The movies are filthy with examples of artificial intelligence. Some, like the first Terminator, are evil. Some, like the Star Wars droids, work for the good guys. And so many of them are flatly iconic—Blade Runner (both of them), 2001: A Space Odyssey, War Games, Westworld (the movie and the HBO series), Matrix[i] … the list keeps going and going. We aren’t at the point yet when we can get R2 to talk the Millennium Falcon—or the data center—and find out what’s wrong.

From the Cloud First policy established in 2010 to last year’s Cloud Smart update, it’s clear the government is driving federal agencies toward cloud computing. The strategy makes sense, but for agencies migrating, however, the decision is less clear cut, because there are several options agencies can choose based on individual agency needs.

It’s a day for celebration! Our migration is complete, and our applications are now running in the cloud environment best suited to their needs. The rest of our application inventory, the ones not cut out for the cloud, remain on-premises where they belong. Actually…we’re not done yet. We still have some work to do to make sure our hybrid environment runs smoothly and delivers the business value we expect. Fortunately, we aren’t the first ones to travel this path.

The global effect of and challenges to business in 2020 is the very definition of “unprecedented.” While large enterprises enjoy the advantage of scale to redistribute focus and sustain demand for their goods and services, small- to medium-sized businesses may not be as lucky. For example, your favorite restaurants and retail shops, both local and national chains, have been hit in previously inconceivable ways, and are doing everything in their power to survive.

For some, change is something to look forward to. For others, it may be scary and anxiety-inducing. If the latter describes your organization, it may be time to rethink your change management practice. Changes are necessary in ITSM. Whether standard or an emergency, if IT changes are not successful, the business could suffer in the long run. Performing changes allows IT pros and business leaders to be proactive when risks arise to minimize disruption and keep employees engaged in the work that counts.

There are two easy ways to make your cloud application faster and they’re homonyms; cash being the first and cache being the second. (Sorry, but not sorry, for the dad joke). The cloud makes it very easy to increase the amount of compute power and therefore performance associated of your cloud resources.

As networks become more distributed and complex, it’s becoming ever more challenging for IT professionals to track all the events happening on their networks. Still, it’s vitally important to do so—logging activity on an agency’s network is critical to determining who’s on the network, what applications they’re using, and whether those applications can compromise the network and user data.

Customer engagement with your company’s site and applications is critical to your business. That’s why the performance of those transactions is equally important. Customers need to be able to log in to your application. Prospects need to download your newest whitepaper. Site visitors need to register for your latest webinar. And most importantly, shoppers want to checkout seamlessly.