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Best Practices for Remote IT Management
As companies adjust to the new normal of a completely remote workforce, IT teams still struggle to maintain productivity and workflows, meaning DevOps practices have never been more of an asset. IT teams must be more agile and efficient to manage their IT infrastructure from remote locations; otherwise, confusion and errors can ensue at a moment’s notice.

To ensure IT teams remain efficient and thrive in a collaborative, open culture, there are several steps that companies can take now to cultivate an innovative environment long after COVID-19 is over.

Implementing “Game Day-Style” Practices

In theory, “game day-style” practices are probably one of the best ways to ensure teams are ready for any remote work. This involves companies having IT teams work remotely as a test run, and then reporting problems early and often to avoid issues when everyone needs to be remote. Unfortunately, we’re well past this, which means that it’s now up to teams to communicate early and often. Breaking down siloed work environments, while creating open dialogue up and down the leadership chain, can go a long way. Naturally, connectivity is also a key factor here. With communication and connectivity at the core, companies can more easily assemble and designate teams for specific issues.

This does, though, depend on the encouragement of company leadership, with senior decision-making being integral to the IT team’s success.

Identifying a Trusted Team Leader

An enterprise’s IT director or manager requires substantial expertise, true empathy and effective communication. Not with a command-and-control approach, but rather one that supports people by helping to facilitate communications and working to remove impediments without micromanaging.

However, the most important condition for a director or manager is their own aptitude for working remotely as they must always maintain a high degree of diligence. Their communication and guidance reflect their leadership as well as strengthen the IT team’s capabilities.

Directors or managers must ensure there is seamless coordination, strengthening cohesion between each team and reducing the number of dependencies. A DevOps approach is instrumental as it entails mechanisms such as version control, automated testing and deployment, ultimately creating autonomous, resourceful teams. Additionally, directors or managers can develop a methodology for pinpointing conflicts and enhancing synergy within IT teams. As a result, when working remotely, IT teams can operate at maximum efficiency and maintain high levels of productivity.

The Components for Maximum Productivity

With IT teams working in different locations, productivity and workflow are likely to be strained, especially with the current crisis. To counter this, IT teams have adopted collaboration tools to interact with one another, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom. These three platforms have seen a massive uptick in users:
- Microsoft Teams has a total of 44 million daily active users.
- Slack added 9,000 new paid customers, having over 12 million daily active users.
- Zoom has a total of 300 million daily active users.
While not any one platform is better than the other, it’s important to create the conditions for autonomous, empowered teams. This is where making the most of tools, such as version control, automated testing and other aspects of a good DevOps approach to software development and deployment, come into play. You not only have to manage the teams and their deliverables, but you have to ensure that you have a methodology that quickly identifies when they’re creating conflicts for one another. IT teams should select which is easiest to use and best satisfies their needs. Effective communication is the objective as using multiple messaging channels can cause confusion or reduce any likelihood of productivity.

Communication Is Key

Clear and consistent communication is the key to an IT team’s success as members must know what’s happening at all times, including the project’s current status and necessary components, assigned roles and responsibilities, and the overall goals and expectations of the project.

The enemy of communication is assumption, which can harm an entire group’s synergy and productivity. For example, you assume that the software will simply work as intended, or you assume delivery will happen on time regardless of the project’s timeline.

Assumption guarantees a project’s failure, which is why it is important to outline everything about the project, both the tangible and intangible.

Never Forget About the People

Companies, large and small, need to foster an environment exuding collaboration, communication and good will, which causes IT teams to flourish and grow. Given the current crisis, some companies are taking several measures to ensure that morale remains consistently high among all employees. This means investing time and effort into team-building or team-bonding activities such as virtual coffee breaks, lunches via Skype or Zoom, or even games.

There is much fear surrounding COVID-19 and companies must prioritize each employee’s well-being, including routine check-ins, team or staff meetings and 1:1 time with managers to ensure that the health and safety of employees is kept at the forefront of decision making. Creating an inclusive atmosphere also helps remind IT teams that they can depend on one another and are part of a larger community, regardless of the distance.

The Common Denominator

Most importantly, for all of the above to work, teams must rely on one underlying element: communication. It is virtually impossible for remote IT management to thrive without clear communication between individuals and their teams. Furthermore, there is the possibility that IT teams will adopt this remote lifestyle permanently once COVID-19 subsides. If so, companies must implement these best practices to ensure their growth and longevity as they will encounter more complex, demanding assignments from others.
May 8, 2020
Coronavirus Impact: Enterprises Must Focus on What Works

As the economic slowdown continues, CIOs, CFOs and enterprise technology teams continue to grapple with frozen budgets and how their enterprise will keep their operations functioning as they attempt to move forward with crucial digital transformation efforts, and possibly shelve those initiatives deemed less critical.

