5 Password Policies to Up Your Security
Complex passwords can save users from being hacked—any IT admin will tell you that. Plus, countless studies and articles on password security have been published about why password policies are vital to online security. Increasing the length of passwords, adding complexity to them and never reusing passwords more than once … these are three examples […]
Achieving Full Disk Encryption and PCI Compliance
Full disk encryption (FDE) is a critical security measure in today’s modern networks. With data security being more critical than ever, many IT admins are wondering how they can enforce full disk encryption across their fleets of cross-platform systems. Many organizations are also subject to compliance regulations including PCI DSS, which require FDE as a […]
SaltStack Updates Enterprise IT Automation Framework
SaltStack has partnered with Tenable.io to make it possible to pull vulnerability data into the enterprise edition of its namesake IT automation framework. In addition, version 6.2 of SaltStack Enterprise now integrates with the IT operations analytics platform from Splunk to make it possible to configure the Splunk Universal Forwarder to index and analyze events […]
Server Security: Minimizing Risk in 3 Steps
Servers located directly on the internet run one of the highest risks of being compromised. It’s just too easy for hackers to find an open “door” or “window” into those servers and then tap into confidential data, systems and information. Companies can’t afford to put their private information at risk, but an increasing move to […]
Teradici Brings Virtual Desktops to Azure Stack
Teradici announced today it has made its Cloud Access Software (CAS) available on Microsoft Azure Stack, the version of the cloud operating system that Microsoft makes available for on-premises servers. Ziad Lammam, vice president of product management for Teradici, said the availability of CAS on Azure Stack makes it possible to employ the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) […]
3 Lessons in Network Visibility from the A-List
The network can be host to multiple performance killers. Here are three worth noting Like Ed Sheeran as a secret stormtrooper in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” some cameos are hard to spot. They can appear out of nowhere halfway through the film or remain a complete mystery until behind-the-scenes footage reveals the masked […]
Stellus Launches Next Generation NAS Platform
Stellus Technologies launched a network-attached storage (NAS) system capable of processing unstructured data at 10 times the speed of existing systems. Based on a software-defined file system written on top of a key-value store, the Stellus Data Platform can be acquired either as an appliance or in the form of a virtual image that IT […]
Sparkhound Unveils Pop-Up Service Desk
Sparkhound, a provider of managed IT services, has launched a Pop-Up Service Desk designed to augment the existing capabilities of internal IT teams during a major transition. Chris Kimmel, managing director for managed services at Sparkhound, said the new service was created to help organizations cope with transitions such as migrating to Windows 10 or […]
Tips for Modern IT Admins’ Career to the Cloud
Fifteen years ago IT professionals experienced a drastically different day-to-day on the job. While the main mission has always remained constant—to take charge of all internal infrastructure—the infrastructure itself has moved off-premises over time. The complexity rested in networking for IT professionals. Routers, switches, firewalls and other gear needed to be managed so the network […]
SSH Key Management and Your Organization
It always starts out the same way: a few machines, a few users and a few SSH keys to manage. You manually copy their keys (and your own) to the appropriate machines. You might even say, “Screw it,” and share one key for root access. Admit it. It’s OK. Well, no, it’s not OK, but […]
Setting Up Google Authenticator on Multiple Servers
Google Authenticator is pretty great. It allows me as an administrator to set up and configure multi-factor authentication into my UNIX boxes without having to spend money on a tool like YubiKey or RSA tokens. It’s easy to set up on any type of phone—no specialized hardware or dongles needed. It’s also pretty cool in […]
SIOS Technology Automates Rebooting of AWS EC2 VM Instances
SIOS Technology Corp. this week launched SIOS AppKeeper, a tool that automatically reboots instances of EC2 virtual machines anytime they fail. Michael Bilancieri, senior vice president of products and marketing for SIOS, said SIOS AppKeeper is an extension of the work SIOS has historically done to enable servers and clusters to failover. However, many organizations […]
Perfect Sense Open Sources Gyro to Automate Cloud Provisioning
Perfect Sense has launched an open source project dubbed Gyro that provides an alternative approach to automating cloud infrastructure provisioning and management. Gyro was developed as an alternative to other open source projects such as Terraform and Pulumi, said CTO Jeremy Collins. It is designed from the ground up around a programming language that allows […]
The Disservice of Cloud Consolidation
There’s no secret that over the past five years especially, the major (“tier 1”) cloud infrastructure players—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—have been snatching up smaller specialty providers, particularly cloud migration and security services. While this acquisition strategy immediately aims to strengthen and expand the provider’s direct and tangential cloud infrastructure offerings, the long-term goal is customer […]
HashiCorp Tools Bridge DevOps, Legacy IT Environments
At its HashiConf EU 2019 conference this week, HashiCorp extended the reach of its Terraform Enterprise tools for automating the management of IT infrastructure beyond the realm of DevOps into legacy IT environments. Via integration with the Service Catalog from ServiceNow, IT administrators working with a traditional ITIL-based framework now can invoke Terraform Enterprise to […]
DevOps Chat: Identity Management with ForgeRock’s Peter Barker
Two megatrends for 2019 and beyond is scale and automation. The identity management space is a perfect example. Considering all of the IP-enabled devices (machines) coming online and the billions of people and their identities, managing these billions and billions takes systems that will redefine scale and, almost by definition, have to be automated. Enter […]
DevOps and the Identity Conundrum
“Who am I?” It is perhaps the most basic question of consciousness. The answer could be subdivided by aspects of my life story … my career, my family, my beliefs, my education … the list could continue. But since I am unique, the challenge in this digital age is for me to somehow remain unique, […]