Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to take its place in the tech field. From virtual assistants to software capable of self-remediation, AI enhances everyday user experiences and increases the use of IT automation solutions in the workplace. Most of the tech workforce welcomes AI with open arms and understands the advances smart technology can bring and how it can improve business objectives.

“Cost” would seem to underpin almost every decision IT teams make. Sure, business requirements drive overall operations budgets, but it’s always in tension with decades-old certainties about cost. It’s long been the unyielding constant of IT equations. In particular, IT pros migrating application infrastructures out of the data center have discovered the on-premises math of cost containment no longer works.

The race to cloud migration can seem like a good idea for most businesses, but a common trend has been to get there as soon as possible. Much like with the story of the tortoise and the hare, there are lessons to be learned from moving too fast. When it comes to cloud migration, businesses would be smart to choose a more strategic route and take their time.

If you’re looking for a way to drive conversion rates up and bounce rates down, attract new customers, and make your existing client base more loyal—and who isn’t?—you’ve got to invest in improving the user experience of your apps and services.

DigitalOcean is a cost-effective virtual private server (VPS) provider popular among the developer community. The platform also offers services for rapid development, deployment, testing, and maintaining modern distributed applications. One of these services is a managed firewall solution that allows blocking unwanted traffic. It’s relatively easy to manage and deploy as an infrastructure component. Sometimes, however, operations teams need to dig deeper when the firewall blocks network traffic.

Do you like to play video games like I do? Recently, I discussed using skills taken from gaming to level up your career. Once I started thinking about the skills you pick up in video games that are transferable nontechnical skills, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. By now, you may have noticed I like to talk about how important “soft” or nontechnical skills are to your career, so I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to tie this to my favorite pastime.

Data is the backbone of any organization. Good data supports the business and helps ensure smart business decisions are made. Bad data, on the other hand… well, you don’t want bad data. But how do you make sure you have accurate and valid data? Data validation and testing are great places to start.

As the world grapples with the transition to a largely remote workforce, MSPs can shore up WFH security for customers with the right suite of tools. Because of the ongoing global impact of the coronavirus pandemic, more people are working from home today than ever before.

Anatomy was always one of my favorite subjects in school—it just made sense. I still know the structure of a human cell, I remember the different parts of the ear, and because I’m active, I know the soreness I feel in my muscles is caused by lactic acid fermentation. Lessons from anatomy have proven to be some of the most practical for my everyday life.

Picture a network—any enterprise network. What do you see? In almost every case, in almost every environment, you’ll find hubs and spokes of hubs and spokes all the way down. For network engineers, their focus may be even more narrow: innumerable clients, lots of switches, and fewer routers connected to a core. This classic on-prem topology has served reliably since the dawn of Unix time.