Maintaining IT infrastructure is a consistent challenge for system administrators, site reliability engineers (SREs), supporting developers, and technicians. Several factors can impact system performance, cause outages, or impact customer experience. On top of that, not all incidents are created equal. The impacts and severity of a system outage affecting 10% of your users are different from an outage impacting 90%.
What are the keys to building software development security into the early stages of product development? And what are the costs of ignoring security? In this article, xMatters Product Manager Kit Brown-Watts provides his insights on the matter. Every investment decision comes with trade-offs, usually in the form of cost, quality, or speed. The CQS Matrix, as I like to call it, captures the dilemma most product people face.
One of the great things about the TV detective Columbo was that he never made a hasty decision based on first impressions or appearances at a crime scene. It didn't matter how obvious it seemed to be who committed the crime (or how good the frame-up) was: Columbo always dug deeper into motives, opportunities, and methods to uncover who the guilty party was.
It’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and as a Cybersecurity Awareness Month Champion Organization, xMatters is proud to be actively participating. Since the National Cybersecurity Alliance started this initiative in 2004, the number of devices connected to the internet and the amount of time we spend interacting online has increased exponentially. The impact on our lives is so massive that it’s become hard to imagine what life would be like without our devices.
Companies moving their applications and services to the cloud is nothing new, but doing business there requires a solid cloud migration strategy. The list of things to consider is longer than you might think. Fortunately, xMatters has done it successfully and has helped its own customers move to the cloud too. In this article, Product Marketing Manager Erin Jones gives a checklist you can use to get your cloud migration right.
The perfect incident management checklist doesn’t need to be a fantasy. In fact, it shouldn’t be! The perfect incident management checklist should cover several topics, be broken down into bite-size sections, and help team members quickly identify tasks that fall under their responsibility. We asked our experts what should be included in the perfect incident management checklist. Here are their answers.
In IT environments, incidents happen all the time and it's impossible to prevent all of them. Regardless of the available software solutions or the level of technical training of both users and developers, no organization is immune to incidents. The increased dependence on IT infrastructure to provide core services means that any disruption in IT services can cause any organization significant financial and reputational harm. For example, IT service providers need to resolve customer support tickets following the service-level agreements (SLAs), and failing to do so makes them liable for breaching such agreements.
As business systems grow to encompass more locations, tools, and organizations, defining processes that keep pace with these changes can’t be left to a hodgepodge of disconnected programs—or worse, manual implementation of paper documentation. You need to automate. Automation within businesses first arose in the 1960s, alongside resource planning systems.
Cloud services have skyrocketed in popularity in the past few years, providing a vast array of resources as well as a cost-effective path for the migration from on-premises servers to the cloud. In fact, cloud services are handling all the computing needs of many businesses. It’s very likely you’re already using cloud services and will continue to use more as time goes on.
When an incident inevitably occurs, many organizations have a well-prepared incident management team that springs into action. Whether it’s a power outage or security breach, an incident can damage your company’s operations if not handled properly. A strong incident response team is critical to mitigating any negative impacts successfully. Furthermore, once your team resolves the problem, you should initiate a postmortem to detail the incident and record any lessons learned.
