Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Engineers have been managing incidents for as long as they’ve been building software, but the idea of incident management as a strategic practice in its own right is still finding its place. We’re starting to see big shifts in that area, though — more companies are dedicating headcount, resources, and tools to help them better prepare for, respond to, and learn from their incidents.

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.

Depending on your business, MTTR stands for mean time to repair or mean time to recovery – but it can also mean resolution, resolve, or restore. No matter how you define it, the basic measurement is the same: it’s the time it takes from when something goes down to when it is back and fully functional. This includes everything from finding the problem to fixing it. For ITOps teams, keeping MTTR to an absolute minimum is crucial.

At incident.io, our number one priority in engineering is pace. The faster we can build great product, the more feedback we can get and the more value we can deliver for our customers. But pace is a funny thing. If you optimise for pace over a single month, you’ll quickly find yourself slowed down by the weight of your past mistakes.

Continuous availability and unceasing innovation are prerequisites for today’s digital businesses. So it makes sense that business leaders invest heavily in teams and tools to monitor digital apps and services. In theory, these tools should also free up time for engineers to push new functionalities that wow customers. But do these investments actually result in more uptime and customer-delighting innovations?

Recently, technology roles have become more generalized—cloud computing, for instance, requires a broader knowledge of technologies like storage and network. As technology has continued to evolve over the decades, many job positions have blurred into many roles or even morphed into new roles with new responsibilities.

As a solutions engineer for FireHydrant, I speak with a wide variety of companies about their incident management programs — from start-ups with a handful of employees to large enterprise companies with thousands of engineers. Whether they’re looking to establish their incident management program or mature it, the same questions remain.

Of growing concern to both patients and the professionals who facilitate their care is the growing trend of healthcare organizations being preyed upon by cybercriminals. In the United States, recent political dialogue has brought special attention to patients’ privacy rights under HIPAA and the ongoing security of their records.