What is a NextGen Firewall

To kick off the new year, Focus has announced a new partnership with Splunk. It is an interesting and very special technology. Splunk has the capability to do many things within an organization, but boiling it down to its most basic form, splunk adds value by helping to make sense out of any systems machine data. For even greater value, Splunk delivers the ability to correlate and visualize the data.

Small and medium-sized businesses are certainly not without options in regards to how they manage their documents, store their files, access word processing applications, internally communicate, and send emails. Not only can they choose to take advantage of a managed IT service provider, internal IT department, or subscription service, but there are also a variety of specialized services to choose from within these options. Furthermore, businesses are not required to limit themselves to only one, and they can choose to access a subscription service, coordinate their IT team with IT Consulting services , or use their own IT department to manage their subscription services. As an IT Managed Services Provider the question has recently been raised as to whether small and medium-sized businesses should choose Office 365 or Hosted Exchange.

It’s been a busy year for technology. We’ve seen a lot of industry changes as well as progression in some key areas from last year. We’ve also seen some failures, or at least delays in emerging technologies. Seems like every year, for the past few at least, it’s been all about doing more with less. This has typically made it more and more difficult to get things done for CIO’s, CISO’s, and ultimately CEO’s. In the chart to the right we have what Gartner reported CIO’s top initiatives were for 2015, with a 2014 column to illustrate changes in priority from 2014 to 2015. Business Analytics and Business intelligence topped the list, followed by Infrastructure/datacenter, cloud, ERP and Mobile. Keep in mind these are polls on what the intent is for spending, not the actual spend.