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.

There’s no debating the value of digital transformation when it comes to optimal business performance, but for many IT leaders, some digital initiatives are pushed to the backburner due to other priorities. Over the last few months, COVID-19 has forced a number of those initiatives to the top of the list. From businesses transitioning to remote work, to schools closing, to travel plans being canceled, no one was fully prepared for what the world would face this year.

One of the business consequences from the pandemic—increased remote working—is causing technology challenges across most industries, including the public sector. Most employees who are now working from home have probably never had to do so before, while those still attending their place of work are mostly people in central government trying to keep the country running, or other critical roles.

While the concept of zero-trust security has many IT organizations thinking in terms of identity, access, and cloud services, zero trust must run on a solid foundation. We should start by talking about the goals of zero-trust security. Zero trust involves creating an environment where each access request is first scrutinized to determine whether it should be allowed.

Different IT organizations have different needs. The one-man shop might find the best success with open-source software, while enterprises often need something a little more. But occasionally you’ll see an enterprise using open-source or something designed for a small to medium-sized business. This can be a good thing in certain instances, though it’s not without risks. So, why might you want to use SMB or open-source gear in an enterprise setting, and when might it be a good thing?

As all Papertrail fans know, sending logs to Papertrail using syslog is quick and easy. Generating and transmitting syslog packets usually involves just 2 – 4 lines of code, and you can see your logs flowing into Papertrail in minutes. There are times, however, when you just can’t use syslog or install a remote_syslog2 daemon. This is where the new support for sending logs via HTTP comes in. And the best news is, it’s just as quick and easy to set up.

It’s an exchange that happens almost every day in every business office: Employee peeks over the divider and asks her coworker, “Hey, how do I connect this to Bluetooth?” Maybe it’s a frozen laptop, or a glitch in the browser, or an issue connecting to VPN. And maybe it’s a drive-by at the coffee machine or Slack message to a “tech-savvy” coworker.

Managing servers isn’t always the most effective way to run an application. With serverless computing, teams can deploy applications directly to managed hardware, scale them on demand, and avoid the overhead of provisioning and maintaining their own infrastructure. As many as 40% of companies surveyed by DevOps.com use serverless computing. And serverless platforms like Azure Functions make deploying serverless questions quick and easy.

Congress set the stage for IT modernization across the federal government by passing the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, allowing agencies to apply for a loan from the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) to update their legacy systems. The theory states, with access to TMF funds, agencies can now improve innovation, enhance efficiencies, and strengthen their security postures.

You’ve been contemplating adopting a new ITSM solution for some time. The current one handles the bare minimum—it helps your team churn through a ticket queue—but you know there are other solutions capable of more. So what’s standing in your way? Implementing that new platform seems time-consuming and stressful. But it doesn’t have to be.

Over five million people work in the U.K. public sector, representing over 16% of all people in paid work, according to government figures. And mobile working is a reality of daily life for many of us. A report from Deloitte revealed of the 32.3 million people in work in the U.K., the majority (51%) spend some time away from a fixed location in the course of their work.

Query tuning is generally considered one of the fastest ways to accelerate your Microsoft SQL Server performance. System-level server performance improvement activities can be expensive and ineffective. Moreover, expert developers agree most SQL Server performance issues can be traced directly to poorly written queries and ineffective indexing rather than hardware constraints. In fact, many performance problems can only be resolved through query optimization and tuning.

We’ve officially made it past day 100 in quarantine. I hope you’ve found your groove, perfected your at-home office/workspace, learned a new language, tested six new bread recipes, and launched a successful TikTok channel. I also hope your pants still fit and you remember how to put them on correctly. Working from home has been an interesting situation to say the least, and has come with a whirlwind of emotions and business updates, two things I never expected to type in the same sentence.

Okay, good. You have a change management practice in place. You know how to define it, its benefits, how to get the process started, and how to measure its success. You also know it makes for greater success for business initiatives, it prepares the organization for the future, and drives consistency. But how can your current change management practice be improved upon? No matter if you’re a change requestor or change manager, the improvement of your current practice depends on these four actions.

Over the past two decades, two trends have completely reshaped the IT landscape: cloud computing and microservices. With cloud computing, organizations of all sizes can provision infrastructure and run applications on a global scale within minutes. And with microservices, these organizations can deploy highly scalable distributed workloads just as quickly.

The movies are filthy with examples of artificial intelligence. Some, like the first Terminator, are evil. Some, like the Star Wars droids, work for the good guys. And so many of them are flatly iconic—Blade Runner (both of them), 2001: A Space Odyssey, War Games, Westworld (the movie and the HBO series), Matrix[i] … the list keeps going and going. We aren’t at the point yet when we can get R2 to talk the Millennium Falcon—or the data center—and find out what’s wrong.

From the Cloud First policy established in 2010 to last year’s Cloud Smart update, it’s clear the government is driving federal agencies toward cloud computing. The strategy makes sense, but for agencies migrating, however, the decision is less clear cut, because there are several options agencies can choose based on individual agency needs.

It’s a day for celebration! Our migration is complete, and our applications are now running in the cloud environment best suited to their needs. The rest of our application inventory, the ones not cut out for the cloud, remain on-premises where they belong. Actually…we’re not done yet. We still have some work to do to make sure our hybrid environment runs smoothly and delivers the business value we expect. Fortunately, we aren’t the first ones to travel this path.

The global effect of and challenges to business in 2020 is the very definition of “unprecedented.” While large enterprises enjoy the advantage of scale to redistribute focus and sustain demand for their goods and services, small- to medium-sized businesses may not be as lucky. For example, your favorite restaurants and retail shops, both local and national chains, have been hit in previously inconceivable ways, and are doing everything in their power to survive.

For some, change is something to look forward to. For others, it may be scary and anxiety-inducing. If the latter describes your organization, it may be time to rethink your change management practice. Changes are necessary in ITSM. Whether standard or an emergency, if IT changes are not successful, the business could suffer in the long run. Performing changes allows IT pros and business leaders to be proactive when risks arise to minimize disruption and keep employees engaged in the work that counts.

There are two easy ways to make your cloud application faster and they’re homonyms; cash being the first and cache being the second. (Sorry, but not sorry, for the dad joke). The cloud makes it very easy to increase the amount of compute power and therefore performance associated of your cloud resources.