LDAP/OpenLDAP: The Two Pillars in UCS’ Identity & Access Management

LDAP

Our work environment is becoming more ‘colorful’, but also more difficult to handle and control. Employees increasingly determine for themselves which tools they use and where they work. As an admin, you easily lose track and become afraid of losing control over the security of your corporate IT.

Fortunately, UCS provides an identity and access management (IAM) that centrally manages and supervises all tools, devices, data, and accesses. By setting up a centralized IAM, you not only avoid shadow IT, but most of all, you regain control over your network and your precious data.

For those of you who have little technical knowledge in UCS, I like to explain today the terms LDAP / OpenLDAP, as they are the cornerstones of our central IAM system.

Advantages of Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection to Boost Network Performance + Data Availability

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Would you like some valuable tips on how to increase network performance and user data availability when using Windows clients together with UCS?

Thinking about user data, many of us admins immediately understand that questions about the issues of backups, privacy, and availability, no matter whether across different machines or outside the office, can create us a considerable headache. But fortunately there are solutions in place and in this article I want to cover two of them.

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.

DHCP and DNS: A Brief Introduction

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DHCP and DNS are the two fundamental services in an IT network. Whilst DNS makes sure that servers, clients, and services can be found in the network, DHCP ensures that the clients in the network are also provided with the information they require to participate in the communication.

Brief Introduction: High Availability

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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: Samba / Microsoft Active Directory

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Get a brief understanding about the software Samba and Microsoft Active Directory – two solutions for the central detection and authorization of domain members. These are important features as the central administration of a domain network helps to achieve more data protection and higher failure security for your IT systems.

Learn also more about how UCS is able to bridge the gap between the Linux world and the Windows world so that you can reap the benefits of both systems.

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.

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