May 2020 - Page 2 of 2

Why Do Finance Companies Require the Cloud?

Posted on 05/05/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

The need for robust security and to comply with stringent data privacy regulations have, until recently, prevented many finance companies opting for cloud computing. Today, however, there’s a growing shift towards the cloud as more organization adopt digital-first approaches in a bid to stay relevant in the rapidly advancing, technology-based market. Cloud technology provides finance companies with the infrastructure needed for digital transformation, helping them to improve customer experience, drive growth and stay competitive, all while enabling them to remain compliant with regulations. Here, we’ll examine why finance companies need cloud computing.

Cloud keeps financial data secure

It is no surprise that finance organisations are heavily regulated. The data they hold is highly sensitive and includes both the financial information of customers and details of trading operations. This makes it an extremely valuable target for cybercriminals which, if stolen, could have a major impact on personal and business customers and on the financial company itself. Organisations within the sector therefore need to put security at the centre of their IT operations and must develop a secure infrastructure that robustly defends them against attacks.

The issue for many finance companies is that achieving such security in-house is not easy to accomplish. State of the art security tools are expensive to implement and require specialist expertise. Cloud providers, however, already have both the tools and the expertise in place to keep their infrastructure and their customers’ systems and data secure. This also helps them maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS. Migrating to the cloud, therefore, can provide levels of security far better than most companies can achieve on-site and in most cases, come included in the cost of the service.

Cloud vendors provide protection for finance companies in a number of important ways. For those with concerns over the multitenancy of the public cloud, for example, this can be overcome by adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure where data is housed in a single-tenancy private cloud and applications on the public cloud.

Of course, whether public or private, the cloud system will be robustly protected by a powerful arsenal of leading-edge security tools. These include state of the art, next-gen firewalls, like the FortiGate firewalls used at eukhost, as well as intrusion detection and prevention tools, anti-malware, data encryption, SSL certificates, DDoS protection, VPNs, email verification and encryption tools, spam filtering and more.

The providers themselves have to comply with stringent security regulations and will have their own security policies and procedures in place. These will include ensuring that they have enough redundancy in their system to maintain services should one of their datacentres be taken offline, providing backup power and cooling systems, maintaining physical security of the premises, and guaranteeing availability with an SLA. This way, they can ensure a company’s financial data remains secure and available at all times.

With regard to GDPR, financial institutions need to be careful that vendors do not store their data in countries that do not provide the necessary guarantees for privacy. Any data stored in datacentres in the USA, for example, can be legally accessed by the US government security agencies if they think it pertinent to an investigation. As this contravenes GDPR, the data of UK and EU citizens should not be stored in such countries. This is why, at eukhost, all our datacentres are located within the UK.

Taking advantage of the cloud

Financial companies that have already migrated to the cloud have put themselves in pole position to benefit from the digital revolution taking place in the market. They are able to adopt and make use of advanced fintech solutions, develop and deploy new services at speed, and analyse big data using tools like AI and machine learning to discover new growth opportunities, predict market movements and find more cost-effective and efficient ways to operate.

With data centralised and synced, teams can collaborate on projects far more effectively, regardless of where in the world they work, employees can work remotely and customers can access their accounts, services and communications via the gamut of devices that they now make use of.

The speed at which the cloud operates also provides benefits. Servers and applications can be deployed instantly and workloads that would have taken weeks to carry out on traditional systems can be done far quicker. Indeed, the interconnectivity of the cloud provides a genuine opportunity for finance companies to benefit from the use of real-time data, enabling them to react swiftly to changes in the market.

Cutting costs

The growing reliance on IT in the finance sector has burdened companies with the ongoing costs of using it. The cloud provides significant opportunities to reduce and better manage those costs. By moving to the cloud, companies no longer need to invest in expensive hardware or pay for the running of a datacentre. Instead of capital expenditure, they shift to operational expenditure and have greater control over what is spent, by whom and when.

Additionally, the scalability of the cloud enables finance companies to increase IT resources on-demand. Whether catering for peaks in website traffic or undertaking resource-heavy processing, their system can access all the storage, bandwidth, CPU and RAM it needs to maintain service. The advantage, financially, is that this is charged for on a pay-per-use basis. Once the demand has ceased, the company can scale down and reduce costs.

