SolarWinds, the 2022 Platinum ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Award Winner for Best IT Access Control & Authentication Solution, recently Nominated to Compete in the 2023 ‘ASTORS’ Awards Program, has released the findings of its 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders.

The report explores how enterprises can act proactively to maximize the advantages of their observability solutions, integrate best practices into implementations, and mitigate common adoption challenges.

The report also found that companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes.

The new report is released before IT Pro Day 2023 on September 19th, proudly established by SolarWinds. It highlights a stark contrast between enterprises that have embraced observability and their peers that have not.

Among the findings, the survey uncovered that observability leaders, those who follow best practices to leverage observability and report experiencing better business and IT outcomes as a result:

• are three times more likely to say their organization is doing extremely well with growing revenue,

• more than twice as likely to say the same about operational efficiency, and

• 2.5 times more likely to say they’re excelling with the speed of innovation

Observability leaders also rated their organization’s employee experience higher, including lower levels of reported employee burnout and fewer skill gaps on their teams.

These takeaways come at a critical time, as IT environments become increasingly complex, and companies experience more challenges in efficiently addressing IT issues.

According to the findings, the typical enterprise suffers from an average of nine brownouts or outages monthly, lasting around twelve hours each, at an average annual cost of $13.7MM.

Observability has emerged as a solution to not only preemptively detect anomalies and potential issues before they escalate into full-blown outages but to proactively address those issues at the root cause and prevent future outages.

(Learn about SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability and how it can help organizations of all sizes and industries optimize performance, help ensure availability, and reduce remediation time across on-premises and multi-cloud environments by increasing visibility, intelligence, and productivity. Courtesy of SolarWinds and YouTube.)

“To combat outages amid increasingly complex IT environments, more organizations are beginning to fully realize the power that observability solutions provide to keep their teams productive and innovative,” explains Jeff Stewart, Field CTO and Vice President of Global Solutions Engineering at SolarWinds.

“Observability is also bringing the industry closer to realizing fully autonomous operations where IT environments govern themselves.”

“Our report from SolarWinds found that adopting observability provides a number of benefits, including revenue growth, greater operational efficiency, and faster innovation.”

“Not only this, but company culture is improving as employee burnout is reported to improve. As organizations consider what steps they can take to improve their environments, observability is proving to be essential to running a successful modern IT environment.” 

“Outages and security concerns are no longer just an IT problem, and observability is no longer just an IT solution.”

“The better business, innovation, and technology outcomes experienced by observability leaders prove the benefits to every level, department, and employee.”

“The findings of this year’s report should serve as an urgent call to action for business leaders who believe they can’t afford to invest in observability tools—when the truth is that we’re rapidly entering a landscape in which companies simply can’t afford to risk being without them.”

The survey also highlighted trends among the observability leaders reporting fewer and less frequent challenges in their ecosystem.

The 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders for SolarWinds, finds the majority are:

Investing in top priorities:

• Data shows organizations using observability solutions to support the priorities most critical to their growth and success: improve their customer experience (96%), enable faster innovation (71%), reduce time spent solving (71%), and detecting (60%) issues, and increase operational efficiency (55%).

More automated and integrated

• Observability leaders embracing automation and investing in tools that provide enhanced efficiency are 214% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with operational efficiency, 750% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with auto-remediation of complex alerts, and 300% better at automatically collecting background diagnostic data for IT support staff.

Ahead on IT:

• The data found that those ahead of the curve on observability are also leading by huge margins when monitoring, detecting, and resolving issues that could otherwise bring the business to a screeching halt.

• Regarding IT, they are 233% better at auto-escalation of tickets, 213% better at auto-remediation of simple alerts, and 36% better at settling alert levels based on historical behavior.

SolarWinds offers its clients full-stack observability solutions that provide organizations across all sizes and industries cost-effective, end-to-end visibility and actionable intelligence to expedite remediation using powerful machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

These fully integrated, on-premises, and cloud-native SaaS solutions provide comprehensive visibility in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including SolarWinds Observability and SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability.

To read the full Lessons From Observability Leaders report, visit www.it-trends.solarwinds.com or to try a free trial of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability click here.

SolarWinds Nominated in Eighth Consecutive ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Programs

American Security Today’s Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards is the preeminent U.S. Homeland Security Awards Program, and now entering its Eighth Year, continues to recognize industry leaders of Physical and Border Security, Cybersecurity, Emergency Preparedness – Management and Response, Law Enforcement, First Responders, as well as federal, state and municipal government agencies in the acknowledgment of their outstanding efforts to Keep our Nation Secure.

SolarWinds Worldwide (First of Three)

Best IT Access Control & Authentication Solution

SolarWinds Access Rights Manager

• The objective of access control is to reduce the risk of unauthorized access to files, data, and systems and is, therefore, an important component of an organization’s security policy, and effective management is required to achieve compliance. However, access control tasks can be burdensome, resulting in insecure accounts, errors, and a lack of audit documentation.

• SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) is designed to assist IT and security admins to quickly and easily provision, de-provision, manage, and audit user access rights to systems, data, and files, so they can help protect their organizations from the potential risks of data loss and data breaches. By analyzing user authorizations and access permission, admins get a visualization of who has access to what and when they accessed it, and with a few clicks, customized reports can be generated to demonstrate compliance with most regulatory requirements.

