Without question, CIOs of organizations of all sizes have their hands full when it comes to dealing with Shadow IT. The way to keep your sanity (and your organization) secure is with regular cloud maturity assessments. How did we get there? Well, back in the days before anyone had heard much about cloud services, the role of the CIO and …
MSPs and Hybrid Storage Solutions: Make Hybrid Storage a Businesses Best Friend
Managed service providers (MSP) have been around for quite awhile now, and, for the past 15 years or so, have had a front row seat for what was perhaps the most massive shift in digital information storage capabilities in human history. If you’re ‘of a certain age,’ you’ll remember the floppy disk. This 3-inch compact storage unit, which gained widespread …
How to Measure the Fundamentals of Cloud Maturity
Cloud technology is no longer the future for business—it’s the here and now, and, as you no doubt know, it’s already weaving its way deep into business culture, playing a vital role for many organizations, both large and small. Whether by way of vendor managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or, as we are increasingly seeing with the addition of hardware, processing, data …
Keeping Data Safe in the Cloud is Every IT Team’s Goal
Here’s something that I hear all the time and I’m sure you do as well: “The future of business is cloud technology.” A decade ago, the pundits and prognosticators who uttered these words may have had been considered visionaries, but today, cloud is not only the future, it’s very much the present. As those of us in the tech space …
The Future of Cloud: Everything as a Service
Contrary to hype around cloud being the future of the enterprise, cloud computing is here and happening right now. The question businesses must focus on is not when but how to most effectively integrate cloud into their business operations. At the Washington, DC-based Collaborate conference held in early January of this year, Google X co-founder Tom Chi’s keynote address focused …
What’s driving the rise of cloud marketplaces?
Every major tech company, distributor, and large SaaS provider is getting into the cloud marketplace game. And it’s only getting bigger. Analysts are positive that cloud computing will continue to grow in all areas, including software, hardware, IT outsourcing, and supporting the latest innovations.Forrester predicts the public cloud marketplace will reach $191 billion by 2020. This makes sense as cloud …
Always On World Means Tech Companies Need to Organize the Cloud
What does an “always-on” world need? To make our hyper-connected world go round, it needs more mobility, data, access, tools, and collaboration. We live in an era of tools and apps. Accounting, email marketing, customer service, project management—literally every area of your business has access to apps to streamline business operation. As business becomes more demanding and complex, organizations fight …
Is mobile driving cloud or is cloud driving mobile?
At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), a mega event once dedicated solely to mobile and mobile tech, I found myself amazed at the many technological elements beyond mobile displayed there. Making an impact were the Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality, big data, and, of course, the cloud’s fingerprints were everywhere. If you ask me, opening up the MWC to …
Should your Company Leverage the Cloud?
Cloud-based services are becoming ubiquitous. Many people are turning to the cloud for some reason or another—whether it is to store their pictures, or their music collection, or archive documents. There has been a huge upswing in the number of people who are increasingly dependent on cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Drive for storing files. But when it …
Cloud and the Revolutionization of Business
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about, writing about technology and how it’s changing the world of business. I’m guessing that you do, too, whether you’re in marketing, sales or IT – am I right? I spent the early part of this week in Las Vegas attending IBM’s PartnerWorld Leadership Conference and the focus of the event was …