A lot has happened since our last State of the Sanctuary blog post — so much, in fact, that we forgot to post one this time last year!
Covid lockdowns are mostly over, but working from home is here to stay for many (at least for some of the week), and the business world is rapidly adapting to “the new normal”, as it always does.
As always, we’re here to help businesses with the IT impact of such changes, as well as support your day-to-day operations with our complementary suite of IT services, all backed by our very flexible consultancy services.
Here’s what we’ve been up to the last couple of years:
Platform Uptime
Uptime for our Cloud platforms is always very important to us, and we like to be very transparent about it. We display the last 90 days of uptime on our status page, and we post yearly reports here in our State of the Sanctuary blog posts. This time around, I’m delighted to report that in 2021 our platform uptime was 99.996%, and in 2022 our platform uptime was 99.981%.
As always, our externally hosted status page is always available at https://filesanctuary.statuspage.io, even during the rare occasions that we’re experiencing a problem. If you haven’t already done so, you can also sign up for email notifications if you would like to be kept in the loop — we strongly recommend this!
Broadband and VoIP
Huge changes are underway in the broadband world, and this will continue for the next few years. In the last two years, we’ve launched FTTP broadband on the Openreach network with top speeds averaging 900Mbps, as well as SOGEA broadband (FTTC without the phoneline) for where FTTP isn’t yet available, both extremely popular options.
Openreach’s FTTP rollout continues at pace and we’re now seeing that it covers one in three properties across the UK. There’s still a couple of years to go until it’s available to the majority of customers, but it will be available to more and more properties every month.
While FTTP is being rolled out, the traditional telephone network is being phased out. Just this week we’ve stopped selling our traditional ADSL and FTTC services — as well as our copper phone line rental — as these products are rapidly approaching end-of-life, in fact they are already discontinued in some locations!
For those still wanting great phone service, we’ve launched our Hosted VoIP service providing powerful telephone services whether you have one phone or hundreds. Towards the end of last year, we also launched our Basic VoIP service — a no frills service that is a very cost-effective replacement for a home landline.
All support for our broadband service is provided by the same team you already know and trust, based in Middlesbrough, here in the UK, so you know you’ll always be able to reach us should you ever need to. Make the switch today!
Leased Lines
Leased lines continue to be the gold standard in connectivity, with ultra-low latency, no contention, and speeds of up to 10Gbps. Leased line costs vary depending on your specific property, so please contact us today for a no-obligation quote.
Cloud Servers
Cloud Servers continue to be one of our flagship products, with powerful Intel Xeon Silver processors, fast DDR4 RAM, and RAIDed SSD storage powering your applications with lightning speed. In the past two years we’ve made improvements to our platform to improve reliability and speed even more, with our fifth hardware refresh and their optimised hypervisors. Over 40% of all Cloud Servers are now running on the new hardware and we’re on track to have all customers migrated by the end of the year.
Dynamic Cloud
For very dynamic workloads our Dynamic Cloud platform is an absolute powerhouse, available on-tap with API-controllable spawning of servers, perfect for projects that need to scale automatically to balance cost and power.
Servers on our Dynamic Cloud platform are also available with hourly billing for times when you don’t need to have a server for a whole month — whether you just want to try something out for an hour or two, or you just need temporary extra capacity but don’t want to have to commit to having a server for a whole month. Find out more on our Dynamic Cloud page.
Ubuntu 18.04 EOL imminent
In April 2023 the Ubuntu 18.04 operating system will reach its end-of-life. We’re well underway with moving customers to newer Ubuntu releases, as many of you will already know. For those of you who haven’t heard from us yet, we’ll be in touch very soon to provide more information relating to this migration work.
Web Hosting
Our Plesk-powered Web Hosting and WordPress Hosting platforms continue to be incredibly popular with their huge array of features, including generous disk space allocations, unlimited mailboxes, AI-powered Smart WordPress Updates, premium SpamExperts incoming filtering included as standard, and much more.
We’re maintaining our commitment to continue to support customers on our older Virtualmin platform for the foreseeable future, however if you’d like to upgrade to our new platform to take advantage of the new features, create a support ticket and we’ll do all the work to get you migrated across to the new platform — there are no transfer costs!
Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 continues to dominate the business productivity suite market, and we’re on hand to help you put those tools to work for your business. With Microsoft Teams, 1TB of OneDrive storage per user, 50GB mailbox storage per user, and of course the ever-popular desktop app suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook — always kept up to date with the latest versions — Microsoft 365 gives you the tools to get work done. To find out how Microsoft 365 can help your team — whether they’re working from home or the office — visit our Microsoft 365 page, or talk to us to learn more.
WithSecure Elements
Over the past couple of years, F-Secure has rebranded to WithSecure, and has also launched it’s Elements platform — bringing security intelligence from across your business into one central place with products including Endpoint Protection, Endpoint Detection and Response, Collaboration Protection, and Vulnerability Management.
Your team isn’t behind the traditional office firewall any more. But you still need to keep their devices safe. The most popular component, WithSecure Elements Endpoint Protection, can keep your Macs and PCs safe from online threats with antivirus, firewall, enforced software patching, and filters to prevent you from visiting sites that contain malware. Not only this, it can also be installed on your servers and Android mobile devices, to protect those too.
What’s especially important is that you don’t need to worry about making sure all your staff know how to deal with the alerts normally shown by antivirus software. Instead, similar to how a monitored burglar alarm system is watched over and controlled by a monitoring team, the WithSecure Elements Agent software sends all your computer’s antivirus, firewall and software update alerts to the team here at File Sanctuary, allowing you to transfer these often complicated tasks to us — so that you don’t have to worry about them.
Backblaze Computer Backup
Backblaze is our preferred backup solution for endpoints, and we believe it’s the best way to backup your Macs and Windows PCs to the cloud. With a fast, efficient app that doesn’t slow your computers down, you can ensure that your entire team is securely backing up their computers — even from home, without needing to be on the office network!
Always here, always helping
As we finally start to move away from the pandemic, and into the new normal, we’re always on hand to help you succeed. As always I’m extremely proud of what our team has accomplished, and our extremely low customer turnover shows that you’re happy with the work we do as well. Thank you for trusting File Sanctuary to support your business. We’ll continue to do you proud in 2023 and beyond!
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Aaron B. Russell
Managing Director & CTO