Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

“To err is human.” The possibility of human error is everywhere. However thoroughly a roll-out is planned, however fool-proof an update, however tightly-run a deployment strategy, any business that involves humans is going to carry a certain possibility of human error. It comes with the territory.

Change management is an essential part of IT service management (ITSM), and it's a tightrope walk between implementing the change as fast as possible and mitigating the risks. The risks go up when it's an emergency update. According to Harvard Business Review, 70% of change initiatives fail. But emergency changes are important, they’re essential to keep the business flowing and to mitigate losses. Let's explore the emergency change control process and five best practices for it.

Peanut butter and jelly are two great condiments on their own but pairing them together elevates the sandwich game to a whole other level. That’s pretty much the case with employee experience and customer experience. When organizations pair EX and CX together and channel their efforts to keep both ends of the spectrum happy and delighted, the end result is the sweet and salty aftertaste of PB&J in the form of lower employee turnover and higher customer satisfaction.

As businesses grow, the support teams often struggle to keep up with increasing workloads. There is often more than one issue, service request, or customer query that needs resolving, and the staff can be under-equipped to attend to them in real-time. Hence, it is vital to ensure that your IT support staff should be able to maintain high levels of productivity, swiftly address customer demands, and efficiently manage all incoming support requests.

SolarWinds recently release Hybrid Cloud Observability, a solution we’ve been building towards for a long time, and something I see as the evolution of monitoring. If you missed Thomas LaRock’s recent article on observability and how we got here, then you missed a fun walk down memory lane. Importantly, it covers the history of our evolution from a simple toolset to the comprehensive set of monitoring known as the Orion® Platform and beyond.

We’ve entered a new era of cyber risk where cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue, according to findings from a May 2022 ThoughtLab global survey co-sponsored by ServiceNow. Although cyberattacks and breaches are increasing, many organizations are unprepared to respond. The problems come down to three main areas.

A robust IT asset management solution is key to the efficient delivery of IT services to an organization. It’s important to keep track of the organization’s assets, both hardware and software, to ensure continued service delivery. Without this, these assets may fail or stop functioning as intended and can cause inconvenient service disruption.

Imagine you’re in an airport and going through security. Why do you have to go through such rigorous checks? These security checks protect the passengers and the aircraft themselves from accidental harm and possible crime. Assume you’re in the office now. You enter the office after showing your ID card. Even if you forget your ID card, all you have to do is tell the receptionist your employee ID and they can let you in.

It’s been twenty years since the corporate scandals of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. The collapse of these giant corporations ruined the lives of the employees who tirelessly worked for leaders who let greed dictate their decision-making. Laws have been implemented since then to help reduce the risk of another Enron, but laws won’t stop all instances of poor leadership. Poor tone at the top increases vulnerabilities, employee non-compliance, and job dissatisfaction.

It’s no secret that ransomware threats skyrocketed – in both volume and boldness – during the pandemic. Threat actors capitalized on the sudden transition to remote work and the resulting lapses in security. Now that the working world is beginning to settle into a permanent Everywhere Workplace, you might think the ransomware trend would begin to reverse. Not so, according to a new report from Ivanti. The report details ransomware trends from Q1 2022, and the findings are bleak.