Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Many factors have led to the massive increase of online retail sales in 2020 and 2021, including the increasing reliance of online activities from COVID-19. To put the growth into perspective: in 2017 when we last reported on web performance for the world’s leading retail sites, the industry generated around $2.2 trillion in revenue. In 2021, global e-commerce sales are expected to hit $4.921 trillion.

In a world where 1.145 trillion MB of data is generated every day, the art of database management has become more important than ever. I use the word “art” because it captures a sense of the wizardry needed to effectively manage data. After all, our world is dominated by mobile devices and hybrid IT environments. Database migrations happen regularly, and data resides both on-premises and in the cloud. All these things have brought a new complexity to database management.

Let’s face it—the harsh reality, seen often in news stories today, is that security breaches are going to happen. In today’s world of cybercriminals and nation-state attackers, it’s not a question of “if” but “when” your organization is attacked. If you don’t take appropriate steps to ensure sensitive data is protected properly, it could devastate the organization financially.

One of the easier ways to improve the performance of your SQL Server and Azure SQL database queries is to ensure you choose the right data types for your data, and the data types in your application’s code match the ones in your stored procedures and queries. Choosing the right data type conserves space, because doing something like choosing a variable character type for data of fixed, regular length like a phone number or national ID number is wasteful.

Enterprise web applications or medium-to-large, consumer-facing websites are typically built by teams of engineers, administrators, web developers, and other professionals. However, once a site goes live, the operations team is responsible for keeping the site up and running at optimal performance. Online users aren’t forgiving, often abandoning a site as soon as they encounter an issue with functionality, complexity, or performance.

Logging is an important part of every software application. In addition to capturing user activity, well-structured logs can make it easier to debug problems should they occur. But if your application is split up across several different subsystems, collecting and analyzing disparate logs can be a real challenge. Picture this scenario: You work at a startup that uses a CMS managed by a few admins. You also have a standalone front-end application for users to communicate with your platform via an API.

As organizations move their workloads into the public cloud, their environments gradually evolve. Initially, an organization tends to aim for a 1:1 migration of resources, typically in the form of virtual machines (VMs). Although this approach allows for an easier data migration path, it’s more costly and offers less flexibility than taking advantage of some of the serverless and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings in the public cloud.

When I came to SolarWinds in 2020, I was quickly immersed in the world of developers, application engineers, and IT operations. As I started talking to more customers about their roles, I came to understand each of the job functions uniquely—each with distinct responsibilities completely independent of one another. But as I was researching the age-old conflict between developers and IT ops professionals, I was introduced to a word that has now oversaturated work life: DevOps.

Since schools transitioned to remote learning, districts have added or upgraded their IT education technology and monitoring tools to provide better outcomes for all. But it’s not necessarily a good thing. The saturation of edtech tools may be leading to wasted money, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. In 2020, the deployment of edtech tools in schools increased by nearly 90% year-over-year.