Growing IT security fatigue bodes well for MSSPs
The size of the opportunity for managed security service providers (MSSPs) has always been constrained by one dominant factor. Far too many IT organizations believe they can adequately defend their organizations despite all evidence to the contrary. But, a new report...
Ransomware is now a $1 billion industry
A new ransomware report from IBM Security finds that nearly one in two business executives have experienced ransomware attacks in the workplace, and 70 percent of those executives said their company has paid to regain access to encrypted data. In...
The trouble with customer satisfaction
A new report suggests that when it comes the customer experience being provided by IT service providers there’s plenty of room for improvement. But, who is ultimately responsible for this state of affairs is debatable. The 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings of Tech...
Calculating the cost of a ransomware attack
On average, it takes an organization 33 man hours to recover from a ransomware attack. That’s the benchmark identified by a survey of 500 IT security professionals conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of SentinelOne, a...
What the rise of DevOps and microservices means for MSPs
As is often the case in IT, there is usually a fair amount of revisionist history applied to determining what was the original cause of certain trends. Case in point is a recent survey of 1,850 IT professionals conducted by...
What a Trump administration might mean for IT service providers
While IT issues were hardly a major focus of the 2016 presidential election, the election of Donald Trump to be president of the United States has some interesting implications for IT services providers. Trump has said little about technology issues,...
Friends don’t let friends build data centers anymore
While there may be confusion in the wake of CenturyLink’s decision to first acquire Level3 Communications for $34 billion and then sell its data centers for $2.3 billion to a consortium of private equity firms to help fund the deal,...
MSPs need to be prepared for rising wave of DDoS attacks
Now it’s been conclusively demonstrated how susceptible even the largest of organizations are to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. At the core of these attacks are multiple forms of malware that have spread to millions of devices connected to...
Appreciating the realities of IT budgets in 2017
Now that the fourth quarter is well underway, surveys tracking IT budget projections for 2017 are forecasting that IT spending next year will be anywhere from flat to up 2.9 percent. In fact, Gartner is predicting that IT services spending...
Ransomware moves into the cloud
One of the assumptions many people make about cloud services is that someone is responsible for maintaining security of the environment. That’s true as far as the service itself is concerned, but any data loaded onto those cloud services is...