Sometimes we associate “big” with power and success, but being small doesn’t mean you can’t compete—you just need to be smarter at creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Here are 10 things you can do as a small managed service provider (MSP) to punch above your weight.

Administrators are tasked with configuring interfaces on network devices more than any other single thing. This makes sense—interfaces are the main points of connectivity, sending and receiving traffic throughout an organization. Configuring interfaces can be deceptively easy. Switchports might require a VLAN assignment, and often function with no other configuration at all. Router interfaces can be up and running with only an IP address.

The Internet of Things (IoT) market is evolving at a rapid pace and while some of the early predictions for tens of billions of connected devices by 2022 have proved to be wide of the mark, the use cases are so varied that explosive adoption is likely. However, the encroachment of IoT into all aspects of our personal and business lives brings with it plenty of concerns, from security and data ownership, to business models that acknowledge and enable the global nature of connected devices.

Automation. It’s a common term. Some may call it a buzzword, even. When it comes to building a network, it’s usually not your first consideration. After all, what’s most important is getting users and devices online—and keeping them there. Isn’t automating the network an advanced step? Are we even capable of making network monitoring and management automatic?

SD-WAN is one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market. Designed correctly, it will deliver unique advantages, enabling true digital transformation while reducing costs and management time and increasing application performance, availability, visibility and user experience. While the benefits of SD-WAN are obvious, we know it can often be a challenge to select the appropriate approach to design, implementation, and ongoing management.

The National Retail Federation forecasted historic holidays sales this 2021 season, as retailers grappled with high volumes of in-store and digital traffic, along with a need for full visibility into the user experience. They turned to monitoring their Point-of-Sale (POS) systems for key analytics that revealed unique, real-time details about what customers were experiencing.

Now that we’ve said goodbye to 2021, we are on our way to completing 20 years of IT transformation. We are taking account of every milestone, every accolade, every cheer from our users, partners, and employees to show the world what turned out to be an eventful year.

Troubleshooting container connectivity issues and performance hotspots in Kubernetes clusters can be a frustrating exercise in a dynamic environment where hundreds, possibly thousands of pods are continually being created and destroyed.