On Saturday, December 12, our CEO was advised by an executive at FireEye of a security vulnerability in our Orion Software Platform which was the result of a very sophisticated cyberattack on SolarWinds. We soon discovered that we had been the victim of a malicious cyberattack that impacted our Orion Platform products as well as our internal systems.

Cybersecurity attacks, such as ransomware and phishing scams, have delivered crippling IT blows in the public sector for some time. And here’s the bad news—these attacks have proliferated in the days of COVID-19. A new report from Google found a 350% increase in phishing attacks since the beginning of the year. To better defend against today’s cyberattacks, state and local governments are increasingly exploring the benefits of software-defined networking (SDN).

IT asset management (ITAM) is one of the most crucial strategies for businesses to practice. If 2020 had you shuffling monitors and laptops all over the country, 2021 isn’t going to make things any easier. Next year looks to bring all new sets of challenges for tracking, maintaining, and budgeting for the assets that your IT organization has not had their hands on in almost a year.

In July, we rolled out SolarWinds® Papertrail™ support for SAML v2.0. SAML authentication allows you to log into your Active Directory® domain or intranet and have immediate access to Papertrail, with no additional login required. Today we’re extending Papertrail SAML 2.0 support to include group mapping. Group mapping allows you to define organization and product roles, and grant access to logs and billings plans, by adding an account to an identify provider group.

DigitalOcean droplets provide low-cost scale from a popular server provider. With DigitalOcean Monitoring, you can collect metrics for visibility, monitor Droplet performance, and receive alerts when problems arise in your infrastructure. But when you need to deep dive into your application to debug an issue, resolve an incident, or identify opportunities to improve your platform, you need a deep understanding of the underlying operating system and how it interacts within its environment.

Under the leadership of innovative CIOs—Chief Information Officers—the public sector is blazing new trails and focusing on things like digital transformation to provide constituents with the best services available in the most efficient way possible. While digital transformation will impact the way federal and state agencies look at and adopt new technologies, it will also affect the role of the CIO.

Traditional database and application monitoring used to mean talking about a single server, in a single data center, in a single location. Many monitoring tools were—and still are—built around this single data center, single node idea. And while we’ve progressed to cloud-native applications, our tools haven’t quite caught on.

For many organizations, the circumstances of 2020 led to a review of on-premises infrastructure and opportunities to take a leap to the cloud. These decisions are not one-size-fits-all, and there are slew of challenges to keep in mind. Tackling those migration challenges has led organizations to hybrid IT—an environment of technology infrastructure that lives partially on-premises and partially in the cloud.

One of the biggest challenges organizations face in the current age of digital transformation is the issue of complexity. As the technology landscape continues to expand, organizations are increasingly moving away from centralized management to a more decentralized model. For many enterprises, monitoring, managing, and securing traditional and cloud-based infrastructures is becoming more difficult.