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.

Digital workspaces are the next big opportunity for MSPs

Digital workspaces are the next big opportunity for MSPs

There’s much speculation about the degree to which employees will return to the workplace versus continuing to work from home. The truth of the matter is work as a concept will remain fluid. While more employees will be returning to...

/ July 22, 2020
In defense of MSP cybersecurity, as number of alerts rise

In defense of MSP cybersecurity, as number of alerts rise

It seems like about once a month now some government agency somewhere discovers there might be a potential issue with the cybersecurity of a managed service provider (MSP). The latest warning comes from the U.S. Secret Service, which sent out...

/ July 15, 2020
Shift to the cloud creates additional IT complexities

Shift to the cloud creates additional IT complexities

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that more applications will be moving into the cloud at a faster rate than ever. In general, organizations now have a much greater appreciation for IT flexibility and application resiliency. In...

/ July 8, 2020
Satisfaction cuts both ways in the post COVID-19 era

Satisfaction cuts both ways in the post COVID-19 era

If the COVID-19 pandemic has done anything from an IT perspective, it’s been to expose a lot of flawed IT processes, even among managed service providers (MSPs). A survey of 519 IT professionals published by ManageEngine, a provider of IT...

/ July 1, 2020
Accelerated shift to the cloud bodes well for MSPs

Accelerated shift to the cloud bodes well for MSPs

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, application workloads had been steadily migrating to the cloud for some time. However, what was once a steady flow now appears to have become a deluge. Now, this rapid transition is exposing significant shortcomings in...

/ June 24, 2020
MSPs need to adjust rapidly to the changing SD-WAN landscape

MSPs need to adjust rapidly to the changing SD-WAN landscape

The future of work in the wake of COVID-19 is most definitely hybrid. A survey of 600 IT decision makers published this week by Xerox finds that on average 82 percent of the workforce in organizations will have returned to...

/ June 17, 2020
Rise of DaaS has major implications for MSPs

Rise of DaaS has major implications for MSPs

While it may not be crystal clear how many employees might wind up permanently working from home, it’s apparent there will be a lot more than there were prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, many IT leaders are reevaluating...

/ June 10, 2020
Gauging the breadth and depth of the work from home phenomenon

Gauging the breadth and depth of the work from home phenomenon

Many managed service providers (MSPs) are understandably anxious to better understand to what degree employees might be working from home for the foreseeable future, and to what degree that transition might create demand for their services.

/ June 3, 2020
Faster digital business transformation bodes well for MSPs

Faster digital business transformation bodes well for MSPs

A survey of 200 senior IT executives working at organizations with more than 2,500 employees conducted by IDG Research on behalf of Insight Enterprises, a provider of IT services, suggests there is a high correlation between organizations that have launched...

/ May 27, 2020
SMBs’ security vs. headcount decision creates MSP opportunity

SMBs’ security vs. headcount decision creates MSP opportunity

Business executives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic are now wrestling with some critical decisions that are likely to define their relationships with managed service providers (MSPs) for many years to come. A survey of over 1,000 business decision...

/ May 20, 2020