What's the fuss about Blended IT? Learn more in this whitepaper.

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Research shows that IT executives are challenged to build IT departments that are more strategic, serviced-oriented and engaged with the business, but they’re dealing with employees who lack the skills to make the transformation. By using a blended IT workforce, you can leverage the abilities and expertise of a much larger and technologically-diverse team to tackle issues that your full-time staff may not be equipped to handle. Finding in demand technology skill sets can be challenging, so explore a blended IT solution that involves using a mix of full-time employees, independent contractors and temporary workers.

5 Reasons Managed Services is Crucial to Your IT Strategy

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5 Reasons Managed Services is Crucial to your IT Strategy 

Development and implementation of a global IT strategy is crucial to further advancement of your organization’s ever-growing performance goals. However, this task is hindered by a stagnant or diminishing budget. It can be overwhelming for IT managers to maintain a feasible budget for their business in conjunction with ensuring the performance, security, and operational goals are met. Budgeting experts advocate a predictable cost model such as Managed Services.

Below are five reasons you can consider Managed Services as an integral component of your IT strategy.

1. Predictable Cost Structure 

Costs for an IT department include—but are not limited to—equipment, personnel, and training to keep up with industry standards. Managed Services incorporates these costs into one predictable monthly charge. With the expansion and evolution of your business this single monthly cost can be scaled to meet business demands and address out-of-scope work.

2. Advanced Risk Management 

The insurance industry calculates risk and promotes that insurance provides you with peace of mind. Managed Services reflects that very same assurance. Coverage can include:

3. A Shift in Focus to Your Core Business: 

Building and progressing a business has enough challenges as it is. Building and maintaining fundamental IT infrastructure can be just as daunting. Large IT companies choose to outsource their IT to a third-party to then concentrate on revenue-generating initiatives.

4. Future-Proof Strategy:

The future holds an abundance of technical challenges for the security and operation of your business. Delegating the task of maintaining infrastructure parallel to current industry developments gives you the opportunity to focus on other aspects of your organization.

Managed Services is staffed with specialists that handle both basic routers and firewalls so that the transition from one to the other can be a seamless and stress-free process for your network security. Let experts focus on your company’s adaptation to market demands, while you dedicate your time to growth and achievement.

5. Better Value: 

Value of your business operations is crucial to success and customer satisfaction. Value is the outcome that weighs your investments.

Managed Services models have evolved over time through the hard work and commitment of many integrators and providers. Dedication to the perfection of its delivery resulted in benefits and features that greatly contribute to the equilibrium and profit of your company. Lower monthly costs, constructive operations, expert skill sets, more stringent service level agreements (SLAs), and attractive service level objectives (SLOs), are just a few notable examples from an abundant list.

IT is at the core of most businesses; it is the underlying business engine. Your company could be investing substantial capital on building in-house operations for hardware, software, and the skills required to maintain them.

However, the onsite IT staff may be limited to certain operations that are less modern, and a lot rarer, than the wide-array of operations needed for Managed Services.

If you’re interested in easing the burden of cost management predictions in the midst of unpredictable requirements, consider Managed Services as your solution.

Interested in how Managed Services could work for you? Learn more here.

 

5 simple steps to boost your digital hygiene in 2017

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5-steps-to-digital-hygiene-managed-solution5 simple steps to boost your digital hygiene in 2017

January is a good time to stop making excuses and get your digital life in order. Here are five inexpensive, money-saving, aggravation-reducing ways to maintain tech, and protect yourself and the environment in the New Year.

By Bill Snyder as written on cio.com
I'm not big on New Year's resolutions. Let's face it, no one keeps them.
Instead of resolutions, here are five simple ways to help you save money, avoid digital disasters, and get your personal technology into top-flight condition. None of the tips are complicated, and I've used them all during the past few years so I know they work.

Audit digital subscriptions

These days, many digital services have auto-renew subscriptions. It's wise to regularly check your credit card statements to see what you're billed for. You may find a charge for a streaming-video service, magazine or newspaper you forgot about but still pay for. You don't have to get all compulsive about it, but you might even put reminders on your calendar to cancel services before trial periods expire or keep a list of all of your paid subscriptions. If nothing else, the list will come in handy at tax time if you itemize deductions.

Buy (and use) a can of compressed air

This one sounds goofy, I know, but the vents on your laptop and the spaces between keys on your keyboard collect what technical experts call "schmutz." Clogged vents can cause overheating, and that can kill your laptop. Junk inside a keyboard can cause keys to jam. A 3.5 ounce can of compressed air costs $4.99 at Best Buy, and Amazon charges $7.34 for a 12-ounce option. Both are a lot cheaper than the new laptop you'd need if you fry your system's motherboard.

Find a password manager to love

Hacking is an epidemic today, but most folks simply aren't going to make and keep track of different passwords for every site. No one can track dozens of passwords without writing them down somewhere, and that, of course, defeats the purpose. But a good password manager can be a lifesaver.
I use LastPass, and its free version now let's you share your passwords across multiple devices. LastPass finally supports Microsoft's Edge browser, as well as Chrome and Firefox. The service generates complex passwords for each site you visit and stores them in what it calls your "vault." You only need to remember one master password. A couple more password mangers that get good reviews are LogMeOnce and 1Password.

Backup, backup and backup again

You've heard it over and over again, but many users are left without their data, music and photos when a drive fails or malware corrupts their systems. Backing up can be a pain, but so can locking your door and keeping your money in a bank. If your digital stuff is important to you, you need to back it up to the cloud or buy a roomy external drive — or both.
Microsoft OneDrive gives you 5GB for free and 50GB for $1.99 a month. Upload speeds are generally slow, so the first time you backup to the cloud will likely take a while. Another option is to buy an external drive. A 2TB drive (or 2,000GB) now costs well under $100, and most of them come with software to automate the backup process.

Recycle old electronic junk

By now, most Americans recycle newspapers, bottles and cans, but many old electronic devices still wind up in a landfill. That's a real problem, because they contain heavy metals and other pollutants than can get into the water table. Instead, take them to an electronics recycler. Most cities have them. To find yours, simply Google "electronics recycling" in your community and you'll quite likely find more than one. If you ditch an old smartphone or over-the-hill PC, make sure you wipe the hard drives and get rid of any personal data.

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10 Tips to Avoid Laptop and Data Loss

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Travelers, hang onto your laptops: One is now stolen every 53 seconds. Here are 10 tips to keep your PC and data safe as we enter the busiest travel season of the year.

1. Back Up Valuable Data Before Traveling. Travelers should back up their data as often as possible to minimize the risk of data loss in the event that their laptop is stolen. Use an encrypted thumb drive to back up sensitive or valuable files and keep it separate from your laptop. Because the information stored on the laptop is often more valuable than the laptop itself, it is important to treat the data with as much care as possible.
2. Use Laptop Recovery and Data Protection Software.
3. Don't Put Your Laptop in Your Checked Luggage. Travelers should always keep their laptop with them at all times. "Apart from not having your valuable and expensive gear under your control, baggage handlers don't know what is in your bag.
4. Clearly Label Your Laptop to Distinguish It from Others at Security Checkpoints. The report advises that when going through the metal detectors, you should hold on to your laptop until the last second. "Clearly labeling the laptop itself will help you find it among other laptops once through the metal detectors," states the report. "Make sure to put your name, contact information and address on the label, as most airport lost-and-founds won't power up the laptop to find out whom it belongs to."
5. Ask to Put Your Laptop in the Hotel Safe When You're Not Using It. Most hotels have a safe that guests can use in their room or at the front desk. It's a good idea to check with the hotel when making a reservation. If there's no safe in which to stow your laptop and you can't take the laptop with you, the report states that you should place it in a secure cabinet in the hotel room.
6. Do Not Log On to Unsecured Wireless Networks. This seems like a no-brainer, but if the wireless network you're logging on to doesn't require you to enter a password, don't use it, notes the Absolute Software report. "Unsecured networks are a two-way street. While anyone can access the network, anyone on the network may be able to access your laptop, and subsequently your information."
7. Do Not Access Financial or Bank Records While Traveling. Another good rule of thumb from the report is to avoid accessing financial or banking records while traveling, especially on public wireless networks.
8. Deselect "Remember Me" When Browsing the Internet. Clicking "remember me" on websites, or allowing the Internet browser to remember passwords or usernames, negates the security those username and passwords offer, according to the report. "If a thief gets a hold of your laptop, they will have the ability to easily steal your online (and possibly offline)."
9. Clear Your History and Cache After Using a Web Browser. "Web browsers remember everything about your session even after you've logged off," states the report. "Before ending an Internet session—particularly on a public laptop—clear the private data (cookies, history, Internet files) stored in the browser. This can be accessed through the 'Tools' menu on most Internet browsers."
10. If You Are Using a Public Computer, Be Aware of Keyboard Loggers and Trackers. The report notes that identity thieves will often install keyboard loggers on to public computers (like those in hotels or public libraries). "These programs invisibly track the keystrokes of unsuspecting victims," the report states. "A thief can come back at any time and see where you've been on the Internet and gather the usernames and passwords you've entered."
10 Tips to Avoid Laptop and Data Loss by By Thomas Wailgum as written on CIO.com