How are CIOs deciding what projects get postponed? Many projects underway now are focused on business continuity and supporting remote work, but that can’t be the only focus for CIOs and enterprise technology leaders.

Miles Ward, CTO at business-technology consultancy SADA Systems, said there is a substantial shift to enable staff to productively work from home, increase flexibility in spending and to automate operations, and rely increasingly on managed services so that demands on operations personnel are reduced.

“Projects outside of those focus areas are going to get deprioritized unless they’re in the very final stages of delivery, where stopping creates more waste than it could prevent,” said Ward.

According to a recent survey from Dresner Advisory Services, 61% of respondents said projects and budgets will be impacted by the pandemic, with sizable majorities reporting the same in Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa and North America. The biggest impacts are expected to be in operations (manufacturing, supply chain, services) at 89%, executive management at 83%, marketing at 75%, finance at 65%, IT at 60%, research and development at 60% and business intelligence at 56%.

Dresner Advisory Services found that those organizations with more than 5,000 employees expect the lowest level of impact, while organizations with 1,001 to 5,000 reported the highest level of impact.

Jarod Greene, general manager at the Technology Business Management Council, said a great amount of uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 remains, including the rippling health, economic and business impact. It all presents an incredible challenge for all business leaders.

“CIOs and other IT leaders, specifically, are in the thick of this challenge, [and they are] not only responsible for maintaining the continuity of operations and seamless work experiences but also factoring in the short-, mid- and long-term financial impact of their decisions,” said Greene.

Greene contended that CIOs play a vital role in times like these, and that they can help organizations to clearly understand the costs and corresponding value of their technology investments, and therefore can advise business leaders of informed tradeoffs, rather than merely widespread cuts.

“Conversations I’ve had with Technology Business Management Council members over the past days and weeks have focused on re-planning and forecasting and the execution cost optimization exercises—with the ability to measure the impact of those decisions,” said Greene.

Time to Invest in Measurable Impact

For many organizations, the focus has shifted to delivering improved technology experiences to customers.

“The dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 may seem like ancient history to some. These were events that forced businesses to focus on what’s really important: providing value to customers and investing in projects with measurable impact on revenue and cash flow,” said Vaclav Vincalek, partner at business-technology consultancy Future Infinitive.

“The cash shortage refocused management teams on what was vital for their businesses. The current situation will be no different. Business will have to adapt to a new environment and adapt quickly. Companies with well-planned strategies will adjust some tactics. If they’ve already planned for change and aligned with their vision, they’ll continue to succeed with focused execution,” said Vincalek.

Alex Miłowski, platforms researcher and evangelist at Redis Labs, agreed.

“Essential services, especially customer-facing communications systems, are likely to face surges in demand. As such, it is important to meet those demands rather than pull back and postpone,” said Miłowski.

“It very much depends upon what type of business you are in. It’s not all doom and gloom. It hasn’t been for us, or for many of our customers,” added Kevin Grice, director of digital transformation at Trace Solutions. “That said, I think it’s a fair assumption that there will be widening ripple effects through all parts of the economy—so there are likely to be challenges ahead. How big the ripples are, and how long they last, is yet to be seen.”

“Many companies have gone into a temporary lockdown, with a freeze on all development to reduce risk and the possibility of additional costs in a time of reduced cashflow. However, if this emergency goes on for any significant length of time, that approach will soon become unviable. So businesses will have to adapt,” said Grice.

Not all companies have retrenched and have decided to keep moving forward with investments.

“At Laserfiche, we currently do not have any projects on hold, rather, we are working to accelerate any [projects] that are related to business process automation as it helps the workforce. Content management and automation will continue to lead upcoming projects. As IT leaders, we have a responsibility to get things scaled quickly. The challenge we have is being agile and adapting to our ‘new normal,’ but we’re continuing to move forward,” said Thomas Phelps, Laserfiche’s CIO.

Laserfiche isn’t the only company that has decided to keep moving forward. A survey of 317 CFOs, from research firm Gartner, found that 38% of those surveyed don’t have any plans to cut costs, and only 16% of CFOs said they plan to cut IT by more than 10%.

