Akins IT Named to CRN's 2016 MSP 500 List

Akins IT • February 22, 2016

Recognized for Excellence in Managed IT Services

Newport Beach, CA, February 22, 2016 – AKINS IT announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, that they have been named to the 2016 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Pioneer 250 category. This annual list recognizes North American solution providers with cutting-edge approaches to delivering managed services. Their top-notch offerings help companies navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of IT, improve operational efficiencies, and maximize their return on IT investments.

In today’s fast-paced business environments, MSPs play an important role in helping companies leverage new technologies without straining their budgets or losing focus on their core business. CRN’s MSP 500 list shines a light on the most forward-thinking and innovative of these key organizations.

The list is divided into three categories: the MSP Pioneer 250, recognizing companies with business models weighted toward managed services and largely focused on the SMB market; the MSP Elite 150, recognizing large, data center-focused MSPs with a strong mix of on-premise and off-premise services; and the MSP Hosting Service Provider 100, recognizing MSPs focused primarily on off-premise, cloud-based services.

The core of Akins IT brand is upgrading lives and its growth may be credited largely to selecting the best team to work with- including employees, partners, and clients. Akins IT has worked with hundreds of mid-sized businesses, state, and local education (SLED) organizations in California to plan, implement and manage hybrid solutions for their IT infrastructure and applications. It has helped these organizations free up 20% to 50+% of their IT budgets and resources by providing easy to manage, robust yet less complex IT solutions that upgrade their clients’ life.

“MSPs meet a critical need in the IT market, providing customized, turnkey services that allow for predictable operational expenses, effective control of expenditures, precise allocation of limited resources and convenient access to on-demand and pay-as-you-go technology,” said Robert Faletra, CEO, The Channel Company. “We congratulate the service providers of the MSP 500, who continually reinvent themselves to successfully meet their customers’ changing needs, helping businesses get the most out of their IT investments and sharpen their competitive edge.”

When asked for his comments on the continued success, Chief Upgrade Officer, Shawn Akins said "I'm very proud of our team and honored by this acknowledgment. I would also like to thank our many clients for letting us help them upgrade their lives."

The MSP 500 list will be featured in the February 2016 issue of CRN and online at www.CRN.com/msp500.

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AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)