Member Article

Eight tech gamechangers

This month sees HA Hosting celebrate its eighth anniversary. Back in 2008 when we opened the doors of our data centre for the very first time, cloud computing was in its infancy, Britain was enjoying a pre-banking crash boom and mobiles were largely used to make phone calls. Here are just a few ways in which technology has changed our lives and the way we do business over the past eight years:

1. Broadband for all In 2008 just over half of all homes in the UK were connected to the internet. The technology was starting to mature and whilst the vast majority of homes had ditched the trusty dial-up lines, the high speeds enjoyed today were almost inconceivable! A year later the Government launched its Digital Broadband initiative promising broadband for all. Today there are more than 22.5 million households connected to the internet (six million more than in 2008). The speed of broadband has improved a little too – speeds available today can exceed 100mbp/s: something which could only be dreamed of back in 2008!

2. Enter the cloud! Whether you view emails through an internet browser, share music between your laptop and mobile or store files online, it’s likely that you’ll have embraced cloud-based technology in some shape during the past eight years. The emergence of platforms such as Google Apps (launched 2006), Dropbox (launched in 2007) and Microsoft Office 365 (Launched 2011) have all helped to place cloud-based systems into mainstream use.

3. Internet on the move? 2008 saw the arrival of the iPhone 3G. Although it was possible to surf the internet on your mobile pre 2008, the iPhone with its superior connection speeds was one of the first devices to embrace mobile surfing. The iPhone 3G sold more than 25 million units during 2008, but it was Nokia which dominated mobile phone sales and we weren’t quite ready for mobile web access yet… Just 15% of mobile users accessed the internet via their phones in 2008, compared with 66% of adults in 2015, according to Government data.

4. The rise and rise of online retail Ok, online shopping wasn’t new in 2008, but by that year it had reached the mainstream, with £17.2 billion spent online during the year. Online retail has continued to show a sharp upward spike. 2014 saw the first year when British shoppers spent over £100 billion online for the first time. Today, one in five of all non-food retail sales are made via the internet and it’s perhaps no surprise that many retail analysts have predicted that online sales will overtake the High Street: and that could happen within the next five years.

5. The death of Windows XP Launched in 2001, Windows XP was arguably one the most successful desktop operating systems of all time. Popular with home users because of its ease of use, embraced by business because of its reliability, more than a billion copies of Windows XP were sold worldwide. Back in 2008 Microsoft released its final updates for the operating system and with the newly launched Windows Vista heralded as its replacement, it seemed the writing was on the wall for Windows XP. However, the launch of Vista proved to be a comparative flop, with users remaining fiercely loyal to XP. Support for Windows XP ended in April 2014, leaving users of the system vulnerable to new security flaws. Yet astonishingly, 3% of all computers in the UK continue to use the platform… and in terms of sheer numbers of copies, loaded onto computers, it was only overtaken by Windows 10 in February 2016. It’s worth remembering that if you are one of the die-hard Windows XP users, give some serious consideration to upgrading soon as the security flaws in the software are already being targeted by hackers.

6. Gamers go online Although online gaming via the internert has been around since the mid-nineties, it was only in the last eight years with the popularity of consoles such as the Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox that online gaming became mainstream. Fuelled by superior broadband download and upload speeds online gaming has gone from strength-to-strength and no longer the sole preserve of the computer geek!

7. Edward Snowden lets the cat out of the bag In 2013 former CIA officer Edward Snowden published damning evidence suggesting the US National Security Agency routinely monitored emails, phone records and instant messages, sparking an ongoing debate relating to internet privacy and security. Snowden’s revelations have impacted on many aspects of internet data use and monitoring, but perhaps most notably it brought into question the validity of the Safe Harbour agreement which allowed American companies to move peoples personal information to data centres in the US.

8. Once again, coding is cool! Like many of my contemporaries with a passion for computing, I took my first steps into the industry by pouring over pages of code printed in the magazines of the day. It gave me a great grounding, but others took this one stage further. Some of the best known software houses today were started by programmers trying to push the basic computers of the time to their limits.

A rise in console use during the late 1990s and early 2000s saw programming fall out of fashion. Three Cambridge graduates recognised that there was a danger of losing a generation of budding programmers and by 2008 plans were well underway to solve the problem. Officially launched in 2012, the Raspberry Pi, a credit card sized computer with limited processing power has gone on to become the fastest selling computer of all time. More than five million units have been sold to date and the technology is being embraced by schools and a new generation of programmers alike.

Rory Delahoyde is the managing director of HA Hosting, home of the Sheffield Data Centre.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by HA Hosting .