Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re responsible for a significant number of Windows servers, you already understand the importance of being aware of the health and security of your environment. Unfortunately, you’re probably also aware of the tremendous amount of effort and resources required to monitor your Windows environment. Let’s take a look into why and how you should be closely monitoring your Windows server environments from a security perspective.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources without direct active management by the user. Instead, the delivery of said resources is available over the internet, which has made cloud computing a popular digital service that various industries use to operate and manage work tasks. How cloud computing services are implemented, hosted and accessed by users is called cloud deployment. There are different types of deployments, each with defined advantages for users.

This is the second blog post (part 1 available here) where we look at the history of open source identity management. This post focuses on Oauth and OpenID, the protocols currently used in modern applications and services. This post does not cover the technical details of the open source identity management standards, which are explained very well in this Okta blog post. Rather, it explains the origins of Oauth and OpenID, and provides insights on the context that led to their creation.

In August 2016, the United States government announced a new federal source-code policy, which mandates that at least 20% of custom source code developed by or for any agency of the federal government must be released as open-source software (OSS). The memo of this policy also states that the Federal Government spends more than $6 billion each year on software through more than 42,000 transactions. Obviously, this is a huge business for all open-source developers.

Congratulations, you’ve been tasked with moving your workload to somebody else’s building! The “cloud” is just that: someone else’s data center. But their data center is pretty impressive (so there’s that). And, yes, while there are a million options available to you in AWS and Azure…a plethora of IT goodies, most of us will not use any of those bells and whistles, at least initially. We have to get there first—your basic lift and shift.

Let’s say you are writing a shell script for a systems housekeeping task. Perhaps the script is uploading backups to a remote server, or it is cleaning up old data, or it is making a measurement and submitting it to a somebody else’s HTTP API. What is the least cumbersome way for the script to contact you in case of problems? Let’s say you want to be contacted via email – how to make it work?

Session Replay enables you to replay in a video-like format how users interact with your website to help you understand behavioral patterns and save time troubleshooting. Visibility into user sessions, however, can risk exposing sensitive data and raise privacy concerns. For example, a user session may include typing in a credit card or social security number into an input field.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore the rise of DaaS services across organizations, and the role it could play in the hybrid workplace of tomorrow. When we last wrote about the era of Everything as a service (XaaS), Desktop as a Service (DaaS) was still a relatively niche concept.

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is a collection of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools developed by Google. Today, millions of teams use Google Workspace (e.g., Gmail, Drive, Hangouts) to streamline their workflows. Monitoring Google Workspace activity is an essential part of security monitoring and audits, especially if these applications have become tightly integrated with your organization’s data.