Vendor Forum
Today’s CIOs face a daunting task: They must move their enterprises from a traditional organization, with some degree of optimization and automation, into the digital business age. Digital businesses are software-defined — dependent on or driven by software, and leveraging software-derived data to drive decision-making. In order to move businesses into the digital age, much needs to evolve, including innovation, leadership, organization, and culture within IT. These changes often are driven by a chief digital officer or a digitally savvy CIO ...
As March Madness continues to be a digitally driven event with a large US following, IT knows the business network will be put under additional stress and employee productivity will decline amid the tournament frenzy and all-consuming bracket. This is especially true during the first two days of the tournament when early round games take place during peak work hours. To help better prepare organizations for the oncoming flurry, we've put together our own "Final Four" list of actions every IT team can take to ensure networks don't come down with the nets ...
March Madness is basketball ecstasy for college hoops fans. But it's network agony for the organizations and IT managers forced to deal with severe strains on the network and threats of poorly performing applications. Of course, ever-increasing cloud usage and bring your own device (BYOD) policies only heighten the challenge for IT. With a little bit of proactive planning and with the right performance management tools in place, IT Ops can accurately monitor, identify and address application and network performance issues before they can impact the business. Here are a few tips to make sure administrators stay sane during March Madness ...
The phrase "The customer is always right" is ubiquitous in the business and retail world and one that companies should extend as a matter of course to refer to their employees. For IT teams, they are usually known as the "end user". It is a company’s employees who keep it running and when a network problem gets in the way not only is the end-user frustrated and annoyed, but productivity can quickly be driven to a halt ...
While 93 percent of IT professionals surveyed said adopting significant new technologies is important, many cited barriers to successful adoption that have resulted in achieving mixed results, such as budget (77 percent) and shortage of personnel (49 percent) — two key areas they also identified as top needs to feel more empowered — according to IT Trends Report 2015: Business at the Speed of IT from SolarWinds ...
Retailers confirm that you should have a site performance plan in place, according to the AppDynamics Holiday Web and Mobile Site Performance Review. Here’s the evidence: Retail sites with a site performance troubleshooting process in place were 92 percent more likely to meet or exceed their revenue goals for Black Friday, according to the survey of retail executives ...
As discussed in a previous blog, selecting the right APM for DevOps is an “EPIC” decision. Easy, Proactive, Intelligent, and Collaborative is a user-driven approach to APM focused squarely on helping ITOps teams succeed at managing application performance ...
Cloud-based apps are a reality in the enterprise, with nearly 90 per cent of today’s organizations using them, according to cloud-based application usage research commissioned by Centrix Software ...
As businesses continue to transform to digital and become software-defined by nature, the need to iterate on software releases more rapidly has driven organizations to build specialized, faster-moving teams in order to adjust the business model and execution quickly. DevOps is the resultant philosophy that brings together developers and operations teams organizationally, culturally and technically. BizDevOps is the extension of DevOps into the business ...
Enterprises are increasingly implementing a hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses public and private clouds as well as existing virtualized environments, according to the 2015 State of the Cloud Survey conducted by RightScale ...
A shift to continuous integration (CI) and other agile methodologies is driving a massive change in the way that development and testing professionals approach testing, according to an independent, global developer survey titled Web and Mobile Testing Trends ...
Performance testing is imperative for applications to perform as expected in the real world. In particular, business-critical applications need thorough testing to ensure they can bear the stresses and strains of varying demands.
For a successful application rollout, it is vital to assess the user experience appropriately and have an understanding of how the new app impacts your already deployed apps and infrastructure. This requires a great deal of preparation across various IT functions, from network to application teams. To put your team on the path to a successful rollout, take the time to consider the following points before the wide-scale launch ...
With agile and lean influencing our thinking, it’s perhaps no surprise that the impetus behind DevOps has come from development. That’s great for the speed side of the equation, but success requires that IT operations also modify their practices. This means ensuring that Application Performance Management (APM) tools and processes are not only supporting the resilience and service goals of production systems, but that they exhibit the functionality needed to help improve customer experience – even as applications are developed, tested, released and deployed. APM can accelerate the benefits of DevOps, but where do you start and what tools do you use? The tech landscape is littered with many products and services all claiming to be the secret sauce that’s going to support a DevOps-like culture. But don’t be fooled, modern APM can only accelerate DevOps when it exhibits four fundamental characteristics. Quite simply it has to be "EPIC" ...
Ensuring application performance is a never ending task that involves multiple products, features and best practices. There is no one process, feature, or product that does everything. A good place to start is pre-production and production monitoring with both an APM tool and a Unified Monitoring tool ...
As with anything new (or relatively new) as is the case with DevOps, enterprises are clamoring to embrace it. Why not you might say? With surveys showing impressive results and business sounding benefits, analysts giving it their blessing, and vendors touting their wares, this newest best practice is at the top of the new year’s enterprise shopping list – the top “must do” item on the 2015 list of must do’s. But like shoppers who dive feet first into a holiday or clearance sale looking for a great deal, enterprises should think carefully about what they’re actually investing in. Sure, DevOps is a great way to accelerate all the benefits from digital transformation, but there are also many pitfalls, hurdles and gotchas that could quickly turn your DevOps business “bargain” into yet another IT white elephant. Here are just a few to chew over as you look to take the wrapping off and open up the DevOps gift to your enterprise ...
Of all the ways that web performance has come out of the shadows and into mainstream public consciousness, there is no more prevalent example than the HealthCare.gov fiasco of 2013. The Affordable Care Act’s primary means of providing universal health care to the American public encountered problems from the very moment that it was launched on October 1, and quickly drew all the worst kind of attention. In the face of massive public outcry, the site underwent a huge optimization process to fix the myriad of problems plaguing it, ultimately resulting in much better load times for the remainder of its inaugural sign-up period. As such, when it came time in late 2014 for the 2015 enrollment period to begin, the expectation was that, with a full year to apply optimization techniques, the Department of Health & Human Services would be able to get HealthCare.gov running with strong performance ...
Market demand for DevOps skills is growing, and DevOps engineers are among the highest paid IT practitioners today, according to the DevOps Salary Report ...
The Super Bowl may be the sports highlight of the year in the United States – an unofficial holiday of sorts – but it’s also big business for the advertising world. The average advertisement cost for the 2015 game is expected to be approximately $4 million per 30 second slot with more than 50 commercials set to air. While the game is the headline event, there is considerable attention paid to the advertisements that will run throughout. So what does this have to do with system administrators or your corporate network? A great deal more than you might think ...
In APMdigest’s recent article on predictions for 2015, I gave my insight on the year: "2015 will mark a significant shift in the way that APM tools are used by IT Operations teams." I wanted to elaborate on why this shift will accelerate in 2015 ...
