Month: January 2018
Cloud 5: Apple boosts data center spending, Hyperscale causing memory shortage
Welcome to The Cloud 5, our weekly feature where we scour the web searching for the five most intriguing and poignant cloud links we can find. Before we jump into this week’s links, please have a look at one of...
Co-seller models find increased appeal in the age of the cloud
The way IT vendors have historically sold products and services has revolved primarily around models where a channel partner either resold the product after acquiring it from the vendor or acted as an agent on behalf of the vendor. But,...
When cloud companies partner, customers usually win
When cloud companies team up, good things tend to happen for customers. It provides a way to combine different kinds of enterprise information in a seamless way. Cloud partnerships happen so often and so easily, it’s easy to take them...
Mike J Douglass: How to improve your productivity while running a busy MSP
A lot of MSPs start out the same — launched by techies that want to create a service offering they can control and develop. This often means the MSP owner is spending most of their time working IN the business and...
Customer loyalty to cloud and IT service providers is not all that high
It turns out that in terms of brand loyalty IT professionals are least loyal to cloud service providers (CSPs) and IT outsourcing/consulting partners. A survey of 535 IT professionals conducted by Spiceworks finds more than 70 percent of IT buyers are...
Tech Time Warp: Happy birthday, HAL—however old you are
Depending on your vantage point, HAL—the supercomputer at the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—is turning 21, 26, or 50 this year. In the screenplay, a malfunctioning HAL says, “I became operational at the H.A.L. Plant in Urbana,...
Cloud 5: Meltdown and Spectre’s impact on cloud, Ford’s transportation cloud
Welcome to The Cloud 5, our weekly feature where we scour the web searching for the five most intriguing and poignant cloud links we can find. Before we jump into this week’s links, please have a look at one of...
Most organizations still struggle with fundamentals of IT management
While there’s a lot of well-deserved focus on business and IT innovation these days, the fundamentals of delivering IT services never go away. In fact, a new survey published this week by Syncsort, a provider of data management software, indicates...
DoD removes Star Wars references from cloud planning memo
When it comes to the Pentagon and cloud computing, you don’t expect anyone to be playing around, but according to a Bloomberg report this week, a Pentagon official slipped in a couple of Star Wars references into the initial draft...
Stop doing these 7 manual network management tasks
Active network infrastructure management is a key element of any managed service offering. Traditionally, network management has involved a lot of tedious manual work, making it expensive and very hard to scale. And that’s why many MSPs have shied away...