How To Commission Your First Virtual Machine In AWS: A Primer

Have you been asked to commission your first virtual machine in the cloud? If not, be aware that reliance on the cloud is becoming so commonplace that your turn will come soon. Fear not. If you need a compute resource quickly, and you don't have any experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), we've got you covered. This primer will help you get started.

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Backup and Disaster Recovery

GRAX Introduces Free Data Backup and Recovery Service for Salesforce

businesswire | September 12, 2023

GRAX, Inc., a leading innovator in Salesforce data management and protection, announces the general availability of GRAX Lite for free Salesforce backup and recovery. GRAX Lite is a game-changing free solution that enables businesses to prevent data loss by safeguarding their Salesforce data. GRAX Lite addresses a critical need in the SaaS data protection market by offering comprehensive free backup software. In an era marked by escalating cyber threats and stringent compliance regulations, GRAX Lite arms businesses with a powerful tool to shield their vital Salesforce data. Built on the principle of data ownership, GRAX Lite gives Salesforce users the power to take back that ownership and control of their valuable Salesforce data with a couple of clicks. "At GRAX, we have always believed that data protection is an unassailable right," said Joe Gaska, Head of Product at GRAX. "With the launch of GRAX Lite, we are breaking down barriers and providing businesses with the tools they need to secure their mission-critical Salesforce data so that they can focus on growing their business." Key capabilities of GRAX Lite for Salesforce Backup and Recovery Effortless Backup and Recovery: GRAX Lite simplifies the backup process allowing users to protect and easily restore their Salesforce data with just a couple of clicks. 100% Data Ownership: GRAX Lite empowers users to retain full ownership of their data by enabling backups into the customer-owned storage service – Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure cloud storage environments. Maintain Your Digital Chain of Custody: With GRAX, users retain full control over their data’s Digital Chain of Custody – GRAX runs entirely in the customer-owned cloud. Unlimited backup storage: GRAX Lite enables users to capture all of their data into their cloud of choice, where users can leverage their existing cloud agreements. Daily Automated Backups: Users gain peace of mind with automated incremental backups of Salesforce data, including files and attachments, ensuring no critical information is lost. Granular Control: Swiftly restore individual records, making it simple to bring back data quickly when you need it. User-Friendly Interface: The user-centric design of GRAX ensures that any user can navigate and deploy free Salesforce data protection from the GRAX Platform with ease. GRAX Lite is a testament to GRAX's commitment to data sovereignty and data governance. By providing a free and user-friendly solution for Salesforce backup and recovery, GRAX Lite empowers organizations to take back ownership of their data assets, create a comprehensive backup strategy, and focus on driving business growth. About GRAX GRAX helps organizations adapt faster by making it easier to get strategic value out of their historical SaaS application data. Customers can fully own, access, and reuse all versions of their cloud application data anywhere, anytime by simply backing up or archiving it to their own cloud environment and seamlessly pushing it into their data ecosystem. GRAX delivers unparalleled SaaS data backup, archive, recovery, and reuse functionality in a fully integrated solution, helping leading organizations improve business continuity, regulatory compliance, customer retention, and revenue growth.

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Backup and Disaster Recovery

Pure Storage Simplifies Data Resilience and Enables an Enhanced Service Operations Experience For Enterprises Everywhere

