securityTag Archive

Security is a rapidly moving beast – faster than any other facet of the technology industry. We are in a constant battle with everyone from hackers to script-kiddies, from targeted data theft attacks to Denial of Service. Our security teams and network administrators are playing catch-up with the malicious operators.… Continue Reading Your security is obsolete

I always recommend to create a dedicated management cluster for your vSphere virtual environment, but what is a dedicated management cluster, and why is it so important to have one? Not only is it best practice, there are real reasons why you should choose to do this. What is a… Continue Reading Dedicated Management Cluster

Ring, ring. “Hello, is that the IT Manager? Can I ask you a few questions for a survey? <preamble here to build a relationship and feeling of trust, like complimenting the company or asking what the company does, saying that it’s impressive or hard work>. Can you tell me what… Continue Reading Information disclosure as a security risk

You may know about ToR, top-of-rack (for) switches. It’s the practice of placing a physical switch within each rack, so that the network switching for the rack is close to the servers or devices that need to connect to it. The ToR switches will allow servers to communicate with each… Continue Reading ToR switch placement – not at the top!

In a recent discussion about network security, I had a [relatively inexperienced] network administrator make a comment that security between networks can be achieved with VLANs. As most of us know, VLANs do not equal network security – but it made me wonder why she came to that conclusion, after… Continue Reading VLANs do not equal network security

Today I attended a Microsoft StorSimple 8000 series presentation at Microsoft’s offices here in Adelaide, South Australia. It’s a 2RU / 4RU device that provides primary storage through iSCSI, with inline block level automatic tiering, de-duplication and compression, where the final tier is Azure cloud storage. It incorporates volume-level snapshots “for… Continue Reading Microsoft StorSimple 8000 series review

How many passwords do you have? Do you remember them all? Do you use a password manager tool? Are your passwords complex and secure, or easy to guess dictionary words? What is your weakest point? I bet that last question threw you a bit. Your entire security and identity could… Continue Reading Password security in the age of Cloud

In today’s modern world, the task of threat and risk assessment is based on prior experience and history. It is human nature to be limited in our imagination by prior experience. When identifying the threats to your business and systems, you need to have an imagination on the possibilities that… Continue Reading Threat and risk assessment

Many organisations have allowed staff to bring in their own device for use at work – these are Bring Your Own Device policies (BYOD Policy). It’s becoming more common, but what are the bring your own device policy risks? In this article, when I refer to device, I include phones,… Continue Reading Bring Your Own Device policy risks

Whilst defining your BYOD policy, you might miss some important requirements to producing a document that will help guide your employees when they use their own device for work purposes. More organisations around the world are now providing an allowance to employees to allow them to buy their own consumer… Continue Reading Tips for defining your BYOD policy

Commonly, a vCenter integrated with Active Directory through SSO will provide authentication for users accessing vCenter. Creating vSphere SSO groups will achieve far more than you expected. So, if you want to integrate multiple Active Directory domains and LDAP directories or leverage local vCenter users and groups in conjunction with… Continue Reading Creating vSphere SSO groups

Running release N minus 1? What about release N plus 45 days? Software update best practice should mean that patches and updates are tested, but not held back when it provides known fixes. It is common practice for risk-averse companies to not run the very latest release of software, instead… Continue Reading n-1 is dead, long live N+45

How do you restore the private key for a certificate? You may have generated a certificate request, and sent that request to either your internal Microsoft based Certification Authority (CA) or you sent the CSR to an external SSL certificate provider, and now you try and install the CRT (certificate… Continue Reading Recovering an SSL private key from a certificate

If you build a cluster for a VMware virtualised infrastructure, you can use almost any compute resource that you have available. Do you want to mix a Dell R710 dual CPU host with 32 GB of RAM with an IBM BladeCenter Hx5 with a single CPU and 96GB – sure,… Continue Reading SDDC drives mix and match hardware