A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in software development is often what we strive for when proving a case for improvement or product. With the movement toward the cloud infrastructure, we should start striving for a Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC). An MVC consists of everything needed to get a cloud environment up and running. The main services of cloud infrastructure are Communication, Application, and Storage.

Empire Office is the United State’s largest commercial furniture dealer, providing creative and cost-effective workspace solutions. Based in Manhatten, NY, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, they were mandated to immediate stay at home orders, forcing their entire workforce to work from home. Fortunately, their Senior Vice President and CIO, Michael Pfaeffle, had already enabled the teams to work remotely by investing in Citrix XenApp a few years prior.

As I wrote in a previous blog post, the world has undergone massive changes that have created chaos for CIOs as they struggle to ensure operational continuity, including when in scenarios where things change in an unprecedented fashion overnight. What does operational continuity look like as the world moves forward in the paradigm of the new normal?

In the new normal, if your business has chosen remote operations, this might attract malicious actors. Hackers prey on the remote workforce whose vulnerability has increased in multifold ways. While infrastructural concerns, such as working outside the corporate IT network and using home Wi-Fi are inevitable, other issues, including using personal devices and retaining privileges to access more than required business resources add to the magnitude of this vulnerability.

The current period, with so many working from home due to the global Covid-19 pandemic, has seen a considerable increase in cloud communications consumption. Microsoft Teams’ daily active user count alone has more than doubled in approximately a month. As a long-time partner of Microsoft, Ribbon and our partners have been on the front lines helping organizations keep their communications robust and available during this time.

I'm excited to share how the diverse and powerful channel team at AppDynamics is using this time to embrace a new era of digital business.

In February, we wrote about how major live sporting events in March will impact online ordering and food delivery. We discussed the associated importance of monitoring your web app to ensure a smooth end-user experience and to troubleshoot issues like downtime, slow load times, and broken transaction flows. But unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what happened. All the sports were cancelled. That’s right, no broadcasted games. No championships. No brackets.

If you’ve been building or supporting applications for a while, you’ve probably experienced the uncomfortable postmortem meetings that inevitably follow significant service interruptions. You know how it works. There was a critical outage in one of your apps and it took the team an entire week to track down and fix the issue. Customers and revenue were lost. Now you’re sitting in a large conference room with executives to discuss what happened and why.

As a software producer, you need to keep releases moving, even as you need to move your technology ahead. Transitioning your Jenkins continuous integration (CI) pipelines to a newer, optimized system can’t be a roadblock, and your enterprise can’t afford the work stoppage a rip-and-replace rework would require. We understood that deeply when we built our CI/CD solution, JFrog Pipelines.

When building Icinga DB Web we completely rewrote the basic Icinga Web UI. The “monitoring module”, which it was called before. While this existed for some time and the and the underlying concepts were already used in the Icinga Director, we took the chance and brought our Web UI to a new level. In Icinga IPL every UI element is represented by a PHP class.