The Unite Group News and Updates
Proactive IT Support: Five Numbers That Tell You Whether You Are Getting It
Proactive IT support is a phrase almost every provider in this market uses. Buyers are right to have stopped hearing it. The claim costs nothing to make. None of it can be checked from a website. So here is a version that can be tested: the provider acts on a system's...
Cyber Essentials Plus: The Six Things That Fail The Audit
Cyber Essentials Plus is decided by a hands-on technical test of a sample of your real devices. The test specification is published, so the main failure conditions are known in advance. Six issues account for much of the work: A patch left outstanding for more than 14...
The Microsoft 365 Offboarding Checklist Every Business Skips
Most businesses can describe their leaver process, but far fewer can produce a dated record showing what happened to the last person who left. That gap is where Microsoft 365 offboarding fails. Three months on, the leaver's mailbox is still forwarding to a manager who...
Business Email Compromise and Deepfake Fraud: What to Add to Your Defences
Most people who fall for a fraudulent payment request are not careless. Rather, they are competent staff who did what a colleague appeared to ask, on a day when the request looked ordinary. Business email compromise works because it uses the normal shape of a working...
Cyber Essentials vs Managed Cyber Security: What UK SMEs Need in 2026
Do you need Cyber Essentials, managed cyber security, or both? For most UK businesses above roughly 20 users in 2026, the honest answer is both. Cyber Essentials confirms that your controls met the required standard when you were assessed. Managed cyber security keeps...
Business Continuity Plans for UK SMEs: From Backups to a Tested Plan
A business continuity plan sets out how a company keeps trading while its systems are being restored. Backups sit inside that plan and cover one part of it, which is getting the data back. Government figures show how far apart those two things sit in practice....
Patch Discipline for UK SMEs: What a Managed Patching Cadence Looks Like in 2026
Patch discipline is the invisible backbone of every UK SME that passes Cyber Essentials on the first attempt and renews a cyber insurance policy without hard questions. In 2026 the bar moved. Cyber Essentials v3.3, published by NCSC in April, tightened the fix...
Leased Line vs Business Broadband: A UK Buyer’s Guide (2026)
Business broadband and leased lines look similar on a price sheet and behave very differently under load. In this post, we'll compare leased line vs business broadband to help you understand the differences. The short version is this. Business broadband is a shared...
One-Provider IT, Phones and Mobiles for Newcastle SMEs: What Consolidation Delivers
The typical Newcastle SME running 20 to 50 staff is paying four different suppliers for what one supplier could deliver: IT support from one company, phones from another, mobiles from a third, business broadband from a fourth. Four contracts, four SLAs, four...
Passkeys in Microsoft 365: How UK SMEs Roll Them Out in Q3 2026
Microsoft is turning passkeys on for every Entra ID tenant through 2026. General availability of passkey profiles landed in March. Auto-enablement across tenants that have not opted in is rolling through Q3. For UK SMEs on Microsoft 365, the decision is not whether to...
AI Quick Wins: 10 Ways to Save Time in Microsoft 365 Without Creating New Risk
Half the UK SMEs we work with have paid for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Power Automate and the AI features built into Outlook, Teams and SharePoint. The other half are about to. Most organisations still aren't seeing the time savings promised in the licence brochure...
2026 IT Policy Checklist: The Essentials You Are Missing (and Why Auditors Care)
An insurer asks for your acceptable use policy. A new client wants to see your incident response plan before signing the contract. Your accountant flags during the year-end audit that there is no documented joiner-mover-leaver process. Each of these moments is the...
Microsoft 365 Licence Audit: Where UK Businesses Overpay in 2026
A Microsoft 365 licence audit for a UK business in 2026 typically finds three things: licences assigned to staff who left, users on heavier plans than they need, and add-on subscriptions nobody can name the owner of. The total overspend is rarely catastrophic. For a...
Beyond MFA: Why UK Businesses Need Phishing-Resistant Identity in 2026
Multi-factor authentication is the floor, not the ceiling. Over the last three years, UK SMEs have strengthened MFA across email, Microsoft 365 and remote access. As a result, Cyber Essentials, insurance questionnaires and high-profile breaches have pushed MFA higher...
BYOD Without the Backlash: A Practical Intune Setup for UK Businesses in 2026
Bring your own device is already happening at most UK SMEs. Staff read work email on personal phones, join Teams calls from the car, and check Outlook on the same handset they use for everything else. The question is rarely whether to allow it. It is how to bring...
Retention Is Not Backup: Where Microsoft 365 Stops and Backup Starts
Microsoft 365 backup is not bundled into any Microsoft 365 subscription. However, Microsoft bundles retention instead: it holds deleted items for a defined window, replicates data across data centres, and protects the platform from its own failures. None of that is...
PSTN Price Hike on 1 July 2026: Why UK Businesses Should Migrate Before Legacy Lines Double
The PSTN price increase in 2026 lands hardest on 1 July, when Openreach’s wholesale rental on legacy voice-only PSTN linesrises by a further 40% on top of April’s 20% rise. A third rise of 40% follows on 1 October. By the autumn, the published Openreach pricing...
Microsoft Agent 365: A Governance Starter Pack for Copilot Agents
Four key controls govern Copilot Agents: who can create agents, what data they can access, who can share them, and what actions they can perform externally. Get those four right and Microsoft Agent 365 becomes a useful productivity layer for your business. However,...