IT Trends & Technology

From just dipping their technological toe in the water to fully hosted data centers in the cloud, organizations have begun to embrace a wide range of managed services. If your organization has followed this path, then it is likely that you have heard the phrase “software defined data centers” (SDDC) and wondered what it meant and if it was right for your operations.

As managed services and hosting solutions have evolved, many customers have found that separating out their SQL databases from their other web and applications services can help them realize significant benefits. Whether the SQL databases are used for application development or in production environments, feeding data-hungry websites or business-critical applications with robust, highly available, and scalable hosted SQL databases can prove to be a differentiator for your business.

The digital transformation is underway in the utilities industry, with many public and private service providers modernizing grids and replacing aging infrastructure and assets with more efficient technology.

FNTS has a long history of building strong relationships and partnerships with our clients. Our people pride themselves on delivering excellent customer service, and as we move into 2019, this continued focus on our customer will stay a primary focus. As part of the customer experience and our service delivery focus, we intend to:

As businesses of all sizes become increasingly dependent on information technology, it’s no secret that it’s becoming harder and harder to attract and retain talented IT professionals to keep all their systems and hardware up and running. Making matters worse, business is becoming more data-driven, software is becoming more ubiquitous, and the Internet of Things is bringing technology into more everyday items, all of which require IT professionals to work to stay ahead of the trends while also tending to the basic blocking and tackling of modern IT services.

From smart grids to smart meters, technology is transforming the way the utility industry does business. IT is being used to enhance operational processes and customer experience in a digital age where information security is trying to keep up with big data. To get an idea of the scope of data being collected, one only needs to look as far as the smart meters utilized by households. A single household smart meter can generate 400 megabytes per year. If you multiply that by 135 million smart meters in the United States, it equates to 54 petabytes, or a little more than half of the data uploaded to YouTube in a year. This data must be stored somewhere that is secure, so that if and when disaster strikes, it is protected.

A few years ago, the phrase ”from the back room to the boardroom” was a new concept when it came to the IT department’s influence on business operations. Now, IT leaders are seen as key business enablers, driving initiatives that have changed the way customers interact with their suppliers and the way employees get their work done. This is all while they are also “keeping on the lights”—ensuring network connectivity, keeping hardware functional, and making sure services are secure and available.

Whether they are engaged to refocus spending on operations, regain control of infrastructure and hardware costs, fill critical staffing gaps, or even reinvent themselves, IT departments use managed services to provide technical resources on their behalf. In fact, 65 percent of CIOs who are focused on growth plan to partner with a managed services provider instead of doing everything in-house.

Cybercrime is a continuous threat for organizations of all sizes and across all industries. If the news surrounding the data breaches at Marriott and Equifax are any indication, even global firms with large security budgets can still be vulnerable in the face of a seemingly endless barrage of sophisticated attacks. In fact, IndustryWeek recently reported a 350 percent increase in ransomware attacks against its members versus the year prior, as well as a 250 percent rise in email attacks.

According to a Forrester study, only 2 percent of companies could restart operations within an hour of a disaster incident. Additionally, based on Gartner calculations, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour. In short, pairing a major IT disruption with a poorly designed or reactive disaster recovery plan can result in a perfect storm that could cripple your business and have ripple effects for years to come.

FNTS, a leading global IT service and cloud provider, announced it has formed a technology partnership with Folding@home, a computing project committed to identifying new ways to treat diseases.

Moving your enterprise data to the cloud can bring with it a number of benefits to your operational costs and the management of your information technology footprint. In fact, 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be facilitated via the cloud in 2020, according to a LogicMonitor study. However, with this growth in cloud services can come substantial risk.

Fortunately, by following some key best practices, such as those laid out in this article, you can help your organization take the necessary steps to strengthen your data security and mitigate the potential vulnerabilities of operating in the cloud.

In late November 2018, Marriott International Inc. reported that it had fallen victim to a colossal theft of customer data. Up to 500 million customers’ personal information was exposed, including passport and credit card information. The breach, which began in 2014 and continued until this September, is only the latest in a long string of high-profile cyberattacks making headlines this year.

Despite the eye-popping figures and high stakes, according to a McKinsey survey of corporate directors, the majority of respondents reported that their boards had, at most, one technology-related discussion a year. Similarly, according to EY’s 19th Global Information Security Survey, only one in five executives fully considers information security in planning their larger corporate strategy.

Like many other new technologies, the concept of security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions was born out of a problem that dogged IT professionals. However, in this case, it was multiple problems that couldn’t be solved with existing solutions.

Gartner, who is credited with coining the term, defines SOAR as “technologies that enable organizations to collect security threats data and alerts from different sources,” where technology and professionals can combine to analyze incidents, triage issues, and drive responses in a standard way.

Creating a business case for any IT investment is never an easy task, but it can be a critical piece of winning the support of your leadership team to take on a key initiative. Business cases help to present the expected benefits that can positively affect the bottom line and improve overall operations, while also helping to put the potential costs and unknown factors associated with the new technology into context. The business case to migrate to a container-based architecture is no different, but it is also not a new technology. So why would now be a good time for your organization to consider it?