Recently, we discussed the challenges that we saw in 2016 and how we saw Cloud evolve from 2015 to 2016. We thought it would be a good idea to discuss how we will be dealing with the challenges of 2016 and what we hope to see as trends in 2017.

1. Train and Reinforce Expertise
   
   

A lot of companies have invested in very advanced and complex Cloud solutions, but are only using a small fraction of the features. The base solution is typically very easy to start using, but the advanced solutions require some expertise in the solutions. In addition, it is often quite complicated to migrate your data onto the new solution. But having all your companies’ data available is extremely beneficial. Finding the right partner, with the right expertise, will be very important in 2017 to ensure that you get the most out of your investment.

As the Cloud gains even more momentum in 2017, companies will not only look to improve their ROI from using the Cloud solutions, but they will also look to taking complete advantage of the Cloud solutions that they have adopted. This is exactly why Cloud experts will become a much more important part of the IT industry in 2017.

2. Redefine our Monitoring and CMDB

Your operations team needs a new way to be able to manage Service Levels and also keep track of IT resources. Any ITIL based organisation is dealing with a lot of issues related to the business using Cloud solutions. Ensuring that you have the right monitoring solutions, and also the right CMDB solution integrated with the different providers you are working will be key for operations.

3. Build DevOps

DevOps has been considered a tool for companies that Develop applications. But it is also a very advanced tool for the operations team. In fact, most operations teams will get more use out of DevOps tools than Development teams will. As companies get more used to the new Cloud based solutions they have started using, they will start having new demands that will be fulfilled by DevOps tools. If you have never researched DevOps, start now to ensure you can keep up with the business.

4. Update Compliance

If you have not updated your compliance documents, this year is the year to do it. There are so many different types of Cloud solutions available on the market today, that basic compliance requirements based on the Cloud of 2010 will simply keep your company in the past. Updating your documents to ensure that the different divisions in your company can take advantage of the tools built for them will be key for businesses that want to maintain agility.

5. Pricing Analysis

For many companies, the price of their first Cloud solution was not the most critical challenge. They were concerned about security, compliance, just basically if it will work at all. Now that they have moved into the Cloud and see that it works, they are ready to start looking at the cost of the tools they are using. Preparing a pricing analysis tool that will allow the business to easily compare price to features will be an important tool in many projects. As Cloud providers compete to offer the best in solutions, pricing will become a key factor in choosing the right solution.

2017 will be a year where companies build more control around their Cloud solutions, and refine their selection process. As companies become more comfortable with their data on the Cloud, and how they can move data to the Cloud, DevOps will have a much more important role in the enterprise. Advanced DevOps allow data to be move from one service to another, allowing you to ensure you are getting the best price while ensuring compliance of company rules. This will be the cornerstone of IT Operations and many companies will expand the role of DevOps in their companies to meet the challenges of the future.

Cloud Computing continued to grow rapidly in 2016. As we can see here from Synergy Research, the Cloud market is growing at 25% annually. As a company operating in the Cloud market, we definitely saw a lot of new requests for migrations and new Cloud services in 2016. We also saw the services provided by our partners and suppliers increase significantly, making it a lot easier to move companies to Cloud services and provide all the features they need. As we already see from the market, 2017 will continue to grow and new service requests will continue to come in.

During 2015, we saw Cloud become an accepted solution in most enterprises, and in 2016, we saw most of our customers opt for Cloud solutions over classic delivery options. The following are the challenges that we saw our customers deal with the most:

1. Lack of Resources / Expertise

This is a problem that many companies have with Cloud solutions. Very often, we visit a company who has purchased and is using services on the Cloud, but they have not yet migrated their data into the new solution and they are not yet using all the features available to them. To be able to fully take advantage of these solutions, it is important to work with experts to be able to enable all features and integrate all your businesses data in the tool.

In 2016 we spent hundreds of hours migrating data of companies of all sizes to Cloud services that they have purchased, but did not have a full understanding of their use and features. This is why we provided a lot of consulting services as well.

2. Security and Compliance

The main issue with security that we have to do with ensuring that users are following the companies’ standard security practices for company data. Starting to use a Cloud solution can happen very quickly, often before anybody from IT has heard about it. Most users are not able to understand if what they are following company rules or not. It is important to have a process in place to manage these decisions and ensure that data is safe.

For the past couple of years we have developed several solutions to fit the latest security standards in the Cloud industry. One of them is Buncro a file sharing and collaboration platform that we have had great success with in the past year, providing it to clients that need to share their data, but still need premium security while doing so.

3. Managing Multiple Services

2016 saw many companies move to hybrid Cloud solutions. Very often, this meant using 2-3 public Cloud providers in addition to your private Cloud infrastructure. However, your users still come to you to ensure quality of service and performance. Suddenly, your team is expected to be monitoring infrastructure in multiple locations, global public networks, application performance on VM’s you didn’t create, and in addition control IT costs. Service management has a new level of complexity and must be reigned in.

