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Services Spotlight: Healthcare Industry Podcast

April 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This is an exciting time in the world of communication technologies. It holds the promise of great opportunity as well as some daunting challenges around implementing, managing and maintaining new and evolving technologies.

At Softchoice, we’ve spent many years working closely with a variety of  industries, helping them adapt, grow and thrive in spite of economic change and technology evolutions. With all that experience and knowledge behind us, we thought it would be interesting to hear from the Softchoice team directly, to share their insights and perspectives on what technology trends are most likely to deliver competitive advantage, improved customer service and operational efficiencies now and in the future.

Healthcare Services Industry Spotlight: Podcast with Robert High

Robert High, Director, Professional Services has recently completed several healthcare projects helping hospitals solve their technology challenges. In this podcast, he describes how rapid changes in technology are affecting healthcare organizations today.

Listen Now

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New Report: Six Essentials for the Optimized Data Center

April 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Because it’s hard to keep up with the latest best practices, we asked Infotech Indaba to create a report that provides practical advice, broad and balanced insight and an unbiased point of view.To read the full whitepaper, go to Softchoice’s Optimized Datacenter

We wanted to share some of the key trends identified in the report, as we believe that a thorough grasp of these can help organizations  manage and grow amid the many challenges they face today.

Trend #1: Virtualization

Research shows a decrease of as much as 70% in capital expenditures for virtualized environments compared to a non-virtual infrastructure, which likely explains why so many IT decision-makers have already gone down that path. However, many organizations are realizing all of the efficiencies virtualization has promised. Management and an optimized infrastructure are needed.

Your virtualization transformation must be a thoughtful, cost-benefit based, phased process from initial server consolidation to easier server maintenance and workload consolidation to the creation of more flexible, utility-like internal clouds. [Read more...]

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Why Data Backup And Recovery Systems Are Like Your Insurance Policy

April 8, 2012 by 1 Comment

 

Your data backup and recovery systems are like your insurance policy. Knowing that you have a process and system in place to ensure your data is secure and recoverable quickly and reliably means you can sleep at night knowing that your valuable corporate assets are safe.

But wait, have you tested your tape backup lately? If you have legacy tape backup systems in place – can they cope with the demands of a consolidated and virtualized infrastructure? How about the expanding volume of data growing exponentially year over year?

Challenges of a Tape Back-up Environment

Tape has long been the baseline backup medium used by most businesses, but with the arrival of consolidated infrastructures and virtualized environments the demands on legacy systems may be too complex or costly to manage depending on the types of applications and recovery point objectives in scope for the back-up. [Read more...]

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Choosing An MDM Solution

April 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This article originally appeared on Stephen’s personal blog. You can visit it here.

Right now there are several types of Mobile Device Management solutions.  They all have their place when you consider security and total cost of ownership.  Some of them are going to be much more secure giving more piece of mind.  Others are going to integrate into or leverage existing systems giving you piece of mind that you are not standing up an entirely new environment that also needs to be managed and secured.

We will be focused on MDM solutions that manage Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Mobile.  Blackberry is very well known for having one of the most secure solutions already.  Until a few years ago they were pretty much the only game in town when it came to phones carrying sensitive data so I’m sure they have been under heavy attack.  Very few issues have been published about the Blackberry solution and it’s not because it wasn’t a target.

Generally every solution out there is going to allow you to push email, calendar, contacts.  You will also be able to configure other features on the device such as wifi and VPN profiles.  From a security perspective you are able to force passwords on and enforce complexity.  Finally you can wipe out the work email, calendar, and contacts that you push along with any other settings like VPN and wifi.  Or you could decide to simply wipe the entire device.  These are the main benefits of having an MDM.  Without these abilities I.T. is going to be tasked with managing and supporting all of these devices which would be extremely time consuming.

 

Regardless of which solution you choose there is still some inherent risk today unless you use this solution in conjunction with something else.

1.   Containers
 
This is the first type of MDM solution that made it’s way into corporate environments.  In a container system an application typically found on either iTunes or Google Play is installed on the device by the user. When they sign into the app with their corporate email address and password the app finds the MDM server and synchronizes policies.  Once synchronized email, calendar, and contacts are synchronized to the device.  The stand out feature here is that these services are synchronized to the app that they downloaded.   [Read more...]
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The Revolution of Client Computing

April 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This article originally appeared on Stephen’s personal blog. You can visit it here.

The future of client computing has a very different look and feel.  There are a couple of driving forces and they are driving hard and fast.

Always on connectivity is actually finally pervading.  Smartphones with 8MB/s data connections have been here for approximately a year. Tablets with similar connectivity are here.  And now ultabook laptops will include this capability too.  We will have access to our data wherever and whenever we want.

The force behind this persistent connectivity is ubiquitous data. We want our information, the same information, on our phone, on our tablet, on our PC. There are many examples of this becoming common in life and work today.

I frequently write the bulk of a grocery list in Evernote on my PC.  Then get home to realize a few more things are missing, so open Evernote again on my tablet and update the list.  Finally when I get around to going to the grocery store I consume the information from my phone and get things done.  I do use Evernote for other things but this is definitely my favorite as benign as it may be. [Read more...]

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Study: A Lack of Asset Management is Putting Networks at Risk

April 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

 Our study of 78 corporate networking environments reveals that neglecting device asset management is exposing organizations to the risk of network outage, ratcheting up maintenance costs, and degrading network performance. Read on to see our visual take on the findings!

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