MSP Alliance

MSP News Weekly Podcast for the week ending August 29, 2014. This is a compilation of stories and analysis on noteworthy items in the managed services and cloud computing profession.

Gartner: Global Security Spending to Grow 7.9% in 2014

Organizations around the world will spend just over $71 billion on securing information technology. Increases in mobile usage, cloud computing, and social media are part of the reasons behind this increase. The research firm projects that in 2015 information security spending will increase to a rate of 8.2% or just over $76 billion.

Amazon Cloud Pop-up Stores

It looks like Amazon is bringing back it’s pop-up store concept, except this time, they are hoping to promote cloud computing through these retail like stores. The first one will be in San Francisco. According to Ariel Kelman, vice president of worldwide marketing for Amazon Web Services, the public cloud computing giant will be targeting its pop up stores around the world where there are high concentrations of new startups. Seems to make sense.

While physical stores have obviously worked well for Apple (Microsoft is trying to mimic Apple in this regard) it remains unclear whether Amazon’s approach will translate into more cloud computing users and adoption. We will see.

IBM Launches First SoftLayer Facility in Australia

SoftLayer is planning on launching its first ever data center in Melbourne, Australia. IBM has  committed to opening 15 new data centers around the world, which is part of a roughly $1.2 billion investment into cloud computing. The Melbourne facility will be able to accommodate approximately 15,000 physical servers.

BYOD in California: For Better or Worse?

California governor Jerry Brown this week signed into law a bill that will require smart phones sold in California must be equipped with a “kill switch” in order to wipe the devices in the event of being lost or stolen. While this may seem like a no-brainer for MSPs who currently manage mobile devices on behalf of customers, this new law does raise several questions. First, how will other states react to the law (will they adopt similar legislation)? Second, will this law make doing business in California just a bit more complicated and expensive? Third, will the law interfere with existing IT policies being managed by MSPs, which in some cases, may actually be better than what the law prescribes?

And we’re back!!! After taking a few years off, we’ve decided to bring back our weekly MSP News updates with analysis. And this time around, we’re adding a podcast! That’s right…for all those execs out there that are just too busy to sit and read the news, we’re happy to read it to you! We’ll even through in our analysis for free!

Every Friday, we’ll provide you with a new podcast, full of all the relevant news in the IT Channel (as it pertains to managed services and cloud) along with in depth analysis from Charles Weaver, CEO of MSPAlliance. If you’d rather read, we’ll also post the stories for you here. Now sit back, relax and let us read the news to you! Click on the player to listen to this week’s podcast now!

FBI to Speak at MSPWorld Fall Conference

Security has always been a recurring theme at MSPWorld conferences. We figured, what better source for cyber crime and cyber security than the FBI. Special Agent E. Brent Watkins will be address MSPWorld delegates on Thursday October 16, 2014. Cyber crime threats, prevention, and the role MSPs play in helping protect organizations and individuals will be highlighted. There will also be a Q&A session so you won’t want to miss this conference.

IBM/Lenovo Get US Federal Approval For Acquisition

IBM and Lenovo both got good news this past week when US Federal regulators approved the sale of the IBM System X division to Lenovo. This deal was not very publicized but did receive a great deal of scrutiny due to a number of factors, most notably that the US government currently has a number of System X equipment installed, which may have to be addressed once control of this division comes under a Chinese company.

The deal has considerable upside for both companies; IBM gets to offload another division allowing it to stay focused on the cloud and Lenovo get’s a powerful server division to compliment its desktop acquisition (also from another IBM acquisition in 2004). I think we should expect to see some big things coming from both companies in the near future.

Microsoft Azure Has Outage

Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, experienced a a service outage for approximately 5 hours this week. While not really a major story, unless you were one of those who were affected by Azure’s service disruption, these types of public cloud outages really underscore the importance of keeping perspective when discussing cloud computing. We shouldn’t be happy about it, by any means, but it does give yet another opportunity for MSPs to talk with their customers about the great variety of cloud computing offerings available to them.

Dell & CloudRunner Form Relationship

CloudRunner, owned by longtime MSPAlliance member John Gorst of InsynQ, has announced that Dell will be reselling its cloud application solutions to MSPs. This is a unique relationship in that Dell is the reseller and CloudRunner the provider. Could this be a prelude to an acquisition by Dell?

Hostway Targets MSPs

Hosting provider Hostway just announced that it will be targeting MSPs for a new partner program called CloudConnex. More information can be found at www.hostway.com

Amazon Sells Cloud into US Military

Public cloud provider Amazon is not authorized to host unclassified data on its cloud platform. Amazon states that it is the first cloud provider to have this distinction.