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Enabling Your Website to Survive "The Trump Effect"

Michelle McLean

As President Trump begins his administration, he continues to use a variety of channels to send messages about his thoughts and plans. These take many forms: tweets, Executive Orders, off-the-cuff comments in speeches and press conferences. We've seen the impact these communiqués have had — they move stock prices, spur protests and generate press frenzies.

Some organizations have been majorly impacted by these communications. This past weekend, for example, in the wake of a controversial Executive Order from President Trump, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found its website crashing under the load of an enormous spike in online donations.

When an organization like the ACLU finds itself unexpectedly caught in "the Trump effect" — to its benefit or detriment — the IT staff may be under instant pressure to reinforce its systems to accommodate significant traffic surges. The following steps may help as a fast response:

Leverage cloud capacity

If there are resources already set up to run in the cloud, consider expanding capacity dedicated to those applications and data sources. Public-facing sites and applications in particular should be ready to take advantage of this kind of surge capacity.

Reinforce web resources

Web server capacity can be increased fairly easily, leveraging additional hardware for scale out, paired with TCP load balancers to distribute the load. Augmenting the infrastructure with additional horizontal scale out will help keep a public website online when experiencing major traffic surges.

Focus on database resources

The database is often the weakest link in many organizations' technology stacks. Without high-performing databases, apps and web servers will grind to a halt — and "slow" becomes the same as "down." It is crucial to monitor database performance, and, like with the web tier, consider horizontal scale out to increase capacity, paired with database load-balancing software to distribute the load.

Monitor the complete application stack

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software can provide a holistic view of customers' experiences. Where are the bottlenecks in the application's overall performance? What recommendations can the software make for root cause and troubleshooting?

These actions are easier to undertake with some advanced warning, of course. Any organization that anticipates it could be impacted by "the Trump effect" should plan ahead with these steps to the best of their ability. IT teams in such organizations should look across the full technology stack and identify quick steps they can take to make their systems more robust.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

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Enabling Your Website to Survive "The Trump Effect"

Michelle McLean

As President Trump begins his administration, he continues to use a variety of channels to send messages about his thoughts and plans. These take many forms: tweets, Executive Orders, off-the-cuff comments in speeches and press conferences. We've seen the impact these communiqués have had — they move stock prices, spur protests and generate press frenzies.

Some organizations have been majorly impacted by these communications. This past weekend, for example, in the wake of a controversial Executive Order from President Trump, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found its website crashing under the load of an enormous spike in online donations.

When an organization like the ACLU finds itself unexpectedly caught in "the Trump effect" — to its benefit or detriment — the IT staff may be under instant pressure to reinforce its systems to accommodate significant traffic surges. The following steps may help as a fast response:

Leverage cloud capacity

If there are resources already set up to run in the cloud, consider expanding capacity dedicated to those applications and data sources. Public-facing sites and applications in particular should be ready to take advantage of this kind of surge capacity.

Reinforce web resources

Web server capacity can be increased fairly easily, leveraging additional hardware for scale out, paired with TCP load balancers to distribute the load. Augmenting the infrastructure with additional horizontal scale out will help keep a public website online when experiencing major traffic surges.

Focus on database resources

The database is often the weakest link in many organizations' technology stacks. Without high-performing databases, apps and web servers will grind to a halt — and "slow" becomes the same as "down." It is crucial to monitor database performance, and, like with the web tier, consider horizontal scale out to increase capacity, paired with database load-balancing software to distribute the load.

Monitor the complete application stack

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software can provide a holistic view of customers' experiences. Where are the bottlenecks in the application's overall performance? What recommendations can the software make for root cause and troubleshooting?

These actions are easier to undertake with some advanced warning, of course. Any organization that anticipates it could be impacted by "the Trump effect" should plan ahead with these steps to the best of their ability. IT teams in such organizations should look across the full technology stack and identify quick steps they can take to make their systems more robust.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...