“Oh, they’ll never pay for that.” It’s a phrase Leigh Wood, the Director of Node IT Solutions, hears a lot from his fellow MSPs. It’s easy to understand why. When you’re used to hearing price push-back on every contract, selling something beyond your basic managed services agreement seems impossible.

Today, we live in a world in which, the use of new technology is greatly enhancing the ability to communicate with each other. The Internet has been globalized very fast and relationships are continuously changing and evolving in all areas.

There seems to be a smart version of everything these days. From coffee machines to aquarium thermometers, if you can think of a device that can benefit from an internet connection, it probably already exists. It’s not really a surprise. The IoT market is on the brink of explosion, as Intel projects 200 billion IoT devices will be added to our networks by 2020, up from 15 billion in 2015. And they’re not all for personal use.

Load balancers play a key component in any cloud-based deployment. By distributing incoming traffic across backend servers or services, load balancers help improve responsiveness and increase the availability of your applications. Monitoring load balancers is important for analyzing traffic patterns and troubleshooting performance and availability issues.

From legacy internet service to 5G possibilities, Spiceworks examines the evolution of telecommunications in the workplace. The internet has been a transformative force around the globe, both at home and in the workplace. Organizations rely on internet service providers (ISPs) to provide vital access to email, the World Wide Web, and cloud services that connect us. As communications and commerce increasingly take place online, there’s no question internet access is crucial to business success.

Monitoring has always relied on both network administration and network traffic analysis. Both fields provide ways to obtain data that allows us to obtain information about the general state of the platform. It is easy to understand that when faced with, for example, an application performance problem, we want to be able to observe and evaluate the traffic generated, and this is just what network traffic analysis does.

All over the internet, there are ominous rumblings that “768K Day” is on its way—and it’s likely going to happen before May is over. And while some ISPs think this BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) milestone is being overhyped like Y2K and Cisco assures us the sky isn’t falling, that doesn’t mean we’ll all be left unscathed. If you’re an MSP who hasn’t heard about 768K Day yet, brace yourself—you could be in for a serious connectivity headache.

Understanding the context of an IT incident can greatly reduce the MTTR and enhance the ability to determine the root cause. In an IT environment, ‘context’ is used to refer to the subset of information necessary to troubleshoot and diagnose an incident, or event. For some scenarios, the context may be the downstream dependencies after a high availability pair of firewalls goes offline, and in others, it may be the datastore in contention from multiple VMs.

When you’re working with EC2 or containers, VPCs have long been viewed as a must-have. Without them, you will face a constant barrage of attacks aimed at your infrastructure and OS, such as brute force login attacks. But are VPCs still needed when it comes to AWS Lambda? What do you actually get when you put a function inside a VPC? And what are the downsides?

Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted entire teams of engineers to the project to push it to production readiness. Since 1.0 has been released recently, I wanted to write down some of the things that confused me coming from a strictly Kubernetes only world where we have Ingress controllers and Service load balancers and how Istio takes these same concepts but on stimulants.