The other day, I came across the results of a recent Symantec survey of small and midsize businesses examining the effects of virtualization , cloud computing, and mobility on disaster preparedness .
I was heartened to see results showing that more than a third of these smaller and midsize business decision-makers took disaster preparedness into account when deciding how they’d venture into virtualization, mobility, and the cloud.
Data center discussions inevitably come around to the issue of standards. And while I agree that standards, like the recently released SSAE 16, are good to consider when you’re data center shopping, you should never rely on a facility being “in compliance” as the exclusive determinate for your selection.
Standards should be the place where you begin your search. After you’ve checked off the boxes that ensure compliance with whatever standards your industry requires, dig a bit deeper.
The bad old days of video conferencing — when systems were complex, clunky, and costly — meant that a video conference happened only between two expensively-equipped conference rooms that left participants feeing disconnected from the conversation. Average participants (read: not those in the top executive suite) needed to reserve the video conference space, so meetings were rarely spontaneous.
Not surprisingly, video conferencing remained niched. Regular people (read: not top executives) found that video conferences were simply more trouble than they were worth.
As more and more workers function remotely and as travel budgets continue to shrink, the need for quality video conferencing from any device located anywhere has increased dramatically.
And yet the high price of hardware combined with the complexities involved with operation and maintenance have rendered traditional video conferencing solutions impractical for many, if not all, organizations.
It’s all been too costly to scale, too dependent on expensive QoS networks — and the need to reserve resources in order to conduct successful meetings has created far too much hassle.
What’s needed? Well, to begin with, a video conferencing solution has to be high-definition . It should be able to span mobile, desktop, room systems, and immersive telepresence environments. It should be easy to dynamically scale to changing business requirements and adapt to growth. And, of course, it should be simple to use.
As I pointed out in my last entry, the ability to field web and mobile applications is quickly becoming a business necessity for even small enterprises.
If you’re lacking the substantial developer expertise needed to accomplish that — and most smaller and midsize organizations are — than your best option is to search out an accomplished web/mobile app development services provider.
The numbers are more than impressive: 4.8 billion mobile handsets currently in use — and 19% of those are smartphones, up 2% from just last year.
Then there’s the Internet, which now claims some 2.2 billion users , 1.3 billion of whom access it via some sort of personal computer (desktop, laptop, ultrabook, netbook, tablet).
