As a developer-focused company, InfluxData is always interested in how the community is doing. During the first two weeks of April, we conducted an online survey to find out how developers are handling life and work during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 324 self-identified software developers/engineers from across the world responded (46% from North America, 44% from Europe, 9% from South America, and 1% from Africa) to share their feelings during this unprecedented global event.

With most of the world on lockdown due to the COVID-19 virus, many aspects of IT services and digital transformation have been put into the fast lane. There are reports of massive surges in the use of tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Office 365, etc. in order to communicate and collaborate. At the same time organizations are required to scale up access to their internal applications.

Ransomware is a serious threat to institutions of all kinds, resulting in mounting costs for organizations that must literally pay ransom to regain access to their essential systems. A ransomware attack takes place when a cybercriminal denies an organization access to the data it needs to conduct business, usually by encrypting the data with a secret key. The attacker then offers to reveal the encryption key in exchange for a payment. The payment can vary in amount or kind.

Businesses who operate along supply chains, like manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, have innovative systems and processes for predicting demand and keeping consumers satisfied. Until a crisis hits. When demand for essential SKUs spikes due to panic buying and fear-based hoarding, organizations in essential consumer categories can find themselves forced to make critical decisions without reliable information to base them on, significantly increasing their risk exposure.

The cloud is becoming the vehicle for next-generation digital business and has emerged as the go-to platform for start-ups looking to thrive in today's highly dynamic and competitive market. Traditional on-premises IT solutions require higher investments in hardware, software licenses, maintenance, and training costs, which makes them ill-suited for start-ups.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created some incredible challenges to our daily lives but what will be the wider long term impacts on our future society, and how we go about our every day? With people self-isolating, working from home and away from other people, the key winners in this crisis will be those who provide products and services without needing to come into physical contact with their customers.

Starting today, you can receive notifications from AppSignal in your Discord channels. With AppSignal, you get endless insights with just a few minutes of work. We already have a whole list of out-of-the-box integrations besides Slack and Discord. AppSignal was built with developers in mind and that is why it also allows you to customize it and build upon it with your solutions. You can use webhooks as the ultimate free form to get alerted on any URL you want.

You now have postmortems properly implemented, automated, and well-structured. You’re generating reports and data automatically based on all your incidents. Two levels of management have agreed to your SRE buy-in efforts. That is a huge accomplishment! If you’re here, you’re making great traction adopting SRE best practices, but the battle is not won yet. The hardest but most strategic, important effort will be proving to your C-levels why they should buy into SRE.

On April 7, 2020, the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) released a notice confirming that two of its websites, SFOConnect.com and SFOConstruction.com, were targets of a cyberattack in March 2020. The attack has been attributed to a hacker group that was attempting to steal the Windows logins of the airport’s employees. When we hear news about cyberattacks, a few typical, yet crucial questions spring to mind: How did the attackers perform the cyberattack?

One of the primary concerns of IT admins when employees start working remotely is authenticating users. How can employees securely log in to their accounts while working remotely? What happens if users get locked out of their accounts? These are some of the questions that organizations are asking themselves when implementing work-from-home policies.