Preparing for the future

The pandemic has not only hastened the drive for digital transformation across all sectors; it has also seen customers flock to digital in unprecedented numbers. This ‘push-me-pull-you’ relationship is driving the finance sector along the digital railroad. Consumers are pushing for better online services and customer experiences and financial companies are pulling new customers in by providing them. Increasingly, those services need cloud infrastructure and cloud-based applications to make use of technologies like AI, machine learning, IoT and automation.

Conclusion

Cloud technology opens a world of opportunity for finance companies, enabling them to innovate quickly, improve customer experiences and work smarter and more efficiently. At the same time, it provides a compliant environment in which to store their sensitive data and keep it secure.

The Importance of HTML Headings for SEO and User-Friendliness

Posted on 04/05/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

Do you use HTML headings and subheadings in your website content? If you want your site to rank better in search engine results, it is, perhaps, time you did. Here we’ll explain why headings can help your website rank better and make your content more user-friendly at the same time?

How headings benefit your visitors

Headings and subheadings help organise your content better for your visitors. They divide up the text into sections and provide useful information about what is included in each section. This helps a reader work their way through the text and skip any parts they deem irrelevant. At the same time, a page divided into headed sections looks more attractive and easier to read than one which just has lots of paragraphs.

Using headings, therefore, provides a better customer experience, keeping visitors on the page and entices users to read more of your content.

How headings improve SEO

The difference between using bold text and proper HTML headings (H1, H2, H3, for example) is that search engines can identify the headings’ HTML. This enables the search engine to scan the headings for keywords and phrases and this helps them get a deeper understanding of a page’s entire content. As a result, it can match your pages’ content better to individual user queries so that when people are specifically looking for the type of content on your website, your pages have a better chance of appearing in the results.

Another key SEO benefit relates to the impact on visitors. If your headings help keep visitors on your pages for longer, search engines will notice that your ‘bounce rates’ have declined and your ‘time on page’ figures have improved. They will conclude from this that your page does indeed provide the information particular queries are asking for and this will help you rank even higher. Importantly, this is why, when writing headlines, you should always create them to help the user stay on the page rather than over-pack them with keywords to attract search engines.

How to use headings correctly

The two key tips for using headings are to structure them correctly and to make sure they contain your keyphrase.

Heading structure

When we talk about heading structure, we are really talking about which type of heading (H1 to H6) that you use, and where, on your pages. Essentially, to structure your pages well, you need to know that these numbers don’t merely affect the size of the text on the page; far more importantly, they signify the importance of the heading to both the reader and the search engines.

At the top of the heading hierarchy is the H1 heading. There should only be one H1 heading per page and this should be the page’s main heading or page title. It is the most important heading by far and must contain the keyword or phrase that you want the page to rank for.

The next set of headings, in importance, are the H2 headings. These should be used for your page’s main content headings and at least one of these should contain the page’s main keyword or phrase. However, it is also critical that they clearly inform the reader and the search engines about the content of each section they head.

If these sections are fairly long in themselves, it is also useful to subdivide them using H3 subheadings. H4 to H6 tags, although available on most website software, are rarely needed, unless, of course, you are writing very long content, such as academic papers, that have many levels of textual structure.

Another thing to consider is your heading and subheading distribution. The most important thing is to put a new heading or subheading every time you start to write about a new topic or subject. However, with web content, it is also believed that you should never leave too much text without a heading. The current guideline says you should have a heading (H2) or subheading (H3) around every 250 to 300 words or so on your page in order to help people progress through what’s on the screen.

How to add a heading

The page or post title is usually created as an H1 heading automatically when you type the text into the ‘Title’ field. For other types of heading, most website software comes with an editor or block builder with built-in options for turning a line of text into a heading. These often come with a dropdown menu where you select H2 or H3 (or others if needed) accordingly. It is also possible to create titles in the HTML editor using the HTML tags, for example: <h2> This is a heading</h2>.

Using keywords and phrases in your headings

As we have already stated, it is important to put your main keyword or phrase in the page or post’s H1 title. However, you should also try to put it in other headings, at least once and only where relevant, to make it abundantly clear to readers and the search engines what the content is about and to emphasise the keyword’s importance. At the same time, you should also include it a number of times in the rest of the page’s content, without, of course, going overboard.