PR Newswire | October 12, 2023

Pure Storage® the IT pioneer that delivers the world's most advanced data storage technology and services, announced critical new data resilience offerings, including the introduction of Pure Protect™//DRaaS, a unique Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, new energy efficiency guarantees for its Evergreen® portfolio, and scalable AI-powered storage services via its Pure1® management platform to global enterprises. With the introduction of consumption-based disaster recovery via Pure Protect, a unique data resilience scoring system via Pure1, and updates to Evergreen subscriptions that include a new Paid Power and Rack commitment, Pure Storage enables enterprises to adopt a complete, end-to-end storage strategy that assures data resilience, reduces labor costs, accelerates sustainability initiatives, and delivers unrivaled TCO benefits. Industry Significance The rate of devastating ransomware attacks and the increasing frequency of natural disasters are upending business continuity more often each day. While many organizations recognize the importance of a disaster recovery (DR) plan, current DR solutions on the market are complex, expensive, and disruptive. Likewise, the current energy crisis, new environmental regulations, and ethical imperatives to improve corporate sustainability have led companies to set ambitious net-zero goals, but reckoning with the typical data center's power demands has remained challenging. And with digitization at scale and data proliferation and fragmentation, end-to-end operations management further aggravates the skill and budget shortages for IT. Today's introduction of Pure Protect //DRaaS and updates to the Pure Storage Evergreen portfolio not only address these critical industry pain points, but also set new milestones for customer-centricity with compelling guarantees. News Highlights Assured Data Resilience: Pure Storage enables enterprises everywhere to maximize data protection with a complete, multi-layered data resilience strategy built from the ground up. With intrinsic data protection built into its Evergreen architecture via ActiveDR™, ActiveCluster™, and SafeMode™ Snapshot capabilities, Pure Storage has now expanded data resilience with new trusted operations capabilities and a new disaster recovery service: Pure Protect //DRaaS, a new consumption-based Disaster Recovery as-a-Service solution, drastically reduces complexity, cost, recovery time, and business disruption in the wake of disasters and cyber disruptions. Organizations now have clean environments with multiple restore points to recover clean copies of their on-premises vSphere data, to native AWS EC2, no matter what underlying storage infrastructure it is, while ensuring data centers remain isolated for investigation. Data Resilience Score, within the Pure1 Data Protection Assessment, underscores Pure Storage's trusted operations by providing better transparency in the adoption of Pure Storage and industry-leading data protection and backup partner technologies, while offering the ability to assess entire fleet configurations against leading practices. Zero Data Loss Guarantee, across the Evergreen portfolio, provides peace of mind that customers data will not be lost due to Pure Storage hardware or software issues. In the rare case of any data corruption, Pure Storage assures data protection with advanced data recovery services for any hardware or software product-related incidents, at no cost. Enhanced Service Experience, Everywhere: With Pure Storage's AI-powered asset and lifecycle management services and policy-based automation, customers can achieve operational excellence, anywhere and on any scale. Asset Management and Genealogy allows customers and Pure Storage to jointly optimize Labor costs to run and operate storage. Customers get full transparency to manage Evergreen assets, contracts, subscriptions, and lifecycle, and get visibility into capacity, energy, and rack space usage. Customers can also view how each asset or subscription has evolved over time, including software updates, ramps, expansions, and renewals, and gain insight into upcoming lifecycle events such as EOL, upgrades, or contract expiration. Subscription Lifecycle Operations: Customers now benefit from a subscription viewer to understand when subscriptions require attention and renewal, predictive tracking of capacity utilization with actionable alerts to optimize reserve commit vs on-demand consumption, and new SLA indicators to track how well Pure Storage is meeting performance and efficiency SLAs. Customers can plan for future demand, trigger in-app workflows to request quotes, or use the new Pure1 Marketplace for a simplified subscription shopping experience. Partners can take advantage of these capabilities via APIs and early notifications of lifecycle events (EOL, renewal) to deliver seamless procurement experiences to joint customers. Policy-driven Upgrades take the guesswork out of choosing the right Purity release and simplify fleet management. They help customers strike the right balance between frequent upgrades and maintaining a secure and supported storage environment based on their organization's goals. Pure1 Mobile App enables customers to get insights and alerts even on the go as well as manage cases and get the latest information and news from Pure anywhere in the world. Guaranteed Energy Efficiency While Saving Money: With the only Paid Power and Rack Space commitment in the enterprise Storage as-a-Service market, and unique energy, density, and upgrade guarantees, Pure Storage is not only committed to providing the most sustainable storage solutions in the industry, but is also determined to make being green easier and more affordable for global customers. About Pure Storage Pure Storage uncomplicates data storage, forever. Pure delivers a cloud experience that empowers every organization to get the most from their data while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. Pure's commitment to providing true storage as-a-service gives customers the agility to meet changing data needs at speed and scale, whether they are deploying traditional workloads, modern applications, containers, or more. Pure believes it can make a significant impact in reducing data center emissions worldwide through its environmental sustainability efforts, including designing products and solutions that enable customers to reduce their carbon and energy footprint. And with the highest Net Promoter Score in the industry, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.