• SolarWinds ARM automates access rights management, analysis, and enforcement by identifying insecure accounts while providing audit trails. It enhances security by monitoring, analyzing, and auditing Active Directory®, Azure AD, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and file servers to see what changes have been made, by whom, and when they occurred.

• ARM helps prevent data leaks and unauthorized changes to sensitive files and data through the visualization of permissions on file servers and simplifies Exchange monitoring and auditing to help prevent data breaches by tracking changes. ARM helps improve compliance and detect unauthorized changes.

• SolarWinds ARM is being widely adopted across DoD and civilian government agencies. It’s available on the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule and other government contract vehicles.

• (SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) helps IT and Security Admins meet compliance requirements with centralized provisioning, de-provisioning, management, and audit of user permissions and access to systems, data, and files while protecting their organizations from internal security breaches. Courtesy of SolarWinds and YouTube.)

• SolarWinds ARM enhances security by monitoring, analyzing, and auditing Active Directory®, Azure AD, Exchange™, SharePoint, OneDrive, and file servers to see what changes have been made, by whom, and when those changes occurred, and customized reports can be generated to demonstrate compliance with most regulatory requirements.

• The solution also provisions and deprovisions users using role-specific templates to help assure conformity of access privilege delegation in alignment with security policies.

• ARM helps prevent data leaks and unauthorized changes to sensitive files and data through visualization of permissions on file servers. 

• SolarWinds ARM reduces IT workload through a web-based self-service portal, put access rights of data in the hands of data owners instead of admins.

SolarWinds Worldwide (Second of Three)

Best Network Management Solution

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager

• Successful threat mitigation requires continuously monitoring network configuration changes and potential policy violations. Still, this process needs to be automated, fast, and reliable, and continuous real-time monitoring and alerts for automated detection and remediation of harmful security violations is essential.

• SolarWinds® Network Configuration Manager (NCM) provides these benefits—and more. In addition to the “bread and butter” of compliance and configuration management, NCM offers compliance auditing and leverages baselines and differential viewers to help ensure devices are configured correctly. Automated change control workflow, bulk configuration updates, and automatic vulnerability assessments help teams efficiently identify and fix vulnerabilities, all in a single solution.

• NCM offers several unique and powerful features to help agency IT Pros protect against vulnerabilities and prevent unauthorized network configuration changes. NCM uses Cisco® IOS® and ASA vulnerability scanning and NIST FISMA, DISA STIGs, and DSS PCI compliance assessments to improve network security.

• Administrators can manage changes through automated workflows and set up two-level approval policies for configuration updates, helping ensure that only the right changes are made by the right people. Configuration baseline features help standardize compliant configurations and monitor configuration drift. NCM’s change management auditing and real-time change notification features allow administrators to see who made a configuration change and when so they can quickly respond to the change and mitigate the issue if necessary.

(See how you can increase visibility to your network devices with SolarWinds® Network Configuration Manager. Save time and improve network reliability by automating network configuration and change management to reduce configuration errors, recover quickly from downtime, and improve security and compliance. Courtesy of SolarWinds and YouTube.)

• The NCM software features hundreds of built-in compliance reports to help meet major auditing authority requirements, including DISA STIGs, NIST FISMA, and more. Meanwhile, THWACK®, the SolarWinds online user community, provides several free report templates that can be used to prepare for an inspection.

• SolarWinds NCM is used by nearly every U.S. federal civilian agency, DoD branch, and intelligence agency. It is available on the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule and other contract vehicles.

SolarWinds Worldwide (Third of Three)

Best Security Incident & Event Management Solution (SIEM)

SolarWinds Security Event Manager

• Threats to IT networks continue to accelerate and evolve. While enterprising hackers from external sources test the robustness of network security parameters, internal threats from careless and malicious insiders remain a major and ongoing concern.

• It’s critical agencies take steps to combat these threats—and SolarWinds® Security Event Manager (SEM) is a powerful weapon. This comprehensive SIEM solution delivers dynamic, real-time log collection and analysis for immediate and actionable threat intelligence. It can capture and analyze log data from multiple sources and specific incidents in real-time, allowing users to quickly identify and remediate threats, uncover policy violations, and resolve vital network issues.

• In addition, SolarWinds SEM features other innovations not seen in traditional SIEM solutions, including in-memory correlation for immediate threat detection and remediation; USB Defender® technology to help identify rogue devices and enforce USB policies; and unique IT search capabilities for better remediation and audit reporting. SEM includes support for single sign-on and improved management.

(See a brief overview of the capabilities of SolarWinds Security Event Manager (formerly Log & Event Manager), and how you can use the SIEM tool to detect threats, quickly respond to cyber incidents, and report compliance from a consolidated interface. Courtesy of SolarWinds and YouTube.)

• Like all SolarWinds software, SEM is built to scale and can support IT environments of all sizes. It employs a node-based license model that allows users to stay within their planned budgets as they deploy and expand their IT infrastructures across multiple data centers and geographies. A new Workstation Edition license makes monitoring logs from Windows workstations more affordable than ever.

• SolarWinds SEM is used by nearly every U.S. federal civilian agency, DoD branch, and intelligence agency. It’s available on the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule and other contract vehicles.

• *SolarWinds has been officially recognized with Multiple Award Wins for Seven Consecutive Years – 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016. Thank you for your continued confidence in AST!