E-Business
Move to ‘the Cloud’, Save Costs on the Ground (Google Apps)
When times get tough, focusing on your core business is imperative. Cutting bottom-line costs to the business along with making operations run as efficiently and effectively as possible is one of the first steps towards shoring up your defences.
In these tough economic times, ask any company if they could save money a year per employee and most likely they’d jump at the chance.
IT can be a big upfront cost and having to manage it on a daily basis can increase spend and distract you even further from your core focus – making money. Until now.
The business approach to IT is being redefined by the Internet. Email, documents, calendars and other business communication tools are increasingly being delivered and hosted online via a trend known as ‘cloud computing’.
Cloud computing is a simple concept: applications and data are delivered over the Internet via a third party. It’s a transformational, disruptive technology which is having a big impact on the way the world of IT works and the way businesses run IT.
Cloud computing has many key benefits, but two stand out – firstly, cost savings. Once you’re hooked up to the web, the cost of buying licenses, purchasing servers and maintaining them is reduced because it’s possible to effectively ‘rent’ business applications from a third party.
From a budget perspective, it brings predictable costs for IT and dramatically reduces spend on traditional desktop software.
Secondly, there are productivity gains to be made from running your business via the cloud. Key to this is the shift towards a more collaborative way of working.
We need to share information and work with others to get things done, and the Internet allows you to do this in a way that hasn’t been possible before.
A business owner in Leeds chats with one of her managers working from London as they work on the same spreadsheet at the same time.
An on-the-road sales team meets on a single document in the cloud to plan the next quarter’s budget. Getting access to information instantly, from wherever you might be, on whatever device you need it is crucial.
After all, the geographical and mobile nature of business doesn’t change just because credit is harder to come by.
Some business owners could be hesitant to transfer their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud: hosting your data with a web-based provider can represent a shift in thinking about control and security of data.
However, it is important to remember that the business of the key cloud computing providers who host the data depends on offering a secure environment for it.
They invest more time and money in protecting their customers’ data than any small organisation could possibly afford; in fact, it is one of the most important factors considered when developing new products that handle personal and business data.
Over 5 million businesses are currently using our Google Apps productivity suite which provides online email, instant messaging, documents, video and much more.
Many of these companies are businesses who have seen that this model makes economic and business sense, making them more agile, flexible, competitive and innovative. The question is, have you?
Transcorp Hotels Plc has delivered a stellar performance in the first half of 2025, recording a 60% year-on-year surge in revenue to ₦47.57 billion, up from ₦29.72 billion in H1 2024. Gross profit climbed 71% to ₦36.21 billion, maintaining a strong 76% margin despite inflation and operational headwinds.
The hospitality giant, a subsidiary of Transnational Corporation Plc, also announced an interim dividend payout of ₦1.024 billion — offering ₦0.10 per 50 kobo ordinary share to shareholders.
In a bold move, the company unveiled Nigeria’s largest corporate venue — the 5,000-seat Transcorp Centre — staking its claim as the new leader in event hospitality. Chairman Emmanuel Nnorom described the results as proof of Transcorp Hotels’ transformative strategies and unwavering investor commitment. MD/CEO Uzo Oshogwe attributed the success to relentless execution and a resilient business model.
Transcorp Hotels, renowned for iconic assets like Transcorp Hilton Abuja and its digital platform Aura, says it isn’t just leading Nigeria’s hospitality sector — it’s redefining excellence across Africa.
Chinese “threat actors” have hacked Microsoft’s SharePoint document software servers and targeted the data of the businesses using it, the firm has said.
China state-backed Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon as well as China-based Storm-2603 were said to have “exploited vulnerabilities” in on-premises SharePoint servers, the kind used by firms, but not in its cloud-based service.
The US tech giant has released security updates in response and has advised all on-premises SharePoint server customers to install them.
“Investigations into other actors also using these exploits are still ongoing,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The firm said it had “high confidence” the hackers would continue to target systems which have not installed its security updates.
It added that it would update its website blog with more information as its investigation continues.
Microsoft said it had observed attacks in which hackers had sent a request to a SharePoint server “enabling the theft of the key material by threat actors”.
Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting firm, a division of Google Cloud, told reporter, it was “aware of several victims in several different sectors across a number of global geographies”.
Carmakal said it appeared that governments and businesses that use SharePoint on their sites were the primary target.
A number of adversaries who stole material encoded by cryptography were then able to regain ongoing access to the victims’ SharePoint data, he said.
“This was exploited in a very broad way, very opportunistically before a patch was made available. That’s why this is significant,” Carmakal said.
Carmakal said the “China-nexus actor” was deploying techniques similar to previous campaigns associated with Beijing.
Microsoft said Linen Typhoon had “focused on stealing intellectual property, primarily targeting organizations related to government, defence, strategic planning, and human rights” for 13 years.
It added that Violet Typhoon had been “dedicated to espionage”, primarily targeting former government and military staff, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, higher education, the media, the financial sector and the health sector in the US, Europe, and East Asia.
Meanwhile, Storm-2603 was “assessed with medium confidence to be a China-based threat actor”.
National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has issued a public warning that it is not associated with NINcard.com.
According to the commission, the website has been circulating online to offer services for Nigerians seeking National Identification Number (NIN) services.
NIMC, in a post on its official X account on Wednesday, said, “NINcard.com is not in anyway affiliated to NIMC. Stay vigilant!”
The warning was accompanied by screenshots of fake payment receipts and OTP request pages from the website, both of which were boldly stamped “FAKE” by NIMC to alert the public.
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