It’s December – the time of year when we start thinking about next year. Maybe you’re knee deep into planning for 2018. Maybe the boss is pressuring you for those budget numbers? If you’re like me, you ‘re spending a little time thinking about the past 11 months or so. As I look back at 2017, I’m thinking about the things our clients did – the projects we helped them with and the technologies they relied on to get their jobs done.
One of the things at the top of that list is Cloud. I don’t have to tell anyone Cloud offerings have been a hot topic for the last few years. Moving applications and or data off premises has become common. With our client base, Cloud discussions have been a regular occurrence. We’ve moved several clients to Cloud solutions in the last few months. It’s a tough decision process to go through for IT management – On-premises vs. Cloud. There are advantages and disadvantages on each side of this decision. A close cousin to putting applications and data in a Cloud solution is Hosting – placing your hardware infrastructure in a commercial data center. That was a topic of discussion with several clients and a few decided to move that way.
One of the hottest Cloud topics was High Availability. We’re talking about leaving the production systems On-premises and replicating to a secure Off-premises location for HA or Disaster Recovery. HA in general was a major objective for several of our clients this year. The majority of the production servers we sell now are paired with some type of HA or DR server or solution.
An extension of moving production and/or redundant infrastructure Off-premises is the farming out of administrative activity – managed services. For our larger clients, this means the custom development of a set of services which meets their individual needs. A growing area of business for us, because it’s a growing concern for our clients, is providing custom managed services, allowing our clients to focus on what they do best.
The last thing that comes to mind in my review of 2017 is continued growth of PHP application development. It’s a common language across the platforms we support and our client base is relying on PHP as their go-to development language more and more.
As we look to close out 2017, I hope your year was a successful one and 2018 exceeds all your expectations. If there’s anything we can help with as you look to next year, please let me know.
Michael Miller
President, Arbor Solutions, Inc.
616-451-2500
mmiller@arbsol.com