Conclusion

Visitors and search engines make use of headings and subheadings. They make your pages easier to navigate, look more appealing and break up long text into manageable chunks. When created using HTML, search engines pick up on the importance of your headings and use them to match your site with relevant queries, helping you rank higher for those visitors you most want to attract.

How the Cloud Benefits Charities and the Public Sector

Posted on 03/05/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

Cloud technology brings significant advantages for all organisations, not just businesses. Today, it is being increasingly adopted by both charities and the public sector, including local authorities, healthcare providers, universities and government agencies. Here, we’ll look at the financial savings and operational benefits it can offer, as well as how it can provide a better service to your end-users.

Remote connectivity

Even before the pandemic forced people to work at home, charities and public sector organisations were leading the way with remote working. While many charities have people working around the country and, in some instances, around the globe, the public sector was dealing with austerity by shrinking office space to cut costs and having employees work remotely several days of the week.

One of the benefits of the public cloud is that it enables your employees to work from wherever they have an internet connection. Here, they can log in to your system and access your applications and documents securely. What’s more, data is stored centrally, not on individual machines, meaning that it is kept secure and that everyone has the latest version of files and information available to them. Indeed, modern, cloud-based remote working solutions allow colleagues to collaborate, share work and hold meetings online, no matter where on the planet they are based.

The benefits of remote connectivity are many. For example, you can reduce the size of your office space, allow employees greater flexibility over their working arrangements, recruit employees from further afield and ensure things like bad weather don’t prevent staff from working.

Financial savings

Charities and the public sector both increasingly rely on IT services to carry out many of their day to day functions. Running IT on-site, however, can be a major financial burden, especially for organisations that need to reserve as much of their budgets as possible to deliver frontline services.

Cloud migration can help cut IT costs dramatically. The main reason for this is that, in the cloud, you will be hosting your applications and storing your data on hardware belonging to your IT vendor. This means you will no longer need to purchase, regularly upgrade and maintain those expensive servers. Nor will you need to pay for the ongoing costs of an in-house datacentre, such as premises rent, high energy bills, insurance or security. And of course, your in-house IT staff will no longer need to manage or maintain that hardware, giving them more time to work on projects that benefit the end-user.

Greater security

Keeping data secure is an essential requirement for charities and the public sector, with organisations often handling sensitive information about individuals. Whilst a reticence to move this to the cloud can be understood, it is worth pointing out that the cloud is likely to be more secure than most in-house systems.

Unlike many charities and public sector organisations, cloud vendors invest significantly in cybersecurity to ensure they comply with their stringent security regulations. They employ security experts and deploy highly advanced security tools to keep their infrastructure and data secure. Indeed, even the datacentre premises are protected by robust security measures.

Additionally, the cloud allows all data to be centrally stored, enables organisations to implement strict logical control and access privileges and lets data be swiftly backed up, encrypted and integrity tested. For those requiring additional security, there is also the option of migrating to a private cloud, where a single client has dedicated use of their cloud infrastructure.

Staying online

Often hosting critical, public-facing services, charities and public sector organisations need their applications to remain available for their staff and end-users. For those with in-house datacentres, server failure can be a significant issue, in some circumstances putting lives at risk. Bringing a server back online can be a timely and expensive procedure that causes prolonged disruption to your services.

In the cloud, your applications are run on virtual machines which means they are not tied to any physical hardware. If there is a hardware issue in a cloud datacentre, the virtual machine is simply and instantly moved to different physical hardware and continues without any downtime or disruption. With exceptional levels of uptime, guaranteed by SLA, the cloud offers the high availability needed to stay online.

Scalability

One of the most sought after benefits of the cloud is its scalability. This is the ability of the charity or public sector organisation to use additional computing resources (storage, CPU, RAM and bandwidth) on-demand, at the click of a mouse.

There are two chief benefits of this. Firstly, is that it enables your organisation to cope with peaks in demand or heavy workloads, ensuring you don’t run out of IT resources when you need them most. For example, your website won’t crash if you get a massive spike in traffic, something which could be dangerous if dealing with an emergency situation.

The other benefit is the financial one. In the cloud, you will only pay for any additional resources as and when you need them, on a pay as you go basis. When demand reduces, you can scale down once again and save money. Achieving such scalability in-house would be difficult and expensive to do – you would need to purchase additional servers and leave them redundant just so they could be used in times of heavy demand.