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Adopting modern engineering processes and tools at Microsoft IT

 

Adopting modern engineering processes and tools at Microsoft IT

As written on microsoft.com
Microsoft IT is adopting agile development methods as part of the move to modern engineering. Learn how we’re using Azure and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, and about our processes for agile development and automated testing.
To support our customers and partners, Microsoft IT must respond more quickly to evolving business needs. Taking six months to deliver an application or an update is no longer an option. We need to deliver value faster and more efficiently. To increase our responsiveness, we started the journey to modern engineering. Our goal is to release new functionality every day in a process called continuous integration, continuous delivery.
An important part of this journey is adopting agile development processes and tools. We’re moving to an iterative design process and using agile methods to develop new services and features. And to help our engineers understand how to apply agile methods in their day-to-day work, we’ve embedded a set of practices, called Engineering Fundamentals, into our development environment. We’ve also set up tools and processes to run a project using agile methodology. This includes:
While we’re still working toward our goal of releasing every day, we’ve already shortened our release tempo from as long as six months to as little as two weeks.
Using agile methodology for planning and design
In the modern engineering model, design and architecture are iterative processes. Instead of using the traditional, slow process of creating detailed plans up front, we create sketches of the future state design at a relative level of detail and fidelity. Then we use rapid prototyping to validate and refine our design and get feedback about how it works. Everyone on the team applies deep and shared customer knowledge in every design decision. Throughout the design process, we solicit ideas from a diverse audience and draw upon the work of other teams.
Applying the Engineering Fundamentals
Each sprint team applies them to each project. A checklist defines every step that an engineer should take in the modern engineering approach to do each development task. This encourages engineers to think not only about what they’re delivering, but also about how they’re delivering it.
Engineering Fundamentals serve as requirements, and each fundamental has acceptance criteria that features inherit. Sprint teams make sure that the service they deliver adheres to the fundamentals. New employees use them as guiding principles to learn how to do engineering in our organization. And the Engineering Fundamentals are embedded in Visual Studio Team Services—where the engineers do their daily work—so they’re easy to find and use, as shown here.
The Engineering Fundamentals can be summarized as follows.
Continuous delivery
Dynamic and on-demand environment provisioning. Engineers can, at any time, provision an environment that includes all of the prerequisite components and dependency services, so that when code is deployed, it can run the designated functions.
Continuous integration. Engineers can, at any time, start an unattended build for a check-in that produces a functional build in minutes, which is deployable to any environment without competing for resources.
Continuous validation. Engineers can, at any time, start an automated validation process for a deployment that increases release readiness without manual effort, in minutes.
Continuous service deployment. Engineers can, at any time, start an unattended deployment process for a build that takes minutes in a functional environment without competing for resources.
Customer focus
Safe testing in production. Engineers can, at any time, start tests to learn from experimentation or prove service health.
Know the stakeholders deriving value from the service. Engineers keep a relentless focus on stakeholders: users, customers, and partners. This helps them communicate requirements and translate them into features, user stories, and tasks that produce an output that delights the customer.
Core engineering practices
Ready to code. Engineers can, at any time, check out code to any development environment (local or remote) to compile, run, debug—all within minutes.

Ready to build. Engineers can, at any time, provision a development environment with all of the prerequisite components, so that code can be checked out, compiled, and run.

Componentization. Engineers use componentization to make the codebase easier to build, compose, and deploy.

Security and privacy compliance. All services are highly secure and comply with security and privacy standards. Engineers integrate security infrastructure and tools into the continuous delivery process/pipeline.

Service health, analytics, and monitoring. Engineers use telemetry and data to form insights about the user experience, system health, the business value of the service, and to support automation.

Using Azure to improve agility

On-premises deployment takes a lot of manual work to configure and manage servers. Also, automated deployment in this scenario requires custom PowerShell scripts. To support continuous integration and agile release processes, we moved projects from Microsoft Team Foundation Server running on-premises to Visual Studio Team Services on Azure. Dev/Test environments are now virtualized. We deploy a complete virtual environment with a click. And we use Visual Studio Team Services to create automation pipelines to promote code, create environments, and to kick off tests.

