Managed IT Services Blog

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. 

Businesses rely on data for just about everything they do. No matter the industry, access to real-time data is necessary to make decisions, identify patterns of behavior, determine root cause analysis, and so much more. So as a business leader, you need to ask yourself where will all of this data will live—in the cloud or in an on-premises data center? Both options have their advantages, and they both have their drawbacks. The question can only be answered by looking at the pros and cons of each to determine which is best for your specific scenario.

Over the last two years, 60 percent of companies that suffered a breach determined that the culprits were systems that were not updated properly, according to research from Dark Reading. The practice of patching software, servers, computers, and other endpoints has long been one of the most tedious, albeit most important, things an IT team needs to do. The report from Dark Reading just emphasizes that point. In fact, in an age when most updating and patch management is able to be automated, there is little excuse for so many breaches to be attributed to this cause.

According to Statista, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are expected to increase their spending on technology to $684 billion by 2021. This is a significant uptick from the $602 billion spent in 2018. However, as SMBs continue to spend on new technologies, they often run into the issue of not having someone on staff who is able to effectively manage that new technology. Having to rely on outside resources is a growing trend, and IT services in Boston are in high demand as a result. Finding the right partner to help with managed IT services takes a bit of work, though. Knowing some of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to managed IT services can help you find the right team to come in and assist.

When it comes to data breaches, the numbers don’t lie. The most recent Cost of a Data Breach Report from Ponemon shows that the average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million, and the average size comes in at over 25,000 records lost.

SMBs are no longer safe from the crosshairs of cybercriminals, either. According to Fundera, 43 percent of cyberattacks target small businesses, and three out of four SMBs don’t feel they have the personnel to properly address IT security.