When I started my career in information technology, I worked for a large insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, they exclusively used Lotus Notes, an IBM product. Even as Microsoft Outlook gained popularity and functionality, the cost of changing email clients was insurmountable, so the company continued using Lotus Notes for many years.

One of my first projects as a consultant created a web application for a small tax software company in Omaha, Nebraska. They were looking to improve their online presence by offering customers the ability to automatically obtain the license for the application. Their website would allow the customer, potentially within minutes, to gain access to their software. They hired me to develop a process with an interface to their existing system to generate a license code, store it somewhere, and then email it.

Recently, technology roles have become more generalized—cloud computing, for instance, requires a broader knowledge of technologies like storage and network. As technology has continued to evolve over the decades, many job positions have blurred into many roles or even morphed into new roles with new responsibilities.

Did you know Halloween isn’t the only event in October ready to send shivers down your spine? Each year, October is “National Cybersecurity Awareness Month” in the U.S. and “European Cybersecurity Month” in Europe. So, before we dress up as ghosts, vampires, or whatever, let’s have a quick look at some old and new cyber risks to be aware of and how to deal with them.

Back in May, I had the pleasure of joining Michael Daniel, president, and chief executive officer of Cyber Threat Alliance, at the Forbes CIO Summit to discuss creating resilient digital ecosystems without sacrificing agility. In the past two years, we’ve evolved our product development models with a focus on a zero-trust mindset and culture.

Operating a modern web application requires having a good handle on what’s going on with your application’s log data. But this doesn’t mean you need to keep the logs pulled up all the time. Sometimes, you want the flexibility to send important logged events to any number of places. The integration of SolarWinds® Papertrail™ and AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) can help you make this happen.

When I began my career in IT more than two decades ago, most organizations had multiple silos of application development teams. Each team would be responsible for a single application or sometimes two and nothing else. Developers would spend days, weeks, or months working on a single release containing countless enhancements and improvements. Release day was a pressure cooker, with IT pros sometimes working on the deployment overnight, hoping nothing went disastrously wrong.

Modern IT environments are so complex, dynamic, and expansive that humans alone cannot effectively manage and maintain them. As a developer and operator, I have had to deal with failed servers and containers, running out of storage space, slow or unreliable network links, bugs in code, and unpredictable workloads in some applications.

Each year, SolarWinds publishes the IT Trends report, a collection of responses to survey questions meant to gain insight into the world of IT. I enjoy the IT Trends report for a variety of reasons, but my favorite reason is because I get to examine the raw data and draw conclusions! While reviewing the data and findings this year, I noted the demographic data collected included the number of years of IT experience for the survey respondents.