Category: News

A New Step Towards Innovation

Criticalcase announces a strategic partnership with Datadog, a leading platform in application monitoring and security.

This technology integration marks a significant step in IT performance optimization, enabling a comprehensive, real-time view of infrastructures and applications.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a key element in ensuring reliability, scalability, and security—fundamental aspects for companies operating in cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments. Thanks to Datadog, Criticalcase will enhance IT system management and provide its clients with advanced tools for more effective and proactive application monitoring.

The Benefits of Integrating Datadog

The adoption of Datadog will allow Criticalcase to offer its clients a range of tangible benefits, including:

• Greater visibility into performance: End-to-end monitoring for more efficient application management.
• Faster anomaly resolution: Immediate issue identification and reduced downtime.
• Optimized scalability: Support for cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise infrastructures.
• Advanced security: Real-time anomaly detection for proactive protection.
• User experience optimization: In-depth interaction analysis to enhance the customer journey.

With its ability to track application performance, Datadog helps identify bottlenecks, monitor users in real time, and correlate events through advanced log analysis. This results in more efficient management and a more resilient, high-performing IT infrastructure.

A Concrete Impact on Business

The adoption of Datadog goes beyond technical optimization—it also presents a business opportunity. With advanced monitoring and analysis tools, companies and decision-makers (CEOs, CIOs, marketing managers) can gain strategic insights into critical aspects such as:

• Cart abandonment monitoring: Identifying pain points in the purchasing process.
• Conversion analysis: Detecting technical issues affecting sales.
• User experience optimization: Enhancing the customer journey to increase conversion rates.

The integration with Datadog will transform collected data into valuable insights, enabling more informed decision-making and boosting business performance.

The Future of Monitoring with Criticalcase

In the coming months, Criticalcase will focus on the full integration of Datadog, with an emphasis on team training and IT operations optimization. The goal is to provide clients with an increasingly reliable, secure, and high-performing service.

Through this partnership, Criticalcase reaffirms its commitment to technological innovation and the development of cutting-edge solutions for IT infrastructure management. Datadog will become a strategic asset, enhancing service quality and delivering increasingly advanced and responsive monitoring.

We are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Resò Srl, a well-established company based in Chivasso, specializing in infrastructure services with extensive experience in the Large-Scale Retail (GDO) market. This strategic move marks an important milestone in our journey of growth and integration.

Resò’s Expertise: A Valuable Asset for the Group

Resò brings with it a wealth of experience in the GDO sector, thanks to its collaboration with key players in the industry. Its three main areas of expertise are:

• NOC (Network Operation Center): Managing around 30,000 monitored sensors, Resò operates a 7-day-a-week monitoring service, ensuring uninterrupted system operations.
• Datacenter Management: Operating a data processing center with approximately 15 racks, Resò guarantees the efficiency and security of critical infrastructures.

GDO Support: Resò is currently responsible for the installation and maintenance of IT infrastructure in over 130 retail locations, ensuring smooth network operations.

Integration Plan: Sustainability and Growth

CEO Luca Nunno shared his vision:

“We are working to fully integrate Resò into our structure. To facilitate the process, we have identified two main technical areas within our organization: Infrastructure, led by Andrea Beccari, and Support & Projects, managed by Giorgio Milanesio. One of our first goals is to integrate Resò’s NOC with our support division, consolidating resources and strengthening our structure. Another key objective is to align the datacenter management already handled by Resò with the infrastructure standards we currently follow, while the retail maintenance and installation services will continue under the supervision of Fabrizio Laurella.”

The Future of Critical Support: 24/7 Operations and International Synergy

One of our most ambitious goals is to establish an even more responsive and high-performing 24/7 support service. The integration of Resò’s NOC with Criticalcase’s support division will allow us to strengthen our team and structure, creating synergies that ensure global, uninterrupted coverage.

With the acquisition of Resò, Criticalcase is unlocking new opportunities for growth and innovation. The integration of Resò’s expertise will allow us to expand our scope and deliver even more efficient infrastructure and technical support solutions. We can’t wait to see where this journey takes us!

One of the major trends in recent years for businesses has been the migration of IT infrastructures from on-premise setups—developed onsite—to the Cloud.

The reasons behind this shift are well-documented: why manage technical complexity, performance, maintenance, updates, business continuity, and security locally when these responsibilities can be entrusted to reliable partners? The cost-effectiveness and the ability to focus on productivity further position the Cloud as an attractive alternative. However, this doesn’t mean that Cloud-based infrastructures should be exempt from continuous optimization.

Enter Cloud Smart Check by CriticalCase, a solution designed to assess security, cost management, and performance specifically for Cloud infrastructures.

What Is Cloud Smart Check by CriticalCase?

Cloud infrastructures offer a secure, high-performing, and user-friendly environment that accelerates the deployment and delivery of platforms and applications. Over time, however, the accumulation of configurations, services, and activities that deviate from best practices can lead to performance degradation and unexpected cost increases. Tight deadlines, which often prioritize timing over quality, can exacerbate these issues.

