IT Trends & Technology

Maintaining a competitive edge is important in today’s technology environment. Organizations can lose out to competitors if they fail to keep up with advances in technology. According to a recent report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), by 2020, 50 percent of the world’s top businesses, known as the Global 2000, will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally-enhanced products, services and experiences. IDC predicts that worldwide investment in digital transformation initiatives will reach $2.2 trillion in 2019, almost 60 percent more than in 2016.

Since there is more pressure on companies to decrease expenses—while simultaneously trying to bolster productivity and revenue—it has never been more important for them to find smart and affordable IT solutions to facilitate the digital transformation. Digital transformation means leveraging the opportunities that come with new technology and optimizing them to grow a business and make it more efficient.

The business of unstructured data: effectively store and managed large amounts of data.

In a typical organization, 80% of data is in an unstructured form; meaning it either does not have a predefined data model or it is not organized in a predefined manner (i.e. database or application).

With data sprawl increasing and big data  there are optimal solutions for managing and storing this data in an effective manner.

Many companies, regardless of size, are migrating to Office 365 for a variety of reasons - to support a mobile workforce, address security concerns, provide collaboration solutions and lower support costs with an always up to date application model.  Here are a few things to keep in mind as you begin your migration to the Microsoft Office 365 application.

What was once considered a novelty, has now become an important aspect of manufacturing, dentistry, and even First National Technology Solutions (FNTS). It’s 3D printing.

Tim Stephenson is working on big things at First National Technology Solutions. For one, he’s trying to incorporate elastic cloud storage into the FNTS data center. 

As a nearly empty nest father of six I find myself relating cloud economics to home economics.  When my family lived at home we shopped at wholesale stores.  The idea was that I could get massive quantities of something for a lower per unit cost, thus saving money on the overall budget, even if a little bit would sometimes go to waste or spoil before it could be consumed by the ravaging teenagers.  This compares nicely with the pre-defined public cloud models.  With these models you pick from pre-packaged configurations of servers that might not fit exactly what you need but it will work, usually leaving you with some amount of un-used CPU, RAM or Disk that goes to waste.

Ever heard of a 3-D printer? It is a lot like Christmas Magic. I purchased an entry level model about 6 months ago and have been learning how to use it to its full potential ever since.

As we approach the end of October and the Halloween holiday I found myself reflecting on what scared me as child; ghosts, boogie men, a pop quiz in school. As we grow and mature those things no longer seem important and lose their ability to grip your soul in the middle of the night like they used to when you were young. In part because you develop some perspective and in part because you learn of even scarier things that are actually real and can harm you in other ways.

David Bowie uttered this memorable phrase back in 1971. At the time he considered it a throwaway song, little did he know it would become one of his most famous lyrics. In the world of IT, change has many meanings just as it did in Bowie’s song of self-discovery.

IO, IO, it’s off to work we go.