Hybrid clouds bring the best of both worlds and ensure IT infrastructure closely aligns with the needs of business. A recent State of the Cloud Survey finds that nearly three-quarters of today’s enterprises are using a hybrid infrastructure and adoption rates have increased from 58% in 2015 to 71% in 2016. As more organizations consider a hybrid IT strategy they should keep seven key factors in mind.

The IT skills required in today’s complex manufacturing businesses have changed. Seasoned manufacturing experts have had to upgrade their computing skills to encompass managed services, or find the right partners to take over the technology components. Many smart manufacturers understand that you can’t let the tools get in the way of production, and forcing company experts to become IT experts is counterproductive. Rather than forcing the industry experts to take on a new discipline, more companies are seeking out partners like OneNeck who understand managed services.

Insider threats from employees and business partners represent one of the largest risk factors organizations face. IBM found that in 2015, 55% of breaches came from the inside. Even though almost half of these attacks were inadvertent rather than malicious, IT departments need to be prepared to prevent and mitigate internal security threats.

One of the biggest lures to Azure right now is for backup and disaster recovery. There are a number of ways that this can be implemented, including Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup; however, when we look at options for SQL Server, we can really start getting into the business continuity aspect of BDR, with the potential for zero downtime in the event of a catastrophic failure. This blog will take a look at how we can put that in place and how Azure can be a key component.

To earn ATS certification, individuals with direct responsibility for data center uptime must attend an intensive training.

Multi-tenant data centers (MTDCs) offer the off-site efficiency, scale and cloud-enablement organizations want, but with the privacy and control they simply can’t get from the public cloud. These colocation centers, can provide floor space, power, access to communications networks and physical security for a single server up to a full data center. 451 Research expects the MTDC market to reach $36 billion worldwide by the end of 2017, with worldwide MTDC capacity growing by 75% and global revenue growing by 63%.

Anyone who has ever worked on a significant software development project knows that keeping DEV and TEST environments available and relatively in sync is almost a full time job. Microsoft Dynamics AX is no different. Best case, installing, configuring, patching and replicating databases will take at least a day unless there is a significant automation process in place. Then, generally, the machines are left in place, consuming storage and possibly compute even when they are not needed. Fortunately, Microsoft has made some significant investments in Dynamics AX technology with Azure to simplify this issue quite a bit. Lifecycle Services (LCS) is a project management site specifically designed to simplify Dynamics AX implementations, including the deployment of DEMO, DEV/TEST and production environments.

In 2014, Gartner introduced the concept of Bimodal IT to separate traditional IT development from new digital initiatives. This initiative has been met with praise, but also with criticism by those who don't believe there should be a separation. By Gartner's definition, Mode 1 is essentially “slow mode,” while Mode 2 is “fast mode.” Gartner believes this allows the IT organization to exploit the benefits of both worlds; however, others are not so convinced and believe it this thinking is a) not something new and b) not sustainable in the long term.

Losing precious data during a disaster — be it natural, human error or breach — can cost your company dearly. FEMA estimates that more than 40 percent of businesses never recover. It’s critical that organizations have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place. Interestingly, Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) are often used interchangeably even though they represent very different activities. In fact, interchanging the two can leave your organization at significant risk.

In the manufacturing sector, there are cycles based on customers’ seasonal demand. To accommodate these cycles, manufacturers want to be able to adjust production and distribution using enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and other software tools while minimizing demand on existing IT resources. Scaling the data center infrastructure to meet peak periods of demand once or twice each year would mean having servers and systems remaining idle most of the time. Rather than wasting resources, more manufacturers are turning to hosted solutions to manage manufacturing and distribution.