre broadband available to well over 24 million homes, BT is well-placed for growth in consumer, business and wholesale markets.

"I look forward to working with Gavin Patterson and the rest of BT's strong team to build upon the solid strategic and financial foundations already in place."

Gavin Patterson, BT Group Chief Executive, said: "Simon brings a wealth of experience to BT having served as CFO and a board director for a number of major international companies.

"On top of his solid financial acumen, his strong organisational leadership and engineering experience at a number of leading infrastructure companies will be a real asset for BT."