Earlier this year, I arrived at the office on a Monday morning to a ringing telephone. One of my longtime customers was on the line, frantic about a security issue. When he arrived at work that morning, he discovered that the Microsoft Exchange server at his midsized company was offline and infected with ransomware. Further…
The “X” in “XaaS” is tantalizingly broad. It stands in for “anything.” Yet for many organizations, the definition of “the cloud” still revolves around three primary use cases: of Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). By broadening your cloud horizons, you can create leaner, more…
For decades, disaster recovery has mostly followed a model: An organization copies data from its primary data center and stores it somewhere else (often on tape) for safekeeping, in case something goes wrong. Many organizations continue to think of DR in those terms, but the practice has moved forward. In fact, even the objectives behind…
Often, I hear people talk about hyperconverged infrastructure as though it’s still an emerging, almost experimental solution. But the reality is that many organizations have deployed hyperconvergence — which combines storage, computing and networking into a single system — for years. As these organizations have learned, HCI can have a significant impact on their IT…
Like their peers in other industries, state and local IT leaders are interested in modernization, but budget constraints often stand in the way. In my experience working with government agencies, many organizations wait five years or even longer to upgrade their data center infrastructures. One obvious consequence of maintaining this legacy infrastructure is suboptimal performance….
Across industries, organizations are moving workloads between on-premises data centers and the public cloud, creating a hybrid computing environment that combines the efficiencies of on-premises equipment with the agility and scalability of the cloud. While this approach delivers an optimized, flexible computing environment, it also creates headaches for IT professionals responsible for coordinating backups across…
