Most conference weeks, I come home with a notebook full of “we’ll see.” This time I came home with a notebook full of “I want to try that.” I spent two days at NetApp INSIGHT 2026 in Las Vegas, and a lot of what I saw sat right where I live: AI infrastructure, agents, and…
Author: Ken Gebhart
Business Continuity Planning: The Third Thing Backup and DR Don’t Cover
I sat in on a recovery once where every system came back exactly on schedule. Servers up. Data restored. Identity revalidated, clean. The IT team should have been taking a well-earned victory lap. Instead the building was still dead quiet, because nobody could take a customer call: the phone system routed through the data center…
The Sovol M1D: Backer Report
I am, by nature, an even-keeled, patient man. Thirty years in IT will do that to you: you learn that most things get fixed by staying calm and working the problem. I have even twice been awarded the “cool under pressure” award at the company holiday party over the years. And yet here I am,…
Azure vs. AWS vs. Google Cloud for Small Business
A client called me last year with a question that made me pause before answering: “Should we be on Azure or AWS?” I asked what they were actually trying to do. Turned out the answer was “run QuickBooks and host a WordPress site.” Neither of those needed a cloud platform decision at all: they needed…
Backups vs. DR: Why You Need Both
I’ve sat in more than one post-incident review where the room genuinely believed they were covered, right up until the moment they weren’t. Backups were running. Reports were green. And the business was still down for two days, or in a few cases weeks, because nobody had actually thought through what happens after the data…
Cloud Computing Explained: Which Parts Actually Matter for a Beginner
Somebody asked me at a church picnic earlier this summer what I actually do for a living, and when I said “I build cloud architecture for large companies,” I watched their eyes do that thing where they’re still smiling but have already left the conversation. I even got a “that sounds interesting.” I don’t blame…
Building a Secure Digital Life in 30 Minutes
A friend of mine got a text last month that looked exactly like it came from her bank. Same logo, same tone, a link to “verify a suspicious charge.” She almost clicked it. She was mid-conversation with someone else and just tapped without thinking, the way we all do forty times a day. What stopped…
Microsoft Copilot vs. ChatGPT vs. Claude (Or Something Else Entirely): Which AI Should I Use?
I get asked this question more than almost anything else these days, usually by someone standing in a hallway holding a coffee, looking a little exasperated. “Which one am I actually supposed to be using?” It’s a fair question, and it doesn’t have a fair answer, because the honest response is (and that’s the consultant…
10 AI Prompts Every IT Professional Should Be Using
I resisted AI assistants for longer than I’ll admit. Thirty years in this field will make you skeptical of anything that shows up promising to replace judgment you built the hard way: on-call at 2am, staring at a trace dump, learning exactly why you always test the rollback plan. But somewhere in the last couple…