26Oct2020
16Nov2018
Three Azure solutions to SMB problems: The first rule of Azure is you don’t sell Azure
Different MSP's out there embrace the cloud to more or less extent. Most providers are doing Office 365 nowadays, but Azure (or IaaS solutions like it) is still nebulous or even a little scary: Some providers feel threatened by services like Azure, because deploying and managing on-premises servers still makes...
31Aug2017
The next evolution of SBS
In a previous article, I compared two alternative deployments for a new kind of "Small Business Server" (being defined in this case as a network of 25 users or less). Microsoft used to have a widely adopted product for this market called Small Business Server, but since it has been discontinued...
27Apr2017
How to enable 2-factor or multi-factor authentication (2FA or MFA)
Enabling a second factor for authentication is an important (and often very easy) thing to do. Usually this can be accomplished in just a few clicks for most websites and cloud services. It is highly recommended that you take the time to do this, especially for any accounts that are tied to...
06Mar2017
What to do about cloud outages
Last week, Amazon experienced a major service disruption to it's Simple Storage Services (S3). Here is their official (detailed) statement on the cause of the outage. As you probably heard, a lot of major online retailers and other companies who depend on these services were impacted. But what can you do about something...
23Feb2017
Benefits to keeping an On-Premises Active Directory Domain
I have seen an alarming trend in the small business market--as more and more companies offload their IT infrastructure to cloud-based applications and services (which is great in many cases), many of them are also starting to abandon older tools and platforms such as on-premises Active Directory. This I cannot agree...
02May2016
Get Rid of My Servers!
If the cloud is supposed to be so great, then why do so many small businesses still have servers? It is a fair question. The truth is, you probably do not need to maintain servers on-premises, but that doesn't mean you won't still want to. The majority of small businesses (the "S" in...
28Apr2016
The Cloud is Faster Because it is More Iterative
It is perhaps no surprise that many organizations have been adopting cloud and mobility the way they would have adopted a new server upgrade in the past, but that's not quite right. We have been trained to take changes in larger leaps and bounds, and less often. In the cloud, there cloud be several...
29Feb2016
Why we tend to focus on IaaS Solutions
IaaS is an area of extreme interest to SMB customers, probably because it is the easiest way for them to translate what they are accustomed to working with (e.g. on-premises servers) into a cloud-based equivalent. In other words, for better or worse, we are in the habit of thinking about our applications and...
25Feb2016