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.

Service level agreement
SLAs are key to expanding available market for managed services

SLAs are key to expanding available market for managed services

Over the years the size of the available market for managed services has stubbornly remained less than 25 percent of the total IT market. The reason for this is two-fold. There are a large number of organizations that don’t view...

/ October 10, 2017
Fueling digital business transformation
Gartner: Digital business transformation to fuel IT services spending increase

Gartner: Digital business transformation to fuel IT services spending increase

The more things change, the larger the opportunity for managed services providers becomes. At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017 conference this week, Gartner predicted that not only will worldwide spending on IT increase 4.3 percent in 2017, but spending on IT services will...

/ October 5, 2017
Cloud migration costs
Cost of cloud migrations limiting adoption

Cost of cloud migrations limiting adoption

Helping migrate applications into the cloud has been a boon to managed service providers. But a new survey of 500 IT decision makers conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Virtustream, the cloud service provider arm of Dell Technologies, suggests...

/ October 3, 2017
Cloud security education
MSPs need to focus on cloud security education

MSPs need to focus on cloud security education

It’s already been well established that the No. 1 concern organizations have about deploying application workloads in the cloud is cloud security. But, it turns out there’s also significant confusion about who is responsible for IT security on a public...

/ September 28, 2017
managed services demand
Managed services demand driven by need to augment, not replace internal IT

Managed services demand driven by need to augment, not replace internal IT

Now that more application workloads than ever are running in either a public cloud or a third-party data center, it appears IT organizations are starting to appreciate the value of managed services. A new Voice of the Enterprise survey of...

/ September 26, 2017
Infrastructure challenges
Legacy network infrastructure acts as a drag on strategic IT initiatives

Legacy network infrastructure acts as a drag on strategic IT initiatives

When it comes to IT projects, most organizations are fairly ambitious. From migrating workloads to the cloud to launching Internet of Things (IoT) projects, there is no end of IT projects in sight. Often, the one thing holding back those...

/ September 21, 2017
Data integration
Expanding data integration needs play to the strengths of MSPs

Expanding data integration needs play to the strengths of MSPs

Most managed service providers also resell hardware and software, so the shift to the cloud has forced them to rebalance their revenue streams. As more applications are consumed as a cloud service, an MSP’s balance sheet fundamentally changes. Instead of...

/ September 19, 2017
5G networking
MSPs need a reality check when it comes to 5G networking

MSPs need a reality check when it comes to 5G networking

Device manufacturers are generating a lot of hype about 5G networking. After all, they want to sell next-generation systems capable of accessing and processing virtual reality applications and Internet of Things (IoT) applications that can process massive amounts of data over...

/ September 14, 2017
cloud application workloads
Distribution of application workloads in the age of the cloud to vary widely

Distribution of application workloads in the age of the cloud to vary widely

Every managed service provider is more than aware that application workloads are moving into the cloud in droves. The real issue is what percentage of all enterprise workloads will wind up being deployed on those clouds. A global survey of...

/ September 13, 2017
Time for MSPs to get ready for the coming IoT data storm

Time for MSPs to get ready for the coming IoT data storm

There’s a storm of data coming unlike any other, and savvy managed service providers should be gearing up for it now. A new report from 451 Research suggests that organizations planning to implement Internet of Things (IoT) projects expect to...

/ September 7, 2017 / 1 Comment