MORGANTOWN, WV, March 25, 2021 — M&S Consulting announced today they are now an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Program Partner. This designation highlights M&S Consulting’s adherence to cloud excellence and provides them another resource to help customers and clients design and implement well-architected cloud workloads. Customers can benefit from working with an AWS Well-Architected Partner to leverage benefits available exclusively through partners. To achieve this status a partner must have AWS-certified staff and demonstrate a history of AWS excellence. M&S Consulting is already an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with an Education Competency and partner in other AWS programs. The … Read More
On-Premises Identity and Access Management – Vendor + Product + Feature Matrix (2021)
Finding the best Identity Management (IdM) products for your enterprise is not a trivial task. This is especially true when different products from different vendors that accomplish other objectives or services have remarkably similar (and therefore confusing) naming conventions. Not unlike other COTS enterprise suites, the ‘cloudification’ of these products has matured rapidly. To help layout the current Identity Management vendor/product landscape as we see it, we’ve put together the following matrix of products by vendors. Click Here to enlarge the table below. Identity management is challenging in today’s world, organizations must manage user identities across a wide range of … Read More
University Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Assessment and Migration
A Higher Education institution recently reached out to us for support regarding their ongoing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) migration to address a handful of pain points they had been experiencing along the way. The University wanted to leverage the enhanced VDI capabilities offered by AWS AppStream 2.0 to streamline and improve their students’ remote learning experience. Our team worked with the University to optimize the AWS AppStream 2.0 workloads by providing insight into usage patterns for the VDI applications. We also established landing zones using the hub-and-spoke account model to lay a strong foundation for the institute’s future cloud journey. … Read More
M&S is Now a SUSE Gold Partner – Press Release
M&S Consulting is proud to announce that we are now a SUSE (and Rancher) Gold Partner! SUSE has been around for more than 28 years and is the world’s largest independent open source company. SUSE provides a range of solutions, including open source products and enterprise support for a range of Linux distributions, cloud solutions, container orchestration (with Rancher), high-performance computing, SAP, storage, and edge computing. In December of 2020, SUSE completed the acquisition of Rancher Labs, a market leader in Kubernetes management and container orchestration. This acquisition, as well as SUSE’s collaboration with a broad open source community, brings … 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