Not many years ago, the role of the data steward was the domain of the world’s largest organizations. When I was in college, the only person I heard of with this job title worked for one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers. Even as mainframes were supplanted by other computing paradigms, only sprawling corporations with intensive electronic data processing needs could possibly have enough information to justify a full-time staff member charged with overseeing it all.

As enterprises begin migrating to the public cloud, it’s important to realize this movement doesn’t happen in one fell swoop. Typically, cloud migration workloads move in groups related to applications or business functions—for a large organization, this process can take years. In some cases, they may run in this hybrid cloud pattern forever, leading to management challenges.

I’m often asked all kinds of interesting questions in my day-to-day work. Usually, these questions are related to the products we build here at SolarWinds®, and I absolutely love answering them. But people often ask me a more existential question when I tell them what I do for a living.

A little over a year ago, we announced a partnership with DigitalOcean to make it easier for users to add log management and monitoring for applications running in DigitalOcean Droplets (VMs). Since then, we’ve created a DigitalOcean Marketplace Listing, provided a direct link to the signup page, and shared many ideas on how to use SolarWinds® Papertrail™ to troubleshoot and optimize applications running in DigitalOcean Droplets.

At SolarWinds, our purpose is to enrich the lives of the people we serve. In a world where complexity is expanding, our commitment to offer simple yet powerful IT solutions has served us well throughout our more than 20-year history. Today’s pace of digital transformation means businesses are actively building new applications and leveraging multi-cloud deployments, while reworking their existing ones, to achieve operational excellence.

Today marks a significant milestone for SolarWinds, as we’ve formally announced our organizational direction to evolve from our leadership position in monitoring to become a leader in observability. Today is also significant because it marks the official release of our Hybrid Cloud Observability, and I’m excited to share more details on what we believe expands the scope of observability for the market.

Since acquiring SentryOne in October 2020, the SolarWinds team has been regularly updating our Microsoft® Partners and customers about the upside these combined offerings bring to the IT community and the marketplace. Of course, SentryOne has long been recognized for its SQL Server and Microsoft Data Platform tools, with an impressive portfolio of category-leading solutions.

The late 1990s were a crazy time in the technology industry. Apple converted a blueberry into a computer, Google still had a “new search engine” smell, and while Y2K loomed over our heads Napster was showing everyone how bad Metallica’s music sounded. Meanwhile, in a garage in Tulsa, Oklahoma, brothers Donald and David Yonce launched a network monitoring software company and named it SolarWinds.

Data continues to be a major driver of business operations, and as a result, it’s becoming more common to see cross-functional teams working within IT. In 2022, for example, data-related projects enforcing data hygiene, data integrity, or data security continue to lead most functional leaders’ investments.