Using Visual Studio Team Services agile and scrum templates, we set up projects in a few minutes. Templates also support uniform processes across teams, so it’s easier for engineers to move between projects. And because release manager includes a library of scripts, we need less custom code to seamlessly promote a build through development, staging, and production.

To increase speed and agility, we incorporate other Azure services into our solutions. When solution components must remain on premises for security reasons, we use Microsoft Azure Hybrid Connection Manager to integrate them with cloud services. New applications are entirely Azure-based.

Automating build and test

The biggest challenge in moving to an agile, continuous delivery model is ensuring the quality of the code. Pushing code into production without enough testing could break the build. Handling this issue in an agile manner requires evaluating risks and mitigating them proactively. Safety is important, but so is knowing which risks are acceptable.

To manage risks, we put modern engineering tools and processes in place that help prevent production problems and that mitigate problems before customers experience them. Test automation is an important part of this. Previously, code was handed off to the test team, and they executed one or more tests against each component of a feature or solution. For example, on a Bing site, the ability to navigate to a search page might be one test case. Another might be the ability to see the search box and another the ability to type in the search box. Another might be to get a set of results. Each test succeeds or fails. Testing each component separately in this manner is time-consuming.

Today we use a different approach. Engineers write code for functional tests based on end-to-end scenarios. Scenario-based testing puts the customer experience first. It addresses these questions: What is a customer really going to do? What are the key scenarios? What must work? What are the critical elements to test? How can we automate the tests? We no longer have explicit tests for each component, but rather use functional tests of outcomes. For example, a functional test might get search results for a query. To get faster turnaround, the team determines what minimum level of quality is required to ship the code. The goal is to test and correct failures faster.

Production-ready check-ins

We use build definitions in Visual Studio Team Services to support gated, production-ready check-ins. Code must pass tests to be promoted to the next phase of testing or deployment. If code fails to pass a test in any phase, the engineer must fix the code and then check it back in for retesting.

The phases are as follows:

Improving business value and customer satisfaction

We still have a long way to go on our journey to modern engineering, but our efforts are already yielding benefits. We’re able to maintain a consistent and predictable release cycle and deliver updates and enhancements frequently. This way our development efforts yield business value faster. Using single source control within Visual Studio Team Services has helped us increase code reuse for more efficient development. Also, applications are “production ready” at release, and rework is reduced. Finally, breaking down releases into smaller chunks has reduced risk because all features represent two weeks of effort rather than several months.

Best practices

We found some practices that worked well when adopting the processes and tools for modern engineering.

To run fast, first slow down

Balancing the need to make infrastructure improvements with ongoing business needs for new functionality was a challenge. Stakeholders agreed on priorities and timelines to make sure that we would lay a good foundation. We made the right investments early, such as in test automation. Changing the infrastructure and moving from six-month to two-week release cycles took about a year. Before we could run fast, we first had to slow down.

Let one team manage migration to Visual Studio Team Services

A single team was responsible for moving projects from Team Foundation Server to Visual Studio Team Services. Team members became familiar with the steps and tools involved and handled the process more efficiently as they gained experience with multiple migration projects. This process saved time and headaches.

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On Demand Webinar: Blended IT is Best for Strategic Business Outcomes

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On Demand Webinar: Blended IT is Best for Strategic Business Outcomes

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Webinar presented by Jackie Weiner, Vice President Customer Engagement at Managed Solution.

Learn more about Blended IT and what a hybrid IT department could do for you! Tune in to the webinar below to see how using both in-house and outsourced IT can simplify your business, save you time and money, and improve business operations.

 

TOPICS:

-What is Blended IT
-Why Blended IT could be a fit for you
-Myths about Blended IT
-How Blended IT has already helped someone like you
-Types of Blended/Hybrid IT models available

 

Missed the live webinar with Jackie? No problem! Catch it here on-demand:

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On Demand Webinar: Blended IT is Best for Strategic Business Outcomes from Managed Solution on Vimeo.

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Channel Partner Calculator

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CHANNEL PARTNER CALCULATOR

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MANAGED SOLUTION'S CHANNEL PARTNER PROGRAM

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The Managed Solution Channel Partner Program provides your business the opportunity to drive profitability and growth, while differentiating from competitors. The program helps partners deliver more innovative technology solutions and services to provide for their customers' business needs.

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