Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Congress set the stage for IT modernization across the federal government by passing the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, allowing agencies to apply for a loan from the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) to update their legacy systems. The theory states, with access to TMF funds, agencies can now improve innovation, enhance efficiencies, and strengthen their security postures.

You’ve been contemplating adopting a new ITSM solution for some time. The current one handles the bare minimum—it helps your team churn through a ticket queue—but you know there are other solutions capable of more. So what’s standing in your way? Implementing that new platform seems time-consuming and stressful. But it doesn’t have to be.

Over five million people work in the U.K. public sector, representing over 16% of all people in paid work, according to government figures. And mobile working is a reality of daily life for many of us. A report from Deloitte revealed of the 32.3 million people in work in the U.K., the majority (51%) spend some time away from a fixed location in the course of their work.

Query tuning is generally considered one of the fastest ways to accelerate your Microsoft SQL Server performance. System-level server performance improvement activities can be expensive and ineffective. Moreover, expert developers agree most SQL Server performance issues can be traced directly to poorly written queries and ineffective indexing rather than hardware constraints. In fact, many performance problems can only be resolved through query optimization and tuning.

We’ve officially made it past day 100 in quarantine. I hope you’ve found your groove, perfected your at-home office/workspace, learned a new language, tested six new bread recipes, and launched a successful TikTok channel. I also hope your pants still fit and you remember how to put them on correctly. Working from home has been an interesting situation to say the least, and has come with a whirlwind of emotions and business updates, two things I never expected to type in the same sentence.

Okay, good. You have a change management practice in place. You know how to define it, its benefits, how to get the process started, and how to measure its success. You also know it makes for greater success for business initiatives, it prepares the organization for the future, and drives consistency. But how can your current change management practice be improved upon? No matter if you’re a change requestor or change manager, the improvement of your current practice depends on these four actions.

Over the past two decades, two trends have completely reshaped the IT landscape: cloud computing and microservices. With cloud computing, organizations of all sizes can provision infrastructure and run applications on a global scale within minutes. And with microservices, these organizations can deploy highly scalable distributed workloads just as quickly.

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.