Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Nine. Million. Dollars. Well, $9.44 million to be exact for your average data breach according to the latest report from IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022. From 2017 to 2022, that number has only continued increasing from $7.35 million, an almost 30% increase in just five years. For a small company, a security breach can be the difference between staying open or closing the business. And for a Fortune 500 enterprise, that cost will be more severe.

The direction of travel for business technology is one-way. The momentum towards strategies around decentralised, hybrid technologies is unstoppable. Examples abound, from the composable software stacks of e-commerce to the ongoing death of monolithic ERP. Modern, digitally-driven business is based on a dynamic alignment of resources, data and technology at the granular level, which is then coordinated precisely.

The pressure to release application features faster to meet the demands of customers presents a number of challenges, including unforeseen deployment delays, custom feature sets, and complex rollbacks when errors occur. To overcome these challenges, developers can use Flagsmith, an open source feature flagging and remote configuration service that allows developers to easily roll out and test new features for a specific subset of users.

Microsoft Azure, one of the leading cloud computing platforms, provides various services that enable businesses to run and manage applications efficiently. Among these services are virtual machines (VMs), which offer scalable computing resources to accommodate the diverse requirements of modern applications. In this article, we will delve into the different Azure VM types available and guide you on how to select the most suitable option for your specific needs.

ChatGPT has been the talk of the town for more than four months now. As the first ever artificial intelligence (AI) -powered chatbot, it has quickly gained immense popularity, helping students, engineers and even executives generate content, write and debug code and run market analyses. But could ChatGPT be used for anything other than natural language processing (NPL)? Could it, for example, assist businesses with strategic decision-making? I decided to try it out.

Over the last five years, there has been a constant push to move infrastructure to the Cloud, which accelerated further during the pandemic. It is becoming clear that for a proportion of organisations, the Cloud is not always the best route and that an on-premise (also known as on-prem, on-premises) or a hybrid model is most beneficial. On-premise relates to where IT infrastructure is located; this can be physically in a building, usually in a server room.

During my recent work on extending our GitLab packaging capabilities, I came across various types of tokens that can be used to authenticate users, services, and pipelines while using GitLab CI/CD. Each token has its unique features and use cases that can help ensure the security and integrity of your GitLab environment. By understanding the features and use cases of each token, you can leverage them to enhance your GitLab CI/CD workflows and ensure the security of your GitLab environment.