Google recently joined Facebook, Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter and HPE in recommending its North American employees work from home to help slow down the spread of Coronavirus COVID-19. Workers can communicate in real-time on message systems like Slack and videoconferencing like Zoom. However, with >200k tech workers now at home needing robust and secure connection to the internet for these high bandwidth collaboration tools, the virus is not the only thing these workers are slowing down.

Some of the most common challenges we hear about from customers are things that might be all too familiar to some of you. Things in IT have always changed rapidly, and it’s only picking up speed. The explosion of DevOps, cloud-centric architectures, and software-defined networking are making it increasingly difficult to keep monitoring and management tools in sync with the environment. This leads to another issue – management and individual teams lack visibility into the whole environment.

I fly a lot. Mercifully, not as much as your typical road warrior type, but enough where I’ve developed a routine on travel days. If it’s a good weather day, then I’ll hear the pilot announce, “We’ll be cruising at 33,000 ft. and expect clear skies all the way to our destination.” And if there’s lots of clouds? There’s auto-pilot, air traffic control and radar available to do some of the heavy lifting. That got me to thinking.

Aren’t we told, “The best things in life are free”? When tasked with picking up our “4 Cs of Quality Monitoring Tools” series. I knew the next topic to cover was “Cost” and the aforementioned quote immediately popped into my head.

Today’s IT organizations are faced with the challenge of integrating new technology into their infrastructure while continuing to support all of their legacy needs. Building upon the host of features already present in our flagship product, Netreo is proud to announce the release of OmniCenter 12. The enhancements found in this latest release greatly furthers an administrator’s ability to get deep insight into resources across their entire IT landscape.

Some things in life are easy and some things are hard. Sleeping-in on weekends (provided you don’t have small children), shifting into 6th gear and ‘flooring it’ on a deserted stretch of Eastbound I-70, and taking a swig of Breckenridge Brewery’s Vanilla Porter go in the “Easy” column. What kinds of things are on the “Hard” side of the ledger?