The Friday Five: Change Management, SDN and Application Monitoring

Dec 14, 2018

Twice a month, we highlight five popular news stories from the world of networking, security and automation. Here are the top five stories from the last two weeks:

How Can Organizations Improve Their Network Change Management? – SearchNetworking

In today’s modern network environments, changes like security patches, system configuration, software updates, and the addition of new technology is inevitable and frequent. But with change comes the chance to make mistakes, and these errors can lead to costly network downtime. Some estimate that the average hourly cost of network downtime starts at $300,000. This article discusses how having solid change management practices in place can reduce and even eliminate outages.

DevOps: Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them – ITProPortal

Organizations big and small are innovating through software development and embracing DevOps to adopt the principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery, while changing business culture to support and promote collaboration between departments. However, when implementing DevOps, there are several common failures teams are likely to come across. Here, Brian Dawson shares some of the common mistakes businesses may face and how to best learn from them.

SDN: Where Is It Now and What Is the Future? – ComputerWeekly.com

SDN has been all over the IT headlines over the last few years, but adoption of the technology was slower than some had hoped. In fact, a recent Gartner report implies that SDN has been a catalyst of change, rather than being directly adopted by the enterprise. Now, it’s clear that SDN has expanded significantly since it initially emerged on the market. This article discusses where SDN has been and where industry leaders believe it is going.

Is an SD-WAN Managed Service Right for You? – NetworkWorld

A big decision for organizations considering an SD-WAN solution is who will be responsible for implementing and managing it. For larger organizations with a substantial-sized networking team, implementation of SD-WAN is more feasible, but it still could require the development of new skillsets to fully take advantage of the technology. A structured vendor-selection process will be important for both choosing products that align with the enterprise’s specific needs and continuing the internal team’s education. This should be used not just for technical considerations, but also for a discussion around the potential challenges.

Application Monitoring: What DevOps Can Do Better – InfoWorld

DevOps helps organizations deploy applications more frequently and reduce the errors from manual steps and configurations, but many businesses want more. They expect SaaS-like performance from their applications. These new expectations prompt a whole new set of monitoring considerations around applications. This article outlines the four ways DevOps teams can perform application monitoring correctly in order to meet new business demands.

 

Want more of the Friday Five? Check out our last blog: The Friday Five: Networking Tips, IoT, and SDN Security.