Many of these challenges are quite new for company IT groups. In the past, IT was able to keep very close control over these topics and ensure that nothing happened without them knowing about it. The new service offerings make it a lot more difficult to be able to manage IT in the same way. 2016 has been a year where Business managers are taking advantage of Cloud services, and IT managers are starting to work and manage these new environments driven by business instead of IT.

We are very happy to announce that we are a proud supporter of the IT4Charity event in Skopje.

The guys and girls of our Skopje office will be attending this event on the 16th of November in XO Club in Skopje.

This event is organized to help people in need in developing Macedonia, and the funds gathered at the event will be donated to SOS Detsko Selo Macedonia, an organization that is dedicated to improving the lives of homeless children by providing housing, education, and courses of those in need.

At the event itself there will be donation boxes in which everyone can contribute with their own amounts. More info and details of the event here.

Entry is free, party starts at 20:00!

Hope to see you there, IT people of the Skopje area!

We are very proud to announce that our official internship program called Crowd Cloud Camp is now open!

This is a program that was created by our development partners ITCrowd along with us here at Radix Technologies. Within this program young students and fresh graduates can take part in actual projects and attain knowledge in some of the most used Cloud platforms, enterprise level solutions that are used for managing large networks, as well as some of the most used programming languages and the most used methods for project management in IT.

Besides the technical capabilities that our students can acquire within Crowd Cloud Camp, we also provide them with courses that can improve their soft skills, such as presentation, writing skills, foreign languages, personal communication, developing emotional intelligence at work, etc.

With over 20 experts at our disposal we have made sure that the students learn from the best trainers, some with over 15 years of experience in fields such as programming, network management, system administration, Microsoft technologies, Cloud Platform experts as well as language and communication experts.

In terms of technical skills, knowing the following is preferable:

•  Programming languages
•  Some DB management experience
•  Analytical and problem-solving skills
•  Knowledge of Microsoft Technologies
•  Network Management skills
•  Android and iOS technologies

Follow Crowd Cloud Camp on their official social media for the latest information regarding the program:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Linkedin

So, if motivation, dedication and eagerness to learn new technologies and languages are your characteristics – we are expecting you!

Crowd Cloud Camp!

Some time ago, we had a request from one of our clients to compile a list of all scheduled reports in their Cognos 10 environment. They had over 2000 schedules which were not maintained, so a lot of the recipients were no longer valid, some schedules needed to be stopped, etc. One way to check the recipients list in the scheduled report is to open the schedule for the specific report and check the To, CC and BCC fields. Given the sheer amount of the schedules, checking the schedules one by one was simply not an option.
What came to my mind was to compile this list from the Cognos Content Store. I started going through documentation, forums and discussions to figure out the needed database tables to construct a query. As it turned out, the Cognos Content Store is pretty much in the shadows when it comes to information about the data stored inside. I did find a lot of threads opened by people facing the same problem. It is not too hard to find a query which would generate a list of scheduled reports with their names rather than IDs, but the bottom line regarding the retrieving the recipients list on all of these places was pretty much the same. They all concluded that in order to retrieve the recipients list, you would need a third-party tool or check the schedules manually. As stated before, I could not check 2000+ schedules, and a third-party tool was a luxury I could not afford. So, I had to figure something out. After extensive digging, I came to the following finding:
Cognos Content Store has a neat table CMOBJPROPS26, and that table has a column DELIVOPTIONS. This column in massive in size, since it contains all kinds of data. When it comes to reports, it contains prompts, delivery formats AND the recipients, if any. Based on a query for the scheduled reports I found, I constructed the following one:
select ob2.cmid, c.name as className, n.name as objectName,
o.DELIVOPTIONS as DeliveryOptions
from CMOBJPROPS2 p
inner join CMOBJPROPS26 o on p.cmid=o.cmid
inner join CMOBJECTS ob on ob.cmid=o.cmid
inner join CMOBJECTS ob2 on ob.pcmid=ob2.cmid
inner join CMOBJNAMES n on n.cmid=ob2.cmid
inner join CMCLASSES c on ob2.classid=c.classid
where ACTIVE = 1 order by objectName
You can export the output of this query to Excel. The DeliveryOptions column will contain a lot of useless information (at least for me in this given situation). To ease the search, I used the nice Find and Replace option to eliminate them, for example, Find burst; and Replace With blank space. Make sure that you put the semicolon in the Find field or you may end up losing some valuable data (for example, if some of the reports have burst in the name, if you do not use the semicolon, it will be deleted as well). In the most cases, the emails are contained in the tag <item xsi:type=”bus:addressSMTP”>RECIPIENT_EMAIL</item>. However, try to find them after you remove all the other data which are not related to the email address. You may even try to adapt the original query to try and narrow down the search, however, I would strongly recommend to use it as is, and spend a bit more time clearing the Excel, rather than risking an entry loss.
If you have any additional questions regarding this, please contact me, and I’ll be happy to reply.
Jana Georgievska
DBA

We are extremely excited to show you the picture below, which has all the necessary info for you to be become a part of our RadixCloud Lead Generation Apprentice Program!

People from Macedonia, feel free to send us your CV!

