Government and Education Webinar: How the New Normal Could Improve your IT Operations

Editor's Notes

• #5: Shrinking budgets - The 2020 IT Trends Report is out, and even before the global pandemic gripped the world, 35% of surveyed respondents said their departments lacked the budget and resources to successfully support their organizations. Now, with today’s economy, many of our customers have had to furlough employees with the remaining staff having to shift around projects and work to get the bare minimum accomplished. Leaders are working hard to figure out the best tactics to cut costs, without disrupting business services. Before the pandemic, many organizations suffered interruptions to their work in responding to issues. 29% of IT teams’ bandwidth is spent dealing with digital performance issues. Now with less staff to respond to issues, interruptions will likely lengthen MTTR and reduce IT’s ability to work on business critical projects. Complexity – The IT Trends report also highlights that the underlying challenge of hybrid IT management continues to escalate with complexities like multi-cloud and distributed environments. The time organizations are spending on managing complex environments has shifted from infrastructure to managing complex application environments. Organizational dynamics have changed too. Now, with cloud-native, open-source apps, developers are increasingly responsible for managing the database in addition to the application code. According to a recent state of database devops report, 78%  developers are now responsible for dev + dbs.  Source: http://assets.red-gate.com/solutions/database-devops/state-of-database-devops-2020.pdf 2020 State of Database DevOps  Also with the increases in the volume of data to run these applications, DBAs have workloads that are extremely difficult to manage effectively. According to a recent survey, SolarWinds found that 20% of respondents were managing 100 or more databases. instances. Source: https://thwack.solarwinds.com/t5/Monitoring-Central-Blogs/Virtualized-Database-Survey-Results/ba-p/592034 Security – Bad actors are using the pandemic to create new threats. According to our recent research, 65% of respondents said at least 10% of their daily activities included IT security management. With workforce reductions, this could leave gaping holes in security practices if these tasks are not prioritized. It is evident that many organizations, even before the pandemic did not even have basic security controls in place. According to a 2020 by Cisco, 46% of organizations had an incident caused by an unpatched vulnerability. Sources: This is evident in a recent study by Cisco, which found 46% of organizations had an incident caused by an unpatched vulnerability. https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/92437-of-organizations-to-increase-cybersecurity-spending-following-covid-19-pandemic
• #12: In order to manage all inside and outside threats, a layered approach is required. With a layered approach, security responsibilities are delegated to different teams. As mentioned previously, with resource reductions, this brings risk because responsibilities for securing the environment are distributed by the network teams, application teams, helpdesk, systems teams and so on. Having automation in place not only reduces time spend doing these often manual activities, but improves the reliability that these activities will be done on time and without error.