Faster, better, cheaper are the driving pillars that have enabled smartphones to control our lives, make drones a commodity, and bring self-driving cars to the horizon.  However, almost all of these great breakthroughs have downsides.

Companies of all sizes are facing the demand of two popular employee trends – the want to use personal devices at work and the desire to work remotely. These trends are prompting many employers to implement mobility features that will embrace data across any and every device within their organizations.  While mobility is a game changer regarding real-time collaboration and productivity for companies of all sizes, SMBs are at a disadvantage with budget limitations and often limited to no on-site IT departments.

Most businesses have physical servers, virtual machines, or a combination of both supporting production operations.  These organizations also have a variety of production workloads such as Microsoft® Exchange for email, SharePoint® for collaboration and content management, and various vendor-supplied or internally-developed applications running SQL database servers.

Not too long ago (even 5 or 10 years seems an eternity) life was easy. Most of us were tied to our desks. The ones that were not, like sales people, would carry boxes with printed materials and price lists in the trunks of their cars. Remote workers would dial in and connect via VPN to access their file servers.