Efficient project planning is an important skill for project managers. It helps you get things done on time, make iterations, and develop contingency plans for emergencies.

Downtime is the biggest nightmare for organizations that capitalize on technology. A study about enterprise outages found that nearly 96 percent of enterprises had faced downtime in the past three years. Businesses lose a minimum of $1.55 million annually and 545 hours of staff time due to IT downtime. Up to 51 percent of downtime is preventable, which means businesses are spending on damage control when these resources could be diverted to something more fruitful, like R&D.

The task of monitoring and managing an entire network, including all the servers and applications that run on it, is by no means easy. With so many components of varying complexity, the volume of performance data coming at you can be overwhelming. This information overload increases the chances of missing data that could help discover performance inefficiencies.

In the previous blog in this series, we discussed the principle of least privilege, and the importance of assigning bare minimum privileges to users and systems at database or server levels. However, there are certain built-in principals in your database that possess all permissions in SQL Server. If an attacker managed to get hold of one of these principals, the database could be easily exploited and damaged.

Organizations around the world are increasingly relying on the cloud to capitalize on its speed, ease of management and scalability, and the business value it provides to transform and grow their business. It’s an ever-growing market that is currently estimated at 266.4 billion dollars—a whopping 982.9 percent increase in growth compared to a decade ago when it was worth a little over 24.6 billion dollars.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we have discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore the data privacy challenges and concerns that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of COVID-19, the world has witnessed the power of technology.

The increasing adoption of cloud applications and an expanding remote workforce are redefining network security. In a traditional setting, the emphasis was on perimeter-based security—assuming that everything behind the corporate firewall is safe. However, it’s clear that organizations have to rethink the philosophy of implicit trust in a corporate network.

Amid concerns of resource scarcity and increasingly complex resolution processes, service desks are constantly under pressure to deliver more with less. This, in effect, forces service desk managers to drive technicians to resolve requests faster, leading to an unhealthy obsession with numbers. Several service desks are known to regard the number of requests closed by technicians as a good yardstick for their performance.

The trend of working from home has hit the ground running, and businesses have turned to strategies and tools that will ensure a no-plummet productive environment. There are two major forks in the road when it comes to provisioning remote endpoints—users can use their own devices, or the company can hand over corporate-owned devices.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google, launched in 2008. It is a powerful cloud platform that offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service, and serverless computing environments. Many companies are now using GCP to build, modernize, and scale their businesses. GCP monitoring with Applications Manager Monitoring GCP service instances can be pretty challenging.