Talking about the cloud as a solution no longer draws skepticism in the business world. With over 77 percent of businesses having at least one application or a portion of their infrastructure in the cloud, it is safe to say businesses are now comfortable with cloud technologies. Yet with the increased comfort level comes deeper discussion about what businesses can move to the cloud.
IT budgets continue to increase each year as business needs evolve, requiring more digital needs and larger infrastructure—according to Spiceworks, 88 percent of organizations expect their IT budgets to stay the same or grow in 2020. Businesses are looking to replace older operating systems by providing hardware such as laptops and to improve security setups to protect sensitive business and personal data.
Over the years, businesses’ mission-critical technology has expanded at a rapid pace. A network no longer consists of only servers, client computers, and basic networking equipment. Cloud computing has been introduced to host “X as a Service” solutions and applications that rely on big data, allow mobile and remote endpoints, network shares, and multiple communication applications, just to name a few. Even the solutions meant to secure the network and endpoints have grown complex to the point where a misconfigured security solution could leave an organization vulnerable.
This is why many organizations turn to outside partners to conduct a network security assessment. Having one performed by a trusted partner lets you know not only where your organization's security posture currently stands, but also what you can do to better protect yourself from the current threat landscape.
As with most emerging technologies, BYOD (bring your own device) is now something that is accepted among most businesses. BYOD policies benefit both the workers who bring their own personal devices into the workplace and the businesses that allow for it.
Public cloud infrastructures continue to rise in popularity. According to Gartner, Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for nearly half of the global infrastructure-as-a-service market. For many organizations, moving to the public cloud can seem intimidating, but it offers benefits of high reliability and scalability.
AWS is popular because of the number of data centers it has around the globe, providing business leaders with a sense of security and availability of company data and systems. As companies expect to expand and grow their business, moving infrastructure to AWS can result in time and cost savings.
However, businesses looking to move to the cloud need to evaluate how to minimize the costs of running applications and workloads in the cloud. Although there are numerous ways to accomplish this goal, here are five helpful tips for AWS cost optimization for your business, whether you’re in Boston, Worcester, Manchester, or elsewhere.
In light of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), companies are looking for a means to offer employees the ability to work at home to maintain "social distancing." With employees hunkering down to remain healthy, Microsoft is helping companies by offering Office 365 E1 licenses for six months. This version of "free Teams licensing" provides unlimited chat, built-in group and one-on-one audio or video calling, 10 GB of team file storage, and 2 GB of personal file storage per user. You also get real-time collaboration with the Office web apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
Organizations that move to Office 365 still need to use Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) relay to route mail from a line-of-business app or scans from a multifunction device to either internal or external recipients.
Ransomware has quickly become one of the most troublesome issues that businesses deal with nowadays. In the US alone, ransomware attacks cost organizations more than $7.5 billion in 2019, and there are no signs of them slowing down in 2020. Multiple city governments, hospitals, and businesses have all been victims of ransomware attacks.
The threat landscape has grown so large that attackers can now buy and sell ransomware as a service. Couple this with the fact that new strains and variants of this type of malware are added on a frequent basis, and it becomes evident that ransomware is a threat you have to take seriously. And you must do so immediately.
IDC research revealed statistics showing that 42.4 percent of global IT infrastructure spending is expected to be spent on traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure environments by 2023, down from 51.9 percent in 2018. Of course, no one is surprised at the growth of cloud infrastructure—including those businesses that have yet to embark on their cloud journey, which is clearly a shrinking subset.
If you are unfamiliar with the term operational intelligence, you may think it is another aspect of the data-driven decision-making bandwagon. At a high-level view, you would be correct; operational intelligence relies on data to help you make better decisions. However, unlike business intelligence, which measures data with a lag of hours and sometimes days, operational intelligence is measured in real time so you have an accurate look at what is going on at any particular moment in time.