What does Gartner advise enterprises do? Essentially, to do what they are doing: focusing more on what works and cutting the deadweight.

“Where there is excess scope in their organization’s product or service portfolios, the hidden costs of complexity drag down profitability,” Dennis Gannon vice president, advisory at the Gartner’s finance practice said in this statement. “The best CFOs will use COVID-19 as the catalyst to derive significant operating leverage from their most profitable lines of business without destroying value.”

April 30, 2020
How 200 CIOs Responded to a Fully Remote Economy

The COVID-19 global pandemic has ushered a significant priority shift for the digital workplace. As development teams become completely remote, executive priorities are rapidly adapting to meet the gravity of these unanticipated times.

But, were IT leaders prepared for such a dramatic shift? What are they doing to evolve? To answer these tough questions, let’s turn to the data. A March 2020 study, conducted by Adobe and Fortune, surveyed 200 chief information officers (CIOs) on how their priorities are changing to meet the needs of a global crisis. Here’s what they found.

Remote Work

As it turns out, the majority of enterprises (84%) report they were prepared for remote work, with a slight increase for SMBs, at 94%.

“Like most business leaders, CIOs now have to rethink priorities, or at least reorder them, and we must reinvent ourselves now as virtual leaders,” said Adobe CIO Cynthia Stoddard.

We are living in a golden age of virtual collaboration tools—teams have Slack, GitHub, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and many other options. Yet, 53% of CIOs still cite communication as the biggest hurdle to remote work. Nevertheless, half of the CIOs surveyed reported their organizations are still actively hiring, indicating steady growth for IT.

New Technologies

Regarding technological adoption, some organizations are struggling to keep pace. Twenty percent of CIOs report serious shortfalls in technology tools. Interestingly, less than 25% of CIOs estimated increased financial spending for areas such as public cloud, infrastructure and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).

“Indeed, nearly all CIOs (90%) surveyed said they use a public cloud service for at least some of their data, but most is housed on-premises,” said Giselle Abramovich. “Only one in three organizations store half or more of their data in a public cloud.”

One thing most enterprises agree on is the need for better security—seven in 10 anticipated increased financial investments into cybersecurity.

Artificial Intelligence

Only 50% of enterprise CIOs said they use AI in one or more projects (25% for SMB CIOs). However, it seems to be a growing discipline, as 90% of the organizations that have implemented AI have done so in the past year.

Though AI has garnered significant interest, there are hurdles to actual implementation. According to the report, “the biggest issues related to AI include getting data in order, funding and finding the right talent.” With more people online and the importance of distanced communication, it is likely that investments into AI will increase, especially for use in IT support and customer interactions.

“We’re making AI a strategic priority at Adobe. AI implementation is difficult for many organizations because it’s still new to most businesses, and there is a shortage in talent that has a deep understanding of it,” said Stoddard.

Analysis: Impact on DevOps

CIOs are in a unique position. Leaders are reevaluating business practices and also reassessing their technological investments. As the Adobe/Fortune study shows, many companies were prepared for 100% remote work, albeit some more than others.

To endure a COVID-19 economical drought, CIOs are taking action. The report indicates increased investment into remote tools, AI and cybersecurity, while aligning hiring and new infrastructure to reach these goals.

Institutions with a previous investment into cloud infrastructure as well as scalability practices, such as serverless, are likely well-equipped for increased online interaction and unanticipated usages. In this virtual realm, automation is also key to streamline deployments and monitor applications in remote fashions.

Though the report doesn’t differentiate between company types, it’s likely that digitally native enterprises are well-equipped as well. In addition, the trend from physical storefront to “brick and click,” has only been magnified by the current climate, forcing retail and banks to invest heavily in digital technologies and DevOps.

From a DevSecOps standpoint, increased end-user online action means an increased number of threats. Thus, security strategies for containers and service meshes should be reevaluated.

By repositioning priorities, IT can adapt to the new state of interaction. With deliberate execution, CIOs and all executives alike could find themselves on the right side of the river once the economy resumes.

April 22, 2020
The Way Forward: Digital Resiliency Wins

As we wrote in Digital Transformation: Digitally Resilient Organizations, digitally resilient enterprises have built themselves business-technology platforms that are elastic, agile and can correctly position themselves to securely meet current business demands. These enterprises are also constantly learning from their data and adjusting as markets, workforce and customers demand.

These enterprises have also eliminated the bulk of their technical debt and continue to innovate so they aren’t disrupted by competitors with a better idea, execution or understanding customer needs.

