Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August 2022

What is Enterprise Design Thinking?

Since IBM introduced its concept in the IT business landscape, enterprise design thinking has been making huge waves and has become a synonym for innovation. We have thoroughly explored the benefits and inner workings of traditional design thinking, but as with all great ideas and concepts, new and boundary-pushing versions tend to crop up with time. Enterprise design thinking takes elements from experience design and experience management to new levels.

The Basics of Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management is a proactive and continuous process that seeks to keep networks, systems, and general applications as safe as possible from cyberattacks. Vulnerability management is a crucial aspect of security, and it's essential because it can help prevent data breaches that could result in severe damage to organizations. In this article, we'll delve into the definition of vulnerability management, its process, its importance, and some solutions to perform this task.

System Administrator vs. Network Administrator: Which One Are You?

There’s an abundance of career opportunities in IT. It’s hard for newcomers to find their footing in the middle of complicated terminology, with similar job roles but not equal. One of these difficulties is the system administrator vs. network administrator issue. Are they two completely different careers? Today, we’ll help dispel any confusion so you can make an informed choice. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 5% growth for network and system administrators all through 2026.

mRemoteNG: Using the Remote Connections Manager for Windows

mRemoteNG is a simple tool popular among IT professionals for efficiently managing multiple connections. The popularity of password managers has shown how much people don’t like typing in passwords every time they want to connect to a service. And IT professionals are all too familiar with the annoyance of manually typing in credentials every time they want to connect to a remote service. mRemoteNG solves this problem for SysAdmins and IT teams, and in this article, we’ll explore how.

SRE vs. DevOps: Differences and Similarities

Organizations scramble to adopt new frameworks and methodologies to make the software more scalable. Plus, they need to do it in a reliable way that doesn’t cause more problems. Enter Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a set of practices introduced by a Google engineer. But how does it stack up to frameworks like DevOps? DevOps and SRE both enhance the software development and product release cycle.

14 Most Common Types of Cyber Attacks (and How to Prevent Them)

With the digital transformation in general (and the expansion of the digital workplace in particular), the world has experienced increased cyber attacks in many forms and shapes. Simply put, they consist of an intentional act of using a computer to disrupt or damage a system, network, program, or data. They can happen in many ways and can be done by anyone with an internet connection.

20+ SysAdmin Tools You Can't Live Without

Being a system administrator is a high-level and demanding profession. Yes, we’re talking long hours (not counting overtime!), unforeseen events requiring attention, and so much troubleshooting. But not everything about SysAdmin life has to be more challenging than it needs to be. That’s why we put together this list of must-have SysAdmin tools so you can optimize your workflow and focus on critical tasks.

The ABC of the Pathping Command

The pathping command is one of the most popular network troubleshooting tools in Windows. Initially released in 2000 along with Windows 2000, it has since been a part of every version. Despite its simplicity, it has become prevalent among network admins and is one of the first tools they turn to when things are not going right. This command combines the functionality of tracert and ping. In this article, we’ll be exploring what a pathping command is, what it does, and how to use it.

How To Become a Network Administrator: Role, Skills, and Responsibilities

As the demand for specialists in information technology grows, so does the need for network administrators. Future organizations will always need dedicated experts to manage their increasingly expanding computer networks and systems. In this article, we’ll provide an overview of everything you need to know about the role of a network administrator, such as: Computer information technology isn’t going out of fashion soon, and neither are the jobs needed to run computer networks.

Red Team vs. Blue Team: The InfoSec Color Wheel

It is essential to work in teams to strengthen organizations' security. Regarding cybersecurity, in particular, this job is best done from a red team vs. blue team perspective. Red teaming implies mimicking the role of an attacker by trying to find vulnerabilities and avoiding cybersecurity defenses within the network. On the other hand, a blue team has a defensive approach: they take precautions and respond to incidents once they have occurred.

Wireshark: an Open-Source Packet Capture Tool

Wireshark is one of the most popular network packet analyzers available. It has been embraced by network admins worldwide and has become one of the essential network troubleshooting tools for IT teams. Read on to learn more about Wireshark, how to use it, and some relevant cases and alternatives. We will mainly focus on how you can use this tool to maintain a robust network within your organization.

