Articles In Infrastructure

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

This post was AI-assisted — researched and drafted with Claude, which should surprise exactly no one given who I am. The arguing and editing are mine. If it's wrong, blame me, not the machine. AI is raging in your organization right now. Not piloting. Not "under evaluation by a cross-functional committee." Raging. Every employee has tried it, most of them are using it daily, and the results look like every other distribution of human performance you've ever seen. A bell curve. Let me walk you throug... read more.

• September 16, 2026

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure

Microsoft made Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Hybrid generally available on September 1, 2026. It lets you run desktop hosts in your own datacenter while Microsoft manages the AVD service in Azure. That’s good news if data residency, latency, or compliance rules have kept you off cloud-hosted AVD. Key Benefits Microsoft still runs the core service. You don’t manage a connection broker or gateway. Use the hardware you already have. Works with your own hypervisor or dedicated physical servers. ... read more.

• September 04, 2026

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Support

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called "It's Not the Model." The short version: frontier AI is finding vulnerabilities at industrial scale, the capability will land on every platform eventually, and the scarce resource isn't the model — it's the ability to absorb what the model finds. The reactions came in two flavors. Half the room heard "the sky is falling." The other half said "the sky was always falling, why are we talking about it now?" Both halves are wrong, and it's worth being precise about w... read more.

• September 03, 2026

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Microsoft Autopilot is a cloud-based solution that is used to provision new Windows devices and provides an alternative to the older imaging technology. When coupled with Intune, Autopilot enables vendors to drop-ship new machines directly to end users. The user then initiates an out-of-box provisioning experience by powering on the device, connecting it to the network, and signing in with their Entra ID credentials. Autopilot facilitates the build and performs an Entra join, or hybrid join, and enables an... read more.

• July 27, 2026

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Modern mobile device management solutions like Microsoft Intune are becoming more popular because they allow people to use their personal iPhones or iPads to access organizational data while giving the organization a controlled way to protect its assets on those devices. For bring-your-own-device scenarios, the goal is not to take over the user’s phone. Instead, Intune helps create a practical balance: users keep personal privacy and familiar device ownership, while IT can apply the right level of man... read more.

• July 23, 2026

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

Everyone wants to talk about AI. Nobody wants to talk about the thing that's going to determine whether AI pays off: your data. Here's the uncomfortable truth I keep running into with clients. The models are fine. The models are, frankly, astonishing. If your AI initiative fails, it almost certainly won't be because the model wasn't smart enough. It will be because the model couldn't get to your data, or because getting it there cost more than the value it created. The Access Problem We spent the last fi... read more.

• July 22, 2026

By Joshua Joseph, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

Executive Summary Enterprise cloud environments spanning Azure, AWS, hybrid data centers, and SaaS platforms have outgrown legacy "full interception" network security models. Routing all traffic through centralized Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs) for blanket inspection creates severe operational friction, inflates infrastructure costs, and introduces system bottlenecks. By transitioning from an indiscriminate "inspect everything" philosophy to a "context-aware traffic separation" model, an enterprise ca... read more.

• July 07, 2026

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Citrix Platform Flex is one of the more meaningful changes we’ve seen in the platform in recent years, not because of new features, but because it changes how we think about delivering and consuming Citrix. At a high level, Platform Flex introduces a persona-based consumption model. Instead of assigning the same resources and licensing to every user, organizations can purchase a pool of capacity and allocate it based on what different users actually need Why It Matters Most environments today are s... read more.

• June 30, 2026

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

So anyway, let me tell you about the robots. In 1950, Detroit employed over 220,000 auto workers. Good union jobs. Good wages. By 1970, half of them were gone. Not to Mexico. Not to China. To robots and assembly line automation that simply didn’t need much human labor. By 1982, another 400,000 jobs disappeared in just four years. Cities hollowed out. Communities devastated. Here’s the part that surprised me. Cars didn’t get cheaper. All that productivity. All that automation. A robot-ho... read more.

• May 21, 2026

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure

As more organizations look to move desktops to the cloud, many don’t want to give up the platforms they already rely on. For teams running Citrix, Amazon WorkSpaces Core offers a simple way to extend into AWS without starting over. This shift is important because, historically, Azure was effectively the only practical option for running Windows 10/11 multi-session desktops, especially for organizations aligned with Microsoft 365. In many cases, that meant customers were forced into Azure for VDI, eve... read more.

• March 30, 2026