Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We now have ever-expanding digital identities to live our daily lives and, whether it’s crossing international borders or more innocuously buying basic products and services, our digital footprint is growing. With the increasing requirement to have a digital identity to do just about anything, our data is constantly being shared online. That said, the demands on FinTech companies to keep personally identifiable information (PII) safe are more pressing than ever.

Included with Avantra Enterprise edition, Avantra Add ins are pre-packaged best practice scenarios that accelerate your business time to value using our expertise. One such Add in is SUSE hardening and is based on the hardening guide from the makers of SUSE Enterprise Linux. This Add in is a collection of eight custom checks that are designed to be extensible by you to match your organizational requirements.

As much as I enjoy writing firmware, I am, at heart, a hardware engineer. I love hunting for minutia in chip datasheets. I love fiddling with eval boards, tacking on wires, and reworking nets together. I love flipping through The Art of Electronics, finding a new circuit, and piecing through its operation. This is why, when invited to write for Interrupt, I jumped at the chance to write about a hardware-related topic that’s near and dear to my heart: debug tools.

All Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud offer Object Storage solutions to economically store large volumes of data and retrieve it on demand. It’s far cheaper to store one petabyte of data in object storage than in block storage. As AWS S3 has become the standard, many on-premise storage appliance vendors have incorporated S3 APIs to store and retrieve data. Oracle wisely continued that trend to OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).

Modern software projects are mostly composed of open source code. The question of who really controls this code, and is responsible for detecting and fixing software supply chain security issues, became a significant source of concern after the discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability.

Ransomware attacks are increasing in frequency and severity every year. The impact to companies is devastating. These attacks typically lead to lost business for companies as they often cause increased customer turnover, system downtime, diminished reputation and other adverse side effects.

A new year is a chance to have a new start, and one thing that it’s a great opportunity to think about is the monitoring and observability platform you’re using for your applications. If you’ve been using a legacy monitoring system, you’ve probably heard about observability all over the ‘net and want to figure out if this is really something you need to care about.

On your journey from reactive to proactive IT operations, you may be unsure where to start. If your organization is lacking visibility into your operations, that’s the best place to begin. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can help you gain that needed visibility. AIOps and visibility Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) offers numerous benefits, including faster response time, improved IT health, and simpler IT management.

A cynical network engineer might say, “configuration drift happens when you take the day off.” Someone changed something they shouldn’t have, and didn’t tell anyone. As a result, the network gets just a little less secure, and a little harder to troubleshoot. And then it happens again. And again. And over time, all those little changes that people thought would never mean anything suddenly add up to a network looking a lot different from what it’s supposed to be.

When I’m speaking to any IT solution provider or managed service provider (MSP), one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “What’s the one mistake you’d recommend any IT businesses avoid?” My answer is always this: Not documenting your business. The reason is simple. If you don’t document your business, you’ll inevitably find your business is prone to an SPF—a single point of failure.