Is Your Data Center Ready for the Internet of Things?
As consumers and businesses continue to adopt connected appliances, the amount of data being sent to data centers will increase astronomically. According to a recent report from Gartner by 2020 the internet of things (IoT) will encompass 26 billion units. Aside from gathering a large amount of data, these devices are a unique challenge for data center professionals to tackle because much of this data will need to be processed and analyzed in real time while still being stored in a secure fashion.
How Agile Principles Relate to System Administration
Agile methodologies are commonly associated with development methods today, however as system operations becomes more complex, the concepts from agile development are now becoming vital for managing complex server networks. As discussed in a previous article, system administration and software development are similar to the point that a new field – DevOps – has emerged as a way for administrators to keep systems in sync regardless of whether their server cluster contains tens, hundreds or even thousands
IT Web Ops Success Lies in the Hands of End-Users. Add RUM to Your Arsenal Today!
Gone are the days when IT was primarily focused on site infrastructure and the network. Today, user satisfaction rules, and is the ultimate measurement of IT success. Moreover, your business success and revenue depends on your ability to ensure top-notch Web and mobile performance on an ongoing basis. But then again your users are more demanding than you may think. According to a recent Wired piece, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Moreover, 40% will totally abandon
Is Your Website Ready for the Valentines Shopping Rush?
Follow these 10 simple rules to ensure success The mad dash of shoppers may be behind you for the 2014 holiday season, but another rush is already right around the corner. It is time to ensure your website readiness for the next flood of shoppers: Valentine’s
The awesome power of AngularJS and Ember.js
Over recent years, we've seen a staggering rise in the popularity of rich internet applications (RIA) like Google Drive, Flikr, Facebook and Google Maps. These browser-based applications, with much of the functionality we'd historically have expected only from a piece of desktop software, have not only been made possible by enormous leaps forward in technology...but also the use of development frameworks. These changes have transformed the landscape for web developers. You'll probably remember that,
Things to know when using Cloud Based Server Monitoring
For any~ successful IT Team, it is vital that the server monitoring solution should be top-notch. But have you ever wondered what capabilities to check when evaluating a cloud based server monitoring vendor, apart from the usual monitoring and alerting? Try asking the following questions. 1) Will your architecture need me to punch holes in my firewall? 2) How secure is my data stored at your end? 3) How do you avert false alerts when there is a network problem in your data center or when there is
Site24x7 Subnet Calculator for IPv4 and IPv6: Network IP Calculations Made Simple
Is your organization's rising network security concern making you think of subnetting it? Site24x7 IPv4 subnet calculator and IPv6 subnet calculator free online tools make your task simple. For the given network address block, Site24x7 IPv4 calculator provides the number of subnets, hosts, broadcast address, host range, wildcard mask and CIDR notation at a glance. If your organization is IPv6 enabled, you've probably obtained a /48 block from your ISP. With our IPv6 calculator you can split this
Best Practices for Hardening Your Cloud Instances
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions have been a boon to system administrators due to the versatility it offers datacenter professionals. Unfortunately the dynamic nature of cloud solutions makes them difficult to maintain. When instances are being created on the fly, security often becomes an afterthought. Fortunately you can use the guide below to ensure that you and your staff are aware of the best ways to secure cloud instances whether they are used for short or long term projects. Remote
Site24x7 Status Pages: Redefine Business Transparency
Lets face it, downtime cannot be avoided, but if handled well, can bring a sense of security and trust among customers. Business~transparency goes a long way, as It is critical to keep your customers informed about the availability and maintenance schedules of your services which helps in nullifying a case of an unexpected downtime that could prove costly both in terms of business and goodwill. Communication is key Site24x7's pubic status page features helps you communicate with your customers well
A Season in Review: 2014 Holiday Ecommerce
Retailers needed to pull out more tricks in 2014 to get shoppers in the virtual aisles, relying more on IT and less on traditional strategies of years past, and the strategies worked in a big way. Record numbers for e-commerce, with holiday shopping across US and Europe approaching $130 billion (Source: Forrester Research). Online sales, particularly of the mobile variety, ruled the 2014 holiday shopping season, bringing hungry consumers in droves to retailers’ websites. Let’s take a look at the
What will Datacenters of the Future Look Like?