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VPN

Automox Announces Immediate and Secure Actions at Scale to Keep IT Fast and Compliant

globenewswire | September 21, 2023

Automox, the leader in AI-powered IT automation, is proud to announce two new capabilities, FixNow and PowerShell Signing. Combined, these new features further extend Automox’s industry-leading automation, speed, and security to enable organizations to act immediately to enforce and audit configuration, remediate vulnerabilities, install or remove software, query devices, and more. According to a 2019 IT Outage Impact Study, human error was the #1 cause of IT outages in the United States and Canada, and the #3 cause globally. Using FixNow for immediate testing and validation enables IT professionals to confidently automate configuration changes at scale and to minimize the potential for human error. FixNow runs Automox WorkletsTM immediately at scale across IT environments without a VPN or servers. With a catalog of over 300 automations that span Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, FixNow runs securely in real-time on the devices you choose. Early-access Automox customers are already confirming the value of FixNow. Matthew Rehm, Director of Information Systems at Methodist Theological School in Ohio said, “[FixNow] made updating some machines so much easier than having to schedule.” And David Thomson, IT Manager, St Andrew's First Aid in the UK said, “I use FixNow when evaluating new Worklets. The capability to execute instantly allows me to see instant results without cluttering up my existing policies.” “The value of immediate and secure action at scale cannot be overstated. We know time is of the essence, and FixNow lets our users remediate fast,” said Tim Lucas, CEO of Automox. “FixNow is the fastest and most secure way to audit and fix hundreds or even thousands of devices immediately.” According to a 2020 study by Cisco, PowerShell accounted for more than 33% of critical threats detected on endpoints. Automox PowerShell Signing will ensure script integrity and adherence to security best practices by enabling remote or all script signing to further reduce potential attack surfaces. Whether you automate or immediately execute PowerShell with FixNow, tasks like configuration, software deployment, and patching will be signed. To ensure the integrity of scripts from Automox and enable IT teams to adhere to security best practices, all PowerShell commands and automations will be self-signed by Automox. Once enabled, organizations can enhance their security posture by disallowing unsigned and potentially malicious PowerShell from running in their environment. “All Automox customers will be able to opt-in to sign every PowerShell command sent through Automox, so they can be confident that critical endpoint management tasks like configuration updates were unchanged in transit to managed devices,” said Jason Kikta, Automox CISO. “This is a major advance in security for IT teams. Dual-use and fileless PowerShell scripts comprise nearly half of the critical security threats on endpoints.” FixNow is available to Automox customers today as a free preview, Secure Signing will be made available to all Automox customers shortly. About Automox Automox is the IT automation platform for modern organizations. It makes it easy to keep Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints patched, configured, controlled, and secured – without servers or VPNs. Using AI-powered automation, IT professionals can fix critical vulnerabilities faster, slash cost and complexity, and win back hours in their days. Join thousands of companies transforming IT operations into a strategic business driver with Automox.

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Virtual Server Management

Precisely Announces Powerful New 3D Visualization Capabilities in Latest MapInfo Pro Release

businesswire | September 14, 2023

Precisely partner, Pelican GeoGraphics, has long understood the power of location intelligence for complex research and planning purposes. The team helps clients in the natural resources industry with the exploration of minerals to help create renewable energy sources. “Understanding the 3D nature of your data is essential in mineral exploration, so we’re thrilled that this feature will now be available directly within the familiar interface of MapInfo Pro - and at a fraction of the cost of some of the more specialist standalone packages on the market,” said Caroline Hilton, Managing Director at Pelican GeoGraphics. “Even at grass-roots level, geologists will be able to visualize their regional and project data in greater detail, draping aerial images, geological mapping, geophysics grids, and geochemistry data onto the landscape with ease.” As an all-in-one solution for managing, analyzing, and visualizing location data, MapInfo Pro is widely recognized for its ease-of-use, empowering customers to leverage critical location-based insights across a wider range of business users. It can also be easily customized through a wide variety of features and functionality available to customers via the MapInfo Marketplace. “Precisely remains committed to delivering a complete desktop GIS solution in MapInfo Pro, that is powerful, flexible, and easy to use,” said Clarence Hempfield, Senior Vice President – Location Intelligence at Precisely. “The latest release helps to unlock maximum levels of location-based context for our customers across an almost endless array of critical business scenarios.” MapInfo Pro v2023 is available today in English, German, and French, with 13 additional languages slated to go live by early 2024. About Precisely Precisely is a global leader in data integrity, providing 12,000 customers in more than 100 countries, including 99 of the Fortune 100, with accuracy, consistency, and context in their data. Precisely's data integration, data quality, data governance, location intelligence and data enrichment products enable better business decisions to drive better results.

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