Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What does it mean to build a successful networking team? Is it hiring a team of CCIEs? Is it making sure candidates know public cloud inside and out? Or maybe it’s making sure candidates have only the most sophisticated project experience on their resume. In this post, we’ll discuss what a successful networking team looks like and what characteristics we should look for in candidates. What does it mean to build a successful networking team?

As I’ve discussed in my previous blogs in this series, smart networks are becoming increasingly important in an ever-increasing range of industries. These smart networks can deliver significant benefits, but there are some risks, challenges and issues associated with moving to “smart”. In my final blog in the series I will discuss what is required from a modernized communications network to counter some of these risk, challenges and issues.

Just the other day I was working on a side project. As we sometimes tend to do, I began on the production branch thinking to myself, “I’ll move this to the feature branch before I push”. Of course, as we tend to do, I forgot that I was working from the production branch and git push’ed—triggering a production deployment. I’d have loved to be able to abort that deployment at that moment.

People are handling more and more matters on their smartphones through mobile apps both privately and professionally. With thousands or even millions of users, ensuring great performance and reliability is a key challenge for providers and operators of mobile apps and related backend services.

We implemented a small, but valuable feature requested by some of our users. You can now store some free form notes on a site. When heading over a site's settings, you'll see the new "notes" field. Here you can add some important information to the site, for example, some details on the SLA or technical details, ... When you saved notes on a site, we'll show it when hovering over the site on the site list. Of course, you can also get to these notes via the API.

Over two years after releasing The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020, Forrester recently released The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation, Q1 2023 report. If you are unfamiliar with the most recent report, it examines eleven top vendors within this space, and their capabilities to help guide purchasing decisions based on need.

The tech world has been on a rollercoaster since the COVID-19 pandemic. During the large-scale shift to remote work throughout 2020-21, big tech firms invested heavily in talent and infrastructure and there was plenty of growth in the IT space. Since the second half of 2022, however, high inflation, big tech layoffs, and the threat of an economic recession have organizations focused more on remaining cost-effective than investing in growth.

Observability is the ability to gather data from metrics, logs, traces, and other sources, and use that data to form a complete picture of a system’s behavior, performance, and health. While monitoring alone was once the go-to approach for managing IT infrastructure, observability goes further, allowing IT teams to detect and understand unexpected or unknown events.

MSPs own and process large amounts of sensitive data and act as gateways to the sensitive data and infrastructure of their clients, which is why cybercriminals view them as good potential targets. To adequately protect this sensitive data from today’s sophisticated attacks, it is crucial that MSPs leverage cybersecurity best practices to ensure the safety and security of their own systems and their customers’ systems.

Agility matters in incident response, and the easiest way to spring into action is by having a well-defined team in place ahead of time. The right people in the right roles will help you respond to and resolve incidents more quickly and efficiently. In fact, we found in the Incident Benchmark Report that incidents with roles assigned had a 42% lower mean time to resolution than those that didn’t. But what roles do you need to fill?