Craig Lowell

When cloud cost optimization strategies are more trouble than they’re worth, take the effortless route to cloud savings
For all of the scalability, reliability and flexibility the public cloud offers, there is still no such thing as a free lunch. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud allow you to use and pay for compute power and services as you need them, but doing so on a purely on-demand basis incurs high costs. At some point, on-demand public cloud usage becomes cost-p...

Commitment discounts are complex and require large investments of time and money. Automation can unlock those savings with minimal effort or risk.
For as long as the public cloud has existed, users have been trying to figure out new ways to optimize their spend and prevent their cloud costs from spiraling out of control. Optimizing areas like your storage or database usage can certainly help, but the greatest opportunity to lower your public cloud costs lies in optimizing your compute spend. ...

After a year’s postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UEFA 2020 European Football Championship tournament (aka the Euros) ended up playing out over 4 weeks across June and July, culminating with the Italian national team defeating England in the championship match on July 11. As one of the most prestigious international football/soccer tournaments in the world – and one that fans had to wait an extra year to see – UEFA Euro 2020 unsurprisingly drew huge streaming audiences on OTT plat...

Although the travel and hospitality industries took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, the return to normalcy will bring a surge of traffic and revenue back to them in the coming months. However, with so much demand on the horizon, two questions loom large for travel and hospitality companies:
How will they continue to differentiate themselves in a competitive marketplace?
How can they reduce costs and improve efficiency after the financial impact of the past year?
Consumers tend to have...

Here's everything you need to double check before the game, thanks to the masters of the double check: State Farm.

Retailers have been at the forefront of digital transformation strategies since before the term ‘digital transformation’ had really entered the lexicon. For over two decades, ecommerce providers have been seeking ways to create new customer-centric shopping experiences through the use of websites and mobile apps, cloud migration endeavors, and most recently, edge technology solutions.
Standing out in a crowded market
The hard truth is that retail is one of – if not the most – competitive indu...

Like other industries that rely on positive customer experiences to grow and maintain their business, banking and financial service providers must be able to provide fast, reliable and personalized digital applications to meet the increasing demands of their users. With an already crowded marketplace being further disrupted by new-age banks that operate entirely online with no physical locations, traditional banking institutions have significant ground to make up if they want to remain releva...

As digital architectures become more distributed and the edge continues to extend closer to end users than ever before, securing applications and the networks on which they rely has become an equally rising challenge. In addition to traditional threats, security teams must now account for the fact that flexible application and service deployment strategies also mean that malicious actors have potential entry points in every corner of the globe.
Meeting these threats head-on requires network a...

Delivering a live sports broadcast – or any live streaming event, for that matter – requires many different moving parts that must all work perfectly in sync. In addition to the actual filming of the event, a broadcaster must also invest in server infrastructure, network infrastructure, and software in order to get the video files from the on-site event location all the way to the end-user devices. Should any performance or availability issues occur to the live video delivery chain, viewers c...

As we all continue to adjust to the new reality with which the world has been confronted in the first nine months of 2020, the idea of “returning to normal” is very much a moving target. More realistically, our social and professional lives are on a winding and unpredictable path towards a “new normal” as we find new ways to work, learn, socialize, and be entertained.
Online video has been and will continue to be at the heart of many of these new ways of life. Whether it’s getting on group ca...

Network engineering and operations teams are currently faced with a paradoxical dilemma. On the one hand, the capabilities for delivering content and services to end users are more robust and diverse than ever thanks to the explosion of third-party infrastructure and services. The adoption of new IT architectural structures such as multi-DNS, multi- and hybrid-cloud, multi-CDN, and others means that when everything is operating smoothly, end users are getting content and services delivered to...

Ensuring the health of your BGP routes is one of the most important parts of a robust network monitoring strategy. When any of your IP prefixes are unreachable for end users, you need to know as soon as possible with direct, actionable data that pinpoint the exact nature of the problem. Without this kind of incisive real-time BGP alerting, troubleshooting end-user experience issues becomes much harder, leading to increased mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Sett...

As we all continue to struggle with a new reality of telecommuting and working from home, it’s become more apparent than ever that we are at the mercy of networks that are ultimately out of our control. Performance, reachability, and latency issues in these network layers now take more of a toll than ever on our daily lives, as they can disrupt the business-critical sites and SaaS applications on which we all rely so heavily. Monitoring these networks is, therefore, more important than ever, ...

When synthetic monitoring was first invented in the mid-1990s, it was a revolutionary way to ensure that your digital properties were performing as expected for your end users. Back then, synthetic testing was mostly used for availability testing of your external websites and services. The majority of the monitoring budget was spent on infrastructure, network, and applications. End-user monitoring was merely a luxury and an afterthought.
This worked well at the time because the majority of yo...

One of the biggest nightmares for any service provider is to find themselves in SLA hell due to poor performance. An issue that negatively impacts end users’ experience is inevitably going to have an effect on a company’s business metrics, and when that happens, they’re going to be looking for someone to blame, and more importantly, and compensate them for that lost revenue.

The reasoning behind having comprehensive SLAs in place is not a difficult concept to grasp. Protection of one’s brand ...