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 get business leaders more involved in cybersecurity decisions

MSPs need to get business leaders more involved in cybersecurity decisions

Managed service providers (MSPs) have been benefiting from increased spending on security software and services throughout the past year. However, while industry analysts report that spending on security has, on average, increased by 9 percent on a year-over-year basis, a...

/ January 2, 2020
crisis
MSPs need to get closer to customers in 2020

MSPs need to get closer to customers in 2020

This time of year, most managed service providers (MSPs) are trying to discern what issues are top of mind for their customers as they gear up to head into the New Year. A recent survey of 500 IT professionals conducted...

/ December 18, 2019
Edge computing consortiums start to multiply to the benefit of MSPs

Edge computing consortiums start to multiply to the benefit of MSPs

When vendors band together to promote the adoption of a standard via a consortium, it’s usually a sign that it will benefit managed service providers (MSPs). At the Edge Computing World Conference this week, the Eclipse Foundation, which now oversees...

/ December 12, 2019
Shift to the hybrid cloud drives increased reliance on MSPs

Shift to the hybrid cloud drives increased reliance on MSPs

Just about everyone agrees that more application workloads will be moving into the cloud. The only real question now, is to what degree. A survey of 508 IT professionals conducted by Internap (INAP), a provider of managed services, finds that...

/ December 3, 2019
Ten technology trends MSPs can be thankful for in 2019

Ten technology trends MSPs can be thankful for in 2019

The arrival of Thanksgiving once again presents an opportunity for managed service providers (MSPs) to take stock of the opportunities that lay before them. With the spirit of the holiday in mind, here are ten technology trends benefiting MSPs, as...

/ November 28, 2019
Percentage of revenue organizations are investing in IT increases sharply

Percentage of revenue organizations are investing in IT increases sharply

A global survey of more than 2,500 business and technology leaders conducted by the research firm ESI ThoughtLab, on behalf of Cognizant, a provider of IT services, suggests that the amount of money organizations are willing to invest in IT...

/ November 26, 2019
Shift to network services on Kubernetes and containers is underway

Shift to network services on Kubernetes and containers is underway

Cloud-native container technologies are about to extensively transform networking services. At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 conference earlier this week, a demonstration of how a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) network built on top of a Kubernetes cluster that accessed...

/ November 21, 2019
Hybrid cloud computing opportunity starts to manifest for MSPs

Hybrid cloud computing opportunity starts to manifest for MSPs

Most IT organizations want to embrace hybrid cloud computing, but most are far away from achieving that goal. In fact, a survey of 2,650 IT professionals conducted by the research firm Vanson Bourne, on behalf of Nutanix, suggests a large...

/ November 19, 2019
As cloud spending increases, relationships become complicated

As cloud spending increases, relationships become complicated

A forecast published this week by Gartner suggests that the spending on various cloud services will continue to accelerate through 2020. However, the Gartner report also predicts that 60 percent of organizations will be employing managed services provided by cloud...

/ November 14, 2019
Optimizing cloud experiences could be the next big opportunity

Optimizing cloud experiences could be the next big opportunity

Most organizations at this point have migrated some portion of their IT environment to a cloud computing environment. However, a report published today by Unisys shows that not all those organizations know what to do once that migration is completed....

/ November 12, 2019