Author: Richard Firth

Since it became available to the general public in 2022, ChatGPT has become the poster child for AI. With its ability to write everything from essays, to poetry, to code, ChatGPT has made an impact on every area of our lives, allowing everyone from school children to industry specialists to change how they approach tasks related to writing, research, and automation. While there is no doubt that there is a time and a place for AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, the increasing prevalence of AI-generated work is forcing society to start looking at how it should be used, and…

In today’s always-on cloud-driven technology environment, companies – and their customers – expect their IT services to run constantly. While no system is completely error-free, any outages or downtime should be measured in seconds, or minutes at the most. An outage lasting days or weeks is almost unheard of, and more than a week of downtime is not only unacceptable, but could put even the largest organisations out of business. The recent CrowdStrike outage is a perfect illustration of this, with Delta Airlines not only having to cancel about 7000 flights over five days, but also facing an investigation from…

Twenty years ago, if you asked business leaders what their most essential utilities and business enablers were, they would have listed electricity, a phone line, and internet connectivity, in that order. Today, after 16 years of load shedding and cloud-based everything, that list would be slightly different. Most South African companies have invested in solutions to combat load shedding, so Eskom-supplied electricity is no longer a priority, nor is a traditional phone line, which has largely gone the way of the dodo thanks to hosted PBXs and other similar solutions. Internet connectivity, however, has never been more important. According to…