Day: May 21, 2026

Choosing a cloud deployment model in 2026 is far more complicated than it was five years ago. Last year, while running an IT assessment for a 30-person design firm in Wangjing, I found that their business systems were still running on three physical servers purchased five years earlier. The owner’s reasoning was simple: “Data in our own server room feels safer.” But that peace of mind comes at a cost — every time Photoshop files pile up, server memory runs short, and from submitting a purchase request to actually scaling the system, the whole…

Starting in the second half of 2025, we clearly felt that clients were finding it harder to get IT budget requests approved. Not because budgets were cut — more precisely, the same amount of money buys less than it used to. A mainstream-brand server quoted last year costs more than 15% more today; Microsoft 365 Business Standard quietly moved from USD 12 to USD 14 per month; and even domestic cloud providers, whose pricing had long been stable, saw their…

The VPNs we once chased—who is replacing them now? Late last year, while helping a auto parts factory in Shunyi with a security assessment, an veteran engineer opened the seven-year-old Cisco ASA in the equipment room, and I saw something hard to describe in his eyes—not disdain, more like bidding farewell to an old comrade-in-arms. His remark, “It took me three days and nights to configure this thing back then,” made me realize that for many Beijing enterprises, VPN is not…