
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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Time to apply an application resiliency calculus to data protection
A research report published this week by CAST Software, a provider of tools for analyzing software, uncovers an interesting correlation between how old an application is and the potential impact it can have on the business should it become unavailable....

Rise of digital business enables MSPs to elevate IT conversation
Digital business transformation may be the latest buzzword phrase to come down the marketing pike, but in terms of elevating the conversation around IT, this shift in understanding the true value of IT may turn out to be the best...

Increased demand for cybersecurity training is a gap MSPs should fill
Just about everybody agrees end-user training is the best defense against spear phishing and other types of cybersecurity attacks that rely on social engineering. The trouble is finding someone to provide that training at a time when cybersecurity professionals are...

DataOps is emerging as next big opportunity for MSPs
Coupled with rising interest in artificial intelligence (AI), the need to derive business value from data is driving organizations to create data operations (DataOps) functions that should create additional opportunities for managed service providers. A survey of 266 data professionals...

GDPR to Force Long Overdue Data Management Conversation
One of the more intriguing aspects of the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR) implemented by the European Union is that organizations are required to appoint a chief data protection officer. That person doesn’t necessarily need to have that formal title....