Consider the grocery delivery wars, and how the coronavirus pandemic may have shifted the balance. Today, $78 billion retailer Target has a chance to prove, to a delivery-eager customer base, its prior investments in its online services designed to compete with Amazon Prime. Will its new Drive Up pick-up service and Shipt delivery service meet customer demand during this period of social distancing— and keep those customers over the long run—while Amazon tries to manage its way through supply shortages and shipping delays?

Walmart and Instacart have also seen significant usage surges, due to social distancing mandates. According to app store intelligence provider Apptopia, comparing average daily downloads in February to Sunday, March 15, Instacart, Walmart Grocery and Shipt have seen surges of 218%, 160% and 124% respectively.

“We’ve also noticed people in the United States have been turning to Target to stock up on groceries, entertainment and everyday essentials. March 15’s downloads saw an increase of 98% over the average number of daily downloads in February,” Apptopia wrote in its analysis.

While certain industries, such as online food and grocery delivery, may have seen years of adoption growth condensed into weeks, many enterprises are seeing downturns in demand.

Research firm IDC previously estimated that real GDP in the U.S. would reach 2.4%, but downshifted that to a worst case 1.4%. While IT spending dropped from an expected 5.1% year over year growth to worst case 1.3%. IDC pegs the base scenario for GDP growth now at 2.0% and for IT spending at 4.3%.

This has thrown CIO priorities into the air. According to a recent poll conducted by McKinsey & Company, CIOs are pressed to solve immediate challenges. For example, 32% cited increased demands for collaboration services and operating norms for working from home at scale, and facing increased strain on budgets (22%), a medium- and longer-term consideration.

McKinsey & Company advised CIOs to keep their focus on stabilizing emergency measures by strengthening remote working capabilities, improve cybersecurity, adjust ways of working with agile teams and prepare for a breakdown of parts of the vendor ecosystem (supply chain). In the interim, CIOs need to address immediate IT cost pressures to reduce costs, and creatively redeploy the IT workforce, while also pivoting to new areas of focus in the future.

According to McKinsey & Company, many organizations are successfully digitally engaging with customers, and cited a government in Western Europe who embarked on an “express digitization” of quarantine-compensation claims to deal with a more than 100-fold increase in volume.

“Sometimes this effort is about taking loads from call centers, but more often it addresses real new business opportunities. To engage with consumers, for example, retailers in China increasingly gave products at-home themes in WeChat,” McKinsey & Company wrote.

“Technology departments must anticipate and prepare to offer more of these kinds of digital services, products, and channels,” McKinsey & Company advised. “The key to reaching customers will be creating suitable access interfaces between internal IT systems and external social platforms and accelerating the integration of new vendors and distributors.”

In the months ahead, the organizations to move beyond the economic downturn will be those that built the platforms that enabled them to efficiently endure the recession and position themselves to adapt to whatever the new business as usual turns out to be.

April 20, 2020
Tips For Managing Development Teams Remotely During Coronavirus

Thanks to the global coronavirus pandemic, around a third of the world’s population is on lockdown in their homes, which means a huge number of businesses are currently trying to navigate remote working solutions. Trying to collaborate on software development is difficult at the best of times when your team is all in the same office, but with your team split across various home offices communication and collaboration is made all the more difficult.

Remote development work is an altogether different challenge, one that needs careful thought and new solutions. Luckily, there are ways to get around it, and they don’t all require huge investment or innovation. Just tweaking the way you think and work will help you continue to deliver on your development goals.

Spread Knowledge

Many teams run into problems with their remote workforce when they realize knowledge is not equally distributed amongst team members. I don’t mean the company log-in details (though you might have that problem too), but that the company’s vision and culture have not been effectively communicated. In an office setting this isn’t too much of a problem, as developers can be sent off on projects and the team can come together to implement them with one voice at the end, but when the whole team is divided it’s a lot harder to achieve this final cohesion.

To avoid having to piece your projects together like a jigsaw puzzle, make sure all of your developers are clear on what goals the company wants to achieve as a whole, and what culture and tone the company is wishing to promote. That way any development decisions made in private working sessions are still geared toward the overall company aim, and individual projects will slot in well together.

Communicate

To spread knowledge effectively, you also need a major focus on communication. You won’t realize how much the office dynamic contributes to communication until it’s gone. Working from home eliminates many of the little interactive scenarios in which team members can discuss ideas and clarify details.

