Welcome to the Sure Communication (sur.co.uk) Ltd Blog

Those of us old enough to remember the early internet will recall what a strange and geeky place it was.  Nobody was out to steal your identity, and no daughter of an exiled Nigerian magnate wanted to make you rich.  Instead, the would-be internaut was faced with a bizarre and scary array of tools and protocols, as the stuttering 300 baud modem eventually offered us the chance to do battle with Archie, Finger, Gopher and Veronica.

Sometime in the late eighties and early nineties, happily, it all settled down. The vast majority of new users were non-nerds, and the internet was for browsing web pages and sending email, operating systems came with a program for each, many graphic artists learned enough HTML to give you a website without the need to remortgage the family jewels, and we all congratulated each other on making it through the wilderness years.

While we took a well-deserved lunch, somebody came along and invented Voice over IP, the mobile internet, Web 2.0, 24-bit encryption, social networking, cross-site scripting, instant messaging, payment gateways, SQL injection …  and the world had changed again.  You now apparently have a platform instead of a computer, our graphic designers can no longer build our feature-packed websites, and online security means a whole lot more than not using our dogs’ names as passwords.

Of course, in reality nothing has suddenly changed. Rather, we and our internet have all grown up a little, and our clients now see professional website design, email management and bulletproof hosting not as sales points but as givens.  Many now see the role of their web partner not as just a host, a website designer or such like. Additionally, their view our purpose as to navigate this technical and administrative maze, understanding all of the ongoing developments that, they tell us, they don’t feel they should have to; while they get on and run their businesses.  Thankfully, we entirely agree.

In this blog we’ll share some interesting highlights of the journey, such as technical tips, news items and security issues. We welcome your comments.