Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

December 7 started as a typical, but busy, pre-holiday weekday. This included a mix of booming online retail sales ($33.9 billion spent during cyber week), packages flooding delivery services, and high online traffic. But much of that quickly came to a crawl. An outage of the AWS us-east-1 cloud region changed the good fortune for many websites and applications and impacted the lives of consumers across the United States and parts of Europe.

Many years ago, in my earliest IT jobs in Omaha, Nebraska, I realized the field of data was going to continue to evolve and, as such, there would always be a need for people who worked with and understood data. Regardless of which industry someone worked in—financial, medical, governmental, transportation, or retail—someone would have to work with and maintain business data, or the business would fail. This realization led me into the world of databases and SQL Server.

2021 holiday travel has been a rebound for the industry. Just this week, I was attempting to purchase flights for a long weekend before travel picks up for the holidays. However, after a failed attempt to sign up for their Executive Club and enduring slow page loads after every click, I abandoned the site and booked elsewhere. Just like that, I was a lost customer.

Nobody could have predicted 2020, and 2021 was another year to be reckoned with. With 2022 just around the corner, the SolarWinds Head Geeks share their thoughts on what the new year has in store.

A relational database management system (RDBMS)—often referred to as a SQL database because of the Structured Query Language (SQL) used to interact with it—has long been the gold standard for storing transaction-based data. Since the 1970s, RDBMSs have been used to store bank transactions, stock trades, inventory management, and more.

As this fiscal year wraps up, many agencies are planning their response to compliance reporting requirements. Meeting these requirements—particularly in advance of an audit—can be incredibly time-consuming. While the Defense Department has made managing risk easier through Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), it’s still dependent upon IT staff to help ensure their systems are continuously secure and compliant.

In the first post of this two-part series, we talked about the need to fully understand how users experience your website. Without understanding how your end users interact with your site’s pages—what’s working for them and what’s not—you’d be optimizing on a hunch without solid data to guide you.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a workflow orchestration service used mostly for data integration and transformation. It was first released as part of SQL Server 2005 and continues to receive updates and new features today. While SSIS can be installed and run on a server (on-premises or in the cloud), it’s also available in Azure Data Factory. SSIS is commonly used to perform tasks such as: While SSIS originally only ran on Windows, it has also been available for Linux since 2017.

In advance of this week’s Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a reminder for critical infrastructure to stay vigilant against cyber threats during holidays and weekends. This advisory is a reminder the holidays present a noted challenge for businesses and an opportunity for cyber adversaries.