Life in the world of managed IT services is not without its pleasant surprises. Although we’re an industry of system builders dedicated to facilitating the smoothest of operations possible, downtime still happens. An unexpected system or network failure is not uncommon. In fact, it's inevitable. Even some of the world’s biggest companies can’t get away without painful outages.

Among all the inconveniences endemic to living in the 21st century, there are few as common as a faulty internet connection. Most everyone with internet access is familiar with the experience but perhaps less so with the reason why. There are several, but chief among them is packet loss. In this article, we’ll explore what packet loss is and show you some of the first steps to conducting a packet loss test. But first, let’s briefly review what a packet is.

Two of the most important ITSM practices in today’s IT managerial landscape are asset management and configuration management. Since software and hardware components are at the heart of the service a company provides, understanding how these components work is vital in IT service management. It might sound tricky since management has so many branches that extend anywhere from a company’s resources to its partners, its data, processes, and suppliers.

Software Asset Management (SAM) is a topic that is seldom discussed in conversations about the importance of IT Asset Management. And yet it's a crucial part of every company's organizational efforts. This is because software is more than just installations.

When transferring data between systems, it's extremely important to preserve integrity and confidentiality. There are protocols and procedures to do so. One of them is the Secure Copy Protocol (SCP); which is a method designed to securely pass on digital information. The SCP protocol helps transferring files from a local to a remote host or between two remote hosts.

Way back in the early days of the Internet, having an antivirus was the end-all-be-all of cybersecurity. These were admittedly wilder times but in a way, only a few bad actors had the tools and knowledge to threaten and breach corporate IT infrastructures. Times have changed and thanks to the dissemination of information and widespread accessibility to more hacking technology, cyber-attacks have become a very real and tangible menace with potentially devastating consequences.

For a long time, businesses have been using enterprise OEM software licensing to sell their products faster as well as to enhance the features and functionalities of their solutions. These solutions empower companies to provide more value to their customers without bringing in significant investments. And they present a huge portion of the global software market. In the age of the digital workplace, it's advantageous to have a full understanding of how these software agreements work.

DevOps is not just one thing, but rather a set of tools and practices that, well, everyone is following, or should be. But, for all of its ever-increasing popularity, few can really explain what DevOps is about without tangling themselves up in jargon. With this guide, we’ll help you navigate the DevOps maze in a way that’s easy, fun, and will hopefully get you going in the quest for more—and better—implementation. Without further ado, here’s DevOps explained!

SSH or Secure Shell is one of the oldest protocols used in networking for secure encrypted communication between two systems and to remotely manage servers and other systems. Ever since its introduction, they have been adopted by IT teams in organizations all over the world to manage their assets. And SSH keys continue to play a significant role in granting secure access to computer systems, and with the cloud computing boom, they’re playing even more important roles. So what are SSH keys?

Being at the helm of a project is both exciting and scary! If you jump straight into it without a good plan you run the risk of your voyage ending in a shipwreck. You don’t want that, nobody wants that to happen. The best solution for this is what is called a project plan. Yes, as a project manager, it sounds tempting to just go with the flow and wing it, but the dangers of not sticking to a project plan are many.