BSIT400-T301

 Cloud Automation In the past few weeks I have written about the perks, bonuses, and reasons why a company or organization may want to look into could offerings, however, I left out one final great reason that is truly different than a locally hosted environment.  Automation is the way of the future, this is a way that some work can be offloaded or done without human intervention and can reduce the needed personnel to complete repeating mundane tasks. Some great examples of things that can be automated is new user account setup and share drive mapping, with a simple CSV file upload a server can create a new Windows server active directory user and provide a new private portion of an existing storage drive for the individual user (Herrington, 2021). The idea behind this is to take more time at the beginning to make a template or “cast” of what the basic tasks look like. If every user has the same naming conventions as FLast @myCompany.com then doing a basic search for curren...

 In the ever-developing world of IT more companies are deciding to build out from the cloud versus going through the hassle of hosting at the office. Some of the unintended benefits of this type of planning can provide a better alert system for IT staff and small businesses owners. One super exciting feature of AWS and Azure cloud is the configuration of notifications, users can set thresholds for bandwidth or other utilization metrics to send a notification via text, email or push notification. The goal is to make the user aware of potential spikes in performance or denied request due to limitations set by the budget. These alarms can be configured to be abnormality based or fixed, in either situation the end goal is that someone or someplace will be alerted and no major changes will be made automatically. On the other end of the spectrum there are alerts that can be set to automatically scale systems as needed to provide the service even with a large influx of request, although t...

Anytime data is being used for a company purpose it is a great idea to back up all data to prevent data loss from natural disasters or external threats. Having backups on-site that are done on a schedule is a great start, however, this does not protect the data if the physical building has an issue. To remediate this issue the practice of off-site backup was invented, there are three types of topologies that can be used for off-site backups. First is a hot site, which will constantly back up all the data to another location with an identical storage system at another location, the biggest downside is the cost of power, hardware equipment, networking resources, and building rack space. Although there are places that can rent out shelf space this is still going to be a costly expense. This is the best choice for companies that can absorb the cost without an issue due to all data still working when the main system fails. The second option is a warm site, unlike a hot site this system ...

 All around the world there are individuals that have technology with passwords, the idea is not foreign to most people and is a mild inconvenience for the appearance of security, however poor cyber hygiene and reused passwords are a easy target for bad actors. Anytime a account is setup you may see the requirements: “Upper and lower case, special characters, and a minimum length”, all of these provide more complexity that’s goal is to prevent an account takeover. By simply changing from numbers only to adding lowercase letter and at 10 characters it adds the complexity of cracking the password from almost instant to about an hour. Add uppercase letters and it goes from one hour to one month, add symbols and it takes 5 years. It is incredible how adding a single additional key can make all the difference, this is done by what are called brute force attacks. Brute force attacks rely on trying every possible combination by starting to the lowest and working the way up, for an example...

When a virtual machine is needed, typically it will fall on the system administrator to create, manage and secure the virtual machine. In most virtualized environments there are sperate networks used for management, failover and client connections. The primary network is what connects the end user to the VM, this can be a remote desktop connection or a provided web interface login. The second network is known as the management network, this is what the hosted system will use to network access, this should be only visible to the system administrator or other trust networking professionals. The final network is the High Availability (HA) and the Distributed Resource Schedule (DRS), this is the network that will be used if the original hosting server goes offline it will seamlessly relocate the system to another hosting unit in the same pool of servers. The third network also provides a fast connection to a redundant storage drive that any of the VM servers can host file systems on. Keepi...

In the world of technology, there are many moving parts that are required to work for other items to work. One such system is a NTP system or network time protocol, this system's singular job is to provide the baseline time for all devices that point to it.  Many companies host their own NTP servers and even larger companies will host NTP servers for non-system services for home devices to point back to, some good examples are Google Time.google.com or Facebook time.facebook.com. In each of these systems, they need to remain secure and be constantly connected to the web, this is hard to do unless there are methods put in place. Additionally, if a single-time server has too many devices requesting the time it may slow the server and throw off the time. In both situations, the use of the principle of failover or load balancing will be a good fix. Instead of all traffic going to a single device, the load can be split between two or more systems that are configured to be almost identic...