Much like most operating programs/projects/entities within the Department of Defense (DoD) enforce the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and Risk Management Framework (RMF – NIST Special Publication 800-53), the new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is the DoD’s attempt at commonly securing and documenting the cyber controls of it’s Defense Industrial Base (DIB). Following repeated cyberattacks on the DIB, the DoD decided to enforce standards and checks on its contractors and its periphery, much like any program operating on a US Government system. Particularly DIB’s with the following information stored or accessible across that entity’s systems. Beyond that, it … Read More
Overview of AWS CloudShell
At AWS re:Invent 2020, AWS CloudShell was announced as a new service. A browser-based shell that provides access to AWS services from your web browser. This feature has been available in Azure and Google Cloud in some form for some time now; AWS CloudShell now brings the same capability to AWS. AWS CloudShell has unquestionably made many AWS tasks easier. CloudShell inherits your current user’s credentials, so there is no need to authenticate; simply click the AWS CloudShell icon, and you are ready to go. AWS CloudShell itself provides a managed Amazon Linux 2 environment. The service already includes the … Read More
Improving the Process and Technology of License Management
A large government agency was struggling to effectively track the acquisition and renewal of software licensing. Due to employee turnover and the infrequency of licensing review, there was not a consistent record for licenses purchased across the various organizations. The de facto process, unfortunately, consisted of emails and shared spreadsheets spread out among various stakeholders, with no consistency in price verification, expiration dates, or a common approach to vendor management. This process resulted in wasted effort, frequent requests for license extensions, and, in the worst cases, schedule and cost impacts due to production software deactivation when licenses expired. Our team … Read More
Getting Started with GitOps using ArgoCD (How-To)
GitOps is a modern twist on DevOps that prescribes one or more Git repositories as the “source of truth” for the declarative state of your environment(s) and applications. In GitOps, all environment and application configuration is stored as code and actioned upon to change the state of the environment/application accordingly. In this post, we’ll explore how you can get started with this concept and try GitOps out for yourself on a local test cluster. Create a Local Kind Cluster Kind (Kubernetes In Docker) is a local cluster tool under a Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Kubernetes project space. Kind … Read More
End-of-Life Impact of Adobe Flash on Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE 11g) and Alternatives
If you have recently installed Adobe Flash Player before December 31, 2020, you may have noticed a popup displayed by the program that informs you that Adobe Flash support is ending on December 31, 2020. As of January 12, 2021, Adobe has put the final nail into the EOL coffin and will block Adobe Flash content from running Adobe Flash Player, and all browsers before 2021 will have a “kill switch” to deactivate Adobe Flash. Adobe strongly recommends users to make the transition out of Adobe Flash in order to help protect their systems as vulnerabilities may be present in … Read More
Selecting the Best Cloud Option for an Oracle E-Business Suite Migration
A nation-wide professional services company was running an on-prem version of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Financials and Projects and needed an unbiased evaluation as their hardware aged, support costs began to increase as relative performance decreased. Like many other companies, they began to explore moving to the cloud, but they were unsure how to choose from the wide range of cloud options with licensing and compliance implications to consider. Our team evaluated hosting Oracle EBS on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). After careful evaluation, OCI provided the best combination of low total cost of ownership, flexibility, and … Read More
Growing Orthopedic Institute Gains Modernization, Security, and Flexibility through Migrating to the AWS Cloud
The Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio (OIO) faced the challenge of refreshing legacy hardware while planning for the increase in capacity of several upcoming acquisitions. To solve these challenges, OIO asked M&S Consulting to evaluate and create a strategy for its cloud alternative. We recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good fit for their needs and provided a strategy that would migrate over 90% of their servers to the cloud. The primary business applications for OIO are Patient Electronic Medical Records and Imaging solutions which are vital to the success of treatment. To support migrations, we created a set of … Read More
What Do SAP, Salesforce, and Solar Have in Common?
A large, publicly-traded solar power company used Salesforce to track sales activities and SAP for billing and other finance-related functions. Each of these systems performed their respective functions effectively; however, our customer believed that sharing information between systems could greatly improve efficiency with new customer deployments and internal processes. They called on us to help advise them and implement a new integration. Our team focused first and foremost on the business needs. Many data integration projects fail to deliver returns because they focus on tools and tech at the expense of the business drivers. Once requirements were fully understood, we … Read More