Federal User Groups: A Valuable Resource for All IT Pros
The federal IT landscape is continually changing – consolidation initiatives, the Joint Information Environment (JIE), security directives and policies, and technology adoption all add to its fluctuating nature. With all of these variables, it is important that federal IT pros are equipped with the right tools to gain a full understanding of the health and performance of their environment. But where do you even start?
Recently, SolarWinds hosted two federal user groups, one in Austin, TX and one in Washington D.C., to talk with federal IT pros from every agency, both military and civilian, and government contractors about the challenges they face, and provide some answers and insight into how to manage them. The conversations were engaging and attendees got updates about recent product launches relevant to government, an understanding of how we plan to continue to support their unique needs, the opportunity to provide feedback about our products and insight into where SolarWinds is headed.
But because we could only host two of these user groups in person, and sometimes jobs get in the way of career development, I wanted to share some highlights and all of the resources from the events for those that couldn’t attend.
To kick things off we touched on the evolving IT technology landscape – a hybrid world where one size does not fit all. Although on-premises environments will probably last beyond our lifetime, SaaS, hosted cloud, and even public cloud will continue to become more prevalent in federal IT infrastructures, meaning IT pros are going to be asked to manage it all.
As end-users are continually demanding quality of experience as they connect from anything and anywhere through a more dynamic and complex infrastructure – quick and efficient troubleshooting has become imperative. Through all of this, we want to make the invisible, visible. Watch this on demand presentation for more information on how we plan to do this: Product Update and Tips to Get the Most from Your Implementations
After setting the stage by discussing all of the new challenges that federal IT pros are facing and what SolarWinds’ goal is for helping solve these challenges, it was time to dive into the products. Attendees got inside information about recent updates and launches of products directly from our product management team, shared feedback with us, and gained some insight into what we are working on.
To support the needs of federal IT pros, our main product strategy themes are, and will continue to be:
- End-to-end troubleshooting of application and IT infrastructure performance and availability
- Monitoring infrastructure – everywhere – with new deployment scenarios and scale improvements
- Functionality enhancements such as deep packet inspection (DPI) and application monitoring
To gain a better understanding of how our continued user-centric approach to our products – only buy what you need, when you need it – can to help solve the problems you are facing now take a look at these presentations, which cover recent product updates and what we’re working on:
- Network Products Update
- Security Products Update
- Systems Management, Database Performance and Tools Product Update
As federal IT environments continue to become more complex, it is important that the tools used to manage them have the ability to scale and grow with the infrastructure. With this becoming more of a concern within federal IT as data centers are consolidated, we took some time to talk through the scalability of our products including rough scalability limits, deployments basics, Multi-domain deployments, and automation & API. Find out more in this presentation: Enterprise Scalability and Product Integration
The user groups also presented a great opportunity to share and discuss the results of our recent cybersecurity survey. In the survey, federal IT pros exposed a need for internal cybersecurity threat prevention. Respondents identified careless and untrained insiders as their greatest source of cybersecurity threats – over malicious external sources such as hackers and terrorists – yet disparately reported that malicious external threat sources maintained priority for threat prevention investment. Walk through the results in this presentation: Federal Cybersecurity Survey Results and Next Steps
We had such a great time sharing lots of SolarWinds information, gathering feedback, and engaging in conversations with all of the IT pros that attended the users groups. We always appreciate feedback from our users about our products, so once you have taken a look at the presentations head over to thwack and let us know what you think.
Stay tuned for information about our 2016 federal user groups, we hope to see you there!
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