Englewood, Colorado — Zunesis, announced that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has honored Zunesis on its 2023 Tech Elite 250 list.
This annual list features solution providers of all sizes across the U.S and Canada that have differentiated themselves by achieving the highest level and largest breadth of certifications and specializations from key technology vendors in the infrastructure, cloud, and security spaces.
Businesses rely on solution providers to maintain the highest levels of technical prowess across critical products and services to help them meet today’s IT challenges and take advantage of the benefits of cutting-edge solutions. To meet these demands, solution providers such as strategic service providers, systems integrators, managed service providers and value-added resellers strive to maintain high levels of training and certification from IT vendors and achieve the highest tiers within those vendors’ partner programs.
“CRN’s Tech Elite 250 list features the leading solution providers in the IT channel with the most in-depth technical knowledge, expertise, and certifications for providing the highest level of service for their customers,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “These solution providers have continued to extend their aptitudes and abilities across various technologies and IT practices, demonstrating their commitment and value to their customers.
Coverage of the Tech Elite 250 will be featured in the April issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.CRN.com/techelite250.
About Zunesis
Zunesis can help your organization compete in the digital economy with infrastructure transformation aligned to your business goals. We have more than 18 years of experience serving customers throughout the Rocky Mountain Region and Southwestern U.S., including Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada. Our staff of solution architects have decades of expertise and in-depth product knowledge to customize IT solutions with success. www.zunesis.com
Follow Zunesis: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Zunesis Contact:
Rachael Stiedemann
Zunesis
rachael.stiedemann@zunesis.com
About The Channel Company
The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers, and end users. Backed by more than 40 years of unequalled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com
Follow The Channel Company: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
© 2023. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
The Channel Company Contact:
Natalie Lewis
The Channel Company
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the world of storage and data management at an unprecedented pace. This emerging technology is not only streamlining the way organizations store, process, and manage enormous volumes of data, but it’s also significantly improving the insights gleaned from this information. Offering advanced algorithms and machine learning capabilities, AI is powering the future of storage and data management—and is expected to transform the way businesses handle and use their data.
As organizations generate and store ever-increasing amounts of data, AI will continue to play a crucial role in helping businesses manage and utilize that data to drive innovation, optimize operations, and make data-driven decisions that fuel growth.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), with solutions like HPE InfoSight, is leading the charge in harnessing the potential of AI-driven storage and data management technologies. At Zunesis, we are committed to helping you capitalize on HPE’s AI-powered solutions to ensure a seamless, optimized, and forward-thinking data management strategy tailored to your specific needs and objectives.
For more information about how to transform your storage and data management processes with HPE powered by AI, contact us here.
In today’s digitally driven world, businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on network connectivity to operate effectively. But with increased connectivity also comes increased risk exposure. Cyberattacks are on the rise, and more businesses are succumbing to security breaches, data loss, and other security-related issues. In fact, cybercrime damages are expected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025.
Your ability to protect your network from cyberattacks and unauthorized access while maintaining network performance and compliance with regulatory requirements is not a nice-to-have—it’s essential. With a Network Access Control (NAC) system in place, you can safeguard your network infrastructure and your data while maintaining business continuity.
NAC is a security solution that restricts access to network resources based on users’ identities, roles, and devices. Today, more businesses are turning to NAC solutions, and here’s why:
By implementing an NAC system, your IT team can ensure the network is secure, reliable, and always available, while supporting regulatory compliance, network management, and network performance.
At Zunesis, we can help you protect your network infrastructure, safeguard sensitive data, and maintain business continuity with ClearPass from Aruba, a leading provider of NAC solutions that help businesses secure their network infrastructure while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. Providing robust network access control with granular role-based policies for authentication, authorization, continuous monitoring and enforcement, Aruba ClearPass gives you anywhere, anytime connectivity while supporting simplified network security operations and enforcing security policies.
Downtime costs businesses an average of $84,650 per hour. A natural disaster or cyber-attack can result in weeks of downtime for a business that’s not prepared, delivering a massive financial blow. Even worse, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 40% of small and mid-sized businesses never reopen after a natural disaster, and an additional 25% reopen but fail within a year. These statistics are staggering—and sadly, we’ve seen scenarios like these play out many times with our clients.
The threat of man-made and natural catastrophes is real—and in most cases, it’s something you can’t control. What you can control, however, are the safeguards you have in place to help your business recover when disaster strikes.
