Hybrid cloud brings you the best of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. But how does it stack up in terms of security and compliance? Two of the biggest vendors in the cloud space, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, have kept pace with one another in...
For more than two decades, it has been SPK and Associates' privilege to support our clients’ varied engineering and systems integration needs. We're grateful for the opportunity to be useful to them all, in their various markets. We support a gamut of needs: From...
In the fourth episode of our podcast series “Can IoT Jump These Five Hurdles?”, SPK & Associates’ Chief Strategy Officer, Rajiv Mistry, explains the challenges of IoT total cost of ownership and return on investment. To see all published episodes, scroll down this...
Not long ago, the city of Asheville, NC migrated their infrastructure backups and disaster recovery to a cloud backup solution utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS). This not only saved the city government a lot in expenses, it provided the city a fail-safe in case of...
I recently returned from TechEd North America 2014, which was in Houston, TX this year. There were hundreds of vendors and around 10,000 attendees. One of the hottest topics this year was the topic of Cloud – what does it mean for the enterprise and how does it affect...
During 2012, the shining star for cloud services has once again been Amazon’s web service (AWS) offering. It success and popularity has made it an almost household name for cloud based web services. However AWS, or any other web services cloud offering, isn't the only...
Predictions are hard to make in any area of life, however short term forecasting is not impossible. Ask a meteorologist for the weather in the next twenty-four hours and you will get a fairly accurate prediction. Ask for the outlook over the next 30 days and you will...
The technology industry loves buzzwords. The decade of the '80s was all about synergy and paradigm shifts. In the '90s, it was the web and the Internet. The turn of the century brought talk about virtualization and social media. Today it's all about the cloud. Of...
The difference between quality assurance (QA) and testing is often misunderstood. In fact, the terms are frequently used interchangeably. However, testing is actually just one part of QA. Quality assurance, on the other hand, covers a larger, more holistic part of the...
All of us who work in software development want the products that we release to be high quality, and also low cost to maintain in the field. This is no big revelation; it’s common knowledge, and it’s common sense. It’s not clear that there is any silver bullet in...
Bugs can be introduced anywhere in the software development lifecycle, from the early stages (requirements gathering etc) right up to the final shipping of the project. The most expensive types of bugs to fix are those introduced earliest and fixed latest. For...
I recently came across a forum post asking for advice on the combination of running Pro/Intralink 3.4 on Windows 7 64-bit. In short, I’m happy to report that we’ve been using this combination without incident: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1, PTC...