Cloud Smart Check serves as a comprehensive assessment tool that provides an accurate snapshot of an architecture’s health. It evaluates security, costs, and efficiency levels through an automated process.

Security

Cloud Smart Check begins with a risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities and potential threats. Regularly conducted security audits and tests are essential for ensuring ongoing infrastructure protection. Similarly, access control strategies based on Identity and Access Management (IAM) frameworks ensure resources are available only to authorized personnel.

The assessment also verifies the use of up-to-date security protocols, which are less prone to breaches. It helps establish a monitoring system to detect suspicious activities and defines an incident response plan to mitigate potential damages.

Cost Management

With Cloud Smart Check, businesses can analyze the costs of their Cloud resources, identifying recurring and unnecessary expenses to optimize investments. This process includes resource optimization, ensuring costs are aligned with scalability benefits.

Organizations can better forecast budgets and predict spending, reducing the likelihood of overages through real-time consumption monitoring.

Efficiency and Performance

The success of a Cloud infrastructure heavily depends on its ability to deliver high performance. Monitoring and analyzing the performance of applications and resources is therefore critical.

Cloud Smart Check facilitates an in-depth analysis of inter-application dependencies, aiming to prevent resource conflicts and bottlenecks that could disrupt deployments.

In a Cloud environment, efficiency is closely tied to resource scalability, ensuring availability is proportional to demand. Testing various scaling strategies—both horizontal (scale out) and vertical (scale up)—enables businesses to plan for automatic resizing, balancing consumption and performance effectively.

User experience (UX) also plays a pivotal role in evaluating efficiency. Proactively addressing user feedback allows for quicker identification of issues and more precise improvements to UX.

Whether it’s poorly configured, outdated Cloud services or architectural patterns implemented incorrectly, Cloud Smart Check provides practical solutions for continually optimizing infrastructures.

Conclusion

Security, cost management, and performance are the three pillars of Cloud Smart Check, CriticalCase’s integrated assessment solution for data protection, cost reduction, performance enhancement, and UX optimization.

With a highly qualified 24/7 monitoring service and incident management, CriticalCase offers periodic reviews of critical areas, enabling any project to evolve over time, adapt to technological changes, and tailor Cloud solutions to business needs.

Black Friday is one of the most critical periods for the e-commerce sector, often significantly impacting visitor and order volumes.

Anticipated by both consumers and merchants, it presents substantial opportunities for boosting sales but also poses challenges in managing web traffic and the performance of online stores. It’s crucial to delve into the importance of web performance monitoring for e-commerce, highlighting how a service like Business & UX Monitoring by CriticalCase can be a game-changer in creating a competitive edge.

Black Friday: A Challenge for E-commerce

During Black Friday, e-commerce platforms experience traffic spikes rarely seen at other times of the year. The surge of users eager to take advantage of offers, discounts, and promotions can strain websites, leading to unpredictable consequences that harm sales and customer loyalty.

Sudden traffic increases can cause slowdowns, extended latency, or even crashes, rendering e-commerce pages inaccessible. This disrupts the purchasing process, often driving customers toward competitors. To underscore the stakes, consider that today, the average waiting time users tolerate for online content to load is well below three seconds.

Economic and Reputational Risks of E-commerce Inefficiencies

A poorly performing website during a crucial period like Black Friday can face significant economic repercussions. Simultaneous issues such as slowdowns, downtime, or transaction errors directly translate into revenue losses. Moreover, a subpar user experience can damage the brand reputation of an e-commerce platform, undermining any engagement efforts or investments.

In the digital landscape, negative reviews and word-of-mouth can spread rapidly, influencing purchasing decisions of both loyal and potential customers.

The Value of Managed Performance Monitoring Services

Opting for a managed performance monitoring service means relying on expert professionals to analyze and optimize an online store’s performance.

The Importance of Continuous Specialized Support

Continuous support from a specialized team ensures that a website is optimized to deliver the best possible performance, focusing on the most critical KPIs from both a technical and business perspective.

This involves identifying bottlenecks, unusual user behaviors, and potential vulnerabilities. Rapid intervention is essential during critical periods like Black Friday, where every second of downtime can result in significant financial losses.

Key Components of a Managed Performance Monitoring Service

Understanding the importance of web performance monitoring is just the first step. When choosing the right partner, it’s essential to recognize the key components of such a service:

• Real User Monitoring (RUM): This tool tracks real user experiences, collecting metrics such as loading times, interactions, and frustration signals. RUM provides a detailed view of how users perceive a website, helping to identify potential issues.
• Synthetic Monitoring: This involves scheduled tests to measure key performance metrics, allowing for anomaly detection even in the absence of actual traffic.
• CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report): A report that collects UX data directly from Google Chrome users, offering insights into a site’s performance under real-world conditions. These metrics can also influence SEO rankings.

