“Cloud” has been a buzzword within the industry for the past decade. In fact, some even claim it’s “old news.” And while others may be looking to the next big thing, visionaries in the space view the cloud movement as the first step of a monumental shift in both the IT industry and the world. This shift is driven by connections with other waves of innovation as established technologies (such as mobility) continue to evolve and new movements like the Internet of Things (IoT) continue to rise. Cloud will play a major role in fueling efficiency, profitability and collaboration in the very near future.

In my recent posts, I’ve focused on initiatives in the Federal space and steps Avnet Government Solutions is taking to protect Uncle Sam’s goods. As summer wraps up I wanted to drill down on the other side of the public sector. Last month we attended XChange SLED University and then road tripped to the Sunshine State for NASCIO a couple weeks ago. The state, local and education (SLED) industry provides a lot of white space and the time to capitalize is now. But first, let’s take a closer look at what SLED organizations are doing to shake things up.

Tech Data just announced an expanded agreement with Veeam Software, a leading provider of availability, backup, replication and virtualization management solutions. Adding Veeam to Tech Data Cloud’s portfolio will enable solution providers in the United States to offer Veeam’s Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions.

What does DevOps look like? For one healthcare company, DevOps wasn’t pretty. Sure it had a more mature set of processes than competitors and for the most part its IT environment worked, but there were still a lot of manual processes that made its IT environment complex – it wasn’t scalable or user-friendly.

As a managed service provider (MSP), it can be challenging to get cloud solutions in front of your existing and potential customers—but hybrid technology solutions should absolutely be part of your offerings. These challenges are made even more complex by the expanding cloud ecosystem made up of born-in-the-cloud technology vendors, legacy technology providers and purpose-built cloud-focused independent software vendors (ISV). Despite these challenges, there are many different ways to share solutions and execute the provisioning once a decision has been made.

Organizations of all sizes are using Microsoft Office 365 (Office 365) to power their websites. It’s such a hot topic that Microsoft just did a webinar about it.