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.

it security fatigue
Growing IT security fatigue bodes well for MSSPs

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...

/ February 14, 2017
Ransomware is now a $1 billion industry

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...

/ December 20, 2016
customer satisfaction
The trouble with customer satisfaction

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...

/ November 30, 2016
cost of ransomware
Calculating the cost of a ransomware attack

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...

/ November 29, 2016
IT Services Trends
What the rise of DevOps and microservices means for MSPs

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...

/ November 23, 2016
donald trump
What a Trump administration might mean for IT service providers

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,...

/ November 10, 2016
data centers
Friends don’t let friends build data centers anymore

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,...

/ November 8, 2016
ddos attack
MSPs need to be prepared for rising wave of DDoS attacks

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...

/ October 25, 2016
it budgets
Appreciating the realities of IT budgets in 2017

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...

/ October 20, 2016
ransomware
Ransomware moves into the cloud

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...

/ October 13, 2016 / 1 Comment