To counteract this, you need to communicate far more than you previously did. Send more emails for clarification and have more regular meetings (over video chat) than you otherwise would. This might seem annoying or even counterproductive at first, but having a clear flow of information across the whole team is important for accountability.

Take Note

Related to communication, you may find it really helps to note more things down. You’d be surprised how much information is transmitted from being physically in the same space as someone, so a lot of workers find it a lot harder to pay attention to video of audio meetings and can easily forget details. Whether it’s minutes of a Zoom meeting or a brief one-on-one phone conversation, jot down a note of important tasks or details to remember, and circulate them throughout your team.

Be Humble And Accept Feedback

If you’re managing a development team that’s just gone full remote, accept the fact that you might not have all the answers. This might be as new to you as everyone else, and even if you have experience of remote working before it probably wasn’t during a global pandemic. By all means, show a strong sense of leadership and implement a solid plan of action, but be humble enough to accept that it might not be a perfect plan.

Show your humility by being open to feedback from your team members. They are having to adjust to a new lifestyle that may require new strategies to deal with. You might consider flexible working hours, or reassessing your tools or communications strategy. Figure this out as a team and you’re much more likely to keep morale up and not sacrifice any productivity.

Embrace The New Normal

Most importantly, don’t spend your time waiting for things to go back to normal. Treating this period as a brief interruption to your normal working schedule will stop you from fully committing to new strategies and tools to help you produce good work right now. It will show in your products, and if your remote working period lasts longer than you’d expected it will mess up your production schedule. For now, this is the new normal: embrace that and start with your best foot forward.

April 17, 2020
Business Conferences Amid the COVID Crisis

We’re all hunkered down in quarantine, so major trade shows have been cancelled. Virtual events will get us through this patch–but what comes next?

It is said that in times of crisis, we adapt. We modify our behavior and we persevere. And when the immediate crisis has subsided, we look at what worked, and often adapt much of it into our lives as we move forward.

We’re obviously in a crisis now, and among the many changes we have had to make is one that impacts our professional lives. For years, we’ve regarded major conferences and trade shows as an integral part of our technical learning curve–and yes, as a major part of our social interaction with our industry peers.

That’s all changing before our very eyes, and the COVID crisis is only one element. To be sure, the restrictions placed on our travel and ability to assemble have directly impacted the conference industry. A recent article places the loss at more than a billion dollars, and that number has only increased since then.

O’Reilly’s decision to shutter its physical conference business also hit the industry like a bombshell. But our ability to adapt and change presents us with other opportunities. O’Reilly’s CEO acknowledged as much, saying, “With large technology vendors moving their events completely online, we believe the stage is set for a new normal moving forward when it comes to in-person events.”

The past few years have seen accelerated growth in smaller regional conferences, along with a greater emphasis on virtual conferences. The shift has already begun, and we believe it will continue long after we are back to business as usual, which we believe will not be “business as usual.”

For openers, CFOs and others responsible for the bottom line will be more active in questioning the value of spending significant sums of money on a conference in Las Vegas or elsewhere, especially in lieu of the cancellation of conferences this spring. They will ask: What is the ROI for going to these large get-togethers? Can the money be more efficiently and effectively spent to attract and retain prospects and customers? Are there smaller, regional alternatives that cost less and pose fewer risks?

Conference attendees ask the same: Can I spend less money and achieve similar results closer to home? Would I prefer to be among a smaller public gathering? Can I simply attend an online forum of some sort?

Regional and virtual summits will meet those needs on both counts; in fact, they have already begun doing so. A recent Los Angeles-based physical conference that had signed up 300 participants quickly pivoted to an online virtual summit when the “stay at home” order was issued. In the process, the event more than doubled its registrations. Even when things get back to normal, companies may well see regional conferences as delivering the same educational and business benefits as the large mega-conventions. They will be treading lightly, with even less inclination than before to attend and spend at the bigger shows.

I’m not suggesting that all of the big conferences will shrivel up and fade away. Those sponsored by major vendors, such as RSA, Microsoft, Tableau and Gartner, will still be held and will still be successful. But the COVID crisis has forced companies, big and small, to take a more focused look at the conventions they may have previously taken for granted. And it’s not only in the tech sector, of course; events such as hardware shows, auto shows, even PizzaExpo, have been delayed or cancelled.

Our current crisis has forced us to adapt and to alter our thinking in any number of areas. The purpose of the conferences we attend to learn and interact with our peers are, and will be, no different than in the past. However, their physical nature (where and how they are held) will. The change has already begun.

