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.

VoIP
Transition to VoIP solutions has some hang-ups to overcome

Transition to VoIP solutions has some hang-ups to overcome

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is at the root of many of the more advanced communications and collaboration applications that have been deployed in the past year. But a survey conducted jointly by Spiceworks and CenturyLink suggests there is plenty of room for...

/ December 26, 2017
revenue growth rates
Revenue growth rates rise sharply in 2017 across all classes of clouds

Revenue growth rates rise sharply in 2017 across all classes of clouds

They say a flood lifts all boats, but given the revenue growth rates across the entire cloud computing sector, something more akin to a tsunami is occurring. A report issued this week by Jeffries, an investment banking firm, says the...

/ December 21, 2017
digital business transformation
Digital business transformation expectations likely to lead to high turnover

Digital business transformation expectations likely to lead to high turnover

Most IT leaders today are being asked by to perform a magic trick. On the one hand, they are being tasked with driving IT that will help materially reinvent the business, also known as digital business transformation. At the same...

/ December 19, 2017
IT labor costs
Spiceworks report finds IT labor costs likely to rise in 2018

Spiceworks report finds IT labor costs likely to rise in 2018

The single biggest expense when it comes to managing IT is IT labor costs. So, when the salaries of IT professionals start to increase it has positive and negative implications for managed service providers. A 2018 IT Career Outlook survey...

/ December 14, 2017
multi-cloud computing
Study finds mastering multi-cloud computing is difficult

Study finds mastering multi-cloud computing is difficult

A funny thing happened on the way to the cloud. IT became more difficult to manage. Most IT organizations today either already are or soon will be trying to manage multiple clouds, primarily for one of two reasons. The first...

/ December 12, 2017 / 2 Comments
Containers
Shift to microservices architectures based on containers is on now

Shift to microservices architectures based on containers is on now

Emerging technologies tend to be double-edge swords for managed services providers. They typically create new opportunities for MSPs, but often at the expense of existing revenue streams. The rise of Docker containers along with the Kubernetes orchestration platform employed to...

/ December 7, 2017
external IT services
Reliance on external IT services shows steady gains

Reliance on external IT services shows steady gains

A global survey of 890 CIOs shows that the percentage of IT managed by external IT services providers is climbing at a slow but steady pace. Conducted by The Logicalis Group, a reseller and provider of managed IT services, the...

/ December 5, 2017
AWS partners
Standard AWS Enterprise Contract heralds wave of change for AWS partners

Standard AWS Enterprise Contract heralds wave of change for AWS partners

The coming year promises to be one of great change for managed service providers that partner with Amazon Web Services. At an AWS Global Partner Summit this week, AWS revealed that it is testing a standard Enterprise Contract that it...

/ November 30, 2017
cloud services
Increased consumption of wider variety of cloud services bodes well for MSPs

Increased consumption of wider variety of cloud services bodes well for MSPs

New data from 451 Research shows the cloud computing market is on track to grow from $28.1 billion this year to $53.3 billion by 2021. That represents a 19 percent compound annual growth rate. But more importantly, the mix of...

/ November 28, 2017
GDPR compliance
Cloud Security Alliance publishes GDPR compliance guideline

Cloud Security Alliance publishes GDPR compliance guideline

Compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Rule (GDPR) is moving from a theoretical construct to an existential threat as the May 25, 2018, deadline rapidly approaches. To provide service providers and their customers some guidance on how to achieve...

/ November 22, 2017 / 1 Comment