PICK CHART

A PICK chart (Possible, Implement, Challenge and Kill chart) is a visual tool for organizing ideas. PICK charts are often used after brainstorming sessions to help a group identify which ideas have a high payoff and can be implemented easily.

A PICK chart is set up as a large grid, two squares high and two squares across. The PICK acronym comes from the labels for each quadrant of the grid:
Possible - ideas that are easy to implement but have a low payoff.
Implement - ideas that are easy to implement and a high payoff.
Challenge - ideas that are hard to implement and difficult to determine payoff.
Kill - ideas that are hard to implement and have low payoff.

PICK charts are useful for focusing discussion and achieving consensus. Once each idea from the brainstorming session has been placed on the most appropriate square, it becomes easier to identify which ideas should be acted on first.

CLOUD APM

Cloud APM (CAPM) is the process of monitoring user experience (UX) for application programs that are running in private and hybrid cloud environments. An important goal of any CAPM initiative is to provide administrators with the ability to identify a poor user experience quickly so the cloud service can be turned off until the issue is resolved.

Measuring the user experience for public cloud-hosted applications usually requires an intelligent agent to be placed on the application server to monitor application response-time. CAPM tools can then be used to combine data from disparate monitoring silos into a correlation engine and dashboard. The dashboard makes data logs easier to read and saves IT staff from memory-dependent and error-prone manual correlation and analysis.

Before the advent of APM tools, application performance troubleshooting was a time consuming and tedious task. As organizations begin to move enterprise applications to the cloud, however, the need for a tool that monitors and manages the performance and availability of applications across a distributed computing environment has become a must-have.

A SESSION BORDER CONTROLLER (SBC)

A session border controller (SBC) is a dedicated hardware device or software applicationthat governs the manner in which phone calls are initiated, conducted and terminated on a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network. Phone calls are referred to as sessions.

An SBC acts a router between the enterprise and carrier service, allowing only authorized sessions to pass through the connection point (border). The SBC defines and monitors the quality of service (QoS) status for all sessions, ensuring that the callers can actually communicate with each other and that emergency calls are delivered correctly and prioritized above all other calls. An SBC can also serve as a firewall for session traffic, applying its own quality of service (QoS) rules and identifying specific incoming threats to the communications environment.

For security reasons, session border controllers are likely to be deployed on both the carrier and enterprise sides of the connection. An SBC on the enterprise side is referred to as an E-SBC.