DRaaS is a pay-as-you go cloud service model that delivers backup services in a managed data center to ensure access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster. It gives an organization a total system backup for rapid restoration of data servers and applications in the event of system failure. By replicating and backing up all cloud data and applications, DRaaS protects data, limits downtime, and shortens Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) when a disaster happens.
At Zunesis, we can help you achieve modern data protection with HPE GreenLake for data protection. Ask us about how your company can install a free trial of HPE Greenlake backup and recovery.
For more information about HPE’s industry-leading backup, recovery, and ransomware protection capabilities, contact us today.
According to IDC research, businesses are prioritizing resiliency and agility as foundational elements of their IT strategy. They want more visibility, cross-platform control, better data management, and protection from the edge to the core. While consumption-based models are playing an increasingly important role in powering those goals to accelerate digital transformation, many business leaders are hesitant when it comes to Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). Some still think of as-a-service in terms of software, compute, and storage. However, as budgets grow tighter amid an inflationary economic environment, organizations need a better way to predict the ebbs and flows of the network, with flexibility to adapt as business needs change. That’s where NaaS comes into play.
Among the newest as-a-service approaches, NaaS combines hardware, software, services, and support in a pay-as-you-go model that delivers network services on a subscription basis. Allowing users to consume network infrastructure through flexible OpEx subscriptions, NaaS helps businesses shift their focus from managing their architecture to driving business outcomes.
As market conditions continue to change at a rapid clip, your business needs to be one step ahead of your competition. With NaaS solutions from Aruba, Zunesis can help you move from reactive network management to a proactive approach that uses the network to deliver innovation and power profound business outcomes.
For more information about how you can accelerate business outcomes with Aruba’s subscription-based network consumption model, contact us here.
Securing or Hardening aims to protect and secure your IT infrastructure against cyberattacks by reducing the attack surface. The attack surface is all the different points where an attacker can to attempt to gain access or damage the equipment. This blog is focused on securing Servers and storage.
The goal of server hardening is to remove all unnecessary components and access in order to maximize security. This is easiest when a server performs a single function. For example, a web server needs to be visible to the internet whereas a database server needs to be more protected. It will often be visible only to the web servers or application servers and not directly connected to the internet.
If a single server is providing multiple functions, there may be a conflict of security requirements. It is best practice not to mix application functions on the same server.
The information below provides a starting point for implementing hardening policies. Some of these only apply to the servers, but others apply to all devices on the network (Servers, Storage, Networking).
Contact Zunesis today if you would like more information on hardening your infrastructure.
It’s that item on your to do list that you often ignore and say you will do later – software updates. Not only may you be missing out on the latest improvements, but you can create a major security risk for your organization by ignoring these updates.
One of the largest data breaches on record is the Equifax data breach in 2017. It exposed the personal information of 147 million people. Hackers were able to get in due to a known system vulnerability for which a security patch had been issued two months before the breach. Unfortunately, no one at Equifax applied the patch. It cost the company $700 million in a settlement reached with the FTC.
Before you get distracted by another project or think that you can wait to do your next update, here are a few reasons why software updates matter.
Security is the number one reason to make sure you take care of updates as soon as possible. Software vulnerabilities often give cyber criminals access to one’s computer and plant malware. Malware enables one to take control of computers and steal information. It also can encrypt files, documents and other programs so they are unusable. Security patches block these open doors in the software to protect a device from attacks.
Risks from third-party vendors account for over two-thirds of all data breaches today. Third-party applications often interact with the internet. This makes them highly vulnerable to ransomware. Hackers know companies often overlook updating various programs that don’t seem important.
Cybercriminals want to exploit the most vulnerabilities as possible simultaneously. They are constantly searching for popular third-party programs. They will jump on an opportunity to hack millions of users who delayed updating their software.
On a positive side, software updates can give you access to the latest improvements and remove the old ones that are out of date. A software program may get a new shot of stability — no more crashing. Or an update might boost program performance — more speed. Some of these new features could save you time and most importantly enable the software to keep working and not shut down.
Your Data is your most valuable asset at any organization. Often hackers will search for personal data such as financial information, passwords, usernames or other documents with sensitive information. They will look to sell this information to the dark web and commit crimes. Allowing your customer’s information to be vulnerable can impact your company’s reputation and future business.
Just like your vehicle needs regular maintenance to help improve its performance, your software can benefit from updates. Bugs are often found in programs or enhancements are made to improve the overall experience.
