IT Expert Voice

Making the switch from hosting your servers and applications to letting a Managed Service Provider do it for you can reduce costs and improve productivity. But a mismatch with the wrong MSP can be a disaster. Here are questions you need answered before you tie the contractual knot.

MSPs are becoming more popular. Using an MSP can help an enterprise maintain existing service levels with a reduced IT staff, or provide a less-costly means of increasing services than hiring new staff. Since many of them have expertise in Internet applications, they can quickly bring them online. Also, increased regulatory complexity requires offsite storage, which can be provided by MSPs. READ MORE

The workplace is evolving: as telecommuting becomes more common, the office now goes to the worker rather than the worker goes to the office. This radical shift frees corporations from costly real estate and severs the last geographic ties to any sense of place. Geopolitical restraints are becoming less of a factor, talent can be recruited and used anywhere, IT is moving to the cloud, and behemoth corporate headquarters are fast becoming cavernous relics. Is this the agile future that corporations were hoping for?

Several factors came together to bomb the commercial real estate market, effectively and forever reducing the notion of “corporate headquarters” to a fraction of the space it once commanded.  “It was a perfect storm of [changes in] real estate, human resources, and information technology,” says David Rush, vice president of Interior Design for HOK, a global architectural firm. Indeed, first outsourcing and then the recession shrank workforces to minimal levels. Legions more were unshackled by technologies from cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) to laptops and smartphones. Now, savvy companies are dumping behemoth-sized facilities in favor of smaller workplaces peppered around the globe.

“Companies are moving from sprawling suburban corporate campuses to smaller scale headquarters — a hub and spoke model — as they represent much more efficient operations,” says Rush.

The new reality finds a glut of open office space, deserted and cavernous, where a sea of cubicles once washed through. Huge data centers have shrunk to mere skeletons in tiny closets, as workloads ascend to the cloud. Many a company’s sense of place has thus faded into a sense of wasted space. READ MORE

For some corporations, going Green has already gone red. Green initiatives, such as lowering energy consumption and recycling, have taken on a new sense of urgency in response to legislation, eco-conscious customers and investors, and/or ever-rising energy costs. While regulatory compliance will undoubtedly become more complicated on an international scale, greening the IT department is becoming steadily simpler.

Indeed, the green movement has overgrown the IT industry to such a degree that a corporation can, in fact, become significantly greener without making a specific effort to do so. This is good news for corporate leaders who face ever-tightening regulatory requirements while also grappling with still-too-tight budget constraints.

Going Green (even if you don’t call it that) has other benefits to corporations. Because far from being just a warm and fuzzy PR move, the benefits of going green are tangible and bankable.

“At a high level, going green can (1) improve the bottom line; (2) help a business earn new contracts, especially since Fortune 500 and government institutions are providing preferential treatment; (3) increase revenue by accessing a new customer demographic; (4) compliance with environmental law and ability to get rebates; (5) hire the best talent — more and more of the young, smart graduates want to work at a company with adequate corporate responsibility culture; and, of course (6) it’s the right thing to do,” says Marcos Cordero, chief executive officer and co-founder of Green Business Bureau.

It makes sense, then, for your governance and regulatory compliance, facility management, and public relations departments (among others) to start ticking off line items on the Must-be-Green list as the IT department goes about its daily business. To get you started, here are a few areas where you can expect to reap green points on almost immediately (and without even really trying). READ MORE

Oddly, few can accurately define the cloud but they are utterly convinced it is moving closer. READ MORE

Migrating to Windows 7 does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition for a large enterprise. This article addresses the highest-impact elements of operating system migration and how to balance its cost with support of a heterogeneous environment. READ MORE

Network administrators will find many improvements in Windows 7’s networking. We introduce you to the most important that IT managers need to know about.
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