Providing expert commentary on Cloud, SaaS, Virtualization and general IT management topics and challenges as well as reactive commentary to articles or current hot topics being discussed in the industry.
Last year Mark Shavlik commented on the changes that cloud computing and virtualization would bring to the business of IT. One of the main challenges he highlighted was the decision to adopt virtualization technologies and cloud-based services, and tying them squarely to a business need and the desired user experience.
As expected, IT organizations have gained huge efficiencies by making the decision to employ virtualization technologies throughout their IT infrastructure as well as moving some of their internal IT operations to the cloud. According to Gartner, by 2015 virtualized systems likely will be more secure than their …
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NetChk Protect 7.8 is nearing Beta. We have a good list of participants started already, but there is room for more. Requests will be on a first come first serverd basis. If you would like to participate please contact us at Beta@Shavlik.com. This release boasts many new features, but there are a couple in particular that I know people are interested in.
Agent SP Deployment: Now you can approve SPs and allow the agent to deploy them in a more automated fashion.
VM features: Template support, snapshotting, state aware scan and deployment to on and offline VMs.
Archive File Support: This will …
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One of the single greatest challenges facing any information technology professional these days is the need to do more with less. Even though it appears our economy is beginning to rebound, organizations are still taking a very conservative approach to spending, and the information technology sector is no exception. However, with the advent of cloud computing solutions – from cloud-based application ware, to full blown infrastructure platforms – the ability to do more with less is becoming much more realistic.
According to the Aberdeen Group, cloud computing is changing the role of IT from predominantly one of maintenance …
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Forward:
I was an entrepreneur at a very early age. During my college career, I led a dual life of a student and an employee at a local start-up company that manufactured wearable computers and the software that enabled them. At this particular company, I worked for two great leaders, Dave and Jim Carroll. The two brothers were similar in many ways, but different in others. From Dave, I learned how to create a dream and turn it into a reality, a trait which I hold near and dear to my heart. From Jim, who tragically left me well before I could …
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Over the past year, there has been an enormous amount of attention paid to activities, technology and innovation surrounding the subject of Cloud Computing, and for obvious reasons! As the world of IT continues to reshape itself, the role of cloud-based services and technologies will play a vital role. That said, the ability to take advantage the “economies of the cloud,” which are the economic forces, business drivers, and structural issues affecting the costs and benefits of adopting cloud technologies, rest squarely with the technology adopter (user) and vendor alike. From the vendor’s perspective, cloud-based services need to be easy to consume and accessible from anywhere, …
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For the last 4 days, I’ve had a lovely time out in San Francisco, California at Salesforce.com’s 2010 Dreamforce show which was attended by north of 30,000 attendees. I’ve been to most of the Dreamforce events, as this is now my third company that uses Salesforce.com in their day-to-day operations. In our case, we’re heavy users though with nearly a 100% adoption of their entire product footprint. The massive adoption that we have here at Shavlik opened up some interesting opportunities for us to shake hands with the other Salesforce elites and see what is new in …
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Happy Holidays to one and all! It’s that time of year again where all of us who are amongst the “technically gifted” end up being IT Administrators for our families. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong… we all step into the house and whether it be by our choice or a wave of sympathy that washes over us after we observe a machine that has not received care-and-feeding since the last holiday, we step up and proceed to click-away in an attempt to get even the most poor performing and security unaware computers up to speed. That …
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Confession… this Sunday, I woke up to my cell phone ringing nearby my bed-side. The first thought that crosses your mind as your phone rings in the middle of the night is that either something really bad happened to someone close to you… or something really bad happened to a technology you run your business on. Either way, the event is emotionally charged, and no doubt your woes in either case are dramatic and ongoing.
Fortunately, my call this weekend was the latter. A cloud provider we use for integration between our billing system and our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system …
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It’s a typical Thursday morning, and as I come into the office I open up my e-mailbag of customer questions for the week and begin to churn through them. Over the past few months a new pattern has emerged where people are discussion Anti-Virus (AV) and the issues that they run into with it. Common complaints such as “It slows down my computer” or “It’s eating up network bandwidth” typically top the scales with the “it’s so expensive” not too far behind. No matter how you slice it, the requests center around a few key things:
It’s expensive
It’s …
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Every few weeks, we get an email from a small business or home user with a small slug of machines they want to make sure are patched. It awesome to see everyone care about patching, but implementing a routine patching plan is sometimes a tough thing to do. All of the emails we see always say something to the effect of:
Patching isn’t fun, but I know it needs to get done.
How do I do it in a non-intrusive way?
After thinking about this issue for quite some time, we now have a great answer. On Tuesday this week, …
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