With technology constantly changing, often older software will not be compatible with new technologies without the appropriate update. Microsoft, Google and Apple are frequently updating their technology interfaces. Most of us use multiple devices so compatibility is essential.
It important to update your software but beware of fake messages or popups out there. Pop-ups are typically a scam to get you to click somewhere that you should not. Close the pop-up and go directly to the vendor website to look for downloads. There a suspicious emails making their rounds stating that your updates are past due and make an update now. It is best to reach out to the vendor directly.
You may have the option with some software to do automatic updates. Some software makes it possible to choose the time of day you update or even how often. Scheduling and automating your updates this way will make them less of a nuisance.
Like ignoring the check engine light on your car is something you shouldn’t do, the same goes for software updates. They can help protect personal information as well as company data. Contact Zunesis to find out more about how we can help.
Keeping on topic with how our country is fairing, I thought I would touch on one of the many elephants in the room that often goes unnoticed or is ‘conveniently’ forgotten about. That elephant is named Disaster Recovery, and an organization might be called a ‘Dumbo’ if they don’t have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place.
First, what constitutes a disaster in the IT world? A disaster in the IT world is defined by many different categories:
All of the above seem to be happening on a daily basis. The question is no longer if this is going to happen to an organization, it’s WHEN is it going to happen to an organization? There’s plenty of natural disasters all year long, and they seem to continue to increase in severity.
Thieves are getting more and more creative and are constantly thinking of innovative ways of hacking into even some of the most fortified infrastructures. Just ask Epsilon, Facebook, Sony, Yahoo, etc. Ransomware is nerve-racking to say the least. An organization could shell out hundreds, if not millions of dollars on the hope of possibly getting data back. Talk about a gamble! You’d have better luck at the Blackjack table. Power Outages seem to be more frequent now than ever. Rolling blackouts seems to be the trend in many states, and it’s only mid-June!
And, then there is the human race and our ability to be create a cataclysmic mistake because he or she might have been having a bad day. We’ve all been there, and we all know that sometimes the slightest little thing will set us off and put a constraint on our ability to focus on the smallest of details. Even worse, there are many times where an organization knows they need to do something as soon as possible, but instead they try to wish it away or the problem will go away by itself. Disasters are like a Cancer; they aren’t going away unless treated.
These stats from Markel Insurance Company are shocking and should open some eyes.
Now, I am not here to sell insurance to you, but to create more awareness out there that if an organization doesn’t have a plan in place, many will be filing unemployment WHEN that day happens.
Before that plan is created, it may be a good idea to have an overall Disaster Recovery Assessment which will look at a company’s Server, Storage and Network Infrastructure. What usually happens is that a specialized Engineer will be onsite and also remote-in to a specific infrastructure and document the existing environment. From that environment, an Engineer will provide recommendations based on best practices and a ballpark figure of what it’s going to cost to make sure that the Disaster Recovery Plan will minimize the pain from the actual disaster as much as possible.
There are some organizations out there whose pride is bigger than their brains. Don’t let ego get in the way and be a know-it-all. The reality is that organizations don’t know-it-all. Employees have been doing the work of two or three people since the early 2000s. This Disaster Recovery Plan should not be added to their list of daily duties. Swallow the pride and get a team out there who specializes in Disaster Recovery. They know what to look for, ask the right questions, uncover a weakness or threat that has gone unnoticed and may even reduce the risk of a disaster that was right around the corner.
I am not an alarmist, but a realist. It’s going to happen to every organization. How prepared are you if it happens tomorrow? Good luck sleeping with that floating around in your head tonight. Contact Zunesis for an assessment of your current environment and for recommendations on Disaster Recovery solutions.
How many changes or transformations has IT undergone in the past decade?
Business has been historically transacted in the traditional sense, on premises offices, on premises staff, and on premises infrastructure (both hardware and software). Sure, there have always been the need for remote users, but always the outlier. Business has strived for collaboration. This was typically done again through on premises means: a conference room, a white board, face to face communication, and that old dinosaur, the printer.
In 2017, Microsoft launched an initiative to achieve a mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. To accomplish this mission, they decided they would need to transform the way they do IT. Microsoft had operated like a traditional IT shop, highly reactive to circumstances and more focused on the technology and the experience. The team transformed to be “vision-led” focused on building and deploying the right solutions to meet the needs of people, not just deploying the latest technology.
