Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Operational excellence is a must for any military member, with decision-makers needing up-to-date and relevant intelligence to plan and manage an operation. Achieving decision advantage ensures an operation’s decision-makers have the intelligence they need to coordinate operations and use their teams and resources most effectively. As the military aims to achieve decision advantage, decision support systems (DSSs) and secure collaboration tools have become an integral part of these efforts.

Apache ActiveMQ is a widely used message broker that enables seamless communication between distributed applications. However, as the volume of messages increases, performance bottlenecks can arise, leading to slow message processing, high latency, broker crashes, and out of memory (OOM) errors. One of the most critical issues affecting ActiveMQ is OOM errors, which occur when the broker exceeds its allocated heap memory. This can result in service failures, message loss, and prolonged downtime.

Middleware plays a crucial role in modern IT infrastructure by enabling seamless communication between applications, systems, and services. It facilitates data exchange, enhances interoperability, and supports various business functions by providing capabilities like messaging, transaction management, and integration services. Over time, middleware has evolved from simple message brokers to sophisticated platforms supporting APIs, cloud computing, microservices, and event-driven architectures.

Kafka is powerful. No doubt about it. But it’s also a beast when it comes to operational complexity and cost. What starts as a simple deployment quickly turns into a resource-hungry system that eats up engineering hours, compute power, and budget. Let’s consider a company that eagerly rolls out Kafka to streamline event streaming. Year one? Smooth sailing. Everything runs fine, and the team feels great. Year two? The cracks start to show.

The Hidden Costs of Apache Kafka Apache Kafka is powerful. No doubt about it. But it’s also a beast when it comes to operational complexity and cost. What starts as a simple deployment quickly turns into a resource-hungry system that eats up engineering hours, compute power, and budget. Let’s consider a company that eagerly rolls.

Critical infrastructure — including systems vital to energy, water, transportation, communication, healthcare, finance, the military, and more — is the backbone of any nation’s public health, safety, security, and economic stability. As a result of their necessity, these systems are prime targets for sophisticated state-sponsored threat actors, organized cybercrime groups, and even hacktivists interested in drawing the most attention to their cause.

If your organization uses Skype for Business for collaboration, it’s time to start thinking about your next communication platform. On Oct. 15, 2025, Microsoft will stop supporting Skype for Business. As a result, the platform’s performance issues, security vulnerabilities, and other bugs will no longer be fixed. There’s still time to move to a new platform before Skype for Business is no longer supported.

As cyber threats grow in sophistication and frequency, organizations worldwide are grappling with the challenge of safeguarding their systems and data while maintaining operational continuity. Cyber resilience, the ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents, is no longer just a competitive advantage…it’s a critical necessity.

The Mattermost Desktop Client for Windows is now available in the Windows Store, bringing secure, real-time collaboration to teams tackling the most critical challenges of our time. Whether you’re safeguarding national security, managing complex operations in critical infrastructure, or driving innovation in defense and government, your work matters. Mattermost is here to help you do — and protect — the work that matters most with tools that are adaptable, secure, and resilient.