Datacenter professionals always need to stay on top of the latest trends in Datacenter infrastructure development. As discussed in a report from TechTarget, datacenter innovation can be a complex topic however the topics below are areas which stand out. Numerous Improvements in Energy Efficiency With concerns over LEED certification in the data center and keeping costs in check as demand increases, energy efficiency remains one of the biggest drivers of data center innovation. Energy aware hardware
2014 - The Year of Innovation (Infographic)
There was lot of action at Site24x7 this year. 2014, we call it the "Year of Innovation". From launching industry first solutions, kick starting the partner program to numerous enhancements to our existing feature set, we did it all. As we look forward to carry the same momentum next year, here is an infographic highlighting some of the major enhancements that went into our product. Want~us to work on a new feature you~would like~to see in Site24x7 in 2015? Just submit your entry here and we will~get
Scheduled Network Maintenance on Dec 31, 2014
We are planning for a network maintenance on 31st December, 2014 (5:00 PM PST) to 1st January, 2015 (1:00 AM PST) for upgrading our network components . However, no downtime is expected during this period. Follow this blog post for further updates. For any clarifications, please get in touch with support@site24x7.com.
Why All Datacenter Professionals Need to Understand DevOps?
As agile development methods continue to gain steam with developers, system administrators need a way to keep pace with rapidly changing trends in technology. Enter the field of DevOps, which is a discipline centered on ensuring developers and system administrators understand the importance of collaboration through all stages of the development lifecycle. By combining agile and lean principles into system operations, system administrators are able to improve efficiency in a manageable way. A Combination
The Secret to Streamlining your Development Workflow
In the past, application development used to be a difficult process. The biggest challenge to developers wasn’t developing a final product, but struggling to manage bugs and glitches which come up on customer systems as the product is deployed. While development systems often are built to uniform standards, client systems have an infinite amount of configurations. Fortunately this problem is being overcome thanks to technologies such as Docker. Unlike traditional virtual machines which run completely
Format SQL Statements to Make Troubleshooting Easier
"#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax”. A line which implies you need to go through and make the complex SQL statement simple. Frustrating, isn't it? Especially after finally having convinced yourself of making no errors till the last line. That's not the end of it. The mundane task of identifying misspelled keywords or missing characters becomes even more laborious when the text is plain without any breaks in-between. Site24x7 SQL Formatter comes to your rescue in such situations! The online
The Importance of Live Migration Capabilities in Modern Datacenters
Recently the popular Xen hypervisor system showed its limitations due to leading cloud service providers being forced to reboot chunks of their compute instances due to a glitch in the software. In the past, this may have been an acceptable solution, however now that datacenters are powering mission critical applications, system administrators need to know all their options when it comes to protecting their servers from expected and unexpected downtime. For any data center using cloud technologies,
Internal Application Monitoring DO’s and DON’T’s
If you think that monitoring your external-facing applications is enough to have your bases covered, think again. User escalations and complaints are much more likely to arise from your internal users than from customers and prospects. In fact, when external applications underperform, visitors will abandon to your competitors (some will also vent in Social Media channels). When internal apps slow down, regardless of where they are deployed, in your datacenter or in the cloud, phone calls to your
XML Formatter for Enhanced Content Visibility - Site24x7 Free Tool
Last month, I was caught in a tight spot. The website I was working on couldn't go live because I couldn't comprehend its sitemap! Yes, it does sound trivial, but the XML sitemap that my colleague shared didn't have the right indentation and the elements and attributes were all clustered together. I couldn't identify the right tags to make the required changes and get the website up. One thing that could have saved my day was a formatting tool. A tool that would format and highlight the data so that
Slash Costs by Using One IP for Multiple SSL Certificates
For data center administrators, managing secure websites can be a costly endeavor due to the common requirement that every SSL certificate have its own IP address. Aside from requiring administrators to purchase multiple addresses, data center professionals often are forced to purchase multiple network adapters to handle the additional demand. Fortunately Apache v2.2.12 and OpenSSL v0.9.8j along with later versions now support the TLS Extension Server Name Indication (SNI) which allows multiple SSL
