CompTIA Blog

There is a common problem amongst technology business owners. That commonality is failure to answer a question about their business that typically starts out with, “What are the steps you use to do X?”Sometimes it’s dependent on the subject, but often this question can’t be clearly answered. The subject could be sales, marketing, financial, service delivery, employee or even client related. Regardless of the question, there is a relatively high chance that silence will be the response when a bus ...

Enacted last year, the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 established an “Intermediary Lending Pilot Program” to provide direct loans to non-profit intermediaries for the purpose of making loans to small business.  This pilot program will terminate after three years.  Under this pilot, loans of as high as $1 million will be made to 20 organizations in 2011, and these organizations are required to use this money to make small business loans of as high as $200,000 in mostly underserved markets.This p ...

Legal professionals are among the earliest tech adopters, at least pertaining to the toys they love to buy (whether they need them or not). From iPads to the latest mobile smart phone devices, many lawyers enjoy being on the “cutting edge” in all aspects of their lives. With an estimated 1.2 million licensed attorneys in the U.S. according to the American Bar Association—almost 75 percent of them in a private practice—it’s a market that solution providers need to be actively involved in. With un ...

The main challenge to successfully implementing health IT isn’t the technology aspect, but rather how to understand, digitize and improve clinician workflow, speakers at the CompTIA Tech Summit said on Thursday. “You are re-engineering the way medicine is practiced in healthcare settings,” said Bethany Gilboard, director of health technologies for the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. Physicians can sometimes be resistant to a new model of patient care, said Charles J ...

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for virtually every industry, thus creating a growing demand for professionals with security skills. Cyber foundations is the second fastest growing job field in the U.S. between now and 2018, second only to healthcare. But where are these people going to come from? A hot-button topic at CompTIA Breakaway, Joseph Cuenco, executive director at The Science Center of Pinellas County in Florida, gave CAPP Academic education leaders a glimpse into the innovative cu ...

Cybersecurity experts at the CompTIA Tech Summit today shared a chilling scenario of the current threat level in the world of mobile devices and applications"Right now mobile security is a pretty dicey place," said Andrew Hoog, chief investigative officer, viaForensics. "It's too much for an IT department to take on, but it's too big an issue to ignore. It's a massive hole.""The numbers of users, devices and applications are massive," said Brian Contos, director, global security and risk managem ...

Security considerations in a cloud computing universe are real, but not much different than the threats organizations wrestle with today in a traditional networking environment."This is not a new set of issues," said Ellen Rubin, founder, CloudSwitch. "The issues are the same that you have in your own internal environment."Rubin was one of the speakers on a "Security and Cloud Migration" panel at the inaugural CompTIA Tech Summit, co-located with CompTIA Breakaway 2011.Just like in-house IT depa ...

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for virtually every industry, thus creating a growing demand for professionals with security skills.  Cyber foundations is the second fastest growing job field in the U.S. between now and 2018, second only to healthcare. But where are these people going to come from?A hot-button topic at CompTIA Breakaway, Joseph Cuenco, executive director at The Science Center of Pinellas County in Florida, gave CAPP Academic education leaders a glimpse into the innovative cur ...

Protecting bare drives is imperative while storing and transporting digital data as spills and falls could be catastrophic to a hard drive. CRU-DataPort has redesigned and improved its anti-static drive case for bare 3.5" hard drives and 2.5” notebook drives. CRU-Dataport was one of 160 vendors showcasing their solutions to help VARs grow their business at Breakaway.DriveBoxes add minimal height to a drive making them more compact to steadily store on a shelf and archive data or access files. CR ...

At Breakaway this week in Washington, D.C, more than 160 vendors showed their latest and greatest to 1,000 key industry players.  In our series of posts covering what’s new, check out these six vendors and how they can help solution providers grow their businesses.Calyptix Security released its Beta version of its “Single Pane of Glass” management platform, dubbed SPS v1.0, at Breakaway.  The SPS will provide a platform for IT professionals and managed service providers to centrally manage all n ...

There are myriad opportunities for partnering in the telecommunications and cloud services space, and global IT vendors are eager to do so.Seventy percent of vendors surveyed by Amazon Consulting said telecom service providers were “very strategic” to their 2011 indirect channel go-to-market plan. Beth Vanni, Amazon Consulting vice president, presented results from the survey of 64 global IT vendors at a Breakaway session on Wednesday.Sixteen percent of the vendors were “still formulating a stra ...

The market for mobile devices and applications is a 21st century version of the Wild West where technology solution providers can strike it rich by bringing law and order to the technology frontier.“There are not a lot of standards,” Bill Taylor, president, Panasonic Systems Networks Company of America, said during a mobility trends industry panel discussion Wednesday at CompTIA Breakaway 2011. “You’ve got this Wild West of multipurpose devices.”What’s needed, especially by business users, is so ...

Lester Keizer offers this perspective to MSPs, “If you don’t have a business continuity/disaster recovery plan you can share with clients, you are doing them a disservice that borders on unethical.”Keizer, CEO of Business Continuity Technologies, led today’s “Business Continuity Planning: The Top IT Priority for 2011” session at Breakaway 2011.  The program was the winner of the Attendee-Voted Breakaway Wildcard Session – and with good reason.  Events during the last decade – such as the Septemb ...

The IT solution provider companies best positioned for future success are the ones that take a hybrid approach to customers, combining traditional product sales and support with new offerings in managed services, cloud computing and customized application development.That’s the collective view of four IT industry analysts who spoke Wednesday at CompTIA Breakaway 2011.“We believe the hybrid model will be here for the next 10 to 15 years, a combination of on-premise equipment with elements of clou ...

A common them cut across today’s panel discussion “Business Operations Challenges: What’s Keeping Solutions Providers Up at Night?” at Breakaway 2011: Expectation Management.  Panelist responses to questions from moderator Regina Ciardiello, managing editor, SMB Nation, were laced with the consistent message “manage expectations before expectations manage you.”Vetting vendors for partnerships?  Manage expectations, said panelist Ilene Rosoff, CEO and president, The Launch Pad.  “We approach vend ...