Drew Robb

Most companies these days are heavily virtualized. Gartner numbers suggest that 75% or higher virtualization use is the norm. But benefits such as reduced complexity, better server utilization, increased flexibility, and greater responsiveness to business needs are not the whole picture. The additional software layer added to create virtual machines (VMs) can make it difficult […]

Supply chains around the world are struggling. A survey by the Institute of Supply Management found that 75% of U.S. manufacturers have experienced delayed resources and materials during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is forcing a rethink in supply chain management, and a need for more automation and digitalization technology. “For the first time in recent […]

Internet of Things (IoT) devices and external users have made edge technologies a growing priority. But even as strong use cases have emerged for new technologies at the network’s edge, IT departments have struggled to find the talent to implement edge solutions. Those are some of the key takeaways from a new study by Aruba […]

A recent Gartner report was rather scathing about the effectiveness of chief information security officers (CISOs). Only 12%, according to the 2020 Gartner CISO Effectiveness survey, excel in all categories considered by the analyst firm in the study. The bar was obviously set high. But that is a sign of the times. CISOs have to […]

For many organizations, real-time analytics is a means to automate the response of the business to ongoing events. It relies on streamed data to augment existing data stores to provide an accurate and timely account of the current and evolving situation. In fraud detection, financial institutions capture transactional changes in real-time and combine them with […]

It’s hurricane season. Every day, it seems, yet another weather event threatens the U.S coast. More than 20 major storms so far in 2020, and more coming, many of them hurricanes. Technology plays a key role in detecting, tracking and warning populations about bad weather. But it also harnessed once disaster strikes. After Hurricane Maria […]

IT harnesses availability as a vital metric. How available are your servers, your networks, your applications? Any time they are down, that means they are unavailable to users. Out of that, we get five-nines as symbolic of high availability. Move over to the transportation sector. Availability stinks. Vehicles sit still for most of their existence. […]

When the pandemic began, most businesses complained about the disruption. How could they be expected to operate outside of the office? Somehow, they found a way, courtesy of technology. And surprise, surprise, productivity flourished in many cases. 57% of knowledge workers say their COVID-19 experience demonstrates they can perform most functions from home, according to […]

COVID-19 shutdowns have hammered the viability of small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs). Figures released by Yelp show that about 100,000 small businesses shut down in the last six months, about 30% of them restaurants. And a study by SMB Group discovered that almost 80% of SMEs report that they are doing worse since COVID-19 hit. […]

Phishing has been with us for many years. Just as almost no one falls for the Nigerian inheritance email scam any longer (well, for the most part), you would expect that phishing was ready to fade into the security threat sunset. But the KnowBe4 Phishing by Industry Benchmarking Report 2020 paints a very different picture. […]

Data centers were the thing to have in the early 2000s. Just about every mid-sized and large organization, and a whole lot of smaller ones, rushed to build their own data center. The trend became so prevalent that many of them wanted another one — an additional data center for business continuity or resilience purposes. […]

Chief information security officers (CISOs) usually have a lot to worry about, but the dramatic growth in people working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic has made 2020 more fraught with security threats than usual. Splunk recently outlined some of these threats in its list of the top ten things keeping CISOs up at […]