Most industry data suggests that the lion’s share of sales in the HCI market are going to Nutanix or VMware, so why consider anything else? Well if you’re thinking about building a hybrid cloud, read on…

To say it has been an unusual year is an understatement, and we still have a lot to face in the coming months; one of those being a new period of austerity and potential recession. When times get hard, organisations will naturally review their budgets and projects they have on the roadmap, and tough decisions will have to be made about where to make investments. Now for many people that will be investing in things such as business continuity and remote working solutions to prepare for the “new normal”, but what happens to the other projects?

This Sunday marks the 8th year of World Backup Day. What began as a light-hearted campaign to encourage end-users to create secure copies of their treasured photos and files is slowing morphing into a message for the business community: without data there is no business.

Data Management has always been a challenge for organisations and with the changing landscape of how businesses run their IT, this has never been more accurate. For years, many organisations have had a siloed approach to data management. And by that I mean data is put into buckets - whether that be on premises on traditional architecture or in a private cloud - through to branch offices with their own silos of data. Add into this the advent of public cloud and the utilisation of multiple public clouds, companies have found themselves with pockets of data spread across the whole organisation. As a result, many companies have approached data management in a similar way - with the approach being siloed, rather than an overarching data management strategy.

Having the ability to run VMware virtual machines on Microsoft Azure brings many cloud benefits to the mainstream, while being overlooked by cloud-native purists. It’s a question of perspective and, as with most things in life, different people have differing views.

Back in October, leading IT channel publication CRN hosted its inaugural Women in Channel Awards. Five Logicalis UK employees were shortlisted, with two going on to win their categories! And now, five are on the A-List!

If you’re attending next week’s UCISA Leadership Conference, make sure to visit the Logicalis stand 83-90 to meet our higher education experts and see first hand how technology can create a connected campus to improve student safety, reduce costs and transform experiences.

The role of the CIO is transforming, from its position in the C-suite hierarchy to the very footprint it covers. This week, we welcome guest blogger Paul Pugh, Mason Advisory Director, to give his view on the Logicalis Global CIO survey findings and tell us what’s keeping his clients awake at night.

Peel away the shiny facade of any great business and you’ll no doubt see the same things. Data. People. Process. This combination, when correctly tuned, is the critical factor in the success of businesses today. So I’m always surprised when I work with clients who haven’t yet discovered this ‘secret sauce’ and who aren’t yet driving value from their data.