Archive for the ‘How To’ Category
Tuesday, November 20th, 2012 by Mario Duarte
Our previous security articles from GoGrid discussed 5 steps to enhance your security on Microsoft Windows and how to tighten up Windows security. But what about making your Linux server security a bit more robust?
Overview
Security studies strongly demonstrate that most systems will be attacked within 5 hours after becoming publicly accessible—in some cases, in less than 2 hours. The sources of the attacks are often unsuspecting users whose systems have been compromised by malware and are in turn being used to attack and infect other systems. The majority of attacks target two common threats:
- A combination of commonly used system accounts (e.g., the root account) with weak, dictionary-based passwords
- Systems that are missing critical or high-security vulnerabilities
Solution
This article provides GoGrid’s security recommendations for Cloud Servers running Linux. Perform these 4 steps in sequential order immediately after provisioning new GoGrid Cloud Servers to maintain the security (confidentiality + integrity + availability) of your system. (more…) «Security Basics: 4 Steps to Tighten up Linux Security»
Tags: Anti-virus, apt-get, AV, best practice, CentOS, Debian, How To, Linux, Patch, root, Security, ssh, Unix, yum
Posted in Cloud Server, General, GoGrid, How To, Linux, Public Cloud, Security | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 12th, 2012 by Scott Pankonin
In this blog post, I’m going to discuss disaster recovery. After superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, there were people without power weeks after the storm. Data centers were affected by the storm as well. And although GoGrid’s East Coast data center didn’t experience an outage, some providers did. So it is timely to consider geographically redundant solutions rather than wait for the next superstorm.
Geographic Redundancy
There are three basic strategies you can implement today on GoGrid to make your application better able to recover from a data center outage: cold standby, warm standby, and full geographic-redundancy with multiple active data centers. Let’s start off with a definition:
Redundancy: (noun) the ability of an application or system to resist the failure of one or more constituent parts, or recover quickly from such failure.
Systems administration and IT management boils down to that proverbial 3:00am phone call. Your application is down. How do you respond? Having the proper plan and appropriate recovery assets in place is the key to surviving this all-too-real scenario. How current are your backups? Do you have standby servers already in place? If not, how quickly can you bring new ones online?
It’s pretty standard to have offsite backups. If the offsite backups are in a secondary data center, they can be used to springboard reconstituting your application. GoGrid offers two products that make this process easy to implement: (more…) «You Don’t Need a Superstorm: Disaster Recovery Basics»
Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, cold standby, Disaster Recovery, disaster recovery solution, DR, failover, hot standby, How To, solution, warm standby
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, Datacenter, Disaster Recovery, Features, General, GoGrid, How To, Public Cloud | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012 by Michael Sheehan
Everybody wants to be successful. Although we can often learn from our mistakes, we can also avoid pitfalls and hurdles by doing a little bit of research and even some trial and error in advance. Part of being successful is choosing the right team, the right tools, and the right partner for your project. And when it comes to building out your company’s infrastructure, any solution or partner you choose should be cost-effective and helpful so you absolutely don’t compromise on reliability or performance.
In order to be successful, your infrastructure should be ready for this success. Here are three things to think about when scaling your business and its infrastructure:
- Plan for success – Don’t think about just 1 week or 1 month down the road. Look at your historical information. Look at your competitor’s traffic. Is your industry seasonal? Figure out where those peaks and valleys are and plan for them.
- Do some testing – Don’t just hypothesize on how well your infrastructure will perform. Do some real world testing. There are many 3rd party software and SaaS solutions that can simulate load on your site. Test some various scenarios with and without extra infrastructure. Test your scaling, manual or automated.
- Plan also for failure – What if something doesn’t go as expected, are you ready for that? Part of developing a scalability strategy is also working on those less-than-positive scenarios. Planning for success is fun, but planning for failures is just as important.
How GoGrid can help
For more than 10 years, GoGrid has been delivering compelling infrastructure solutions worldwide. We believe in a consultative approach because we understand that every business needs solutions that fit their unique requirements. When it comes to success, cookie-cutter approaches simply don’t work.
(more…) «Got Growing Pains? 3 Ways to Painlessly Scale your Cloud»
Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud infrastructure, GoGrid, How To, IaaS, over capacity, scalability, scalable application, scalable website, Scale
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, General, GoGrid, Hosting, How To, Public Cloud | No Comments »
Thursday, October 25th, 2012 by Mario Duarte
In the previous Security article from GoGrid, we outlined 5 Steps to enhance your security on Microsoft Windows. This article walks you through some of these steps.
Step 1: Patch your system
The following steps apply to Microsoft Windows 2008 OS and Microsoft applications:
- Select the Start button
- Type “windows update” in the search area and press the Enter button.
- You should see the following screen:
- Select the Check for Updates option, which will connect to Microsoft to determine if your system requires security updates.
- Install security updates by pressing the Install updates button.
Note: You may need to reboot your system immediately after you’ve applied the security updates.
Step 2: Rename the administrator account
The following steps apply to Microsoft Windows 2008: (more…) «How To Tighten Up Windows Security»
Tags: administrator, cloud, Cloud Computing, password, Patch, Security, security update, Windows, Windows Server, Windows Update
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, General, GoGrid, How To, Microsoft, Public Cloud, Security, Windows | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012 by Mario Duarte
Security studies (including GoGrid’s internal research) strongly demonstrate that most systems will be attacked
within 5 hours after becoming publicly accessible—in some cases, in less than 2 hours. The sources of the attacks are often unsuspecting users whose systems have been compromised by malware and are in turn being used to attack and infect other systems. The majority of attacks target two common threats:
- A combination of commonly used system accounts (e.g., the Administrator account) with weak, dictionary-based passwords
- Systems that are missing critical or high-security vulnerabilities
Solution
This document provides GoGrid’s security recommendations for Cloud Servers running Microsoft Windows. Perform these 5 steps in sequential order immediately after provisioning new GoGrid Cloud Servers to maintain the integrity and security of your system.
Note: For a step-by-step how-to with screenshots, please see the companion article, “How To Tighten Up Windows Security.”
(more…) «Security Basics: 5 Steps to Tighten Security for Microsoft Windows»
Tags: administrator, Anti-virus, AV, cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Servers, GoGrid, Microsoft Windows, password, Patch, Security, trusted sites, Windows, Windows Server 2008
Posted in Cloud Computing, General, GoGrid, How To, Microsoft, Security, Windows | No Comments »
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