Technically Speaking

Can you afford for your team to lose eight hours a day? According to the 2016 State of Data Center Architecture and Monitoring and Management report by ActualTech Media in partnership with my company, SolarWinds, that’s precisely what is happening to today’s IT administrators when they try to identify the root cause of a virtualization performance problem. And that doesn’t even take into account the time required to remediate it.

Keeping track of all the documents involved in any construction or infrastructure project can be quite a headache. RFIs, design changes, estimates, mark-ups, approvals, and more, not forgetting the many-to-many relationships involved in the process. Sub-contractors are on and off the construction site, changes, issues, and requests are sent back and forth, new document sets are created and versions are updated.

The world drone market is anticipated to reach $127 billion in 2020, suggests PricewaterhouseCoopers. From real estate surveying and image capture to Hollywood films to hobbyists, the use cases are vast. But drones are also predicted to become a preferred tool for construction sites.

The concepts of threat hunting and threat intelligence went mainstream in 2016 bringing with it a whole new paradigm to threat mitigation and cybersecurity. But what is threat hunting and what use cases does it serve?

Is your state or local agency ready for the cloud? Whether you’re thinking of moving to a SaaS email system or migrating data to cloud storage and processing platforms, a cloud readiness assessment might be in order. Before you make the move to the cloud, risks need to be assessed and technical readiness must be considered. In-house expertise must be aligned and security concerns overcome. Then there’s the matter of data governance. Not forgetting your procurement team who must familiarize themselves with cloud models, contracts, and billing.

On the same day that U.S. intelligence agencies issued a non-classified report citing that Russian state-sponsored influence campaigns sought to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process…” using a blend of covert activity (such as cyber activity) with overt efforts (state-funded media, paid trolls, etc.) the Department of Homeland Security took steps to protect the bedrock of our voting system – the nation’s election infrastructure.