IT Trends & Technology

Despite the growing momentum towards digital transformation, businesses across all sectors are limited to incremental change because of budget constraints. The result is legacy technologies and IT infrastructure that must be maintained for a wide variety of reasons. The challenge with this incremental approach is fulfilling the IT staffing needs for maintaining these legacy systems.

Container technology adoption has been picking up steam in the last several years across all sectors and types of organizations. According to a Forrester report, 82 percent of container users expect to have more than 100 containers deployed within the next two years.

In the recent IDC paper, “The Business Value of the Connected Mainframe for Digital Transformation,” there is a clear path for its part in digital transformation moving forward. How organizations find that way forward is largely dependent on keeping pace with innovation, including making decisions regarding updates and support.

According to the Cisco 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report, ransomware is growing at a yearly rate of 350 percent. That type of growth means that businesses face a scenario where it’s just a matter of time before they are dealing with ransomware. One way to protect an organization is to develop a sound data backup and recovery strategy.

Company leaders worldwide are taking measures to ensure they will be in compliance with a new and far-reaching law aimed at protecting European citizens from privacy and data breaches. General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), a data privacy law adopted by the European Union taking effect May 25, 2018, is one of the largest changes in data protection and privacy regulations. GDPR builds upon existing principals set forth in the Data Protection Act and puts tighter obligations and restrictions on data controllers and data processors.

Although it hasn’t yet reached the stage of ubiquity, container technology is well on its way to becoming a fundamental part of the IT infrastructure toolbox. While its many uses revolve around applications and app development, they are delivering ROI in multiple forms. A Forrester study found that 66 percent of organizations who adopted containers experienced accelerated developer efficiency with even more seeing an increase in application deployment speed.

First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) has attained a gold Cloud Platform competency, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft Corp. customers’ evolving needs in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world and distinguishing itself within Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

There are plenty of reputable sources that point to near parity in container adoption versus virtualization, such as SDxCentral’s 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration Report. The bigger story is the many potential users that are still on the fence about containerization. The hesitation of this significant base of holdouts often stems from the fact that they don’t know as much about containerization as they do about virtualization.

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.

You don’t have to search far to find numerous articles touting mainframes or x86-based server farms as the superior choice for organizations. But when the question of the right choice for the future becomes the focus, things may change in the mainframe versus server farm debate.

The use of public and private clouds is now a cornerstone of an enterprise’s ability to innovate and operate with agility in an evolving business landscape. The challenge has been maximizing that ability while minimizing costs, vendor lock-in, and security issues that are inherent to the public cloud at scale.

We have all heard of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applies to physical objects that we use, such as computers, cars, mobile phones and other everyday devices. A white paper from Cisco predicts that by 2020, the number of internet-connected devices will reach a staggering 50 billion globally. A newer trend being coined by Cisco is the “Internet of Everything” or IoE.

The IoE extends the definition of IoT and includes people, processes, data and things, which is pretty much everything. IoE includes a level of hyper-connectedness for anything and everything that connects to the internet, such as applications, data and Application Program Interfaces (API). First National Technology Solutions  (FNTS) already is helping businesses manage and integrate all connections that IoE currently includes.

Are you struggling to keep up with everything your IT department is being asked to do? In today’s business climate, both threats and opportunities offer significant challenges to even the most seasoned staff. Escalating salaries and frequent job movement can make it difficult to find and retain the right people without breaking the bank.

If your business is running legacy IT systems—and chances are that it is—you know they can introduce a number of challenges for you and your staff. But more than just an annoyance, legacy systems eat into your bottom line, costing you money, alienating customers, and introducing security risks. Legacy IT is a form of technical debt not easily satisfied.  Here are just a few of the issues you may be facing.

Having discovered the advantages of the cloud, many enterprises are now taking a multicloud approach, implementing a mix of public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures in their efforts to make computing more efficient and available.