iomart calls on UK Government to make Kitemark for Child Online Safety compulsory for public sector

iomart Group, a UK-based web hosting company, has issued a call to the UK Government to insist that all public sector organisations with a duty of care to children should only purchase software products that have been awarded the BSI Kitemark for Child Online Safety.

iomart Group’s stance follows the announcement on 2nd February 2012 by the Science and Technology Select Committee, that the UK government should consider imposing safety standards on software sold if self-regulation isn’t adopted by the IT industry.

iomart’s web security software Netintelligence, which provides internet protection for 100,000s of school children and families in the UK, is the first and only such software to carry the BSI Kitemark for Child Online Safety. Netintelligence was awarded the Kitemark by Children and Families Minister Tim Loughton in January 2011. So far, no other UK software company has taken up the accreditation and the government has not supported the Kitemark publicly.

The BSI Kitemark for Child Online Safety is a certification scheme for internet website filtering software produced by software manufacturers. These products can be bought as stand-alone products from computer retailers or come as part of an operating system or ISP package. The software’s ease of use, reliability, and performance must meet the scheme’s strict criteria.

Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart Group plc, said: “Back in 2007, iomart along with the British Standards Institute, OFCOM, the Home Office, several major UK child safety organisations and other private sector companies spent a considerable amount of time working on the specifications required for PAS 74 (Access control systems for the protection of children online), which ultimately became the BSI Kitemark for Online Child Safety.

Rather than yet another clarion call for more action, the UK Government could make a bold stance now. It should insist that all public sector organisations with a duty of care towards protecting children online, for example schools and local authorities, should only purchase products that have been awarded the Kitemark. That way other commercial companies will have to follow the lead of Netintelligence and iomart to provide software that the public can trust.”

iomart Group plc is ranked as one of the top web hosting companies in the world by HostReview and is Scottish Digital IT Company of the Year 2011. Bill Strain was recently named IT Leader of the Year 2011 by IT Pro.

For more information about iomart Group plc visit www.iomart.com

Westcoastcloud offers free email archiving to Webroot customers

UK hosted cloud services provider Westcoastcloud, is offering Webroot customers the chance to transfer their email archiving to its BusinessMail [http://www.westcoastcloud.com/business-mail/] service for free after it was announced the US firm would no longer offer email archiving from the end of March.

Webroot customers [http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2139171/webroot-part...] have to move to offshoot Sonian by the end of February or migrate their data to other providers at a cost of £6.39p per Gigabyte by the end of March.

Westcoastcloud says it will pay the migration cost of £6.39 per GB itself for any Webroot customers who want to transfer their email archiving to its own cloud-based BusinessMail service. The offer of free migration is open to any customers signing up for Westcoastcloud’s BusinessMail services prior to 1st May 2012.

Westcoastcloud director Bill Strain said: “Webroot’s decision to end email archiving in the UK appears to follow a current trend for companies in the IT marketplace to change their business model. This is why it’s so important that when you select a supplier for a service as business critical as data storage, you engage with one that is committed to the UK market and has both the proven expertise and physical hosting infrastructure to support you for many years to come.”

Westcoastcloud offers the whole range of business critical cloud services including email, backup, storage and web security. All its services are hosted through parent company iomart Group plc’s wholly owned and managed network of UK data centres.

Westcoastcloud is a subsidiary of iomart Group plc which is ranked as one of the top 25 cloud services providers in the world by Talkin’ Cloud 50 and was named Scottish Digital IT Company of the Year 2011. Westcoastcloud director Bill Strain was named IT Leader of the Year 2011 by IT Pro.

For further details please contact Westcoastcloud on 0370 050 0121 or email info@westcoastcloud.com

iomart Hosting keeps online retailer sweet after X Factor judge Gary Barlow’s tweet points 1 million fans to website

A top UK managed hosting and cloud computing company iomart Hosting [http://www.iomarthosting.com] helped Britain’s biggest online sweet shop A Quarter Of [http://www.aquarterof.co.uk/]cope with unprecedented demand after X Factor judge Gary Barlow tweeted to fans before last weekend’s final.

Two days before Little Mix were crowned 2012 X Factor winners, Gary Barlow, whose Twitter name is @GBarlowOfficial, tweeted to his 972,000 followers to ‘Check this bag of goodies out www.AQuarterOf.co.uk.’ Within seconds over 15,000 people had logged on to the retro sweet retailer’s website.

iomart Hosting managing director Sarah Haran, said: “The bandwidth graph for A Quarter Of clearly shows the huge spike in visitors to the website but there were no issues other than the retailer’s staff having to go into overdrive to meet the unexpected demand for Christmas orders!”

Michael Parker, managing director of A Quarter Of, said: “We had no idea what was going on. There was a sudden massive flood of orders, which, on top of Christmas, put a real strain on operations. But we’ve got a great technology team and a great hosting company, so we just ploughed on until we got everything done.”

A Quarter Of moved to iomart Hosting in 2007 after experiencing serious problems with a previous provider.