5 Useful Security Tips Every Business Needs After Sony Hack
The ill- fated Sony attack With National Cyber security awareness month coming to an end and the business headlines still talking about data breaches, here comes the next big one: Sony Pictures fell prey to a hacker attack which led to sensitive data being exposed on torrent networks. Reports say close to 25 GB of confidential information including movies, payroll information, social security and health care data of close to 7500 employees went public. Even worse, the malware seems to have even wiped
Thank You for being a Valuable Customer! Now Win an Amazon Gift Card
This Holiday, double your celebrations by taking part in our Thanksgiving Contest. All you need to do, post 3 reasons why you like Site24x7 and you might be the lucky one to win an Amazon gift card worth $100! Contest Rules Participants need to post three reasons for liking Site24x7 on their Twitter / Facebook / Google+ walls with the tags #Site24x7 and #Thanksgiving Don't forget to follow our Facebook / Twitter / Google+ handles after posting, so that we can contact you for further clarifications
Measure end-user satisfaction with Apdex
Now that IT is becoming a metric-driven organization --and your success is measured in terms of user satisfaction with IT core business processes and service levels, you should add Apdex to the list of IT metrics and actionable measures you track and report on. With Site24x7 Apdex – an industry standard for measuring the satisfaction of a user of an application or service, you can understand how your applications are performing from your users’ perspective. Think of Apdex as a simplified Service
Common Firewall Issues in the Datacenter and How to Resolve Them
Firewalls are a vital component of securing your networks, however they often are a challenge to configure even for the most experienced server administrators. This is why datacenter professionals need to be able to follow best practices for server operations while also being able to effectively handle firewall issues as they come up. As discussed in an article from Site24x7, having your servers operating at optimal performance is crucial to the success of any project. Since tuning your server can
Before you migrate to the Cloud Know What you need
For software development companies today, moving from desktop to hosted software is becoming the de-facto standard for many developers. Although some legacy applications can be placed on servers and accessed remotely with ease, other applications require a bit more work. Fortunately by considering a few points, you can ensure that your cloud transition goes through without issue. Managing Existing Infrastructure One of the benefits of using SaaS services is that it allows your business to streamline
Are You Protected from BadUSB?
Security in the data center already is a challenging aspect for many professionals to juggle. Aside from constantly dealing with digital threats, system administrators also need to ensure their systems are protected from physical attacks. In fact inside attacks often do more damage than outside attacks because they are harder to spot and the attacker often is a trusted party who has enhanced access to the systems in question. A new piece of malware known as BadUSB allows a determined attacker to
Are You Able to Keep Your Cloud Services Costs in Check?
Cloud computing is one of the hottest trends in the IT world today because it allows companies to tap virtually unlimited resources, as needed, while only paying for the resources that they use. Although it sounds great in theory, when implemented improperly, it can result in significant cost overruns that make cloud computing more expensive than traditional systems. As discussed in an article by Site24x7 there are many factors you should consider when choosing a cloud services company, however in
Use Site24x7 Real User Monitoring Beta to Gauge Real User Experience
With a fluid web application, you can be sure of two things; business growth and success. This is because the more fluid the web application, the better your end user's experience. Certain real user interaction metrics need to be considered to tailor application performance to suit your users. Synthetic monitoring is best suited for monitoring the uptime of web services. In case of real user browser performance of applications, real user monitoring is the perfect solution. Site24x7 Real User Monitoring
Meet Site24x7 @ AWS re:Invent 2014
Event - AWS re:Invent 2014 Date - 11th - 14th Nov'14 Venue - The Venetian - Las Vegas, NV Booth No. - 542 As you join the largest gathering of the global Amazon Web Services community at AWS re:Invent 2014, meet Site24x7 at booth no. 542 and grab an opportunity to interact with technology experts and share ideas on ways to improve developer productivity, increasing application performance and a lot more. We are also launching a new feature during the event which will take end-user experience to a
Repurposing Older Servers in High Performance Settings
