IT Trends & Technology

FNTS, a leading cloud and IT managed services provider in Omaha, Nebraska, is helping power the fastest supercomputer in the world through a computing project committed to tackling COVID-19.

In February 2019, FNTS began providing in-kind technology support to Folding@home, a research project that uses donated computing power to analyze and fight diseases that result from protein misfolding and mutations inside our body. Humans rely on proteins to live, but when they misfold or misbehave, there can be serious health consequences like cancer and heart disease.

Designed from the outside in, 20th-century hierarchical networks have traditionally relied on classifying users as “trusted” and “untrusted.” Unfortunately, this methodology has proven to be insecure. With increased attack sophistication and insider threats, operating on the assumption that everything inside an organization’s network can be trusted is no longer viable. This legacy model assumes that a user’s identity has not been compromised and that all users act responsibly. If a user is “trusted,” that user has access to applications and data by default. History has shown us that trust is a vulnerability that can be exploited.

When disaster strikes, seconds matter when it comes to preventing company downtime. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $300,000 per hour. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is an innovative, next-generation and cost-saving method of consistently automating and streamlining recovery of critical data and applications, covering each aspect of planning, testing and management.

Over the past few months, IT professionals have made working from home possible with remote capabilities; however, the industry has not been spared from the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the IT profession has been hit hard – more than 110,000 layoffs were reported in April. With IT playing such a critical role in business, there is an increased need for managed services as a cost-effective means of keeping operations up and running during these uncertain financial times.

According to a recent report by Forrester Research, the strength of organizational enterprise technology will play a critical role in providing a smooth transition back to work as organizations that employ millions of Americans consider reopening their doors. Many businesses were thrust into a remote work environment without warning, and FNTS tech leaders said the next challenge will be migrating employees into a new hybrid work environment in which some on-site employees return while others remain in newly remote roles.

In 2020, remote work capabilities and infrastructure have become a major priority for organizations of all sizes. Microsoft Teams, a communication and collaboration platform that is part of Microsoft Office 365, has seen increased growth with more than 20 million daily users.

In today’s 24/7 business environment, having a disaster recovery plan is essential to guarantee critical data, software and applications are replicated and available in the cloud in the event of a planned or unplanned IT outage. Costly outages happen more often than one may think; one in three companies has declared a disaster in the past five years, according to research from Forrester.

In today’s threat landscape, experts say it’s no longer a matter of if a cyberattack will affect an organization, but when. Something as simple as a link click in a phishing email can compromise an entire network.

FNTS’ steady growth stems from guiding our valued clients through the fast-paced, ever-changing technology and services landscape. Founded as a managed service company, FNTS has evolved its service delivery, tools, processes, governance and capabilities to meet the changing needs of the organizations we serve. While FNTS remains a managed service company at its core, the expansion of our service offerings with different technologies has built a solid foundation for the future. The team at FNTS is eager to build upon this foundation in 2020 through enhanced service delivery with increased consultative services. Additionally, FNTS has refined its focus on service offerings and strategic partners to amplify efforts and excel with outstanding delivery.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system and Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 are among the products that will reach the end of support on January 14, 2020. Microsoft Office 2010 will meet the same fate later in 2020, along with several other products. These end of support deadlines highlight the need for organizations to migrate to Windows 10, Office 365 and Windows Server 2019 to avoid technical and security disruptions.

“A data center migration is just like any other IT implementation project.” 

Technology is evolving quickly, and organizations' ability to adapt and integrate new technology with their legacy systems is increasingly becoming a problem for IT leaders. According to the 2018 Opsview State of IT Infrastructure Survey, less than 50 percent of respondents believe they are seeing progress toward transforming their legacy infrastructure and are able to embrace digital transformation.

According to Juniper Research, 146 billion records are expected to be exposed in data breaches between 2018 and 2023. IBM and the Ponemon Institute estimate the global average cost of a data breach is $3.6 million. In addition to high risk and the costly damages faced by all organizations, financial institutions face stringent regulatory and compliance standards.

Many leaders across the finance industry find themselves needing increased information security but having to fulfill that need within budget constraints. Additionally, cloud computing and digital transformation add layers to the need for a more sophisticated and integrated information security strategy.

When a large healthcare provider saw the writing on the wall that their existing IT infrastructure, data center, and systems were not enough to keep pace with their projected growth and compliance requirements, they knew something had to change. With the help of FNTS, they successfully moved their legacy data center to the cloud and laid the technical foundation for responsive operations for decades to come. 

At the end of the day, every CIO and IT professional is there to enable the business to run at its highest potential. And the last thing a CIO wants to be thinking about is if their infrastructure can handle the business’s demand for responsive and innovative technology. This is why partnering with a service provider for infrastructure as a service is a popular solution to these challenges in many different ways.