Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Government agencies face challenges in moving forward with digital transformation. IT infrastructures are complex, and making sense out of massive amounts of disparate data is a struggle.

Let's rip off the bandaid and get the bad news out there first: we're rolling out telemetry for Puppet content. Read on to find out why I think that's actually good news for you, how you can see exactly what data it collects, and how to make sure it never runs if your corporate policy doesn't allow it. And maybe a free beanie if you choose to opt in?

Following my previous blog post (which you can read here), I’m continuing to look at marketing and lead-generation activities for small MSPs. Here are my remaining tips on how to effectively market when you are an MSP of one.

This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is re-published here with permission. In our technology-driven business climate, most companies have at least some, if not all, workloads on the cloud. And unlike on-premises networks, these cloud environments lack secure outer perimeters and specific off times. Cloud networks are always on and always available. While convenient, this also means hackers can access them at any time.

Cloud platforms are not new — they have been around for a few years. And containers have been around even longer. Together, they have changed the way we think about software. Since the creation of these technologies, we have focused on platforms and apps. And who could blame anyone? Containers and Kubernetes let us do things that were unheard of only a few years ago.

This december, we are posting security advice and modules, every day until December 25th. Now, it’s December 21st, and we’ve gotten through most of the security hardening holiday calendar.

When your development team is under pressure to keep releasing new functionality in order to stay ahead of the competition, the time spent on quality assurance (QA) activities can feel like one overhead that you could do without. After all, with automated CI/CD pipelines enabling multiple deployments per day, you can get a fix out pretty quickly if something does go wrong – so why invest the time in testing before release? The reality is that scrimping on software testing is a false economy.

We've found a pattern to mock external client libraries while keeping code simple, reducing the number of injection spots and ensuring all the code down a callstack uses the same mock client. Establishing patterns like these is what makes test suites great, and improves developer productivity when writing tests. Here's how it works.

Checkout optimization can increase conversions by 36% (according to Sleeknote). And if your company struggles with a high cart abandonment rate, you’ll have to work on enhancing your user experience by removing blockers that lead to your customers abandoning their shopping carts. And for that, you will need to leverage qualitative and quantitative user research.

While I write this blog post, I reflect on the years of being a system administrator and the task of ensuring that no sensitive data made its way past me. What a daunting task right? The idea that sensitive data can make its way through our systems and other tools and reports is terrifying! Not to mention the potential financial/contractual problems this can cause.