Optimize Today's Tech for Tomorrow's Success

By Leon Adato, Head Geek, SolarWinds

According to Gartner, the abatement of revenue uncertainty in late 2020 will allow for the resurgence of more predictable IT spending by CIOs, but social distancing will continue through 2021, capping office capacity at 40%. Organizations will continue to employ the lessons they learned in 2020-namely, investing in architectural agility up and down the stack. Additionally, the adoption of new initiatives will be lower on the list of leadership priorities, so internal innovation will be key in maintaining distributed workforces. Keeping the organization alive and connected-both in terms of technology and regarding emotional engagement and enthusiasm-during the ongoing economic downturn will require IT teams to home in on existing technologies within the business and strengthen the skills required to keep them running optimally.

Of course, this isn't the first time this has happened. The technology we use to monitor and manage when it comes to networking has been more or less the same for over a decade. What's changed has been the sophistication of implementing and managing those techniques, along with the speed and variety of visualizations based on the data collected. What's changed recently is the opening of network infrastructure to automation. Because of this, monitoring and management tools are now expanding to help network engineers create, manage, and monitor the scripts and tools used to create them, incorporating the best aspects of integrated development environments (IDEs) programmers have come to love and rely on. We'll see these shifts and evolutions continue in the future.

As we try to adapt to the new normal, tech priorities will also continue to be shuffled around until we find the right balance. For example, when it comes to network management, the systems and infrastructure once business-critical (e.g., the fiber backbone running across the campus) are now secondary, while parts of the network once viewed as "nice to have" (e.g., client VPN connections for every employee) are now more than mission-critical-they're the essential tools of the business.

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About the Author

Leon Adato, Head Geek, SolarWinds

Leon's 30 years of network and systems management and monitoring experience spans the financial, healthcare, food and beverage, and other industries, with 20 years focused specifically on monitoring and management.

Before he was a SolarWinds Head Geek^TM, Adato was a SolarWinds software user for over a decade. He launched his IT career in 1989 and his expertise led him through roles as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, desktop support tech, server support engineer, and software distribution expert.

In the early 2000s, Adato became involved with systems monitoring and has since worked with a wide range of tools, including Tivoli, Nagios, Patrol, Zenoss, OpenView, SiteScope, and, of course, SolarWinds. He has designed solutions for companies that ranged from extremely modest (approx. 10 systems), to impressively large (5,000 systems), to ludicrous in scale (250,000 systems in 5,000 locations). He has experience monitoring all types of systems, including routers, load balancers, and SAN fabric, as well as Windows, Linux, and UNIX servers running on physical and virtual platforms.

His career includes key roles at Rockwell Automation, Nestlé, PNC, and Cardinal Health, providing server standardization, support, and network management and monitoring.