I recently returned from TechEd North America 2014, which was in Houston, TX this year. There were hundreds of vendors and around 10,000 attendees. One of the hottest topics this year was the topic of Cloud – what does it mean for the enterprise and how does it affect...
Mike Solinap
OSS, Heartbleed, and the Impact on Medical Device Design
The use of open source software (OSS) within the medical device industry is a double edged sword. On one end of the spectrum, you have freely available code that is available for the world to scrutinize. In the process, one would hope that bugs are more easily...
Cyber Security in Medical Device Design
With the push by big technology players (Cisco, Google, Intel, etc.) towards connectivity in everyday devices, cyber security is becoming more and more crucial. This push is even seen in medical device design as the industry begins to move toward cloud-integrated and...
Common issues using OVF Tool to transfer VMs from the ESXi Shell
Chances are if you are in IT management or providing IT services you have had to deal with virtualization hosts. When it comes time to retire your old hardware and move to a new host, there are a number of different ways to go about it. One in particular for ESXi lets...
3 Real World vSphere Situations to Avoid
Almost a year ago, I wrote about 10 Pitfalls that Can Impact VMware Performance. I thought I’d revisit this topic, provide some specific situations I've encountered over the past year, and explain what I've learned from them. You may have already taken the advice of...
Keep Track of Passwords with Pleasant Solutions
When involved in IT strategy consulting services, you need a way to keep track of passwords in a safe and accessible manner. There are a number of different options out there ranging from single machine managers to cloud-based services. The one I found to be a great...
Agile Development in Regulated Environments – Part 1: Yes, it can work
The value system and practices that embody Agile Software Development have been around for well over a decade, and have been touted as having "crossed the chasm" by organizations such as the Agile Alliance, Gartner, and Forrester Research. Numerous studies indicate...
Tackling Email Archiving Regulations
Whether or not your in a heavily regulated industry, having a solid email archiving solution is an absolute necessity. Email’s importance in the workplace for the past decade-and-a-half is similar to the need of having a dial tone in years past. In addition, email is...
PLM in the Cloud: Computer System Validation in FDA Regulated Industries
Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems have evolved from being custom-built, on-premise applications to cloud-based, off-the-shelf solutions. As adoption for PLM in the cloud increases, system validation approaches in FDA/GXP regulated industries have had to...
Continuous Integration in 8 Easy Steps with Buildbot
Several weeks ago, Ron provided some great insight regarding how to install the Hudson continuous integration tool on Windows. This week, I'll be discussing a different tool: Buildbot. My initial exposure to continuous integration tools in general was only a few years...
Calling the Experts to Manage Your IT Network Infrastructure
An often overlooked part of IT network infrastructure management is network security. The majority of business networks, even for small businesses, have a large variety of heterogeneous devices that are working together to provide the services for the various...
Why Leaving Systems and Application Management to Engineers Can Cause Trouble
How Economizing can Hurt your Business There is a saying in some parts, “I am too poor to buy cheaply.” At first it sounds contradictory, but anyone who has bought something cheaply (electrical goods, car parts, computer equipment or any kind of service) and then...