Conclusion

Charities and public sector organisations are making increased use of the cloud to benefit in all the ways mentioned above. Indeed, the UK Government’s keenness to encourage cloud adoption has led to the launch of its G-Cloud. This is a marketplace of approved cloud vendors with framework agreements already in place, from which public sector organisations can buy services without needing to run a full tender or competition procurement process. Anteelo is an approved G-Cloud supplier.

Features to Look for in a Web Host for a Hospitality Business

Posted on 02/05/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

As the hospitality sector prepares to bounce back after the lockdown, many companies are seeing the importance of their websites going forward. From marketing to customer experience, your online presence can make a dramatic difference to the success of your business. Here, we’ll look at some of the ways your website can benefit your company and what things you’ll need to include in your web hosting solution.

Better marketing

Having a website ensures your hospitality business is open 24 hours a day. Visitors who search for you, click on ads or see your social media posts can quickly find all the information they need about your business.

From a marketing perspective, you’ll be able to make a feature of your business’ services, whether that’s your menus, hotel rooms, spas and other services. You’ll be able to post detailed descriptions, interior and exterior photographs, videos, customer reviews, star ratings and all the other details that discerning customers want to know before making a reservation.

Improved customer experience

Websites are no longer just for promoting your business. Today, many hospitality companies are making them useful for customers throughout their journey with you. A website can enhance customer experience in many ways. A hotel, for example, can use it to take room bookings, enable customers at the venue to book restaurant tables, order room service, contact the concierge, find out about nearby amenities, take advantage of offers, check out and more. Even after they have left, you can use the website to create a members’ area to develop customer loyalty and promote future visits.

Customer experience has become increasingly important in hospitality and those venues that make things quicker, easier and more convenient for their customers will benefit from better reviews, increased loyalty and a growth in revenue.

A website for staff

A further way to use your website is to create a separate area for your staff. This can be used to increase efficiency and improve the way you deliver services. Staff can use your site on their smartphones to sign in or notify you of absences, they can inform management about issues, such as low stock or maintenance requirements. It can be used to send messages, display notices and timetables, issue daily instructions and more. All of these can improve the way the venue is managed and enhance the service you provide your customers.

What to look for in a hosting solution

To put these things into place and get the most from your hospitality website, it is vital that you have the right hosting solution for your hospitality company. Here are some of the hosting features you should look for.

Strong security

As a hospitality company, you will likely need to collect and store the personal data of your customers. In some cases, this may include names, addresses, contact information, payment details and even passport information. Legally, you are required to keep this data safe in order to comply with regulations, such as GDPR.

Hospitality companies are the targets of cyberattacks simply because the criminals know they keep this information and they are using increasingly sophisticated means to acquire it, including ransomware, phishing attacks, malware infections and hacking.

To keep your system and data protected, you need to choose a secure hosting solution. Make sure your web host provides a range of security tools, including a robust firewall, intrusion prevention, malware scanning, remote backups, SSL encryption, spam filtering, email scanning and more.

Growing room

As the hospitality sector becomes increasingly digitised and automated, your hosting needs will grow over time in order to provide a wider range of online services for both staff and customers. You might, for example, need to deploy website chatbots, virtual tours, customer-facing reservation tools and link your website to third party booking sites. Additionally, the increasing reliance on data for decision making means you may need to analyse more data to improve online and digital services for your customers.

To make use of these tools and technologies, you’ll need a hosting package with more storage and better performance, such as VPS, dedicated servers and cloud hosting. To make growth easy, look for a web host that provides all these services and will help you migrate from one to the other. This will save you the headache of having to move everything to a new host.

Guaranteed uptime

If you are going to offer 24/7 services to your customers, you need a website that remains constantly online and which can cope with the demand for your growing online services. Failure to do this can lose you custom, damage your reputation and lead to complaints and poor reviews. Look for a web host that guarantees an uptime of 99.9% and above and make sure your package is large enough to deal with the demand you expect.

24/7 technical support

Managing a hospitality business is challenging enough without having to struggle with technical website problems. However, as the sector adopts more sophisticated online technologies, the demand on managers is likely to grow. To take away the stress and the challenge, it is important that your web host provides 24/7 technical support. This way, should you have an issue there will be a qualified expert there to help you, regardless of the time of day.

