It’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and as a Cybersecurity Awareness Month Champion Organization, xMatters is proud to be actively participating. Since the National Cybersecurity Alliance started this initiative in 2004, the number of devices connected to the internet and the amount of time we spend interacting online has increased exponentially. The impact on our lives is so massive that it’s become hard to imagine what life would be like without our devices.

Customers expect that online services are available all the time. The truth is that outages happen to almost everyone because providing 100% service availability is challenging and costly. Creating reliable and profitable service is, amongst other things, finding the balance between application availability, costs and time to market. Faster feature delivery means less availability as constant changes to production may cause issues and introduce bugs.

In order to respond in real-time to urgent, critical digital incidents, on-call responders must be able to take action from anywhere. But when on-call responders become overwhelmed with alerts, they often just “ignore them” because they cannot tell the difference between a real alert and a false one.

StatusGator has a wide a variety of use cases: from education to help desk to IT and managed services and DevOps, too. All corners of an organization depend on cloud services and StatusGator gives you visibility into the status of all of your vendors. We’ve heard over and over from our DevOps users that alerts and notifications for their teams are already centralized into a single incident management platform such as OpsGenie, PagerDuty, or FireHydrant.

Resolving the incident is only half the battle when it comes to responding to incidents. For many teams, incident communication is an afterthought, leaving stakeholders inside and outside the organization guessing what happened. But ensuring that important information about the incident is disseminated clearly and quickly is essential.

Over the last few quarters a couple of interesting patterns have emerged amongst our larger customers who are looking to catalyze cross-team collaboration during a major incident spanning members from multiple teams.