Consultancy Services
J2 Technology specialises in helping businesses achieve the most from their IT infrastructure investment. We can provide the complete solution from specification, supply, configuration, installation and on-going hardware and software support.
Discover our range of Professional Consultancy Services
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Cyber Essentials
The Cyber Essentials scheme was developed and launched by the UK Government in 2014, and is aimed at highlighting security controls that should help organisations mitigate the risk to IT systems from Internet based threats and cyber-attacks.
The Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus certificates demonstrate commitment to your clients and business partners that you take data protection seriously.
The accreditation is based on self-assessment, completing a questionnaire that is then verified by a government approved Certification Body. Once you’ve passed, you will be awarded a Cyber Essentials certificate.
We can help you achieve certification by reviewing your existing security position, offering guidance for remediation to achieve compliance, and reviewing your answers prior to submission.
GDPR
The Data Protection Directive will be replaced by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and despite BREXIT, is expected to become British law on the 25th May 2018.
GDPR applies to all industries and organisations that holds, processes, manages or deals with personal or sensitive data.
Fines of up to 4% of an organisations worldwide annual turnover, or €20 million (whichever is higher) can be imposed in the event of a compliance breach. If you have a breach, you must notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours, and you may also have to notify your customers.
If you have yet to start, or are still in the early stages of preparing for GDPR, we can help you work through the 12 steps that you need to take in order to prepare your organisation for GPDR readiness. We can also review how your data is stored and encrypted, assess whether you have the right technology in place to help prevent a data breach, assist with updating your privacy notices and implementing processes and policies to ensure continuous compliance.
Software Licensing
All software must be installed and used in accordance with the software vendor’s license terms, and non-compliance can result in fines and penalties.
Software vendors conduct regular audits on organisations of all sizes, and if you are not prepared, it can lead to significant financial impact from true-up costs, fines, and legal fees, not to mention the damage to your organisation’s reputation.
We can help you prepare by conducting a software license audit that will identify what software has been purchased, and more importantly, what software has been installed. The resulting data will provide an accurate vendor-specific view on your current state of compliance, which could show under-usage as well as over-usage.
We can also provide an ongoing Software Asset Management (SAM) service for organisations working with multiple software vendors and license agreements.
Data Storage Assessment
Every organisation generates and / or processes data, however, not all data is the same, and not all data is stored in the same way. Data can be stored locally within a structured database, or on an unstructured file-system that could be at risk to CryptoLocker Ransomware. Data can also be stored in online cloud services such as Dropbox, as well as on USB drives, laptops, smartphones and other mobile devices, and could fall in to the wrong hands if not secured and encrypted.
With GPDR looming, it is more important than ever to ensure you have full visibility of what data is stored, how and where.
We can help by conducting a data storage assessment to identify what data is held, where, and whether it is secure or not.
Backup and Recovery
Backing up data is one of the most important aspects of a data protection strategy, but unless the methods used are efficient and effective, the chances of reliably restoring data when you most need it are greatly reduced.
A good backup strategy should always take the requirements of the business in to account, catering for the rate of data change and required speed of recovery for instance. Implementing a cloud based solution for offsite backups should ensure availability of data should the worst happen to your building, whilst an onsite backup provides the fastest recovery times. Best practice employs a combination of both methods.
Knowing your backups are working gives you piece of mind, but how do you really know unless you conduct recovery tests. A complete backup strategy should also always include a repeatable test recovery process.
We can review your existing backup and recovery strategy and processes, validating against business requirements. We will recommend improvements where necessary, or help define a backup and recovery strategy if one doesn’t exist already. We can also recommend and supply a backup solution to match your strategy, including a managed backup service for complete piece of mind.
Data Security
Keeping data secure involves taking measures to prevent unauthorised access, and implementing adequate protection against corruption and loss caused by failure or deliberate action. This is not only essential for meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, such as GDPR, but also to maintain an organisation’s reputation.
Having a robust and tested backup and recovery strategy will mitigate the impact caused by storage system failure, as well as from corruption caused by viruses and other malicious software, including CryptoLocker Ransomware.
Implementing Firewalls, Antivirus and Anti-malware software will help protect your data from attack, whilst encrypting data at rest and in motion should further prevent unauthorised access, especially when combined with a strong credential and password policy.
We can review your current data security measures, recommend improvements where necessary, and assist with attaining GDPR compliance.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery is an integral part of the overall risk management for any organisation. Since all risks cannot be eliminated, you need to have a Disaster Recovery plan so that you are prepared for any potential disruptive event, and the business can continue after a disaster.
In the event of a disaster, the continued operations of your organisation depend on the ability to replicate your IT systems and data. The Disaster Recovery plan stipulates how a company will prepare for a disaster, what the company’s response will be, and what steps it will take to ensure that operations can be restored. The Disaster Recovery plan describes all of the steps involved in the planning for and reacting to a potential disaster.
We can review you current Disaster Recovery plan, or assist with its creation to ensure that it meets your organisations recovery objectives. We can also also recommend and implement an appropriate solution that meets the requirements of the plan.
Audit
If you are looking to change or update your infrastructure, or have simply lost track of what you have, an Infrastructure Audit is the best place to start.
We will attend your site and capture details of all items of IT infrastructure, such as make, model, serial number, and other relevant information.
The standard audit will also capture operating system and core application information from Servers and PCs, whilst configuration data will be recorded from network equipment, printers and other devices.
We can also offer an enhanced audit service, where inventory software will be used to capture detailed system information, including application versions and software patch levels.
A software license audit will then be conducted using the data gathered from the inventory software, and validated against the licenses purchased by your organisation. This can highlight under-usage as well as over-usage.
Review
Once an audit has been completed, an infrastructure review can provide valuable insight in to the performance of each component in your environment, highlighting possible areas for improvement, or even potential cost savings through the use of more efficient technology.
The review is a fully collaborative process, and can also include systems providers to ensure all requirements are understood.
Design
Our extensive technical knowledge, coupled with over 30 years of industry experience enables us to design infrastructure solutions to suit all requirements.
Our knowledge spans a wide range of technologies, and that allows us to identify component parts from best-of-breed vendors to design a solution that is fit-for-purpose.
Consulting closely with you on every aspect, we’ll define an infrastructure strategy and appropriate deployment plan, whether for a single implementation project, or a large scale roll-out.
Audit
IT security threats have increased as technology has evolved, and protecting your systems and data should be high up on the list of priorities.
The IT security strategy should not be based on assumptions, and should instead be based on thorough and regular security audits.
We can help by conducting an internal and external security audit to determine the current state, and making recommendations where potential risks have been identified.
Compliance
Certain regulatory compliance often outlines very specific IT Security criteria, and schemes such as Cyber Essentials focus heavily on strict security controls.
We can review your current security strategy, and recommend improvements where necessary.
System Hardening
There is a general perception that computer systems are secure, however, by default, most systems have a number of unnecessary services and applications that increases their vulnerability to attack.
Hardening Operating Systems, and network devices such as routers and firewalls, removes as many vulnerabilities as possible. System hardening is typically also a requirement for regulatory and compliance standards.
We can review your existing system configuration, make recommendations where necessary, and assist with the implementation of a system hardening process.
Vulnerability Assessment
All computer systems contain vulnerabilities, either software defects or configuration issues, and exploitation of known vulnerabilities in software remains the greatest cause of security incidents.
Organisations should perform vulnerability assessments of their entire computer system on a monthly basis, and doing so ensures that you are aware of any risks that are present.
We can implement and manage a suitable vulnerability assessment solution that checks your system from both an internal and external perspective. We can also assist with the management and remediation of detected vulnerabilities.