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 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.

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.

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. 

As digital transformation strategies drive more customer initiatives, banks and credit unions are changing their views of cloud usage.  Financial institutions are becoming more pragmatic in their approach to gaining operational efficiencies, improving the customer experience, and move beyond their traditional core banking platforms.  Off to a slow, fragmented start, expect to see cloud adoption accelerate.  Gartner expects the cloud computing services market to grow 17.3 percent in 2019 alone, topping $200 billion worldwide.

Implementing a disaster recovery plan and preparing for unexpected disruptions is becoming imperative for utilities in the event of natural disasters, cyber attacks, human errors and other issues or security threats that could result in a critical outage of power, water, gas and other resources. According to a recent Information Security survey by PwC, only about half of utilities have an IT disaster response plan because of concerns about price, time or changes to operations. The reality is, a true event can end up being far more disruptive. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime caused by an IT failure is $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour, on average. This doesn’t even account for lost customers, delayed services or damage to a company’s brand. In today’s digital, fully-connected community, utility companies can’t risk not having an alternate solution to get back online in the event of an outage.

Keeping pace with digital change can be a huge undertaking for utility companies, both big and small, especially in today’s rapidly evolving digital age. Continuous technology advancements mean even the newest technology will someday be obsolete, and investing in upgrading equipment can be costly, unexpected and hard to prioritize.

If you feel like the IT security and threat environment has evolved at a remarkable pace in the last 5 years, you’re right. Between the introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), regular updates to compliance standards such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA, threats of ransomware and data leaks, and the continued growth of cloud services, it can be hard for any organization to keep up and feel secure.

A few years ago, the idea of moving all of your IT infrastructure to the cloud was dismissed as just a trend that would soon fade away. The reality, however, is that cloud computing—when planned effectively, implemented properly, and managed with the right vendor—can offer huge financial and operational advantages over traditional data centers.

When you see big brands such as Marriott, Target, and Sony in the news announcing they have fallen victim to cyberattacks or ransomware, it can be easy to think that it could never happen to your organization. Sadly, it is not until an unexpected natural disaster, cyberattack, or even human error occurs and severs access to critical corporate data that a company ends up realizing the full extent of the fallout—to their bottom line and their brand.

Completing a data center migration is no easy task—but it can be a necessary one, whether because of a need for more storage, an effort to comply with new regulatory requirements, or a desire to reduce costs. Unfortunately, many organizations make the already-complicated technical task even harder by failing to comprehensively plan the migration, understand its impact on the business, or take advantage of the experience of migration experts.

To help set your organization up for success, we have put together these 8 best practices that can turn this chore into a turning point.