You drink tap water every day, right? Do you know who invented the filtering mechanism that makes water pure and clean?… Well, do you actually care? Do you know that this mechanism is exactly the same in all the taps of all the houses of any country? Do you know that this specialized piece is the work of an engineer who does it just because? Can you imagine what could happen if this person had a bad day?

Talking about too many cybersecurity alerts is not talking about the story of Peter and the Wolf and how people end up ignoring false warnings, but about its great impact on security strategies and, above all, on the stress it causes to IT teams, which we know are increasingly reduced and must fulfill multiple tasks in their day to day.

Today, many companies generate and store huge amounts of data. To give you an idea, decades ago, the size of the Internet was measured in Terabytes (TB) and now it is measured in Zettabytes (ZB). Relational databases were designed to meet the storage and information management needs of the time. Today we have a new scenario where social networks, IoT devices and Edge Computing generate millions of unstructured and highly variable data.

Today, digital trust is required inside and outside the organization, so tools must be implemented, with cybersecurity methods and best practices in each layer of your systems and their infrastructure: applications, operating systems, users, both on-premise and in the cloud. This is what we call System Hardening an essential practice that lays the foundation for a safe IT infrastructure.

From the computer, we increasingly perform different tasks simultaneously (listening to music while writing a report, receiving files by email and downloading videos), which involve executing commands, and sending and receiving data. Over time, computer performance can suffer if CPU usage is not optimized. But what is a CPU?

Collectd is a daemon (i.e. running in the background on computers and devices) that periodically collects metrics from different sources such as operating systems, applications, log files, and external devices, providing mechanisms to store values in different ways (e.g. RRD files) or makes it available over the network. With this data and its statistics you may monitor systems, find performance bottlenecks (by performance analysis) and predict system load (capacity planning).

Until recently, the default model for application development was SQL. However, in recent years NoSQL has become a popular alternative. The wide variety of data that is stored today and the workload that servers must support force developers to consider other more flexible and scalable options. NoSQL databases provide agile development and ease of adapting to changes. Even so, they cannot be considered as a replacement for SQL nor are they the most successful choice for all types of projects.

Interview with Alexander Twaradze, Pandora FMS representative in CIS countries. See original here.

Distributed systems allow projects to be implemented more efficiently and at a lower cost, but require complex processing due to the fact that several nodes are used to process one or more tasks with greater performance in different network sites. To understand this complexity, let’s first look at its fundamentals.

To address this issue, first understand that, in the digitization we are experiencing, there are multiple resources and devices that coexist in the same network and that require a set of rules, formats, policies and standards to be able to recognize each other, exchange data and, if possible, identify if there is a problem to communicate, regardless of the difference in design, hardware or infrastructure, using the same language to send and receive information.