By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President Last October, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the United States, severely impacting millions of businesses and governments and displacing 776,000 East Coast residents. It resulted in an estimated $71.4 billion in damages – the sixth most costly hurricane in U.S. history. Although Sandy’s meteorological characteristics were unique, the ensuing … Read more
If your servers are knocked out, how much unplanned downtime can your business sustain? Think about it. Data loss can cripple a business. Downtime results in: lost competitive advantage lost revenue and productivity long-term erosion of customer retention strained relations with strategic partners damage to corporate reputation As a business owner myself, I might also … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President Good news from IDC yesterday — at least for those of us engaged in private cloud hosting. The research group forecasts that worldwide spending on hosted private cloud services will surpass $24 billion in 2016. Compare that to $5.5 billion spent on such services last year. IDC predicts … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President Preparing for an emergency is a key factor to business continuity after a disaster. Wherever the threat comes from – whether it’s physical, virtual, network failure or cybercrime-related – it’s important that your business is equipped to deal with the problem. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President What do our Microsoft competencies mean? They are something we’ve worked very hard to achieve and we’re quite proud of them. There are 640,000 partners in the Microsoft Partner Network, but only 5 percent of partners worldwide can distinguish themselves with a competency and having attained this high … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President Big data, big data, big data. It may sound like an overused buzzword of the day, but it’s an incredibly important phenomenon that will have a lasting impact well into the future as large enterprises – particularly health care, banking, retail and educational organizations – focus their operations … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President SharePoint managers everywhere are asking themselves, “Why should I spend money on SharePoint servers?” Well, with on-premise IT costs soaring, they’re absolutely justified in asking that question. On-premise hosting has become much less cost-effective than outsourced hosting. Quite simply, hosting SharePoint 2010 with an experienced hosting provider saves … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President Why email archiving? Well, from the knowledge management perspective, valuable information is contained within our everyday email conversations, and yet that vast knowledge repository is typically not documented or stored using any formal means or framework. Email archiving solves this problem, especially if it is designed with simple … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President If consumer electronic sales – and particularly those of mobile connected devices (which leverage the elastic resources of various clouds) – are any indication, cloud computing is poised for more growth well into this decade, and surely, beyond. For the first time ever, U.S. consumer electronics sales are … Read more
By Laurie Head AIS Network Vice President How successful are private clouds, anyway? That’s the question asked by a recent research report from Information Week. The survey reveals that most companies with private clouds in place are pleased with the results and are experiencing heightened efficiency and lower costs. I find this report particularly interesting … Read more