Every federal agency has security compliance requirements that must be met on an annual or ongoing basis. Two of the most important requirements are FISMA (Federal Information Systems Management Act) and FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program). While these two federal requirements have a lot in common, they pertain to different types of systems….

Monitoring user-facing software has always been important, no doubt about it. But with the unrelenting migration of software to the cloud, and the adoption of microservices and serverless architectures such as Function as a Service (FaaS), monitoring is now business-critical. These new ways of building modern software involve many moving parts, and developers need to…

IT service management (ITSM) is an umbrella term encompassing the design, implementation, and ongoing support and management of an organization’s IT services. ITSM includes everything from managing devices, like end-user workstations, printers, and scanners, to password resets and troubleshooting larger issues. These capabilities are an essential part of ensuring a business remains functional and productive….

While everyone knows application monitoring is an essential part of running awesome software services, understanding whether you need application performance management (APM) or log management isn’t so straightforward. Both techniques involve collecting data that describe your application’s behavior, and both help you analyze that data. Despite the similarities between APM and log management, they serve…

Optimizing your WordPress website for performance is one of the most important tasks you can undertake as a page owner. If your website is suffering from regular bouts of downtime, or just continuously running slowly, your users aren’t going to hang around. It’s important to implement plugins and strategies that help ensure high performance levels…

Joomla is a powerful content management system that enables users to create stunning websites to exact specifications. The control over your site, and the customization options using a CMS like Joomla gives you, is second to none. However, alongside the flexibility Joomla offers, also comes the extensive selection of choices – plugins, tools, extensions, and…

Edge computing is the new black, and it comes in flavors. One of these flavors is the geo-proximate model, where workloads live in regional data centers, telco COs, or even in micro-data centers at the base of cell phone towers. Geo-proximate edge computing is heavily reliant on GeoDNS and other modern DNS tools.

With more people than ever accessing websites via their mobiles, delivering a high performing site and top user experience for your mobile users is a must. But with best practice for mobile web performance constantly changing, it can be hard to know what strategies you should implement to ensure your site stays ahead of the…

In modern IT environments, the importance of log management cannot be overemphasized. Organizations use a wide range of log management tools to generate, transmit, store, analyze, archive, and replace old log files with new data files in large volumes within a centralized system. Logging implementation in C# helps determine the behavior of web apps. It…

There are plenty of benefits to virtualization, from consolidation of the number of physical servers in use to the dynamic allocation of resources. This includes clustering virtual machines for high-availability environments and provisioning new servers. There’s a certain simplicity to virtualization, which relies heavily on how effectively virtual machines are being managed and the software…

Microsoft Hyper-V is a powerful virtualization solution used by many enterprise data centers across the world. Although it’s a robust and high-performing tool, you can implement some best practices and tips to optimize your Hyper-V performance. Following these tips can help reduce Hyper-V performance issues and enhance the virtual machine (VM) workloads running in your…

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), one of the most rigorous pieces of privacy legislation to date, has become almost synonymous with data privacy. This is partly due to its broad scope. The GDPR applies to any organization collecting and processing the data of an EU citizen—even if the organization isn’t based in…

Any enterprise deploying applications should be using Heroku—a cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) for developers to deploy, manage, and scale their applications without having to manage dozens of pesky cloud infrastructure deployment scripts. One of the most useful features of Heroku is the access to hundreds of add-ons capable of operating as fully-managed services—from…

We live in a world of applications, which are always becoming better at what they offer to their end users. The continuous cycle of development, delivery, and feedback has made drastic changes in the way applications are developed these days, and the cloud has been at the forefront of all these changes. Not long ago,…

SAP security is a technical module that works within SAP systems to allow access where it’s needed and prevent access where it’s not. Establishing good internal security and access processes is a vital part of helping ensure your SAP system is protected and will function well. Protecting against external threats is important, but internal threats…

Active Directory (AD) is a battle-tested software many company administrators use as a standard remedy for concerns about outsider access to data. But within AD, there are many types of security protocols to choose from. What if I don’t want to enable email access to my users, but instead I want my users to securely…

Since it came on the scene in 2013, Slack has taken the business world by storm, especially for SysAdmins looking for a better way to monitor dozens of software programs at once. It’s a full-package instant messaging system, offering organizations the ease of direct messaging, private channels, the ability to share files, and cross-platform compatibility…

Node.js is an open-source, JavaScript-built platform developed in 2009 to help quickly build scalable network applications. It’s a server-side system that’s highly economical, being both productive and lightweight. As a non-blocking IO model that’s event-centric and driven, it’s well-suited to applications that are data-intensive and run at a multi-device level. Node.js offers a large library…

As all IT teams know, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) management and monitoring is crucial because without proper DHCP management, your networking environment can end up as a complete mess. DHCP underpins all the distribution of IP addresses and is a key part of configuring subnet masks, default gateways, and DNS server information. DHCP servers…

Cisco is one of the largest networking companies in the world, providing a huge number of products and services. Most businesses could be assumed to have at least some Cisco equipment forming part of their network, and in some cases an entire network infrastructure might be comprised of Cisco equipment. This includes routers, switches, and…

Accessing devices remotely becomes increasingly important for businesses with multiple offices or remote employees. Remote servers are designed to support users who are not on the local area network (LAN) but need access to it. However, when you’re looking at how to connect to remote servers or desktop interfaces, you might run into a few…