Practical IT insight for decision-makers.
Articles on AI, automation and well-run company IT, without jargon. Written by Caster Consulting.
Google Cloud outage: what’s your plan when the cloud stops?
Tuesday's Google Cloud outage didn't prove that the cloud is unreliable, it proved that most companies don't know what they depend on. An SMB doesn't need its own data centre. It needs a list of its critical services and a plan B for the day one of them goes down.
EU pay transparency: is a spreadsheet enough for an SME?
A small business doesn't need new software for EU pay transparency, but it does need clean pay data. Several obligations apply to every employer regardless of size, and…
Locked into Microsoft? What to do with your licences now
Don't wait for the regulators: today, the savings on Microsoft licences come from your own licence hygiene. The UK competition authority says Microsoft's business software is hard to…
AI on your own machine? The fine print of this week’s news
Meta's new open-weight model runs on a Mac, but only on a rack of Mac Studios with about a terabyte of memory. For a small or mid-sized company,…
What can your IT provider’s apps reach in Microsoft 365?
Probably more than you think, as this week's ConnectWise incident showed. Attackers signed in to hundreds of Microsoft 365 environments as a backup service's app, and multi-factor authentication…
October 2026 Windows update: install it, but not blindly
Install the October Windows update within a week, because it fixes a flaw attackers already exploit. Test it on a few machines first: an NTLM change can break…
No-code, low-code or custom development: when to use which
For most internal business applications, up to a few dozen or a few hundred users, a no-code or low-code platform is faster and cheaper than custom development. You…
AI document and invoice processing: what it really delivers
Today's best AI models read 90 to 96% of invoice data correctly, depending on document quality, but a person still has to catch the rest. AI pays off…
How to commission software development without overruns
Software projects rarely slip because of the programming; far more often, the client and the developer mean different things by the same sentence. Clear requirements, short testable steps…
How to measure the ROI of an AI or automation project
You can only measure what you recorded before go-live. Measure today's time, cost and error rate, count the full cost including human review, and don't expect the same…