The first annual Intelligent Technology Index finds that 61 percent of technology leaders say the most pressing area in need of improvement is network infrastructure. That’s no surprise, as the network is the foundation of the business that is constantly facing evolving needs.
Managing wireless networks effectively can be problematic for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in particular with the growing popularity of mobile devices in the workplace and the constant connection needs of Wi-Fi-enabled devices. Cloud-managed wireless isn’t new, but its rapid growth in the last year or two has been directly fueled by companies looking to upgrade their wireless networks and moving to 802.11ac. Here are just five of the many reasons your business should be using cloud-managed wireless services:
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.
