While technology holds great promise of productivity increases and growth for small businesses, they often feel that budget constraints put the most advantageous of those technologies out of their reach. The fact of the matter is that Office 365 can eliminate those roadblocks to productivity and affordability. Still, as a small business, you may ask: Why migrate to Office 365?
When familiar things change in their most-used applications, people tend to become upset. So when a software suite like Microsoft Office undergoes a new release, you can be sure that people are wary of changes that may cause confusion among their users. People forget that the newly added features are there to make the software more productive and easier to use. Looking at some of the new Office 365 features, you can see how these two goals were accomplished.
According to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), 91 percent of administrators say effective use of ed tech is critical to their mission of high student achievement. Like the business environment, the modern school environment is being driven by technology such as mobile devices in 1:1 or “bring your own device” (BYOD) programs, streaming video, student wearables, and new educational technologies such as augmented and virtual reality.
Virtual networks and infrastructure differ in many ways from their physical counterparts. Increased flexibility, ease of provisioning and lower cost are some of the attributes that make virtualization a practical choice for many types of businesses. A virtual infrastructure requires a shift in thinking, though, especially when it comes to network security.
Companies often conduct a security vulnerability assessment when they come to the realization that they are not where they need to be when it comes to securing their computer network and/or technology resources. Typically, the vulnerability assessment results in a prioritized list of found vulnerabilities and the methods that the business needs to use in order to remediate them. But just how do you go about coming up with that list?
OpenStack boosts business agility, availability, and efficiency by providing a platform with on-demand, resource pooling, self-service, highly elastic, and measured services capabilities. If this sounds like cloud computing, that’s because it is. OpenStack is basically your key to building your own cloud infrastructure.
Ask any business in any industry: If your network infrastructure goes down, business comes to a halt. It is the lifeblood of all communications, data transmission, storage, and even application services that your business relies on daily. That is why Phil Murphy of Forrester Research claims that IT spends 80 percent of its budget to keep the lights on. That high cost comes from companies throwing money at the most expensive hardware, the newest box with lots of blinking lights, and a high-priced staff that needs to be specially trained in the various components that keep the network infrastructure chugging along.
In the world of virtualization, there are many inherent security features that come with a virtual environment natively, but with the rise of Software Defined Networking (SDN), we have a new layer of security which can be easily added to any virtual environment. SDN strips away the traditional boundaries of IT security and brings them directly to the guest virtual machine. Through a concept referred to as Micro Segmentation, a central next generation firewall policy can be defined at the interface level of the virtual machine, effectively plugging each server in your environment directly into a firewall, providing protection, both inbound and outbound for all traffic to and from that host.
If you were to ask someone in IT why server virtualization should be a part of his or her overall strategy, odds are that cost savings would be the number-one reason given. When you look at case studies that show organizations averaging a 67 percent reduction in total cost of ownership after virtualization, then it’s easy to see why cost is the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about server virtualization. Yet there is more to server virtualization than just cost savings alone; in fact, there are some other things you may need to know about this technology in order to help garner more support for it in your organization.
Businesses looking to protect themselves from the devastating effects of prolonged system downtime and irreparable data loss via managed backup services have countless provider options from which to choose. When assessing potential providers, it can be difficult to discern the differences from one to the next when your needs are unique to your business. There are, of course, some fundamental qualities to look for in a managed backup services provider that any candidate must have in order to be in the running. Here are five of the most important of those qualities:
