Category: Tech Insight

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
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
it budget
The budget help IT leaders want most from IT service providers

The budget help IT leaders want most from IT service providers

When it comes to IT, seeing is always believing. The trouble is that most IT organizations don’t have the time or money needed to set up a proof-of-concept (PoC) to determine if the technology solution they’re interested in actually works...

/ October 4, 2016
bare metal server
Bare metal servers gain momentum in the cloud

Bare metal servers gain momentum in the cloud

Bare metal servers are a growing niche of the public cloud space, and IT service providers should start paying more attention to it as the nature of the application workloads being deployed in the cloud continues to evolve. Today, a...

/ September 20, 2016
What MSPs can learn from the Delta outage

What MSPs can learn from the Delta outage

I should have picked up on the warning signs when I walked into the Indianapolis airport at 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning. A news crew was filming in front of Delta’s ticket counter, and a Delta representative was guiding everyone...

/ August 10, 2016
data center
Delta’s data center trouble illustrates the problem with a single point of failure

Delta’s data center trouble illustrates the problem with a single point of failure

No doubt you’ve probably heard about Delta’s no good, horrible, very bad week. It began early Monday morning when a power failure at its Atlanta data center led to an outage of epic proportion, causing a domino effect in which all its...

/ August 9, 2016
windows 10
Assessing the impact of Windows 10 on MSPs

Assessing the impact of Windows 10 on MSPs

As Microsoft gears up for the second anniversary of Windows 10 next week, managed service providers should plan on seeing a lot more of the latest version of Windows on corporate desktops. Overall, Microsoft claims to have delivered more than 380 million...

/ July 28, 2016
CompTIA study: MSPs gearing up to add more services

CompTIA study: MSPs gearing up to add more services

Managed service providers are ready to expand. A full 59 percent of the 400 U.S.-based MSPs surveyed by CompTIA plan to increase the number of managed services they provide. Managed print services (32 percent), help desks (31 percent), virtual desktops, and database...

/ July 21, 2016