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.

CompTIA CEO advises channel partners to mind the widening managed services gap

CompTIA CEO advises channel partners to mind the widening managed services gap

CompTIA CEO Todd Thibodeaux is warning solution providers that have not yet made the transition to business models based on managed services will soon discover the gap they will need to cross to make that transition is only going to...

/ August 2, 2018
Proliferation of file repositories drives greater need for managed services

Proliferation of file repositories drives greater need for managed services

Much to the probable chagrin of IT leaders the number of places that end users can store files has rapidly expanded. A new survey of 160 IT professionals conducted by Cloudtenna, a provider of enterprise search tools, finds that on...

/ July 31, 2018
Advanced Analytics Creates Opportunity for MSPs to Transform IT Operations

Advanced Analytics Creates Opportunity for MSPs to Transform IT Operations

A new report published this week by Dresner Advisory Services sheds some light on how IT organizations want to apply advanced analytics to optimize IT operations. The 2018 IT Analytics Market Study finds that the top four management metrics in...

/ July 26, 2018 / 1 Comment
IT Leaders Need a Little Extra Digital Process Transformation Help from MSP Friends

IT Leaders Need a Little Extra Digital Process Transformation Help from MSP Friends

There’s naturally a lot of hype these days when it comes to digital process transformation. But a survey of 200 CIOs and IT directors published today by Trace3, an IT services provider, suggests the most important areas of IT focus...

/ July 24, 2018
IT Infrastructure Paradox Creates Opportunity for MSPs

IT Infrastructure Paradox Creates Opportunity for MSPs

Something akin to a paradox has emerged when it comes to the management of IT infrastructure on the age of the cloud. A new survey of 401 IT leaders conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Virtual Instruments, a provider...

/ July 19, 2018
Battle for control over network edge begins in earnest

Battle for control over network edge begins in earnest

A battle for control over the layer of abstraction that will enable services to be delivered to the network edge is now being waged between various types of hypervisors and container technologies. Various types of embedded systems that make up...

/ July 17, 2018
Most organizations plan to reevaluate cloud computing strategy

Most organizations plan to reevaluate cloud computing strategy

A whopping 72 percent of 727 respondents to a global survey conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Virtustream, the cloud service provider arm of Dell Technologies, plan to revisit their organizations cloud strategy within the next two years. The...

/ July 12, 2018
On-Premise IT Thanks to Automation Starts to Achieve Cost Parity with Public Clouds

On-Premise IT Thanks to Automation Starts to Achieve Cost Parity with Public Clouds

Managed service providers (MSPs) have a complicated relationship with cloud service providers (CSPs). On the one hand, the massive number of workloads running on public clouds clearly helps drive demand for managed services. At the same time, however, CSPs have...

/ July 10, 2018
SD-WANs
SD-WANs create major downstream opportunities for MSPs

SD-WANs create major downstream opportunities for MSPs

While software-defined networks (SDNs) within the data center remain a nascent opportunity for managed service providers, software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) represent one of the hottest segments in IT. The research firm Futuriom expects the market for SD-WAN tools and network-as-a-service...

/ July 5, 2018
Rate of SDN adoption is slow but steady

Rate of SDN adoption is slow but steady

Sometime around 1983, industry pundits without fail would declare that the “Year of the LAN” was upon us. A decade later and most organizations were still getting around to deploying their first LAN. The same glacial pace of adoption appears...

/ July 3, 2018