IT Trends & Technology

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.

Traveling for the holidays? The Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holiday periods are the busiest long-distance travel periods of the year, and we often rely on technology to stay connected and entertained while we’re away. With cybercrime hitting an all-time high, there are security measures you’ll want to consider taking before hitting the road or the friendly skies to ensure your identity isn’t compromised through your smartphone, tablet, laptop and charging devices.

You can utilize the following holiday travel safety reminders to help protect your tech while you’re on the go:

The days of storing personal, health and business records on paper, tucked away in a locked filing cabinet are gone. More organizations are making the digital transformation as a more efficient way to access and share information online, in servers and in the cloud.

When selecting a hybrid cloud solution, you may feel overwhelmed, even though your legacy network infrastructure is costing you too much per month and limiting business growth. You’re not sure about putting all of your sensitive data on the cloud just yet, or how to manage it.

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.

It’s easy to get lulled into thinking that just because IT systems are compliant with regulations, that means they are secure. After all, compliance is intended to safeguard data and ensure privacy. Security seems like the natural outcome and many organizations fall into a false sense of comfort, believing that just because they have checked all the boxes on compliance, their systems must therefore be secure.

Did you know that HIPAA settlement payments reached record levels in 2016, totaling nearly $23 million? Of that group, seven healthcare organizations were on the hook for more than $1.5 million each.

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.

Designing a hybrid cloud model for your unique organizational needs is crucial for your company’s overall success.

In fact, it’s one of the most important to-dos in your day-to-day business. A recent study by IDG Research found that 88 percent of respondents believe hybrid cloud capabilities are critical to enabling the digital transformation of businesses, while 73 percent agree these models forge a path for digital business in their own organization.

First National Technology Solutions (FNTS), a leading provider in remote managed IT services, announced it will begin offering new cloud security technologies to companies, which will allow them to extend security policies outside of their own infrastructure.

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solutions enable transaction level security for cloud managed services, including Software as a Service (SaaS) and (Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), by combining data science, machine learning, real-time traffic processing, insightful visualization and intuitive controls.

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.

A recent IDC white paper survey of medium to large enterprises and their data center servers found that 55 percent of capacity is unused, resulting in Capex waste because of inefficient utilization. Equally important is the Opex waste from the time and personnel resources needed to provision workloads in a scenario in which increased server consolidation process time results in higher costs.

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: