A large government organization hosts a common services platform for thousands of users. Their user provisioning process required manual intervention, which took time and was susceptible to error. With hundreds of thousands of users, this time and exposure to error added up. Our team optimized the user provisioning process by designing and implementing a just-in-time (JIT) provisioning solution. However, instead of relying on SSO and SAML assertions, our solution grabs the required information from the user’s two-factor authentication source, their smart card. In this way, users are automatically provisioned to the web applications as they attempt to access them, instead … Read More
VPN Upgrade Reduces Hospital’s Hassle
The healthcare division of a Fortune 500 company provides data processing services to its hospital clients. They use an IPsec VPN to transport data between the client and their cloud-hosted web application platform. Security and HIPAA compliance are obviously very important. Originally, our client used the VPN offered by the cloud service provider, but they were concerned about limitations in traffic visibility and the inability to locally initiate a tunnel. The final straw came when a new hospital client required the use of Internet Key Exchange v2 (IKEv2) protocol. Our team was able to use an open-source solution to replace … Read More
Quote to Cash (Q2C): 3 Ways to Move Your Business Forward
Quote to Cash (Q2C) touches multiple business departments and potential multiple technologies. Businesses that are looking for ways to support current state and growth are hungry for the solutions for their Q2C challenges. We believe that by partnering with a strategic partner who is willing to help you define your current state, tie your Q2C goals to business objectives, and measure ROI, you can seamlessly move your business forward in your Q2C journey. Define Q2C Current State Finding the solutions for your Q2C challenges is going to require looking at the process, product, people, and technology. It is important for … Read More
What is RPA (Robotics Process Automation)?
What is RPA? Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a productivity tool/software technology that enables organizations to automate manual tasks, helping to create efficiencies, freeing up resources from dull, repetitive work to concentrate on other more complex tasks and increasing productivity. RPA exceptionally well suited for high volume, repetitive, rule-based tasks with limited need for human intervention. Depending on the RPA vendor, RPA automation scripts are referred to as robots or “BOTs”, or a “BOT” is the one executing the RPA automation scripts. For large volume processes, there can be multiple BOTs executing an automation script. For low volume processes, one … Read More
Does the SYS user really become inaccessible in Oracle Database running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
I had heard from a fellow DBA colleague that a known problem with Oracle Databases on AWS was that, in certain cases, the SYS user was not available to the DBA. Curious (and slightly alarmed), I did a little research online and discovered more than a few forum posts asking what to do about the apparent inability to execute common DBA tasks as SYS running Oracle Database on AWS. DBAs who were accustomed to being able to run DBMS_CRYPTO or install APEX from the command line were wondering how to get their work done in the cloud. In response, AWS had … Read More
Building Dapps with Blockchain and Salesforce
Salesforce is the most popular and widely used CRM solution in the cloud, it has helped numerous companies automate their sales, marketing, and customer service processes to increase efficiency and productivity. Blockchain technology is a revolutionary breakthrough which promises to fill a lot of gaps in security and trust with the current supply chain, customer service, and financial systems space (to name a few). Combining these two technologies together will be a perfect marriage of an incredible end-user facing application which offers numerous options for ease of use across multiple consumption platforms, with a system of records that is impossible to … Read More
Machine Learning Cloud Platform Comparison
Last updated on August 6, 2018. Published on August 6, 2018. Forward-thinking organizations are increasingly including Machine Learning capabilities as part of their overall digital business strategy. When used effectively, Machine Learning can enhance existing products and services with new smart features, or reduce operating and production costs. As organizations proceed from strategy development to implementation, Machine Learning platforms and their services support numerous intelligent applications for lightweight, agile POCs as well as highly scalable production deployments, with all the benefits expected from a cloud-based infrastructure. The top cloud platform providers we evaluated are Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP. … Read More
Recovering Data from a Crashed NAS in Windows with VirtualBox and Ubuntu
Home NAS: Having a Network Attached Storage (NAS) is great and convenient, in that all of your data is typically backed up with 2 or more hard drives in a RAID setup in many modern systems. Such was the case with my home Synology Diskstation DS212. The idea is: one of the 2+ drives fails, you buy a new hard drive to replace the bad one, and the data from the good drive(s) automatically copy onto the newly installed blank hard drive, and you’re back up and running again. The Problem: What happens when both drives fail in a 2-drive … Read More