Cloud computing can be more complex than anticipated, particularly as agencies continue to move applications and operations into a cloud environment. Does your federal IT team have the in-house skills to ensure cloud computing is helping your agency rather than draining its money and resources?

In a perfect world, how would like to learn about a problem? If you’re like the development team here at SolarWinds® Papertrail™, none of these options sound good. We’d all prefer to be notified when something starts to fail, but before there’s a service impact. At a minimum, we want to know the instant a service or application goes down. Fortunately, Papertrail has some powerful and easy-to-use alerting capabilities.

When IT professionals change jobs, it isn’t always a smooth and easy transition. Let’s say you worked somewhere else for a couple of years and got used to the environment you worked in. It was your kitchen; you knew what was in each drawer and where to put everything away. And even though the technology will be the same at your new job (the network is the network, after all), there will still be significant differences.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about why you don’t need a blockchain. Blockchain is one long transaction log that always gets written to and is never backed up. It’s a ledger, more or less, with some math. And while distributed ledgers can be useful for some scenarios, I’m here today to say you still don’t need a blockchain. What turns a distributed ledger into a blockchain is cryptography for creating a digital signature to reduce the risk of data tampering.

A lot happened last quarter, so you might have missed a few of the shiny new features now included with SolarWinds® AppOptics™. Don’t worry, we rounded up the recent updates here so you can get the most out of your application performance monitoring (APM) with AppOptics. Simplified Application Root Cause and Service- and Trace-Level Root Cause Summary Views The new service- and trace-level views expand the types of IT professionals who can use AppOptics.

Class is almost in session, and this year will look very different than it did in years past. Depending on the state and district, school officials have decided to continue virtual learning or put safety plans in place for in-person learning. In any case, technology will be the backbone for successful learning in 2020. Schools’ IT departments will be integral in ensuring students and teachers have reliable devices and easy access to software applications to start and finish the year strong.

Modern application development requires more work to ensure the development path and the data it produces are fully in sync, secure, optimized, and error-free. This responsibility has increasingly fallen upon application developers. They’re being asked to double as database administrators to maintain fluidity in the process and support an agency’s rapid release cycle.

With one of the largest threats to a company’s security and privacy being its own employees, having employees work remotely only adds to the risk. While this year’s Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report chalks it up to internal errors rather than intentional malice, the threat remains. Many corporations have sent employees to work from the confines of their homes, creating a greater need for protection against data and security breaches.

I’m not going to even try to pretend SysAdmin Day arrives this year under conditions anyone would call “business as usual.” I’m going to avoid the cliched and empty platitudes of “the new normal,” “unprecedented times,” and “focusing on what matters.” I’m also going to avoid needlessly reminding you how much your company, coworkers, family, and friends rely on you because of your technical knowledge and expertise.