Many organizations are experiencing the need to modernize their IT systems to keep pace in an increasingly digital world. Adopting DevOps helps companies implement and initialize the modernization processes. At xMatters, our path to IT modernization has included implementing DevOps, but we have done it a little differently to ensure we are using agile processes.
It takes a lot to run a modern business. From websites to technical solutions and everything in between, it’s no surprise we need better monitoring systems to make sure everything is operational. With multiple gears turning at once on any given platform, incidents are inevitable—especially for companies that are constantly growing and innovating. And the impact of incidents can affect user services, operations, and even business reputation.
As a Solution Architect here at xMatters, an Everbridge Company, and through my 30-year career in the IT industry, I've seen many frameworks offering bold new ideas. CMMI, ITIL, Prince 2, Agile, Scrum, and most recently, DevOps. These frameworks come and go, offering huge improvements in the way we deliver and manage our IT capabilities, but never lasting long enough to act on those promises. That's not to say they haven't made a marked difference in the IT space, or that they haven't been hugely impactful for organizations around the globe. They become launching off points for a new framework, and now there's a new term that's appeared, DevSecOps.
ROI might be one of the most popular business acronyms in recent memory, and business to business, the definition remains the same: return on investment. No matter the industry, leaders are concerned with ROI and ensuring that every dollar spent is used in the best interest of the organization. But in practice, what does ROI really mean? Let’s discuss!
In the world of always-on services, many organizations have taken the path to modernize their IT operations to provide greater agility, lower cost, and most importantly, to deliver frictionless digital customer experiences. Is your DevOps team deploying more frequently than operations can support? Are you struggling to keep up with the maintenance issues associated with aging software? Modernizing your IT operations can be the key to overcoming these complexities.
Although IT incidents have always been a concern, the increase in customer-facing technology adds the cost of a bad customer experience to the cost of responding to and remediating an incident. While in a perfect world, you’d be able to prevent incidents from happening in the first place, the reality is they do happen and more often than most of us would like to admit.
When an incident strikes, an organization’s reputation and revenue, as well as customer trust are at stake. Assembling an effective incident response team is critical to minimizing the incident’s impact. But what exactly is an incident response team? Who should be a part of the team and what are their responsibilities? Successful incident responses require a team with a diverse set of problem-solving and communication skills.
With Halloween behind us and the holiday shopping season fast approaching, engineering and product teams know what that means: code freezes! At xMatters, code freezes are a part of our product release process in anticipation of the busiest — and most important — time of the year for many of our customers. But code freezes are just one piece of the puzzle in how we ensure our customers have the most reliable experiences. The way our product releases are designed is much more than that.
As infrastructure stacks grow increasingly complex and involve an ever-growing number of services, system failures are becoming more and more common. There can be a variety of reasons why systems fail: software bugs, misconfiguration or interactions between services that cause unexpected behavior, the network is down, and of course, those rare occasions where natural events can render data centers inoperative.
