Imagine this: It’s 1PM on a summer Saturday, and you get a phone call from Chuck E. Cheese. They’ve had a small electrical fire. No one is hurt, but they have to close for the rest of the day. This is a problem for you, because at 2PM, you are hosting 15 rambunctious 7-year-olds for your kid’s …
Flexibility vs Cost: The Pros and Cons
Good, cheap and fast: Pick two. This pithy quote encapsulates everything we need to know about the fundamental trade-offs facing cloud provisioning. Everything, of course, except how to decide. The fundamental promise of the cloud is that you have the room to grow (or shrink) your resources as …
Happy Birthday Atlantic Metro!
Ten years ago today, my partner, Stephen Klenert, and I set out on our mission to shape our new business into a major, nation-wide provider of Managed IT Infrastructure Services. At the time, I was not certain where this path would lead us and how much we would grow. I merely wanted to act on my …
The Escalating Threat of DDoS Attacks
The most common type of aviation accident is a bird strike. Because of this, most airplanes can handle a bird strike without much, if any, damage. However, there are cases, like with US Airways Flight 1549, aka “The Miracle on the Hudson,” when a whole flock of geese got sucked into the engines and …
Navigating End-Of-Life Concerns with Server Hardware
Like most people, you probably have a drawer or a box in the top of a closet full of old hardware. An iPod, a dot matrix printer, an old Nintendo 64. No? Maybe it’s just me. Those bits of old tech were either cast aside when a newer, better replacement came along. Or they just stopped working. …
5 Tips to Avoid the WannaCry Virus
Last Friday saw the outbreak of a new, high-profile type of ransomware. This virus, named "WannaCry," has been spreading like wildfire, causing thousands of people to be left with the choice of paying ransom to get their data back. Here are some tips you can implement to avoid falling victim to …
Geo-Redundancy: Not as Simple as You Think
It seems like every week or so there’s a report of a major data center outage. Major events like Hurricane Sandy remain an important lesson. Even things like the Amazon Web Services outage earlier this year remind us that merely trusting in the biggest providers is not enough to assure uptime in the …
Why Enterprises are Looking to Shrink their Data Center Footprints
The recent trend in cell phones notwithstanding, smaller is usually better when it comes to tech. Smaller tends to be cheaper, faster, and more efficient, at least when it’s engineered right. And that’s the calculus businesses are doing when they look to shrink their data center footprints. Even …
The Role of Colocation in the Cloud Era
“The Cloud,” also known as “Other People’s Computers” seems to put a stake in the heart of the idea of colocation, where instead of renting both the hardware and the space, you only rent the space and you supply your own hardware. But it doesn’t. It’s like saying, “Why rent a house when you could …
Is Your Encryption Up To Today’s Security Challenges?
A recent Data Center Trends survey indicated that 70% of companies felt that ‘Security’ was one of their top challenges in 2017. And of course that isn’t news to anyone. 2016 was the year of ransomware, of increased man-in-the-middle attacks, and more massive data breaches than the whole rest of …