What is Ansible: The DevOps Tool to Automate IT Tasks

Redhat Ansible is one of the most popular automation platforms in the IT industry. Since its launch, it has earned its place among some of the best DevOps tools. Powered by an open source community of more than 3550 contributors, it occupies more than 50% of the market share in the configuration management segment. This article will explore Ansible and how IT professionals and engineers use it to power their workflows. Read on to learn more about one of the most powerful automation platforms.

How an Electronic Voting Tech Company Centralized its Inventory and Asset Data into an ITIL-compliant CMDB

By the end of 2020, the IT Support team of Smartmatic - the world's leading company dedicated to the management and modernization of electoral processes - undertook a major transformation of its management of internal processes. It faced a well-known challenge: multiple internal tools dedicated to IT service management (ITSM) that carried high costs and inefficient workflows.

SRE Signals: 3 Types of Metrics for Site Reliability Engineering

Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, is a widely-used set of interdisciplinary practices that help increase the efficiency of software development. But, aside from that, its purpose is to create scalable, connected, reliable, communicated systems that keep providing better, more reliable results. SRE leads to more connected, efficient organizations that can build resilient, iterable, and scalable software. To do this, SRE engineers leverage their coding expertise.

Quick Beginners Tutorial to PowerShell ISE

Since its introduction, Windows PowerShell ISE has become one of the must-have system administration tools for IT professionals. Its robust GUI has served as a close companion to Windows PowerShell, allowing users to test and debug scripts for automation and task management. We hope this article serves as a small intro to the PowerShell ISE. We’ll be covering what PowerShell ISE is and how you can make the best use of it. Dig in to learn the basics of PowerShell ISE.

14 Network Troubleshooting Tools Network Administrators Can't Work Without

Solving network issues is one of the main aspects of a network admin’s job description, and every admin will have a collection of network troubleshooting tools. The simple reason behind this is that they are essential for maintaining a robust network, fixing network issues quickly, making network resources available, and keeping business processes alive.

How to Use the Ping Command for Network and Troubleshooting

The ping command is one of network admins' most commonly used tools. It has served and continues to serve network admins as one of the best network troubleshooting tools since it was released almost 39 years ago. In this article, we cover what the ping command does, how to use it, and more. Read on to learn the basics about this simple but powerful networking tool that IT teams can’t live without.

How to Become a Site Reliability Engineer: Job Description, Roles & Responsibilities

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is still going strong in the world of software development. As a bridge between developments and operations, it’s a necessary part of any organization that wants to work like a well-oiled machine. Simply put, SRE tries to fix a widespread problem in organizations: siloing. But not much is known about the job requirements of becoming a site reliability engineer.

An Introduction to VeriSM

VeriSM is one of the latest among the many different ITSM frameworks and approaches for service management. The system realizes that many organizations and departments use various frameworks for managing their IT and business. The approach is not limited to managing just IT but covers all the other aspects of a company, such as finance, HR, marketing, and others.

The ABC of the Value Stream Mapping (VSM)

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a lean technique that has become deeply ingrained in the practices of IT service management (ITSM), DevOps, IT4IT, and Agile (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban). Over a century old, VSM is the best technique to obtain a customer-focused agreement on improving a cross-departmental flow of activities. It’s a simple concept but difficult to begin and sustain in practice. In this article, we will: Let’s begin!

System Administrators: Everything You Need to Know to Become a SysAdmin

Having a reliable IT infrastructure is crucial to the health of your company or organization. And while this is generally true, it’s doubly so in our current times, where practically everything is digital. So, who is the lucky one to make general decisions about how to run a system efficiently — and keep it going? That would be the System Administrator. But what does a SysAdmin actually do? That's what we'll answer here!

What Are Red Team Scenarios? Methodology and Examples

Red team scenarios are frameworks companies use to evaluate their level of security from an adversarial approach. Red teams look for vulnerabilities or security holes in the system by simulating a cyber attack. This helps identify what needs to be improved so that the organization is well-prepared to defend itself against a real-life cyber threat.

Active Directory: Everything you Always Wanted to Know (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Microsoft Active Directory is one of the most popular directory services. As of November 2017, it was being used in 12.8 million organizations with 950 million users, as stated by Alex Simons, director of Program Management for the Microsoft Identity Division. Initially previewed in 1999, Active Directory (AD) became so ubiquitous that it was later a general term for other similar services.