Conclusion

Finding the right hosting solution is critical if your hospitality company is to bounce back from the lockdown and remain competitive in a market that makes increasing use of digital technologies. The right hosting can ensure your website is capable of delivering a wider range of services to your customers, enables you to deploy tools to improve staff and operational effectiveness, keeps your systems and data secure and ensures your site stays online.

The cPanel Control Panel’s Key Characteristics

Posted on 01/05/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

The cPanel control panel is the leading web hosting control panel on the market today. Designed for use on Linux operating systems, it is often used for managing the hosting of WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla and similar websites. With an intuitive and easy to use graphical interface, cPanel offers website owners a broad suite of tools and functions unrivalled by other Linux-based control panels. Here, we’ll provide an overview of cPanel and look at some of its main features.

An overview of cPanel

cPanel is a control panel that enables you to carry out a multitude of website and hosting management tasks. While the admin area of your website is where you can update content, change themes, install plugins, etc., cPanel enables you to carry out higher-level tasks, managing both your website and other aspects of your hosting, as well as offering other ways to carry out some of the things that can be done in the admin area.

cPanel organises its tools into 10 easily navigable sections. These are:

Files: for managing your website files and disk space.
Databases: for managing your databases.
Domains: for managing your domains and DNS.
Email: For managing email, email security, contacts, etc.
Metrics: For viewing website data, such as visitor numbers and resource usage.
Security: a suite of tools for securing your site, such as 2FA and SSL.
Software: to manage PHP, web platforms and to install new apps.
Advanced: More complex tools for things like cron jobs, error pages, etc.
Preferences: for cPanel management, such as user manager, passwords and interface personalisation.
Softaculous App Installer: Softaculous is a tool that lets you install hundreds of tools/apps directly from cPanel.

Main features-

Email

cPanel’s email tools help you to manage your email from directly within the control panel. They enable you to:

Add and remove email accounts
Set up email forwarding, mailing lists and auto-responders
Manage spam filters and global filters
Encrypt emails for security
Read and compose emails anywhere in the world via Webmail.

FTP Manager

The FTP manager can be used to manage FTP access to your server directories and files. Features include:

Set up FTP accounts
Set up anonymous FTP access
FTP session control

File Manager

The File Manager makes managing your files even easier than using FTP as you can do it directly from an interface within cPanel. You won’t need to make an FTP connection, use an FTP program or create additional usernames and passwords.

Backup

Backups are essential to help you recover from lost data, corrupted files, hardware failure and cybercrime. cPanel has built-in backup functionality that lets you create a backup of your website with a single click, download it, and store it remotely from your server.

Domains

cPanel gives you complete control over your domains. It enables you to manage your domains and DNS settings, add new domains and subdomains, publish domains once your websites are completed, set up domain aliases and redirects.

Raw Log Manager

The Raw Log Manager lets you choose how raw logs are stored on your hosting account.

Raw Access Log
cPanel gives you the ability to download the raw access logs for any domain in your account. This information is useful for tracking user movements.

Error Log
cPanel’s Error Log helps you get to the bottom of 404 errors. The log displays all the “404 File does not exist” errors, helping you discover which files are missing from your website and quickly replace them or remove broken links.

MySQL Databases
CMS websites require a MySQL database and you may have multiple databases if you have more than one domain. The MySQL Databases tool enables you to manage your databases, creating new ones, modifying existing ones and creating, managing and removing database users.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA)

Take your cPanel security up a level by using the control panel’s 2FA tool. This will require anyone logging into your cPanel account to use an additional method of verification, sent to their phone, besides the username and password. 2FA helps prevent unauthorised users or brute force hackers gaining access to your control panel.

Softaculous

Make the installation of applications a breeze with Softaculous. Softaculous enables you to install hundreds of useful apps and tools, quickly and easily, to improve your website’s functionality. From CMS, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, etc, popular eCommerce platforms, image galleries, social media tools, blogging tools, forums, ad managers, calendars, user polls, project management tools, customer support tools and much more – all installed with a single click!

There are many more useful features available in cPanel. With such a rich variety of features, it’s no wonder that cPanel is the world’s most used control panel.

Month: May 2020

The Importance of HTML Headings for SEO and User-Friendliness

How headings benefit your visitors

How headings improve SEO