Networking & General Computing Featured Editorial

1. How To Improve Microsoft Teams Performance With SD-WAN 1/26/2021

   This past year has made it abundantly clear how fragile and finnicky video calls can be. Odds are, you too have been on countless calls where someone’s audio was garbled or cut out or their video froze. It’s not so bad when your video quality falls of a cliff with friends on a virtual happy hour, but it’s downright painful when it’s your sales person trying give someone a demo or your support person helping an important customer — or whatever calls are most important for your organization. Video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and BlueJeans have become one of the most important applications a business runs. 

2. Your Corporate VPN Is Not Your Friend 9/24/2020

   Your corporate VPN is being used against you. Dark spiders hide on the web, listening for the unique digital thrumming of a user logging onto the corporate VPN. This digital signature tells them that you’re a remote worker and that someone values company data enough to protect it with a leaky tunnel. So, they wait for you to turn it off and watch Netflix or check your email—then they strike and quietly infect your device with venom. You don’t even know they’re there until you turn the corporate VPN back on and the malware knows it’s time to deploy. And at that point it’s too late.

3. AWS re:Invent 2019: A Networking Perspective 1/22/2020

   AWS re:Invent 2019 has come and gone, leaving the collective masses to sort through the product news. According to AWS, it released 77 products, features and services over five days. Many of the announcements were in the ML space (20 total), followed by news on compute (16), analytics (6), networking and content delivery (5).

4. 4 Wi-Fi Planning & Deployment Best Practices Every MSP Can Swear By 10/29/2019

   By every definition, it was a wireless access point (WAP) upgrade that had seemingly checked every box of thoughtful preparation. Fancy Wi-Fi heat maps, an in-depth proposal, and well-paid consultants. After deliberation by top brass, the district-wide upgrade was greenlit. Three large high school district properties serving thousands of students and staff were assured by consultants that their daily Wi-Fi issues were about to become a thing of the past.

5. Network Blind Spots - What You Don't Know Can Hurt You 5/1/2019

   Did you ever trek up to a famous lookout spot, only to find that once you get there the clouds have rolled in and you can’t see much of anything? Like the time I was in Rio and went up to the Christ the Redeemer statue and it was so foggy I couldn’t even see the top of the statue, much less the city below. I was only there for a day, and had already paid for the tour, so I didn’t have a whole lot of choice about going, even though I knew the weather was bad. I mean, nobody in their right mind would choose to have such terrible visibility, right?

6. HTG Peer Groups Is Now IT Nation Evolve 8/6/2018

   At the top of the New Year, ConnectWise and HTG Peer Groups collaboratively announced that the former was acquiring the latter. Among the HTG associate, member, and greater MSP communities, the news incited a lot of speculation about the future of the HTG empire led by Arlin Sorensen and family. This week, the speculation was put to rest. HTG is now IT Nation Evolve, a new brand that reflects the Arnie Bellini-inspired ConnectWise flavor of channel community building.

7. MSP Owners: If You Were Hit By A Bus, Would Your Business Survive? 5/31/2018

   The difference between being the owner of a business or being self employed is at the end of the day when you consider exiting or selling your business, how does the business transition without you? As you grow your IT business, the way you make operational decisions to increase the equity of your business is very important. It will determine if you have established your MSP as a lifestyle business or a scalable enterprise.

8. This IOT Thing — How Should MSPs Support It? 5/30/2018

   Here are 6 steps to help your business evolve in the age of IoT. 

9. Deeper MSP And VAR Security Services Should include Dark Web Monitoring 10/16/2017

   Recent studies show that 73 percent of the U.S. population (237,736,346) have at least one compromised credential and 18 percent (60,441,444) have a compromised social security number found within the Dark Web, the portion of the Internet that is hidden from conventional search engines. In 2016-2017, 4.2 billion email account credentials have been identified for sale, not including fake data. The global cost of data breaches will reach $2.1 trillion by 2019.

10. Resellers Of ERP Solutions Need This Fencing Skill – Think Two Moves Ahead Or Lose 7/6/2017

    ARRRGH! No, this is not me living my fantasy as a swashbuckler, though as a fencing instructor (a healthy and fun diversion of mine), it would not be too far from reality.  Rather, it is an expression of angst when I hear Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems reduced to being called “accounting” or “financial” systems. I let the rather defamatory term slide when it comes from the chief financial officer or vice president of finance at a client of mine: hey, I am pretty picky about most things but even I have my limitations. But I cringe when I hear it from the reseller, because I know that this is a reseller with a myopic focus.