Strategies for Avoiding IT Burnout in a World of Continuous Delivery

Our always connected world of today is overloading IT operations teams and putting them at danger for burnout. Tech engineers and developers take a heavy personal toll from constantly fighting fires and dealing with application casualties to the point where alert fatigue sets in and best practices within the organization can be overlooked.   In order to keep critical systems up and running at all times, on-call IT support staff are especially vulnerable to the stress of late night wake up calls to deal with temperamental infrastructure, false alarms or poorly designed applications.  However, strategies can be put into place for improving conditions to lower the risk of employee burnout while also achieving better business results.

Implementing a robust suite of monitoring tools is a good place to start.  However, narrowly focused tools will only provide partial answers when it comes to addressing complex problems.  Upper management needs to be aware of the people cost associated with a support team’s stressful on-call rotation schedule.  The high cost of turnover is real, not to mention the business impact on revenue, profits and customer satisfaction. For a closer look at actionable steps that can be put into place for better work life balance for on-call IT employees, read full article here.

 

 

Washington, DC Added To Smart Gigabit Communities Program

At this week’s Smart Cities Connect Conference in Austin, five cities were added to the US Ignite’s Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) program.  For their commitment towards the adoption of next generation smart city technologies, Washington, DC is one of the five that joins an already existing gigabit community network of twelve cities.  Together with municipalities, network carriers and other corporate partners, the SGC program works to develop smart gigabit applications in order to address local community needs.  Smart city solution projects utilizing emerging gigabit technologies or platforms requiring high-speed connectivity will enhance community efforts in transportation, workforce development and public safety.

Washington, DC was chosen for its smart city initiatives in waste management, movement analytics and water quality sensing. By leveraging intelligent city infrastructure, including connected devices and data analytics, Washington is improving the quality of life for residents. The SGC program is funded in part by a three-year, $3 million National Science Foundation grant.  Newly announced SGC cities will develop two gigabit applications addressing issues within their community. The SGC and its team of experts will provide insight and resources for smart city efforts focusing on accelerating growth in fiber applications via programmable fiber and wireless networks.  Read full article here.

 

Saving Money Through Data Center Optimization Techniques

When it comes to today’s data center environment, the word on everyone’s mind is MORE and oh by the way there is not going to be a budget increase in order to satisfy the more demands that are continually being put on the data center.  Meeting the demands of more compute capacity, more storage, more power, etc. is going to be challenging for data center managers without data center budget increases or at the hands of having to maintain a stable budget.  Data Center optimization techniques and efficiency best practices will become more critical without more funding to support the increase in demand data center functions and the savings will have to come from somewhere.

Areas to look at for optimization at the policy and procedure level include evaluating outside contractual arrangements to ensure efficiency for maintaining service level agreements.  Additionally at the hardware level, unused servers could be identified and decommissioned in an effort to right size environments while evaluating risk of running out of capacity. Data deduplication can free up storage space and installing infrastructure monitoring systems along with predictive analytics for problem resolution can go a long way in doing MORE without more money.  For more information on optimizing your data center environment, read full article here.