Cloud Services for K-12 School Districts
Natural disasters such as hurricane’s, earthquakes, and fire can put a school district’s data out of reach. These are obvious reasons to have a solid disaster recovery strategy in place. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy that hit the East Coast (NJ, NYC, and Long Island), there were several school ... Read More
Critical Cloud Skills for 2019 and Beyond
The IT job market has always shifted as technologies advanced, but cloud computing has pushed changes in the market to speeds never seen before. The job market for cloud architects changes as rapidly as the technology itself. At AWS Re:Invent 2018 last week, AWS announced 30+ new significant services alone ... Read More
Become a Budget Hero, Use Third Party Maintenance for IT Assets
The first question you may be asking is, “Why should I be considering third party maintenance over OEM maintenance contracts?” The short answer: MONEY Most buyers who utilize third party maintenance services save up to 50 percent or more over three years, in most cases. In reality though, it isn’t ... Read More
Help, I Have Moved to Containers and Now I’m Blind
Containers and microservices are becoming a very popular option for deploying applications. There are many benefits of containers, faster deployments, reproducibility of environments, cost optimizations, isolation, and flexibility in general. There is one glaring problem that is seen right after initial deployment, monitoring and troubleshooting is exponentially more complex when ... Read More
Site Reliability Engineering – From DevOps to NoOps
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a practice that combines software development skills and IT operations into a single job function. Automation and continuous integration and delivery are used to reach the goal of improving highly dynamic systems. The concept originated with Google in the early 2000s and was documented in ... Read More
Azure Goes Boom to Remind Us Infrastructure and Multi-cloud Still Matter
Microsoft’s had significant difficulties recovering from its most severe Azure outage in years. On September 4, 2018 there was a weather related power spike at Microsoft’s Azure South Central U.S. region in San Antonio. That surge hit crippled their HVAC system. The subsequent rising temperatures triggered automatic hardware shutdowns. More ... Read More
Shadow IT and the Cloud
Several years back, organizations didn’t even think about users signing up for their own applications and tools. The fact that each application required access to resources that were beyond their control kept this problem bottled up. Storage, compute, and network configurations were all IT’s domain and so IT needed to ... Read More
SD-WAN and Cloud, Wonder Twin Powers Activate
SD-WAN has far exceeded 2017 expectations. It is one of the hottest trends in networking, and forecasts are increasing every quarter with IDC predicting the size of the SD-WAN market to be $8.05B by 2021. Forrester’s 10 Cloud Computing predictions predicts that in 2018 the total global public cloud market ... Read More
Cloud Computing Basics
At its simplest level, cloud computing means using someone else’s computer. This gives you rapid access to computing power, storage, and network services that can help you scale your operation up or down, depending on your requirements. Cloud is a technology buzzword with many meanings. Dropbox is cloud. Microsoft Office ... Read More
