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.
The Latest
A vast majority of organizations are still unprepared to properly respond to cybersecurity incidents, with 77% of respondents indicating they do not have a cybersecurity incident response plan applied consistently across the enterprise, according to The 2019 Study on the Cyber Resilient Organization, a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of IBM ...
People and businesses today make mistakes similar to Troy, when they get too enamored by the latest, flashiest technology. These modern Trojan Horses work through their ability to "wow" us. Cybercriminals find IoT devices an easy target because they are the cool new technology on the block ...
Software security flaws cause the majority of product vulnerabilities, according to the 2019 Security Report from Ixia's Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Research Center ...
The majority of organizations (nearly 70 percent) do not prioritize the protection of the applications that their business depend on — such as ERP and CRM systems — any differently than how low-value data, applications or services are secured, according to a new survey from CyberArk ...
While 97 percent of organizations are currently undertaking or planning to undertake digital transformation initiatives, integration challenges are hindering efforts for 84 percent of organizations, according to the 2019 Connectivity Benchmark Report from MuleSoft ...
Companies have low visibility into their public cloud environments, and the tools and data supplied by cloud providers are insufficient, according to The State of Public Cloud Monitoring, a report sponsored by Ixia ...
Without improvement in time and budget constraints, the majority of tech pros (75 percent) say they will be unable to confidently manage future innovations, according to IT Trends Report 2019: Skills for Tech Pros of Tomorrow, a new report from SolarWinds. This reality ultimately puts businesses at risk of performance and competitive advantage losses, making the prioritization of skills and career development for tech pros paramount ...
Tech pros have one foot grounded in today's hybrid IT realities while also setting their sights on emerging technology, according to IT Trends Report 2019: Skills for Tech Pros of Tomorrow ...
This Thursday EMA will be presenting a webinar — Automation, AI and Analytics: Reinventing ITSM — covering recent research. There were quite a few surprises. And in fact, many of the surprises indicated a yet-more-positive outlook than we expected ...
Almost three-fourths (69 percent) of organizations have plans to deploy 5G by 2020, according to a new 5G use case and adoption survey by Gartner. Organizations expect 5G networks to be mainly used for IoT communications and video, with operational efficiency being the key driver ...
