Offering a "full-stack" "full-lifeycle" experience to maximise the opportunity for our customers.
Designed to keep you at the cutting edge of AI, Cyber, and IT advancements, we are voicing the unsaid and shaping the future of business technology solutions.
Your challenges
As a Business Technology Services Partner, we offer the "full-stack" "full-lifecycle" experience, built to maximise the AI opportunity for our customers.
OUR CULTURE
Thank you for your interest in Acora. We'd love to hear from you! Please feel free to drop us a message via our contact form.
Follow Us
Work with us
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that
Home News room The state we’re in
My job is to keep our products and services relevant in the face of constant changes in technology, the market and our clients’ needs. I work closely with our Tier 1 vendors to understand their strategy and ensure ours is in alignment, then build services that bring their products to life for Acora’s clients. A big part of my role is making platforms, tools, integration and service maturity accessible to organisations of all types and sizes, so they can fully benefit from the added value offered by managed services.
For the third consecutive year, we reached out to CIOs and other IT leaders in organisations across the UK to get a sense of the challenges they’re facing now, and how they see things developing over the coming months.
Not surprisingly, we focused primarily on hybrid and agile working. Although it’s starting to feel as though we’ve always worked like this, organisations in general and IT teams in particular are still learning about the practicalities of delivering it, especially at scale. Our survey suggests that while the initial, immediate difficulties have largely been overcome, two issues remain unresolved, and are actually growing in importance.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the one that really leapt out for me was cyber security – specifically, how do we put the right software, people, systems and other controls in place to ensure protection, while enabling users to work seamlessly and productively. In the hybrid working context, there are obvious concerns around remote access to SaaS applications. These are now in-scope for Cyber Essentials; combined with the increasing salience of cyber insurance, this is focusing minds on compliance, certification and supply-chain auditing as never before.
But there’s another, potentially even more daunting issue facing IT leaders. The move to hybrid working has shone a hot white light on the criticality of the user experience. Yet almost everyone we asked – a whopping 96% – told us they can’t take steps to improve it for one devastatingly simple reason: a chronic lack of actionable data.
In an age where we can produce and access reams of data about practically anything, this is pretty staggering. The key word is ‘actionable’. Very often, organisations have the wrong data because they’re still using the wrong tools – KPIs, CSAT – which almost entirely exclude the user experience. For us, this is a strongest possible argument in favour of the experience-level agreement (XLA), which provides real-time, empirical intel about how people are actually consuming your technology. That intel feeds into business cases for investment, provides insights into technology adoption, helps you triage support services and, over time, ensures every user is receiving the best possible experience.
So what lessons did I take from the survey? Firstly, that we’re all going to need to prioritise, invest, and align enhanced cyber security with a framework or certification. This is a basic requirement of doing business, since it’s increasingly being written into service contracts, and part of an ever more restrictive cyber insurance market.
And secondly, we have to leave behind the reactive mindset that got us through the worst of the pandemic and start thinking about hybrid working proactively and long-term. We need to equip our teams, users and wider organisations for this new world we now inhabit. The technical challenges are just beginning; but the main thing we’ve learned over the past year is that we, and our teams, are more than up to the task.
2022 has been about growth, people and innovation. Company-wide, we have seen lots of staff members return back to the office which is essential for communication, personal development and collaboration. We are seeing the benefits of face-to-face internal team and…
Acora is pleased to announce it has secured a new minority investment with LDC, the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group. The new investment round, supported by debt funding from Ares and HSBC, will provide long-term financing for the…