StrataCore Blog

Everyone's talking about blockchain’s untapped potential. Its touted benefits may include lower cost, risk, and capital requirements, faster transactions, more transparency and reliability, improved privacy, and unparalleled security, to name a few.

StrataCore, the premier IT services broker for data center, cloud, connectivity and cybersecurity, has been recognized by its suppliers with awards for top performance.

We’ve worked with many companies over the past few years that have made the business decision to move into or out of the cloud. As our client's businesses grow and change, we're happy to help them make sense of the ever-evolving marketplace to source IT solutions that enable them to meet their goals.

Late last year, industry analyst group Gartner issued a report on the market for Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB), a software service that’s not yet widely understood. The report included a startling statistic: by 2020, Gartner predicts that 60 percent of large enterprises will use a CASB to govern cloud services. Today, we’re at just over 10 percent usage.

The digital communications wave has flooded the enterprise market with new tools that offer better ways for employees to collaborate, share data and conduct meetings. It’s reshaping how we manage our businesses; in fact, one could argue that the digital revolution is really all about people. The enterprise is being challenged to deliver new ways to communicate, from giving the Millennial workforce instant access to everything to a creating a secure channel for a dedicated project team in regional offices.

Blockchain is one of the most ingenious inventions of the last decade. The underpinning technology for digital currencies, blockchain is a methodology for enabling, recording and reconciling transactions across a completely transparent, ultra-secure distributed digital ledger. While its origins are rooted in the world of finance, blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we conduct business in industries ranging from healthcare to shipping and more.

M&A activity in the world of "all things related to cloud" didn't disappoint in 2017. While there was only one blockbuster cloud service provider acquisition, it seemed like every week we saw a new merger or purchase in the news. Many of these were the purchase of cloud-related service companies by traditional enterprise hardware and service companies looking to move their businesses into the cloud era.

The new partnership with Korean Internet Neutral eXchange (KINX) Inc., further expands StrataCore’s portfolio of international data center and network operators to enable enterprise companies deploying infrastructure globally.

In a previous GDPR series we discussed who is subject to GDPR guidelines, security requirements, tips for preparing, and penalties associated. To keep going with this series, we partnered with one of our partners, UnifyCloud, to speak to GDPR compliance in the cloud. If you are in the midst of moving to the cloud or already have some applications or workloads in the cloud (SaaS, IaaS, PaaaS, etc.), we put together a web recording to address concerns around ensuring GDPR compliance when it comes to XaaS services and third-party CSPs such as AWS and Azure.

Over the past few years it’s become clear that the fortress mentality of securing the perimeter and hardening the system is not effective in today’s cyberthreat environment. Even if you add in patching all your software, and randomize passwords, bad actors are going to get past your heavily guarded gate and into your network.

A combination of political transition, economic forces, and good timing may have helped to fuel the brisk pace of mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications industry this year.

This is the first post in our annual IT services mergers and acquisition (M&A) series, we will also be covering telecom/network and cloud acquisitions in later posts. If you happened to miss last year’s data center M&A post, here is a link to it for old times’ sake.