It’s Friday, and a holiday (of sorts) heading into a long weekend (for some). We’re going to start with something light, and then get a little heavier. If you like what you read here, please do share with your colleagues and pals! Share the love...of work. You may not care for the Hallmark holiday of Valentine’s Day, but why not celebrate all sorts of love on this day? Let’s start with work, where great things can happen with the right attitude.

This article originally appeared in Jaxcenter. Canary deployments are a commonly-used DevOps practice for staggered rollouts, sending small updates to groups in order to catch and fix issues. Ultimately, experimenting with DevOps practices such as canary deployments can help IT (and IT operations) bridge the gap with the business and deliver more value, faster.

Martha Heller is CEO of Heller Search Associates, an IT leadership executive recruiting firm. Martha is a frequent keynote speaker at IT industry events and author of two books: The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership, and Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT. We chat with Martha about how CIOs are pushing tech work into the business, the IT skills they need most, and what they need to do to attract and retain women.

CIOs eat business challenges for breakfast. Everyone wants to know what the CIO is thinking and doing. After all, these brave men and women are leading the charge of marketplace innovation and business productivity. They’re being held increasingly accountable to drive revenues. CIOs are therefore focusing more time on identifying opportunities for competitive differentiation over functional tasks like cost control, according to the 2020 State of the CIO Report, by IDG Research.

I’ve always enjoyed working at tech startups, and the journey which led me to join OpsRamp as the company’s first VP of Sales for EMEA began more than 20 years ago. I’ve learned a lot from working across diverse infrastructure categories, such as security, virtualization, storage, and identity management. Nobody was doing SaaS two decades ago, but there’s no question that today, IT is much more meaningful and powerful with the advent of cloud computing.

OpsRamp helps IT teams monitor the availability of physical, logical, and virtual storage resources with performance indicators for storage capacity, overall utilization, and disk latency. IT teams can optimize their storage environments with granular visibility for storage components such as volume, fiber channel, RAID, SAN switches, LUNs, caches, and disks.

Tooting our own horn: Startups need money to grow and continue the innovation pipeline. Luckily for us, three great partners are fueling our next phase of growth as we announced yesterday a $37.5M raise led by Morgan Stanley, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and our original investor Sapphire Ventures.

Network availability is critical for the health and performance of business-critical applications and IT infrastructure. Given that network resources like routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, VoIP/UC, and wireless LAN controllers are the backbone of today’s digital infrastructure, how does IT gain the right levels of visibility to troubleshoot network issues?

This article originally appeared in TechBeacon. Gartner first coined the term "AIOps" a few years ago to describe "artificial intelligence for IT operations," and over the last few years, IT operations monitoring tool vendors have begun incorporating AIOps features into their products. Now AIOps tools are commonplace, but many IT leaders remain cautious about using these relatively new capabilities.

What Wall Street does makes you listen. Netflix, Amazon and Google aren’t the only companies leading the charge for internal IT best practices. Nasdaq’s top IT dog, Brad Peterson, told The Wall Street Journal that serverless computing is a leading strategy in the financial-markets sector. This makes sense, as financial services organizations today must focus on the hefty task of data management, not server management.