Michael Parker explained: “iomart Hosting have been really, really good since we moved to them. I noticed a surge in traffic to the website last week when the tweet went out but nothing more dramatic than that. In the past when we've had sudden surges of traffic, and we've had a fair few, we frequently had the server go down and were completely unable to cope. In one instance in the run up to Christmas in 2003, the site went down for 8 hours and I ended up with an email inbox with 5,000 emails in it. We had to put the phone on automatic answering because we just couldn't cope! This time with iomart Hosting everything went smoothly.”

So what sweets did the Take That star buy?

Michael Parker says: “We’re not in a position to say what it was that Gary Barlow ordered from us. But we are incredibly proud to count him as a fan. Lots of people in the office have been fans of his for years and some of them are still a little bit giddy about the whole thing.

It’s great to know that even superstars love retro sweets. There’s something about enjoying them which transports you back a much simpler time.”

A Quarter Of recently featured on Nigella Lawson’s website as her ‘sweetshop of choice’, and also counts MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace as a fan.

iomart Hosting provides managed hosting and cloud services for a number of well-known online retailers. It is a subsidiary of iomart Group plc which is ranked as one of the top 25 cloud services providers in the world by Talkin’ Cloud 50 and was named Scottish Digital IT Company of the Year 2011.

Certainly not 'head in the clouds' as hosting and cloud company iomart Group plc profits rise 618%!

iomart Group plc, the managed hosting and cloud computing services company, has just announced a very healthy 618% rise in profit before tax to the London Stock Exchange.

The company’s financial results year ending 31 March 2011 showed profit before tax rose to £2.8m (2010:£0.4m, before gain reduction in deferred consideration of £09m). iomart Group’s revenue also showed a big increase, up 38% to £25.3m from £18.3m in the previous financial year.

The majority of growth announced by the Glasgow-head-quartered company came from its hosting (http://iomarthosting.com) operations which generated revenue of £17.7m, a rise of 61% from £11.0m in 2010. This figure includes revenues from the acquisition in November 2010 of Titan Internet for £4.2m, however even taking into account this purchase, hosting revenue still jumped by 47% with many customers looking specifically for cloud-based and enterprise hosting solutions.

Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart Group plc, said: “Cloud computing is something of a buzz word with many companies who add the ‘cloud’ tag to everything they do, yet don't back it up with reliable delivery mechanisms.

“At iomart we have built our technologies from the ground up specifically to be delivered via cloud. As a result we are becoming recognised as an authority on the provision of cloud-hosting solutions and are well positioned to take advantage as the market evolves and people look for reliable vendors.”

iomart Hosting won 400 new orders over the course of the year, many of which were additional orders from existing customers. Increasingly these orders include some aspect of cloud or virtual computing in the overall solution package.

Angus MacSween added: “With more businesses looking to the cloud for their data solutions we believe we have positioned ourselves well to take advantage of this market moving forward. We are in a market that is growing and that is here to stay and we fully expect to participate strongly in that growth.”

Footballer front page sends record traffic to website

iomart Hosting reports burst in bandwidth for HeraldScotland website as story goes global

iomart Hosting (www.iomarthosting.com), the company that hosts the website for Scottish newspaper The Sunday Herald, has revealed the unprecedented surge in traffic that took place after it became the first UK newspaper to publish the name of a footballer as part of its super injunction coverage on Sunday.

According to iomart Hosting, visits to the HeraldScotland website caused bandwidth to double to 220Mb per second just before midday on Sunday. Average traffic to the Newsquest Media Group combined platform which includes the HeraldScotland website, is normally 100Mb/sec.

There was an even bigger spike in bandwidth on Monday lunchtime when traffic peaked at 371Mb/sec after The Sunday Herald’s sister paper The Herald followed up the story – that was an increase of 151Mb/sec on the previous Monday’s traffic.

Paul Jeffrey, technical services director at iomart Hosting, said: “Our monitoring systems for the Newsquest sites showed huge bursts in bandwidth late on Sunday morning as traffic spiked. There’s no doubt that the front page story in the Sunday Herald was responsible. Then at about 12.30pm on Monday there was another burst as people all across the UK tried to access the website for the latest developments given the national interest the story was generating. Even on Tuesday traffic was still heavier than normal.”

The HeraldScotland website is part of a bespoke managed hosting service that iomart Hosting provides for the Newsquest Media Group.

Over the two days The HeraldScotland website received a record number of visitors. There were 358,000 visits and 1,071,756 page views on Sunday despite the newspaper only publishing the story in hard copies of the paper and not placing any coverage online. Those figures then rose to 547,000 and 1,939,147 page views on Monday as the story was followed up by The Herald.

Mark Smith, group digital director for The Herald and Times Group which is part of Newsquest Media Group, said: “ Once the BBC started running the story as their lead news item on Sunday traffic levels rocketed to literally ten times what we would expect normally so the infrastructure was put under a huge amount of pressure, even though the name wasn’t actually published online."