Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In an era where digital threats are evolving rapidly, securing your Office 365 environment has never been more crucial. Office 365, a suite known for its robust productivity tools, also demands a proactive approach to security. This blog post delves into essential practices and strategies to fortify your Office 365 setup against various cyber threats.

Engineering teams rely on certain metrics to assess their ability to deliver quality products, on time. This is a useful exercise, but execution has been lacking—with metric collation often handled via spreadsheet, or stand-alone tool. Neither approach is ideal for two reasons: 1) How—or more specifically where—metrics are collected silos them away from business context.

For modern enterprises aiming to innovate faster, gain efficiency, and mitigate the risk of failure, operational resilience has become a key competitive differentiator. But growing complexity, noisy systems, and siloed infrastructure have created fragility in today’s IT operations, making the task of building resilient operations increasingly challenging.

In this edition of the Cloud Observer, we dig into the impacts of recent submarine cable maintenance on intercontinental cloud connectivity and call for the greater transparency from the submarine cable industry about incidents which cause critical cables to be taken out of service.

Learning about the past helps us understand the present, and even predict the future. So, whether you are monitoring CPU usage or how long your IoT device was powered on and then off, at some point, you might want to know the difference of a value over time. InfluxDB is an open source database for storing and retrieving time series data. Thanks to its own query languages — flux and InfluxQL — it provides different and powerful ways to analyze data.

This week, we announced that Cloudsmith has taken an impressive $11M in additional funding, hot on the heels of our $15M Series A two years ago. That's not just serious cash for a startup; it's a game-changer! The natural questions are: why did we take it, and what's our big-picture plan?

After the absolute barrage of announcements on day 0, day 1 brought us some mild excitement and one big disappointment…

We care a lot about the pace of shipping at incident.io: moving fast is a fundamental part of our company culture, and out-pacing your competition is one of the best ways we know to win. In engineering teams, one way to ship fast is to invest in tools that make your team more productive. We've become good at identifying small pains and frustrations that slow us down over time and – after surfacing them to the rest of the team – find solutions for them.

This is the fifth and final part of this FinOps series, The Operate Phase. If you have missed any of my previous blogs, here is a list of posts in the series: Note: I am ex-AWS, so you will notice a lot more focus on AWS tools and services as examples here, however we are cloud agnostic and all cloud providers have similar services and tools.