New Horizons Blog and Resources

As the New Year's holiday approaches, it's a good time to turn your attention inward and get ready to make improvements that can enhance your skill set and your career. Whether you're aiming to change jobs in 2017, or simply make yourself indispensable at your current place of employment, improving your IT capabilities is one of the best gifts you can get yourself.

Staying productive in the modern office requires a lot of technological tools. Employees are expected to get their work done quickly and effectively, and this focus on efficiency has driven employers to search for people with specific skills revolving around popular business platforms. Although there are many of these, one of the most widely used is Microsoft Office 365. 

In the past, legacy data storage was sufficient for most organizations. They would invest in network servers, multiple hard drives, and other equipment to meet the storage needs of the operation. Today, this method of data storage is quickly becoming outdated. The costs associated with creating an internal data storage solution can be expensive and is being displaced by other cost-effective solutions like cloud-based storage.

Microsoft Azure has been growing rapidly ever since its launch, as it closes the gap with longtime industry leader Amazon Web Services and further separates itself from competitors such as Google, IBM and RackSpace. According to Microsoft's quarterly earnings for Q1 2017, the company booked a 116 percent year-over-year increase in Azure revenue. Compute usage also doubled compared to a year ago, just like it had in the last two quarters of fiscal year 2016.