— Michael Hiskey

April 15, 2020
Three Priorities for IT Operations Continuity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The world has been turned upside down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and organizations that are trying to maintain best IT and security practices are faced with new challenges such as sudden remote workforces, increased COVID-19-related phishing and business e-mail compromise scams, and quarantine-imposed travel restrictions.

Are you facing disruptions in your workforce, limitations in the supply chain and up-ended disaster plans? You’re not alone. A recent survey, Critical Gaps in Business Continuity Plans: Exclusive Survey Results, reported that 62% of businesses surveyed have business continuity plans, but 48% said their plans only cover emergency operations for two to three weeks.

With increased limitations affecting enterprises, what are the top three things organizations must prioritize for optimal security and minimal outages to aim for business as usual?

Consider the Cloud

If you have been considering the cloud for your IT and information security infrastructure, now might be the right time to explore all your options and make strategic moves. Eighty-three percent of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud this year, according to a recent LogicMonitor cloud study, and security hardware and applications will be no exception to that trend. The cloud can increase your capacity and facilitate remote access to vital business functions, especially now when redundancy and scalability are more important than ever.

For example, the cloud could be a temporary solution for a retailer whose existing payment processing infrastructure is overloaded and declining transactions as a result. It doesn’t replace their existing on-premises environment, but it augments it by adding on-demand scalability. This could cover a temporary surge in demand or stand in during a full-blown outage. Do you know whether your existing applications have cloud-based extensibility?

Quite often, organizations aren’t aware of the cloud capabilities they can already utilize. During times of uncertainty, the cloud can be a good temporary approach and does not have to be a big expenditure. Organizations can pursue the cloud with a low commitment, month-to-month contract, and consider it more permanently at a later date.

When moving workloads to the cloud, considering security is of paramount importance. Many public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer functions to help secure these workloads and applications, and one gaining a great deal of attention is encryption key management. All major public cloud providers offer methods for their users to self-manage the keys used to encrypt, decrypt, digitally sign,and validate data. This technology is known as Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and is a high assurance method for letting organizations retain control of their own cryptographic keys even after moving to the cloud.

Ensure Redundancy

System failures are not an option in mission-critical environments, and redundancy will offer up backup to increase the reliability of your systems. Given the current COVID-19 situation, do you have backup resources that can continue to process data without interruption? What if your data center is out of service altogether? Do you have another that can keep your infrastructure operational?

As an example, let’s look at cryptographic key management. Numerous business applications offload private key storage to purpose-built devices known as hardware security modules (HSM). HSMs are tamper-evident, tamper-responsive servers typically certified to rigorous requirements such as FIPS 140-2 Level 3. A typical information security infrastructure may only have throughput requirements to justify a single encryption HSM that is partitioned to provide services to multiple business applications. But if this single HSM fails or must be taken offline, any application relying on it for cryptographic key management may also become unavailable.

In this scenario, the ideal data security infrastructure would comprise multiple HSMs along with at least one centralized management server, split between multiple geographically separated data centers. This example can be extended out to virtually any other type of IT hardware, but it is particularly important for resources representing a single point of failure, where their outage would have cascading impacts throughout your enterprise ecosystem.

To mitigate these risks, talk to your vendors about data security and redundancy options; you might be surprised at their offerings. And consider more than just individual device outages, too. What if you can’t get into your data center? Taking a hybrid approach to infrastructure design, where you rely on a diverse set of tools to prepare you for a wide range of potential problems, will let you maintain the redundancy and high availability that your users and customers expect.

Monitor Your Data Centers

Now is the time to monitor your IT operations even more closely than usual to spot extremes and help with scalability and capacity planning. Can your infrastructure handle the increase of users and transactions? Are you accounting for handling higher volumes that come with an increasingly remote workforce? How would your organization handle a service disruption if you experienced an outage? Closely monitoring your IT and security resources to look for spikes and surges can guard against oversaturation and could help justify offloading workloads to cloud data centers.

Malicious actors often ramp up their activities in times of crisis, specifically because they know that companies’ focus is otherwise occupied. Automated monitoring can greatly assist in preventing these types of attacks, but only if proper baselines and profiles are established. For example, looking at an enterprise cryptographic ecosystem, if a bank knows its HSMs are validating 10,000 PINs per second on average, and suddenly that number spikes to 100,000 per second, they should immediately investigate. Intelligent monitoring and health-checking technology is designed for these exact types of scenarios, as well as to identify infrastructure health issues so administrators can respond proactively rather than reactively.

