IT Trends & Technology

First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) has welcomed two strategic leaders to its executive team. Ken Marr has joined FNTS as Chief Technology Officer and Arvind Thapar has been named Vice President of Strategy. 

On Friday, June 15, First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) is hosting a free Women in Tech event for women in the technology field and young women, ages 14 to 21, who are pursuing a tech career. 

Every second counts in the business sector. Real-time data solutions are necessary in assisting company leaders in business decisions to stay competitive, relevant and accessible. SAP and SAP HANA are completely re-imagined cloud platform solutions that provide live data for real-time business.

Public and private clouds each have their advantages—and limitations—tied to issues of cost, scalability, and manageability. IT leaders are increasingly seeking a “best of both worlds” solution by adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures.

First National Technology Solutions (FNTS), an IT managed services provider, announced it will begin offering Database as a Service (DBaaS) cloud computing and managed services due to rising demand from businesses that want to deploy new databases quickly, securely and at a fraction of the cost of infrastructure-intensive projects.

A database can be one of the most important assets a business has to run its applications and operations. First National Technology Solutions can host database infrastructures in the cloud to streamline business operations, allowing companies to focus on other aspects of their business without having to monitor their own data.

A 2017 report by CompTIA indicates that the demand for tech talent in the United States will continue to outpace the supply of workers. And among hiring employers, almost half (47 percent) expect hiring to be moderately or significantly more challenging this year.

Did you know that by 2020 almost a quarter (24 percent) of the “total addressable IT market will be cloud”? That’s Gartner, Inc.’s prediction in the 2017 Planning Guide for Cloud Computing.

With the continued maturity of the public cloud, and the aggressive adoption of cloud services across all industry verticals, companies are feeling the pressure “to build and invest in cloud-first strategies and architectures.” But the hybrid cloud computing puzzle can turn into a nightmare without key management strategies. Here are four that will help ensure success.

For some companies, the majority of the year is business as usual – they sell, build and distribute their products. Business may be constant, but predicable. However, during the holiday season starting in November and going through the end of the year, most retail companies have an intense selling period where they can make up to 30 percent of their annual sales. This influx may require an increase in bandwidth capacity to accommodate an uptick in online sales.

More than half of IT professionals surveyed (53%) indicated that optimizing current cloud use is the top initiative in 2017. That number rises to 64 percent among mature cloud users. That’s largely because of the amount of wasted cloud spend, estimated at 30 percent by users and likely to run as much as 45 percent.

Because of the limitations of operating in either a dedicated or a public cloud environment, organizations are moving to a hybrid cloud solution to improve security, reduce costs, and find the best-fit solution for business challenges. But as the survey indicates, knowing where to direct resources for the greatest benefit isn’t easy—even for the most seasoned IT pro. That’s why many businesses are turning to cloud managed services.

While there can be numerous benefits derived from data center consolidation, realizing them requires a defined set of outcomes and a clear strategy. Achieving those benefits can be hampered by challenges such as those associated with user base application access, the associated security concerns and the disruption to the enterprise that the consolidation process can bring overall. There are also a number of short-term and long-term costs (both hidden and obvious) that require a detailed plan of execution and long-term strategy.

While 451 Research predicts that application containers will grow faster than any other solution type (40 percent annually in 2017 and 2018, many organizations are still determining how and if containers or virtual machines (VMs) are the best fit for their infrastructure plans. The ongoing debate as to the use of VMs or container technology is happening regardless of the growing adoption of containerization, primarily because every business’s needs are different. When it comes to choosing the right option for your business, it’s important to understand the benefits of each by viewing them through the lens of business priorities.

According to Gartner, Inc.’s most recent mobile app survey, the primary barriers to application development in the enterprise are cost, time, and gaps in technical skills. For many, rapid application development (RAD) methodology has lessened the impact of those detractors on app development.

RAD is a method of software development that is defined primarily by rapid prototyping and iterative delivery. The RAD model is, therefore, a sharp alternative to the typical waterfall development model, which often focuses largely on planning and sequential design practices. While RAD is not right for every situation, here are five competitive advantages of RAD:

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide server market declined 4.6 percent year over year to $11.8 billion in the first quarter of 2017. That decline is clearly driven by data center consolidation and server consolidation more specifically. Server consolidation is a way to make a more efficient IT environment by combining servers or replacing legacy servers with virtual systems, like cloud or SaaS products. Server consolidation is exactly what it sounds like: It’s essentially consolidating hardware for more effective usage.

Agility, elasticity and automation of container technology will provide new capabilities to businesses who need to support digital platforms. According to the Forrester paper, Containers: Real Adoption and Use Cases, 63 percent of enterprises using containers have over 100 deployed, and 82 percent expect to have more than 100 containers deployed within the next two years. Though container technology is clearly making a mark across enterprises, the journey is just unfolding. What is clear is that containerization will have a profound impact on the future of IT infrastructure.

Given the rapid pace of change across the technology landscape, few businesses are able to sustain an effective in-house IT effort over the long haul.

A number of factors work against the enterprise that tries to tackle IT on a purely in-house basis. Qualified experts are in high demand and short supply, and they come with hefty salary expectations. When tech trends shift and new needs emerge, in-house experts may not have the expertise needed to adapt.