“That transformation culminated with our transition to becoming Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. At the core of that transformation is an obsession with the needs of our employees that transcends tools and infrastructure and extends to the entirety of their daily experience, from the day they’re hired to their eventual retirement. We steward their digital experience through every dimension of their employment, ensuring they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure needed to be productive on the job no matter where they are or what they do.” (Microsoft, 2022)
From that experience, Microsoft introduced The Modern Workplace in 2018. Virtualizing the workplace utilizing Microsoft 365, and other online work platforms that provide all the applications, storage, and communication solutions a team needs to get their work done from wherever they have an internet connection.
Then, not a foreign concept but definitely not mainstream.
Enter the pandemic.
Now, a very mainstream concept, in fact, most every organization on the planet is already there or trying to figure out how to get there. The pandemic was a massive shove for the technology world, a shock to the system which required immediate access for teams to get their work done from wherever they have an internet connection – the very definition of Microsoft’s Modern Workplace. One great example of this shove was Microsoft Teams – the ability to have a meeting and collaborate from anywhere with a connection. Many a business were able to get through the pandemic with the help of Microsoft Teams.
As previously stated, the Microsoft Modern Workplace is made up of online platforms which provide applications, storage, and communications to provide the employees they need to be successful. These tools reside within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. For this blog, we are focusing on Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 can be broken down into two segments: Communication and Collaboration; and Productivity and Automation.
Communication and Collaboration products are best known by their common names: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and Teams.
Productivity and Automation products are best known by the Power Suite (Power Apps, Power Automate, and PowerBI).
Both groups riding atop Office 365 Groups, Microsoft Graph, and Security and Compliance.
Navigating Microsoft licensing can be a very daunting task. Organizations are often unsure of where to begin when going through the licensing options. Achieving the Modern Workplace comes in many different shapes and sizes, and most of the time there are different licensing options for each.
Most case studies referenced by Microsoft share the same beginning steps. 1. Establish anywhere working and collaboration and 2. Microsoft Teams. Step 1 is usually Office/Microsoft 365 and Step 2 is self-explanatory, Microsoft Teams.
Now the trick is figuring those out:
Obviously, these are some summary explanations of common license packages. But it does show how complex the choosing the right licenses can be? I definitely recommend having an expert, a Microsoft CSP Partner, such as Zunesis to assist in your version of the Microsoft Modern Workplace.
As the saying goes April Showers Bring May Flowers. Better yet, the IT hurdles of 2020 brought much needed improvements in technology today.
As we all know, the dark days of 2020 caused much chaos and angst across the world. It affected industries and people in a myriad of ways. The IT industry was, of course, not omitted from the all-of-the-sudden-problems. Leaders in the industry scrambled for answers and resolutions to issues that seemed to arise overnight.
The beauty of hardships, however, is that they create resiliency. The silver lining from 2020 is that issues of yesterday bring knowledge and technological enhancements of today. Namely, we are dealing with improved security, flexibility of remote working, and the much-anticipated receipt of previously purchased goods.
In the world of IT, if we are not growing and changing, we are dying. Evolving is a major part of the industry. This is partly due to the nature of the beast. In this case, it is also due to the people and crisis that threaten company and individual livelihood – otherwise known as ransomware attacks and cyber hackers.
A few (of many) advances in technology that have taken off over the past few years are:
Now, of course, much of the above was around prior to 2020, but the focus on making these things higher quality with increased functionality has taken off.
Creating a remote work environment is not easy. It’s not easy when you have the time and resources on your side to do-so, but without thorough planning to execute, it seems almost impossible. Aside from lacking time and resources, we can’t forget about the difficulties in getting our hands on the needed technologies to make this happen too.
As companies struggled to work through the difficulties of enabling a remote work environment in 2020/2021, we are now able to reap the benefits of IT’s hard work.
Positives that have come from a rushed remote set-up include:
In 2021, depending on the product and the manufacturer, some customers were waiting in line for goods to arrive anywhere from 3-12 months out from the purchase date. Some of the many challenges with this, include :
In 2022, we have slowly started closing the gap between purchase date and arrival of product. Though we are not to the finish line quite yet. Again, depending on product and manufacturer, we are seeing ship dates creep back down. The most exciting thing about shipment of product that you bought 12 months ago? You likely finally have that in your hands, and that’s a great feeling! Companies are becoming more familiar with how to handle this (Purchasing further in advance, changing the way we timeline future projects, and understanding the right questions to ask when it comes to support on product).
The silver lining is alive and well and the hope is that we only continue to grow past the hardships of yesteryear! Reach out to Zunesis today to find solutions to help your organization bloom.