You might think that running a high end data center requires constantly maintaining a tight upgrade cycle with hardware upgrades every couple of years, however by properly clustering your servers, you can lengthen your upgrade cycles and get more usage from your equipment. As discussed in an article by Wired, Google has been leading the way in data center innovations in many ways, one of the biggest being that many of their systems are custom built at a fraction of the cost of retail servers by creating
Site24x7 Disabling SSLv3 by 30th November 2014
Update: SSLv3 support to be disabled by 08th December 2014 You must have recently read about version 3 of Secure Sockets Layer (SSLv3) being vulnerable at the protocol level, many news sources and the OpenSSL team has confirmed this vulnerability. The Security Flaw POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) allows an attacker to read information encrypted with this version (SSLv3) of the protocol in plain text using a man-in-the-middle attack. Man-In-The-Middle Attack An attacker could
Site24x7 Scare-to-Win Halloween Contest
Its that time of the year again when we are all geared up to celebrate Halloween with the usual trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns and attending costume parties. Well, this year Site24x7 doubles your Halloween celebrations.~ Participate in the Site24x7 Scare-to-Win Halloween contest on Twitter and walk away with a shiny new Pebble Steel smartwatch. All you have to do is, just take a pic of your scariest best and tweet it with the hash tag - #Site24x7Halloween. The pic receiving
Mobile monitoring versus Web Monitoring
There is no question that mobile is exploding. Just to give you some quick data points, a record 21% of all online 2013 Thanksgiving shopping came via mobile devices (Source: IBM), mobile commerce will be nearly half of e-commerce by 2018 (Source: Goldman Sachs), and mobile apps will generate $77 billion in revenue by 2017 (Source: Gartner). Today mobile users are visiting your Web or mobile sites and they engage with your brand via your mobile apps, while more employees and partners increasingly
Before Implementing an API, Consider These Risks
As businesses continue to place an increased reliance on cloud technologies, many services are implementing application programming interfaces (APIs) into their systems as a way to extend the functionality of their systems.~ One of the great things about software is that it allows companies to expand the power of their code by allowing third-parties to leverage their platforms. Whether you run a collaboration platform, productivity suite or a database of product reviews, creating an API for your
What Shellshock Means for Datacenter Professionals?
Keeping your servers protected against major threats is a significant challenge for even the most experienced server administrators. While the heartbleed bug recently sparked waves in the information technology field, a new exploit recently was discovered which is far more devastating. Shellshock, a vulnerability in the Bash command interpreter and parser, which is now allowing attackers to run commands on affected servers even without proper authorization. For those unfamiliar with shellshock, the
Proper Password Management within the Datacenter
As consumers continue to put more of their data in “the cloud,” following best security practices is vital to ensuring that your business is able to stay compliant with regulations and also maintain the trust of your customers. For this guide, the focus is on best practices to implement within your code to maintain PCI compliance. For professionals in regulated industries such as finance, legal, or medical you will still need to speak with an expert as the best practices for those industries are
Site24x7 migrates with Zoho IAM
Site24x7 authentication has been moved to Zoho IAM. Sign Up with Site24x7 for a hands on experience of all the Zoho features. Start enjoying the rich facilities that you get for FREE as a result of this IAM migration. Let us know your experience!
Meet Us @ GITEX 2014
Join Site24x7 at GITEX Technology Week, 12-16 October 2014 - Dubai World Trade Center. We'll be at the ManageEngine booth in Hall 7, booth # A7-10. Come, join us as we showcase some of our top enterprise IT management solutions. Get to chat with Site24x7 experts and watch live product demos. See you in Dubai.
CRM monitoring Best Practices
CRM applications, a market that according to Gartner grew 13.7% in 2013, support sales and marketing operations that fuel revenue, so they are mission-critical to your organization. While the love-hate relationship between sales, marketing and your CRM system is outside the realm of IT (especially if your CRM system was properly implemented), there is one thing that you can do to facilitate business operations and gain sales and marketing approval. Ensure top-notch CRM availability and performance
Solve Common DNS Issues with These Simple Tips
In today’s connected society, domain name systems (DNS) are the backbone of modern day datacenters. Since DNS systems are responsible for linking domain names to IP addresses, they are a mission critical component of any website because when they go down, it becomes impossible to anyone to access your customer websites. As with anything in life, DNS systems aren’t perfect and downtime must be planned for in any datacenter setting. As Site24x7 mentioned in a recent article on DNS hijacking, these
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