The Network Monitor

If you do any security monitoring, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of events you need to track. You can start by doing longer hours, but eventually you'll end up in a swamp — sucked in to the point that workflow comes to a standstill.

Data transfer has come a long way. From 110-baud modems from the late 1950s to 56-kbps technology used at the turn of the century — and finally more familiar broadband and Wi-Fi — one thing is clear: Speed is an obsession. And while Wi-Fi has enjoyed significant adoption even as telecom companies fight for top spot in the mobile device market, there's still a drive to find newer, faster ways to move data and increase connectivity.

Most IT teams don’t have the budget or resources to satisfy the growing demands of their users. The demand comes in many forms, such as bandwidth consumption, Wi-Fi access, power utilization, and storage capacity; just to name a few.

The future of IT will be molded not just by technology, but also by changing expectations and attitudes toward support's role within the organization.

IT pros know all too well the old "have you tried turning it off and on?" trick - but there are some help desk stories that are stranger than fiction.

Human error is responsible for more than half of all security breaches as of last year, making employees the biggest cyber threat of all. Shadow IT, on the other hand, is the deliberate installation of software that is not authorized by IT. The reasons for it? They vary, but generally include tools to make your tickets easier — which should already be available in a centralized company repository.

What's on your IT wish list?

The plotline for a data center's Big Data story is still being written, and already there is no lack of twists and turns. The Internet of Things (IoT) is just the latest in a multi-episode drama that'll spawn as many shark-jumping forecasts as processes.

IT is a pretty thankless job; long hours to deploy technology that's often invisible to the average user isn't exactly an ego boost as you leave work every night. But for every moment of sheer frustration — and they are many — there's a much lighter side to support, affectionately called "information technology humor." Cue canned laughter.

The Super Bowl is over and hockey playoffs are still weeks away, but many Americans will still get their interim fix during March Madness. The prelims went underway on March 15th, and a huge cross-section of the American workforce faces a challenge: making sure they don't miss a single foul shot, even during business hours.

As Isocrates once said, “It’s important to know where you’re going than to get there quickly.” If you’d like to integrate WhatsUpGold network reporting software with Google Maps, here’s how you get there. And it hopefully shouldn’t take you long to do it.

Today’s IT teams are under a heck of a lot of pressure to support multiple directives. They need to deliver IT infrastructure performance that can support defined business goals, strategies and operations. And very important to their success is complying with their commitments to a defined SLA (Service Level Agreement) with their business owners.

"The IT Crowd" (Image Credit: Channel 4 Television Corporation)

I haven’t been at Ipswitch long, but reading about OfCom opening up BT’s network to rivals got me thinking. While BT has avoided an AT&T-like break-up (for now) the ramifications of this are going to make a lot of people either happy or angry – or even both. In theory, rural, underserved customers will enjoy great access and third-party providers will be able to compete on a level playing field.

CROUS Paris provides education and housing services to more than 300,000 students over 80 locations in France. Each year, its 750 employees prepare five million meals, find housing for 6,000 students and process 60,000 scholarship applications. In order to support such a high volume of activity on a network with more than 1000 different IT devices, Mr. Yu, Information Systems Director at CROUS Paris, needed an infrastructure monitoring solution.

Automating NAS to perform regular network drive backups can be the difference between staying open and losing everything. "Point your NAS at your online service or a device on your network," he says, "and it will automatically suck everything down."

As it grows, your company will probably have an emergency at some point that warrants crisis management in IT. No matter if it's a data breach, natural disaster or product malfunction, you're usually the first blamed for its occurrence and the last credited with resolution. Even in the case of a weather event, sysadmins take the hot seat if user machines aren't up and running quickly. But as they say, people don't remember the mistake — they remember how you handled it.

Take pride in knowing that your company depends on its help desk. And when it comes to information technology problem solving, few skill sets are more valuable to ensure business continuity. Yep, even marketing execs and similar partners pale in comparison to those whose workload is defined by troubleshooting.

Historically, technology adoption has started in the workplace. Computing, unified communications, mobile devices, etc. all got the start in the corporate world and then made their way into the consumer space. In addition, when looking at age demographics, the early adopters of technology are typically twenty somethings.

U.S. armed forces take mobile network monitoring very seriously