MSP News Weekly Podcast: August 22, 2014

FBI to Speak at MSPWorld Fall Conference

Security has always been a recurring theme at MSPWorld conferences. We figured, what better source for cyber crime and cyber security than the FBI. Special Agent E. Brent Watkins will be address MSPWorld delegates on Thursday October 16, 2014. Cyber crime threats, prevention, and the role MSPs play in helping protect organizations and individuals will be highlighted. There will also be a Q&A session so you won't want to miss this conference.

IBM/Lenovo Get US Federal Approval For Acquisition

IBM and Lenovo both got good news this past week when US Federal regulators approved the sale of the IBM System X division to Lenovo. This deal was not very publicized but did receive a great deal of scrutiny due to a number of factors, most notably that the US government currently has a number of System X equipment installed, which may have to be addressed once control of this division comes under a Chinese company.

The deal has considerable upside for both companies; IBM gets to offload another division allowing it to stay focused on the cloud and Lenovo get's a powerful server division to compliment its desktop acquisition (also from another IBM acquisition in 2004). I think we should expect to see some big things coming from both companies in the near future.

Microsoft Azure Has Outage

Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, experienced a a service outage for approximately 5 hours this week. While not really a major story, unless you were one of those who were affected by Azure's service disruption, these types of public cloud outages really underscore the importance of keeping perspective when discussing cloud computing. We shouldn't be happy about it, by any means, but it does give yet another opportunity for MSPs to talk with their customers about the great variety of cloud computing offerings available to them.

Dell & CloudRunner Form Relationship

CloudRunner, owned by longtime MSPAlliance member John Gorst of InsynQ, has announced that Dell will be reselling its cloud application solutions to MSPs. This is a unique relationship in that Dell is the reseller and CloudRunner the provider. Could this be a prelude to an acquisition by Dell?

Hostway Targets MSPs

Hosting provider Hostway just announced that it will be targeting MSPs for a new partner program called CloudConnex. More information can be found at www.hostway.com

Amazon Sells Cloud into US Military

Public cloud provider Amazon is not authorized to host unclassified data on its cloud platform. Amazon states that it is the first cloud provider to have this distinction.