Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The cloud bill arrives at the end of every month, and somewhere in it sits a line item that nobody outside the infrastructure team really understands. It might be called "data transfer," "egress," or "outbound bandwidth," and it might be 5% of the total or even 25%. Whatever it is, it tends to be the line that finance asks engineering about, and engineering struggles to explain in a way that finance can act on. The problem is that egress is a fee that hides in plain sight. It's not on the marketing page.

The default cloud choice for technically literate teams has shifted. It hasn't shifted dramatically; the major hyperscalers aren't going anywhere, and their enterprise position is still strong, but the conversation that used to start with "which hyperscaler" now genuinely starts with "what do we actually need." That's new.

We are pleased to announce the release of Excel Add-ins 3.0, a major update to our Excel Add-ins for databases and cloud applications. The new version adds support for Microsoft Excel 2024 across all products. It also includes new database versions, expanded object and report support, improved data type handling, and enhanced connection security.

We’ve gotten used to understanding our applications through signals, summaries, and traces. Tiny little bits of information about how the app really works. Not because that’s the best way to do it, but because it’s been too hard to get the real thing. The real information exists. It’s on the network. How people called your app and what your code did. What other systems it called, the database queries it made, and the result sets that came back.

It's 7am. An alert fired overnight. You open your monitoring solution, navigate to the alert, cross-reference the waits, check the query plans. Twenty minutes later: it should not have fired. You knew that before you started, but you had to check anyways. The feeling of being overwhelmed by alerts is real. And so is the cost. Thresholds set once and forgotten, firing on patterns that have been normal for months. The inbox fills. DBAs learn to ignore most alerts. The workaround becomes the workflow.

If anyone knows how to operate under scrutiny, it’s database teams within finance organizations. It’s a given considering the more rigorous compliance requirements and processes they must follow. But the 2026 State of the Database Landscape: Finance Edition reveals something more specific, and more uncomfortable, than the familiar story of regulatory pressure.

On June 9, 2026, the OpenSSL project released patches covering 18 vulnerabilities across its supported releases. The headline flaw, CVE-2026-45447, is rated high severity and has the potential for remote code execution. Not too long ago, a security advisory with 18 vulnerabilities would have been routine. Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday provided a predictable cycle, and organizations operated with the expectation of a meaningful remediation window. That model is under pressure.