Your organization’s IT infrastructure and data security are depended on to be reliable, and your IT operations continuity effort needs to be prioritized now more than ever. Here’s to keeping your employees, and your IT infrastructure, in good health.

— Ryan Smith

April 10, 2020
Coronavirus Economic Shutdown: Analysts Hit the Brakes on Global IT Spending Estimates

By most accounts, 2020 was set to be a pretty good year for U.S. gross domestic product and enterprise IT budgets. That was before the novel coronavirus, and the subsequent economic shutdown that is designed to blunt its spread and avoid overwhelming the nation’s health system. Analysts are now slashing their economic growth rates and enterprise technology spending estimates.

Previously, research firm IDC estimated that real GDP in the U.S. would reach 2.4%, but downshifted that to a “pessimistic scenario” of 1.4%. While IT spending dropped from an expected 5.1% year over year growth to a pessimistic scenario of 1.3%. The base scenario for GDP growth is now 2.0% and for IT spending 4.3%.

“The pessimistic scenario is not a worst-case scenario,” said Stephen Minton, vice president in IDC’s Customer Insights & Analysis group. “Things are moving so quickly that we need to constantly recalibrate our assumptions and expectations, but the pessimistic scenario reflects an IT market in which weaker economic growth translates into weaker business and consumer spending across all technologies over the next few quarters. Things could get worse, but hopefully not.”

Earlier this month, Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels wrote in this post that the U.S. and global technology market spend will slow to 2% this year.

“That assumes the U.S. and other major economies have declined in the first half of 2020 but manage to recover in the second half. There is also a 50% probability that U.S. and global tech markets will decline by 2% or more in 2020 if a full-fledged recession hits,” Bartels wrote.

Not all areas in technology will be impacted equally. Forrester expects there will increased demand for cloud infrastructure services, specialized software, communications equipment and telecom services for remote work and education.

However, Forrester expects computer and communications equipment to potentially decline 5% to 10%, while technology consulting and systems integration services spending could be flat to down 5%, should companies really belt-tighten.

“Software spending growth will slow to the 2% to 4% range in the best case and will post no growth in the worst case of a recession. Tech outsourcing and telecom services will hold up better, though contract revisions could cause spending to go down, as well,” stated Bartels.

S&P Global Ratings also predicts slowing IT spend. According to its update, Global IT Spending Set To Slide As Coronavirus Hits Hardware Sales, S&P Global economists cut their global GDP growth rate by more than half to 1% to 1.5% from 2.8%—in just two weeks.

“We believe the spread of the coronavirus will hurt enterprise and consumer IT spending across the globe with particularly bleak ramifications for the hardware and semiconductor segments. However, we expect some of the deferred spending to return gradually in the latter half of this year through heavy government stimulus in the U.S., China, and elsewhere,” wrote S&P Global Rating Analyst Andrew Chang.

S&P Global Ratings anticipates IT spending to decline 3% year over year, compared their prior estimate of 2% to 3% growth. S&P Global Ratings expects some of the biggest hits to hardware, with smartphone revenue falling to negative 9% from up to 2% growth, and PCs to negative 9% from a previous range of negative 3% to a positive 4% growth.

While enterprise technology budgets are being slashed, the need for business-technology isn’t going away. In fact, it’s accelerating as more knowledge workers shift to working from home, more remote collaboration and keeping legacy systems running and moving forward with digital transformation efforts.

— George V. Hulme

March 30, 2020
COVID-19 Pandemic: Appian Offers Free HR App

Appian, a provider of a low-code platform for building applications, has decided to make available a free application to help organizations with 1,000 or more employees track healthcare incidents stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Designed mainly for human resources (HR) professionals, the COVID-19 Response Management application is designed to track the health and work status of all employees by geography and department, including their travel history.

Appian CEO Matt Calkins said that while Appian has built a handful of applications for customers before by request, the company decided to leverage its expertise to provide a free application to help organizations maintain business continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic that is forcing employees to work remotely for the foreseeable future. Organizations can either access the COVID-19 Response Management application as a cloud-based service provided by Appian or download and install it themselves, he said.

Organizations in highly regulated industries that need to still comply with rules concerning personally identifiable information (PII) are likely to want to run the COVID-19 Response Management application in a local data center, noted Calkins. The cloud-based instance of the application runs in an environment that is already certified to be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Calkins said the COVID-19 Response Management application is designed to be set up and configured in less than two hours. Because the application was built using low-code tools, COVID-19 Response Management application is highly customizable using the company’s namesake low-code platform, so as the crisis continues to evolve, organizations will be able to extend the application as they best see fit.

