Mike Vizard

All posts by Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard has covered IT for more than 25 years, and has edited or contributed to a number of tech publications including InfoWorld, eWeek, CRN, Baseline, ComputerWorld, TMCNet, and Digital Review. He currently blogs for IT Business Edge and contributes to CIOinsight, The Channel Insider, Programmableweb and Slashdot. Mike blogs about emerging cloud technology for Smarter MSP.

MSPs need to lead the charge toward observability

MSPs need to lead the charge toward observability

A significant number of organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to manage and maintain observability of cloud computing environments that are becoming more complex with each passing day. A survey of 400 senior IT professionals in the United States, Canada,...

/ May 6, 2021
Digital business transformation requires data engineering heroes

Digital business transformation requires data engineering heroes

Most organizations intuitively realize that sound data management and data engineering practices are at the core of any digital business transformation practice. However, a survey of 150 IT professionals working for organizations with at least 4,000 employees published this week...

/ April 29, 2021 / 1 Comment
Demand for IT services accelerates as economy recovers

Demand for IT services accelerates as economy recovers

A report published by the market research firm Information Services Group (ISG) finds revenue generated from enterprise-class technology, business, and IT services reached an all-time high in the first quarter of 2021. The combined global market for deals that exceeded...

/ April 22, 2021
MSPs gain digital business transformation ground

MSPs gain digital business transformation ground

A global annual survey of 1,350 business and IT executives conducted by Jigsaw Research on behalf of NTT Ltd. suggests that as organization invest more in software to drive digital business transformation initiatives, there has been a corresponding rise in...

/ April 14, 2021
MSPs need to get ahead of coming IT rebellion

MSPs need to get ahead of coming IT rebellion

A survey of 1,003 individuals, published this week by Eagle Hill Consulting, confirms what most managed service providers (MSPs) have long known in their hearts: more than three quarters (78 percent) respondents said technology makes their job harder. Most IT...

/ April 8, 2021
World Backup Day should focus on the recovery experience

World Backup Day should focus on the recovery experience

The annual arrival of World Backup Day on the day before April Fool’s Day may not get the level of recognition it deserves, but it does provide a useful construct for managed service providers (MSPs) to draw attention to an...

/ March 31, 2021
Shift to work from anywhere presents major MSP challenge

Shift to work from anywhere presents major MSP challenge

Most managed service providers (MSPs) today manage a large number of endpoints on behalf of a wide range of clients. So, it makes sense that many MSPs will have a keen interest in understanding how employees might be returning to...

/ March 24, 2021 / 2 Comments
MSPs should bet on all platforms to win

MSPs should bet on all platforms to win

There’s been an ongoing debate about the relative strategic importance of public clouds versus on-premises IT environments for several years. The general consensus today is that the deployment of on-premises servers will continue to decline as more workloads shift to...

/ March 17, 2021
Reliance on open source software expands opportunities for MSPs

Reliance on open source software expands opportunities for MSPs

One of the most attractive things about open source software is that it’s free. Many IT professionals routinely download it simply because they don’t have to get approval from anybody. And quite a few IT organizations have even gone so...

/ March 11, 2021
MSPs find opportunity in cloud security gaps

MSPs find opportunity in cloud security gaps

Cloud security issues are creating a major opportunity for managed service providers (MSPs) as organizations of all sizes continue to struggle with the shared responsibility model that cloud service providers require customers to embrace. A survey of 303 IT professionals...

/ March 3, 2021 / 1 Comment