My last week blog post was about how you can maintain a large number of WordPress sites with InfiniteWP and how you can install it. This week will be about connecting your WordPress websites to the InfiniteWP dashboard. Wordpress websites that needs maintenance need to have InfiniteWP Client plugin installed. It’s a really straightforward process.

Login in to your WordPress website, go to Plugins -> Add New, in the right side type InfiniteWP Client and press Enter. The search will return the results and Click Install Now Button next to the InfiniteWP Client title. After installation click activate now to active the plugin.

This will provide you with three fields: the website Admin URL, Admin Username and Activation Key. You can copy the entire data with the green Copy Details button or write it in a notepad.

Now back to the InfiniteWP dashboard to add a new website. Go to the bottom left corner and click the Add Website button.

This will give you a popup with the same information as in your Wordpress website earlier so enter the following:

• WP-Admin URL: The URL to you backend admin login
• Admin Username: Your WordPress website Admin username
• Activation Key: the activation key from the InfiniteWP Client plugin

To make things even easier if you clicked Copy Details just go CTRL+V (for Windows) and it will fill all the necessary information.

After filling the form click the Add Site button and that is it.

You InfiniteWP Admin dashboard now communicates with you WordPress website and you can see all your WordPress core, plugins, themes or themes frameworks necessary updates. As you can see we have few updates to make to our website. If you click on the green bar you will get a more detailed view of the versions and what category is that needs to be updated.

You can now add as many websites as you like that need your attention and maintenance. Next week we will update to the website to the latest version.

Dragan Markovski, 

Lead Web Developer/Programmer @RadixCloud

One of the relatively common situations during disaster recovery is a suspect database. The suspect flag is a mode which is set to the database by SQL Server in several cases. When it comes to disaster recovery, mainly databases are marked as suspect in case of a hardware failure, improper shutdown of the DB server, DB files corruption, etc. Strangely enough, it can happen when you restore the entire DB server from a valid snapshot (it happened to me).

In such cases, you will need to bring the database back to online mode. At this point you need to be aware that during the process there may be some data loss. This can occur if there are incomplete transactions which will need to be rolled back. In general,

What you will need for the procedure is the SQL Server Management Studio. I will use the Prime database which I corrupted in the previous post 🙂

The first thing you need to do is to turn off the suspect flag (which does not mean that the DB is fixed). You will need to execute the following command:

EXEC sp_resetstatus ‘Prime’

You will get the following message:

The next step is to set the database into emergency mode, which will make it a read-only with the following command:

ALTER DATABASE Prime SET EMERGENCY

Then, perform a consistency check. The output will display any possible errors.

DBCC checkdb(‘Prime‘)

In the next step we do a rollback of any pending transactions. This step also brings the DB in a single user mode.

ALTER DATABASE Prime SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

Finally, we will correct any reported errors. Keep track of the time, since this may be a lengthy process.

DBCC CheckDB (‘Prime‘, REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)

To wrap up the procedure, we will need to enable the multi user access and bring it online.

ALTER DATABASE Prime SET MULTI_USER

If we check the DB status now, it will be shown as online. We can browse through the tables and query data:

select DATABASEPROPERTYEX(‘Prime‘, ‘status’)

Jana Georgievska,

DBA

Anyone that has set up a web or an application server knows how challenging it is to deal with requesting, verifying and install an SSL/TLS certificate is. Fast forward into the future of today…

Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority that has been created by the Linux Foundation with community support to tackle these challenges, a big part of EFF’s mission to encrypt the Web. They claim: “No validation emails, no complicated configuration editing, no expired certificates breaking your website. And of course, because Let’s Encrypt provides certificates for free, no need to arrange payment.”

There are 1,358,780 certificates issued to date and that number is growing by the minute. You can check all the issues certificates here.

The official client software “Certbot” is easy to use and completely open source.

You can grab it and see the help file using the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/certbot/certbot && cd certbot && chmod a+x certbot-auto && ./certbot-auto —help

To create a certificate and reconfigure apache to use it on a Centos6 machine this should do the trick.

sudo ./certbot-auto --apache --email youremail@yourdomain.tld --agree-tos --webroot -w /var/www/html/ -d subdomain.domain.tld -d www.subdomain.domain.tld

For more advanced and automated configuration instruction visit the Certbot homepage. If you need any help leave a reply in the comment section.

Martin Markovski,
Director Of Technology

We are very excited to announce that RadixCloud will be a part of this year’s Job Fair in Skopje Macedonia!

A part of our team will be at stand  #7 at the Faculty of Computer Sciences and Engineering, where young IT professionals or IT enthusiasts will be able to get to know our services better, as well as get to know what is it like to be part of the RadixCloud process. Within our stand, people will be able to experience working on test environments that our engineers will provide for young students to work and see how running a process in a Managed Service Provider company actually looks like! We are looking forward to meeting young minds and  IT enthusiasts that are looking for a position in a IT company that provides a complete set of IT services.

Follow our official FB event for the fair for more information, and of course if you attend come say hi!

We would also like to add that we are felling very very, very…