With Windows Active Directory, a range of different account types can be set up with the necessary permissions, access, and roles. These include service accounts, which are intended for use when installing applications or services on the operating system. Common types of Active Directory service accounts include built-in local user accounts, domain user accounts, managed…

This guide will help you understand VMware server virtualization and the benefits it can bring to your business. VMware is a well-known product option for server virtualization. Choosing a VMware product—and a compatible tool for in-depth virtualization management—allows businesses to enjoy the common benefits of virtualization VMware can offer, including efficiency and cost-reduction. In addition…

In 2002, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, named after its sponsors Senator Paul Sabanes (D-MD) and Representative Michael G. Oxley (R-OOH-4). Instituted “to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws,” the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (commonly referred to as SOX) established a stricter protocol for internal controls…

Professional services automation (PSA) software helps service-based organizations, such as IT consultants, IT consulting firms, and managed services providers (MSPs), ensure service delivery, manage projects and scheduling, optimize workforce and resource utilization, and improve margins. The principal goal of implementing and relying on a PSA solution is to increase efficiency throughout the organization by automating…

Email is the backbone of business communication for most organizations, and being an indispensable communication medium, it is highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. Today, email security challenges have become increasingly sophisticated and threatening to businesses. The drastically rising number of phishing and ransomware attacks pose challenges that can severely dent an organization’s brand image and reputation….

Your network has many moving parts, and it’s important to track them to ensure your network’s health, maintenance, and success. But it can be challenging to manage all your network’s devices and data flows, not to mention keeping your network updated and working through performance issues. It’s important to have some form of network visualization…

Using the Windows event log collector service (or an alternative third-party log collection solution) is a crucial aspect of system and network management. This guide will help you understand what the Windows Event Collector is, how the Windows event log collector service works, and how to collect Windows event logs with the Windows Event Collector….

In today’s digital era, IT services form the backbone of businesses and play an indispensable part in keeping them resilient. With the majority of the workforce now operating remotely, IT departments need to ensure every service request or incident reported by end users from any location, at any time, is seamlessly captured, monitored, and resolved…

For network IT admins, network diagrams can be invaluable, as they offer a quick visual overview of the IT environment. But what type of map is more useful, a logical network diagram or a physical network diagram? It’s useful to understand the merits of both, though for most admins, logical network diagrams are the more…

Why is my virtual machine (VM) so slow? IT experts are regularly asked about virtual machine slow performance issues. If you’re wondering how to make virtual machines faster, then this guide is for you. The question of how to speed up virtual machines doesn’t have a simple answer. An underperforming virtual machine, one that’s slow…

In a time when the world seems to revolve around data, it’s no surprise organizations, no matter their size, need some support managing all of their stored information. With new data constantly being created and added to your databases, trying to navigate data storage, applications, and more without a tool is, at best, overwhelming and,…

Today, most organizations have complex IT infrastructure with a wide range of endpoints, including servers, applications, and the cloud. As it’s difficult for businesses to analyze a huge amount of log data, organizations prefer using log analysis tools to centralize, analyze, and monitor logs. These tools reveal useful information about web app performance, security concerns,…

According to a Web Server Survey 2020 conducted by Netcraft, more than 400 million websites across the world trust NGINX to deliver their content quickly, reliably, and safely. To ensure the smooth functioning of the server and its applications, NGINX writes events in different log formats, including the error log and the access log. Handling…

The modern world is advancing in every respect, and technology is advancing even faster. And now that companies handle most of our confidential data, how can we be sure what we share is safe? To earn our confidence, companies must implement powerful security systems. Many use SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) tools to protect…

Definition of Data Loss Prevention Data loss prevention (DLP) refers to the process of safeguarding data to protect it against thefts and leaks. This is typically done through software identifying and monitoring sensitive data to ensure only authorized users are accessing it. DLP tools also help ensure those authorized users aren’t putting the data at…

One of most important questions for any modern database administrator is, “How do different databases scale?” There are different approaches to database scaling, and not all of them are applicable in all contexts. An increasingly popular approach to database scaling is sharding, but what is database sharding, and how does it help databases scale? What…

As businesses grow, they usually need to expand their IT networks to access and provide greater functionality. However, businesses may overlook proper management practices, performance optimization activities, and security requirements. A network assessment can help your business gain visibility into any IT issues, so they can be rectified before they have a wider impact on…

If we’ve learned nothing else about cybercriminal organizations over the last few years, we know for certain these folks are experts on Microsoft security. They’re no longer simply opportunistically gaining access to your network; instead, they’re leveraging known vulnerabilities in operating systems and applications and using the very network they’ve compromised to assist them in finding their intended target…

Help desk software helps companies resolve tech issues faster, eliminating menial tasks and allowing IT departments to resolve complaints more efficiently. Through the organization of information, streamlined workflows, and the elimination of time-consuming manual processes, support specialists can focus on what they do best: addressing requests that demand their particular expertise. Too often, help desk…

The world may run on coffee, but it’s the alarm clock that gets us out of bed. It operates on a simple threshold. You set the time that’s important to you and receive an alert when that variable is true. Like your alarm clock, today’s tooling for web service alerting often operates on simple thresholds,…

The multi-cloud approach to modern IT means workloads—whether virtual machines, containers, or minimal applications—can be located on any one of multiple independent infrastructures; whether running simultaneously for fault-tolerance or when being moved between these. In a modern IT deployment, workloads can (and will) regularly move between cloud and onsite deployments, whether for price, maintenance, latency, or…