Millions of individuals, unfortunately, may contract the COVID-19 coronavirus or may be unable to work because they need to care for loved ones who have fallen sick in the weeks and months ahead. As organizations race to implement business continuity plans, many of them are likely to discover their existing HR applications were not designed to help manage a highly distributed workforce, which may need to be augmented with little notice. The COVID-19 Response Management application provides a way to manage talent in addition to other HR functions, noted Calkins.

The Appian application is also designed to enable HR teams to function as the hub around which organizations can build online communities that employees can use to interact and provide mutual support. For example, employees can connect with each other to volunteer their time to go shopping on behalf of employees who may be quarantined.

As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies, many organizations are clearly entering unchartered territory. Workforces may be sharply reduced or increased depending on vertical. The number of temporary workers may skyrocket in some cases. Regardless of the outcome, most organizations will need access to applications that enable them to be as flexible as possible to deal with whatever lies ahead. In some cases, organizations may have HR applications in place that enable them to achieve that goal. In most cases, however, it’s probable they don’t.

— Mike Vizard

March 24, 2020
COVID-19: Don’t Sacrifice DevOps

Like everyone else, I’ve been following COVID-19/Coronavirus issues. My focus is more on the IT impact of the disease and its status as a pandemic.

Let’s start by saying it isn’t the end of the world. Yes, it’s serious. Yes, it will be disruptive. Yes, those impacted by the worst aspects of the disease will leave a hole. But when it is over, and the tide has swept by, the vast majority of people will still be here, still trying to do what they need to do.

That includes ITOps/DevOps maintaining whatever you put in during the rush to work remotely. Some organizations will be happy to throw something up and then rip it back down, but most will not. Once they’ve worked out how to work remotely, they’ll want to keep that as an option. Some to offer more work/life balance to employees, others to have a backup plan in case of emergency. Ask any company in Katrina’s path, remote work plans born in emergencies tend to hang around.

It is the nature of DevOps to be nimble and reactive, planning on improving things as time goes on. That’s a good feature of both DevOps and modern IT teams. But some things are less nimble than others, and the rush to remote work is going to show that in a hard way.

The VPN chosen or expanded to enable remote workers is not likely to be swapped out easily or quickly. While there is a sense of urgency—if you follow /r/sysadmin or to a lesser extent, /r/DevOps on Reddit, you know that urgency may even be too gentle a word. Some management teams seem to be in panic mode—you are going to have to live with some of these choices for a while, don’t make them knee-jerk.

Normally, an MSP is your friend when moving like this, offering expertise and knowledge your organization doesn’t have internally, and shortening both deployment and the learning curve. But consensus is that MSPs, laptop manufacturers and VPN vendors are going to be booked solid for the near term.

So, choose software when you can. Not because software is better (truly for some functions it is worse), but because it is generally easier to replace. A software VPN can be expensive, but you’re not buying hardware that is a sunk cost. Consider short-term solutions such as Amazon Workspaces or possibly Chrome Remote Desktop, old standbys like VNC or RDP (likely with VPN in both cases), file sharing with things such as Sharepoint or OneDrive. Later on, you can look at a Cloud NAS such as Nasuni, or a more solid remote access plan.

Yes, all the suggestions above have things you need to worry about. No, not everything will be within your control. However, these things are easier to rectify on iteration than “We bought big solution X, and it doesn’t do Y, so we need to replace it.” Start with short-term solutions and improve them as you go–this is truly the DevOps way, but it is easy to lose as you’re looking for high-volume, perfect and urgent.

IT workloads (particularly operations workloads) are going to increase for any organization that wasn’t already set up for broad remote work. There is no way around this fact. As someone suggested online, “Kiss your family, tell them you’ll see them in a couple months and get to it.”

You’ve got this. The internet is loaded with information to help, places such as Spiceworks and Reddit have people willing to offer advice all day. Smaller MSPs are likely happy to talk with you as they attempt to grow their business. Determine what you need, how fast you need it and implement the best solution you can in the time available, aiming to improve it on the next iteration. And keep the wheels of business running.

It’s a flu variant, not the black plague. Businesses that deal with this well will come out well. Right now, “Deal with it well” includes a lot of IT work: from continuity planning, to fast DevOps iterations, to getting people at home productive and supporting them through this.

— Don Macvittie

March 19, 2020