At the beginning of October, conveniently dubbed National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the Auvik team descended on the city of Pittsburgh to attend Continuum Navigate East 2019. With recent MSP-targeted ransomware attacks fresh in the minds of all attendees, cybersecurity took the event by storm—from keynotes to casual conversations, there was no escaping it. What was everyone saying? We put together a list of four key takeaways from the event to fill you in.

You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert to know that ransomware attacks have become one of today's greatest IT security threats. From WannaCry to the attack against the city of Atlanta, major ransomware exploits have become so commonplace in the last few years that they may seem impossible to avoid. Fortunately, preventing ransomware is far from impossible. Let's take a look at a few strategies you can put in place to mitigate your risk of becoming part of the next ransomware statistic.

Skip ahead to see how we solve a typical Windows 10 update problem (Windows Defender) It hasn’t been the easiest of weeks for Windows 10 users and support staff. And if we’re being honest, the previous months haven’t been all sunshine and rainbows either. For many, Patch Tuesday is starting to look less like a welcomed milestone for Windows 10 updates and fixes, and more like a doomsday for new malware and computing defects.

What is Black Friday? The name originated in the US and it was given to the shopping day after Thanksgiving Day, which is the fourth Thursday in November with many Americans on holiday the following day. As most people are off work on the Friday following Thanksgiving, shops started cutting prices to entice customers just for one day and get the Christmas shopping season underway.

In new and quickly-expanding fields like serverless, long-standing experts are few and far between. I am excited to welcome Tim Wagner, the original leader of the serverless movement, to the Stackery Board of Directors. Tim spent six years at Amazon Web Services as the General Manager of AWS Lambda, where he oversaw the team that built the success of serverless as a platform. In many ways, we have them to thank for creating the environment that supports Stackery and the serverless ecosystem.

Vertica is a platform that uses machine learning capabilities to help you analyze large amounts of data. Vertica provides high availability and parallel processing by replicating data onto multiple nodes in a cluster, and uses a column-based data store for efficient querying. You can deploy Vertica in the cloud, on premise, or as a hybrid of the two.

Earlier this month, Ivana Huckova, one of Grafana’s junior developers, wrote an article about how to contribute to Grafana as a junior dev. As an open-source project supported by engineers around the world, Grafana strongly encourages anyone to contribute. And ICYMI, there are many opportunities to help: Testing the UI and reporting issues, finding and fixing bugs, and improving the documentation are just a few.

StackStorm is headed for the Linux Foundation! This is a big move and we're excited to share this news with our community. For several months now we've been working with the Linux Foundation, the StackStorm team, and many others inside Extreme to make this move possible. We want to thank everyone for their effort to make this move happen. StackStorm's community continues to grow and the impact the project has had continues to show, and show, and show, and show (you get the point).