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
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
Smart Cards Speed Up Just-in-Time Provisioning
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