Strategic Benefits for Business

A managed performance monitoring service like Business & UX Monitoring by CriticalCase provides significant advantages for the functionality of an online store, especially during Black Friday:

• Increased Conversions: A stable and high-performing website during traffic peaks enhances conversion rates. Users are more likely to complete purchases if the browsing experience is seamless and uninterrupted.
• Improved UX: Reducing loading times and preventing latency or errors contribute to a high-quality user experience, increasing purchase likelihood and fostering customer loyalty.
• Cost Optimization: Preventing technical issues minimizes the need for emergency interventions and reduces customer complaints. This results in lower support costs and greater operational efficiency.

Conclusion

During a pivotal sales period like Black Friday, e-commerce platforms face significant risks to revenue, reputation, and customer acquisition. A service like Business & UX Monitoring by CriticalCase is essential to ensure a website can handle high workloads while delivering a user experience that encourages repeat visits and positive word-of-mouth.

Investing in a professional partner for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing performance is not just a technical decision—it’s a strategy that can determine success or failure during the most critical times.

According to the recent “Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE” report by Gartner, the market for Single-Vendor SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) services is experiencing a period of strong growth and dynamism, with an increasing number of providers expanding available solutions and offerings.

Network management Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams must work closely with Cybersecurity counterparts to move beyond marketing hype and select vendors that best meet their needs.

Specifically, a Single-Vendor SASE provides a combined offering where networking and security functionalities come in a single solution, including Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN), Secure Web Gateway, Cloud Access Security Broker, Firewalling, and Network Zero Trust. All of these are delivered through a cloud-centered architecture.

One of the most noteworthy predictions in Gartner’s report is that by 2027, 65% of new SD-WAN network purchases will be part of a Single-Vendor SASE offer, a significant rise from this year’s 20%. This projected increase highlights the growing importance of SASE solutions in the IT landscape, driven by the rising demand among companies to unify networking and security functionalities.

Cato Networks: a new industry leader

One of the report’s most interesting highlights is Cato Networks’ new position as a leader in Gartner’s Single-Vendor SASE quadrant. The company’s unified SASE Cloud platform, which provides an integrated user interface for management with a relatively short learning curve for operators, contributed to this position.

Cato’s services are now seeing significant adoption among mid-sized companies, and if current trends continue, the company’s future innovations – focused particularly on AI and simplified security policy management – will cement its role as a market leader. 

This is why Criticalcase positions itself as an expert consultant and partner for Cato solutions, such as Cato’s SASE Cloud platform, providing additional value through professional, tailor-made services.

Criticalcase and Cato Networks for customized SASE services

Criticalcase chose to partner with Cato Networks because its solutions represent the first SASE framework implementation that enables secure, optimized access for users and applications through a global, cloud-native architecture.

Criticalcase doesn’t merely operate as a Cato Networks reseller; rather, it offers unique added value through its integration, technical support, and optimization services to meet specific customer needs. 

Starting with a provider capable of connecting all of a business network’s resources (branches, mobile workforce, on-premise data centers, and cloud-based services) Criticalcase provides an SD-WAN service with extremely high levels of security and control. This enables companies to migrate from traditional, often costly, networks, such as MPLS, to secure, global, cost-effective, and easily managed networks.

Use Case: a solution for data- and access-security with optimized performance

To demonstrate the partnership’s focus on solving real-world challenges, a successful use case involved a manufacturing company with a distributed workforce and multiple production centers. 

In this case, the client needed a solution to secure confidential data and ensure secure access to industrial applications, given the risks posed by unauthorized access due to managing multiple facilities and high traffic volumes.

Criticalcase provided a suitable solution through an implementation based on Cato Networks’ SASE services with Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), achieving:

• application of security policies focused on both identity and context, resulting in limiting traffic to only the necessary volumes for operations and ensuring legitimate access

• reduced latency in inter-facility communications thanks to Cato’s integrated SD-WAN network, optimizing network traffic

• use of firewalling and traffic-inspection features to protect managed data

Criticalcase’s solution enabled a 15% productivity increase, proving that it’s possible to combine security, performance, and high ROI even in structured organizations aiming to maximize business process efficiency.

Criticalcase customizes Cato Networks solutions

For Criticalcase, choosing Cato Networks aligns with its mission to relieve users of IT infrastructure complexities, investment optimization, and security, allowing them to focus on productivity.

For this reason, Criticalcase’s professional services go beyond third-party platform provisioning, offering:

• business needs analysis
• tailored planning and implementation of proposed solutions
• technology integration
• proactive network management
• 24/7 support

Through its partnership with Cato Networks, Criticalcase supports clients in adopting the SASE model, a framework that consolidates SD-WAN and network security services into a single, unified, secure, and fully cloud-based service model. Unlike legacy architectures, its SASE-centered approach reduces operating costs by up to two-thirds.