Nationwide Insurance just agreed to pay $5.5 million as part of a settlement following a major data breach. UCLA recently warned 30,000 current and former students that their personal data may have been compromised. HBO is investigating a breach in which hackers accessed unreleased episodes of upcoming shows.

There’s no question that the cloud has forever changed the IT environment. According to the State of the CIO 2017, a new report from research firm IDG, the increasing adoption of cloud services has made IT departments more efficient, reducing the amount of time spent on traditional IT tasks.

Companies open branch locations for a number of reasons — to expand into new markets, broaden the pool of available talent and develop deeper relationships with customers, just to name a few. In fact, data from the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics program shows that the number of branch offices has increased steadily while new business startups have declined.

Most people think of managed services in terms of the technology value they provide. The managed services provider (MSP) monitors and maintains the IT infrastructure to ensure optimum performance and reduce the risk of downtime or a security breach. When a problem does arise, the MSP is there to resolve it — often before end-users are even aware there’s an issue.