Short Introduction: How to Upgrade Your E-mail Server to a Bullet-Proof Fortress

E-mails have become an integral part in our everyday lives. In business anyway, but they have also found their way into our schools. However, schools face the same problems that have long been known by organizations: School authorities with thousands of students, hundreds of teachers and many administrative employees offer hackers a target at least as worthwhile as other large enterprises.

In this article, I’ll show you some simple yet highly effective measures that you as the administrator of a corporate IT or school IT can take to effectively protect your users and mail servers from hacker attacks. As massive spams are not only annoying or even dangerous to us all, they can also cause other mail servers to mistrust your email servers so that your users will no longer be able to send regular mails.

Data Ethics & Digital Selfdefense

Using a fake identity to trick Facebook, getting paid for jogging and how to book one and the same hotel room cheaper via VPN – in their keynote speech „Data Ethics & Digital Selfdefense“ at this year‘s Univention Summit, author Pernille Tranberg and journalist Steffan Heuer showed how big our digital footprint actually is and what information we (un-)consciously publish about ourselves on the internet.

Brief Introduction: High Availability

Photo of a hospital resuscitation icon

When recently assisting a customer in choosing a new cloud service provider, the providers of choice offered 95%, 99%, and 99.9% availability labeling their service “High Availability”. For the human brain and considering a scale from 0% to 100% all of these numbers sound rather good, and we would naturally think, that these services almost never fail. However, let us have a closer look at what high availability truly means for IT environments and how it affects UCS and let us think about why you should also consider the time to recovery and planned downtimes.

Brief Introduction: Two-Factor Authentication

Fingerprint authentication
As part of our “Brief introduction” series, you will learn today what is meant by two-factor authentication.

If you are planning to use security software, you will surely stumble upon this term, as this method provides additional protection for your business when it comes to login processes, especially for data-sensitive areas. Often enough, it has happened in the past that the identities and associated passwords of users from, for example, large mail providers like Yahoo were stolen. As users often use the same password for different services, there is a risk that the criminals use the stolen data to gain access to other services, thus causing great damage. Securing user authentication against sensitive areas or business-used services not only by requesting a password but also through a second authentication, data breaches become much more difficult for attackers.

Brief Introduction: Differences of the Cloud Services IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

Cloud computing illustration
Summer time is conference time in the IT world and anyone going to one or more of these events hears about the latest developments in cloud computing, wondering sometimes how to keep up with the sheer number of cloud services acronyms used in this industry.

So let us disentangle the secret code of cloud computing by having a look at what the meaning of the different services IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS actually is.

Brief Introduction: Docker

beladenes Containerschiff
Docker has been one of the buzzwords in recent years. Containers in itself are nothing new in the Linux world, and anyone using a shared web space is almost certainly using some container implementation. Docker, however, provides management interfaces and isolation mechanisms that make Docker containers more attractive to use in enterprise environments than any prior container implementation.

A good enough reason to have a closer look at Docker.

Digital Opportunities in Education Simply Too Good to Waste

Tafel mit Aufschrift "What's Next"

What is the current situation?

Compared with other developed countries, Germany’s pupils, teachers, and curricula are lagging far behind in terms of digital education and media skills. The German Minister for Education, Johanna Wanka, has identified two principal reasons for this, which will now be addressed in the new DigitalPakt#D strategy. One the one hand she sees a lack of pedagogic concepts and strategies, and on the other an underdeveloped IT infrastructure. I can agree wholeheartedly with this assessment for many sectors.