IT Trends & Technology

A widely held but false belief or idea, otherwise known as a myth.  Even though myths are untrue they are sometimes the hardest believe to dispel and prove wrong.  As the evolution of cloud technology has grown into the IT phenomenon it is today many myths have come to fruition, and here are a few. 

First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) has released the FNTS Portal, mobile application, announced James O’Neil, chief technology officer.  The app is available now in the Google Play and App Store.  “Businesses today want to be able to access their technology from anywhere, from any device, with the same user experience as if they were sitting behind their desks,” O’Neil said.  “The FNTS Portal was designed to give our customers access to monitor and administer key elements of their IT environment from Android and iOS devices.”
    

As a Sales Support Associate in First National Technology Solutions (FNTS), I feel it is my responsibility to understand fully the ever—evolving technology solutions we offer.   I spend time reading white papers, surfing the Internet, listening to my co-workers, and personally find exceptional value in video.  
 
FNTS has offered Cloud Solutions for some time; however, recently we added a Cloud Solutions video to our website.  Watching the video has provided greater understanding to me.  For example, I have always understood FNTS offers a Cloud Solution for the Windows, Linux, Unix and iSeries Operating System, but never realized we also offer a Cloud Solution for Mainframe.    
 
This Cloud Solutions video clip provides an overview of cloud technology and services offered by FNTS.   I work closely with the “Personal Cloud Strategists” at FNTS, and I look forward to expanding my knowledge of the products we offer in our commitment to serve you.   

A key characteristic First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) prides itself on is the flexibility available to customers. This quality is particularly demonstrated in a project Vice President of Sales, Kim Whittaker is involved in: offering cloud self-provisioning.

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. 

When cloud first hit the market, some buzz words surrounding it were security, on-demand, lower costs, scalable and bursting. As technology evolved, and more companies implemented cloud solutions, some additional benefits started surfacing as well:

Meet Dan Kurtz. As a Business Development Manager at First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) his role requires him to work with partners. This includes resellers, channel partners, and strategic vendors such as EMC Cisco or IBM. Currently his biggest project has him working with CISCO to make FNTS a CISCO certified cloud provider. 

IBM recently announced its new z13 mainframe.  Pretty amazing in the new world order of cloud everything.  It seems as if cloud is the great elixir.  I hear it all the time – “just put it in the cloud” or “just back this data up to the cloud”.  Poof, it’s done!  Magic!  

We hear it every day – technology is continually changing and there is no sign of it slowing down any time soon.  With the continual change comes the high price of keeping technology up to date to meet demands and upgrades.  More and more businesses turn to cloud providers to help them with these rising demands and help keep the rising costs under control.  So you are off to the race with planning, design, development, testing and finally implementation.  But the race doesn’t stop there; it has only begun.

Platform 3 is the latest topic from an IT perspective – the new development platform for the development of new applications.  What I find the most interesting about this new platform is how it fundamentally changes the traditional approach for application development. No longer will there be purchasing hardware, server provisioning, traditional application development and middleware deployment.  This new platform involves having a platform that developers are able to access and push their new application code to.  You can continuously develop this application with continual enhancements and updates.  Behind the scenes, the infrastructure is deployed based on what the application requires.  The infrastructure than continues to scale as required based upon the application demands.

More with less. Economics is a key driver to implementing change within organizations.  In today’s economy there are two terms heard regularly – do more with less; and what is the impact to the organization.  The role of the CIO is changing – demands to implement applications, manage more websites and add new software, are increasing at an alarming rate.  These requests are not only the demands of the customers but internal business units.  Meeting these demands quickly and efficiently without adding staff or seeing an increase in budget can put a tax on any CIO and their employees.  

Implementing a Cloud solution, like many IT projects, requires careful planning, thorough testing and requires continual assessment.    It is not like the rotisserie chicken commercial where you can just “set it and forget it”.  So what are the important steps of managing the cloud service provider ongoing relationship and what should you expect from your cloud provider.

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.

Identify. Plan. Solve. Every organization has problems or issues that require solvency – the key is correctly identifying the problems.  You know you want to implement a cloud solution; however, you cannot create a business case to move forward if you are only solving general issues – it won’t work.  Exactly define each business or technical problem in an honest and upfront fashion.  Doing so will help you accurately plan for the best solution within the cloud. By limiting scope to what business problems you are solving, you can focus on each issue independently, thus not biting off more than you can chew. 

One of the advantages of working for, and being a customer of, an “Enterprise” Cloud Service Provider is the ability to test and use the latest, best-of-breed, technologies available in the marketplace.