Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This guide provides a comprehensive overview of IT compliance and the part it plays in IT security. It will also help you choose the right compliance reports tool for your company. As you get started, SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) comes highly recommended as a near-automated IT security compliance solution that enables you to verify IT compliance and helps you perform many compliance-related IT operations.

PCI DSS is an industry security standard existing primarily to minimize the risk of debit and credit card data being lost. This is in the interest of both the customer and the merchant, because if data is lost or misused, the merchant could be subject to legal action. To protect yourself and your customers, you first need to understand the six PCI DSS control objectives and how to meet them.

When you make a credit card transaction, the last thing you want to think about is your data getting stolen. Fortunately, credit card companies put several measures in place to make sure this doesn’t happen. For businesses dealing with customer payments, PCI DSS compliance measures are a simple and necessary step in making sure customer credit card data is well protected. Ensuring PCI compliance can be a complex undertaking.

Last month, Starlink suffered its largest outage in years, arguably its biggest since becoming a major internet provider. In addition to the millions of individual customers around the world, the outage disconnected the Community Gateways, customers of Starlink’s new transit service. In this post, we delve into the outage and its impact on these far-flung networks.

South Africa has cemented itself as Africa’s biggest cloud hub, with Johannesburg emerging as a key centre for cloud connectivity in the country. It has seen significant investment from the three major hyperscalers - AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud - all of which have a local presence in Johannesburg. This makes the city a strategic launchpad for cloud services, AI innovation, and digital transformation across the African region.

It’s Monday morning, and a new hire is walking into the office for their first day. Before they can dive into the work, they need access to email, project management tools, cloud storage, and a dozen other SaaS apps their role depends on. IT has already been hard at work behind the scenes, provisioning accounts, assigning permissions, and making sure everything is ready the moment they sign in.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) sure does pack a punch for something with “simple” in its name, as it literally provides the lifeblood of network monitoring and device communications. Network admins rely heavily on SNMP because nearly every technology manufacturer supports the protocol. And, in turn, it enables them to collect information, configure devices and receive alerts about network performance and issues.

There’s a question I hear quite often in my conversations about network management: "Aren't all network monitoring tools basically the same?" Honestly, I understand why so many people feel this way. For as long as I remember, the primary role of these tools has been to tell you when something is already broken. Your team gets an alert—a switch is down, an application is slow, a circuit is saturated—and the fire-fighting process begins.