byrona ✭✭✭✭✭

I agree that Firewalls have evolved but I still think they are in need of more evolution and with AI and ML in the forefront right now I certainly expect we will see some significant evolution in the near future.

Personally, I believe the technology exists for passwords to be phased out eventually, but until that happens, our passwords should be complex, varied, and changed from time to time. I agree, passwords are one of the weakest links in security, we have the technology to phase them out; however, I don't see a lot of momentum…

I certainly think containers are an interesting technology; however, it's still unclear to me if they will continue to be a niche solution or will become the standard for how things are done.

Jfrazier​ I couldn't agree with this more. It's like any muscle, if you don't use it then it will atrophy. We used to occasionally schedule alerts for our NOC staff just to test their response time and accuracy so when real issues hit they were more prepared.

I spend part of my time in InfoSec and the other part in managing our monitoring systems so I spent a lot of time pointing out issues that I personally am not responsible for resolving. It's incredibly frustrating pointing these out only to watch others not really care and avoid spending any time to resolve them.

When discussing HA with clients we have definitely found that we need to make sure we are all discussing the same thing when we say "HA". The other thing that we have found is important is making sure we identify what the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is and then test a failure scenario to make sure everything works as…

I have found that good ole' fashion Troubleshooting 101 starting at the bottom and working your way up the OSI model is still one of the best ways to do this. And of course as you pointed out you need to know the time that the issue happened/is happening.

Yeah, I agree that there is still a lot of room for improvement here so I am going to vote for this as well. I would also like to see this functionality moved to the web console as it's one of the few things I still need to login to the box for. 

SaaS to me is like just about any new technology, it solves one set of problems and introduces a different set of problems. When it comes to SaaS there isn't much you can do to manage the change as far as I can tell since you aren't the one making the change there isn't really much you can manage. As you mentioned, you are…

We had an opportunity to check out Dark Trace a while back also, it was a really amazing product and the UI is captivating.

I think that most companies going forward will be technology companies in one way or another, if they don't realize this then their future is probably not going to be so bright and cloud is clearly where that technology is going to be. The only constant in IT is change and we as IT professionals have always been faced with…

This is awesome! Great job to all those that helped make this happen.

One of the most important things to realize in IT is that the entropy beast is lurking around every corner to be prepared to face him.

I really love the analogy of Federation to the theme park pass, that is a great way to explain it! With our new heavy focus on our partnership with Microsoft we will be moving forward with Azure Active Directory. 

We are a mostly MSSQL shop; however, we do have a bit of MySQL as well. Most of our Windows SysAdmins understand how to manage SQL well enough and we have about 2 people that have DBA level knowledge. Our primary tool for monitoring those databases is Orion and for orchestration we use maintenance tasks on those databases.…

I think that whole VDI ship may have sailed. VDI is a solution that seems to work well in a few select situations but I am not sure it's ever going to take the mainstream by storm. What I have seen become more popular is people using portable computing devices such as the MS Surface tablet or the smaller laptops. VDI is a…

Much like Jfrazier​ I am also not a network guy. You certainly did a good job of highlighting some of the benefits of this technology but what are the drawbacks? There are two sides to every coin so I am curious to know what the flip side of those benefits is? Are there any security ramifications?

I just responded to THIS post regarding Syslog and I feel that response is totally relevant here also: While I think managing your logs is great, just basic syslog and alerting will no longer cut it for environments of any size due to the sheer volume of logs you will end up dealing with. Syslog is certainly a great place…

mesverrum​ I have had the same experience looking at logs on my own network and having to point out things I find to other teams.

We have had great success with O365. We have migrated and continue to manage for several of our clients and it's worked out great. The biggest challenge is the migration. With that said, it's certainly like anything else in that you need to make sure it's the right solution for you so make sure you do your research and/or…

So, not being a DBA myself I guess I don't understand why you would differentiate between a DBA and a cloud DBA? As you mention, it shouldn't matter where the data is right? To me it seems like sticking with just DBA and have that to be all inclusive makes more sense than specifically adding "cloud" on to it. With that…

Great article and thanks so much for sharing those resources!

Storage management is a very misunderstood thing in the industry. SDN is not making storage go away and you still need to spend time managing it; if you don't you are going to learn the hard way how much storage latency, mis-managed IOPs load, etc can impact your environment.

Understanding your environment and your true needs is definitely key before going out and looking for a solution; otherwise you may end up with a solution for which there is no problem. The second part is weeding through the hype to determine if the products and/or services can actually deliver on their claims; I have…

While I have no idea how Austin reacts to snow, here in Portland Oregon if the news so much as mentions snow in the valley people rush to the grocery store and stock up on a months worth of food. If a snowflake is actually spotted falling from the sky the entire city shuts down. If somebody was visiting here from somewhere…

Unfortunately we live in a world where most things are viewed as disposable. Most of the products we buy at the store are only designed to last a few years and then be thrown away and replaced. I miss the days where things were made here in America and were made to last. I still have a few items that were passed down to me…

Funny you point out that article about Cray in Azure when just earlier this morning I was reading THIS article about how Cray has picked Cavium processors for it's ARM based supercomputers.

I think it goes without saying that if you work in IT you are busy. I always tell people that what I do isn't a job, it's a lifestyle. 

ghostinthenet​ ah, that makes sense. So then this brings me to my next question: My understanding is that in many cases containers are designed to only exist for a very short period of time. Assuming that to be true, we need a way for them to be monitored in a way that doesn't take any human interaction. That or just…

It's also good to have an easy way to track changes and correlate changes. Being able to see when performance dropped and correlate that with a change or other issues really saves a ton of time in troubleshooting.