ITSA Features -- Public cloud providers

The IT Solutions Provider (ITSA) Buying Guide series is producing quality content to aid IT administrators is acquiring the right gear for their environments and their businesses.

One of the last series I produced before leaving TechTarget involved public cloud providers. Brien Posey prepared four feature articles that shepherds readers through the service buying process.

The first article -- A primer on public cloud benefits -- covers the major benefits of using a public cloud provider as an extension of your data-center environment.

The second article -- Understanding public cloud risks and costs -- looks at the critical disadvantages of using public clouds.

The third article -- Criteria for choosing a public cloud provider -- outlines the essential purchasing criteria to include in a vendor request for proposal (RFP).

The fourth and final article -- Compare the market-leading public cloud providers -- compares and contrasts the top four public cloud services and providers against the purchasing criteria and against each other.

Freelancer Valarie Silverthorne also prepared excellent descriptions of the top services and providers for the series:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud
• Rackspace
• Microsoft Azure
• SoftLayer
• NetSuite SuiteCloud
• Virtustream
• Verizon Cloud

ITSA Feature -- What to Buy: Comparing products for virtual backup

This is the first article I produced as part of TechTarget's IT Solutions Provider (ITSA) program. We started the program just producing the product and vendor comparison articles before expanding to include the technology research, business case, and RFP features.

I was responsible for deciding on the topic, determining its scope, working with the media groups to coordinate topics and schedules, finding a qualified writer, ensuring the article met all of the ITSA objectives, shepherding the story through the creative process, and editing it, and submitting it to the appropriate site editor.

Brien Posey is a big part of the ITSA program and wrote a number of great stories for me.

Server virtualization has become an indispensable part of the modern IT infrastructure. It can reduce data center hardware costs while improving both agility and resiliency. A downside to server virtualization, however, is that it requires virtual backups to be handled differently than they would be in a physical data center.

Thankfully, data backup vendors are keeping pace with the virtualization trend. If your IT environment is new to the server virtualization scene, or you are planning on changing vendors, there are dozens of different products that can be used to back up your virtual servers.

This article will walk you through the four essential purchasing criteria for virtual server backup software -- enterprise application support, deduplication and replication capabilities, and recovery features. It will also compare four products: Veeam's Backup and Replication v7 Enterprise Plus, Symantec's Backup Exec 2014, CommVault's Simpana v10 and Unitrends' Enterprise Backup.

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IT Solutions Provider Product-focused Features

For the past year, I was involved in TechTarget's IT Solutions Provider (ITSA) start-up program. It's an editorial program focused on helping IT buyers through the entire buying process -- from technology research, needs analysis (business case), purchasing criteria determination (RFP), and product comparison.

We developed technology topics IT buyers are facing now and produced buying decision feature series that walked administrators through the process.

The first article described the technology, who uses it, and how it's used. The second feature detailed which environments most benefit from the technology, and who does not. It assists administrators develop the business case.

The third feature shows the essential purchasing criteria buys should use to compare potential products and vendors. The final article compares the market-leading products and vendors against the established purchasing criteria and each other.

The ITSA editors are responsible for:

• Determining the topics to be covered
• Working with the various media groups to narrow topic scope and match publication schedules
• Finding qualified freelance writers to produce the stories
• Working with writers to ensure the features include all ITSA objectives
• Deciding which products to cover
• Moving the feature stories through the production process
• Editing all content
• Submitting the content to the appropriate websites.

I'm no longer with TechTarget. But I will be publishing here the articles I was responsible for producing.