An April 2015 survey released by CompTIA, a technology association, found that a mere 14 percent of small businesses with fewer than 50 employees have an IT services staff of more than 10 people. On the other end of this spectrum, 17 percent of companies with more than 500 employees have fewer than 10 IT services staffers. In addition, the outlook on data center systems spending worldwide was predicted to amount to $208 billion in 2020, and that figure was exceeded.

To further complicate matters, the majority of small business owners (59 percent) said it is difficult to find qualified IT specialists, according to the survey. Despite this, more than half (58 percent) of small business owners are optimistic that they will find the right technical talent over the next 12 months.

Small Business Hiring Challenges in IT Services

The biggest challenge facing small business owners is competing with the big players. Of the small business owners surveyed, 55 percent said they must compete with larger organizations that can afford to pay more and offer benefits, exhibit fewer work hours, and don't require a lot of individual work.

Why Wi-Fi Quality is Critical for Business Success

A recent study from InterCall found that 71 percent of Millennials would take a pay cut of $10,000 a year to work for a company with better Wi-Fi. Another study by Aruba found that 89 percent of Millennials considered Wi-Fi to be “very important” to them, and 77 percent said they'd stay at a business longer if it meant improved Wi-Fi. And when a business gets Wi-Fi right, 54 percent of Millennials say they're more likely to buy from that business.

Wi-Fi management isn't always easy, especially when we're placed in different areas of our office, all with a different layout, different building materials, and different Wi-Fi signals. It can be confusing. That's why it's important to have a reliable and easy-to-use Wi-Fi management system. A wireless diversity system is an answer. The wireless diversity system helps to ensure that each employee gets the same Wi-Fi signal strength and quality as the one nearest to the router. This is done by using two wireless signals and two antennas — one for each Wi-Fi channel. Rather than bottlenecking all traffic to one antenna, the second antenna is set to a different channel, which gives it a stronger signal.

Networking as a Service

As network capacities have increased, the focus of NaaS providers has shifted from WAN optimization to SDN (software-defined networking). SDN is a paradigm shift that requires many more devices to be configured, operated, and monitored than in typical WAN optimization deployments. This has led to a rash of SDN outsourcing contracts containing restrictive terms that limit the ability of the customer to make independent changes to the SDN environment.