What is Asset Management in IT?

 

 IT asset management (ITAM)

An IT asset is classified as any company-owned information, system or hardware that is used in the course of business activities. The IT asset management process typically involves gathering a detailed inventory of an organization's hardware, software and network assets and then using that information to make informed business decisions about IT-related purchases and redistribution.

IT asset management (information technology asset management, or ITAM) is a set of business practices that combines financial, inventory and contractual functions to optimize spending and support lifecycle management and strategic decision-making within the IT environment. ITAM is often a subset of the IT service management (ITSM) process.

ITAM applications are available to organizations to assist in the ITAM process. These applications can detect the hardware, software and network assets across an organization and then capture, record and make the data available as needed. Some of these applications integrate ITAM with the service desk, keeping all the user and access information together with the incidents and requests.

Being Layed Off and Keeping Positive.

Is it possible to remain positive when being made redundant? Today is my last day at AT&T/DXC after 19 years and I'm about to find out. 

 

Being positive in a difficult situation is hard but it's going to give you better results than perpetuating bad feelings. 

Chronic stress causes you to be in a constant state of heightened awareness, which can create havoc in your body. You may start to experience physical symptoms such as irritability, fatigue, headaches, and insomnia. So take care of yourself even if you may not feel like it. 

Try to do more things that give you happiness. Find your comfort where you can. And please do not feel guilty about taking time for yourself.

 

Posts to my blogs may be a little sporadic for a while as I sort myself out :-)

Have a great day :-) 

 

 

 

The Floppotron: Sweet Dreams

 

 

Awesome use for old computer hardware, wasn't sure if this should be on this tech blog or my scrap blog lol

 

Have a great day all! 

 

 

Top 5 Simple Electronic projects

Discrete component circuits.oh the memories...

  

 Man I miss playing with this kind of stuff. 

 I've still got boxes full of transistors, LED's, diodes, resistors etc might have to break them out and remind myself why I became a tech :-)

 

 

What is Red Teaming?

 

 

 Red Teaming

Red teaming is the practice of rigorously challenging plans, policies, systems and assumptions by adopting an adversarial approach. A red team may be a contracted external party or an internal group that uses strategies to encourage an outsider perspective.
The goal of red teaming is to overcome cognitive errors such as groupthink and confirmation bias, which can impair the decision-making or critical thinking ability of an individual or organization.

A red team is often a group of internal IT employees used to simulate the actions of those who are malicious or adversarial. From a cybersecurity perspective, a red team's goal is to breach or compromise a company's digital security. A blue team, on the other hand, is a group of internal IT employees used to simulate the actions of individuals within a given company or organization, often a security team. If the red team poses as a group of cybercriminals, the blue team's goal is to stop them from committing a hypothetical data breach. This type of interaction is what is known as a red team-blue team simulation.

Red teaming, however, does not exclusively require the existence of a blue team. In fact, this can often be a purposeful decision to compare the active and passive systems of an agency.
Red teaming originated in the military to realistically evaluate the strength and quality of strategies by using an external perspective. Since then, red teaming has become a common cybersecurity training exercise used by organizations in the public and private sectors. Other security testing methods include ethical hacking and penetration testing, or pen testing.

 

 

Do we all need one of these??? HuggieBot

HuggieBot 2.0: A soft and human-size robot that hugs users on request

 

(Extract from Original Article at techxplore) 

 "Users provided many positive comments about visual hug initiation, haptic sizing and haptic release," Block said. "In addition to validating our custom robot platform, this paper validates our six design tenets. These findings show that we are moving in the right direction for creating more natural and enjoyable robot hugs, but there is still some room for improvement."

The feedback that Block and her colleagues collected in their user studies helped them to perfect the robot further, ultimately leading to the fabrication of an even newer version of their system, called HuggieBot 3.0. This new robot will be presented in a new paper that is currently being peer-reviewed.

"In addition to showcasing hardware and software improvements, our new paper about HuggieBot 3.0 centers on enabling the robot to detect, classify and respond to intra-hug gestures like rubs, pats and squeezes," Block said. "Being squeezed by a hugging robot is surprisingly enjoyable!"

Original Article HERE for more info:-)

 

 

 

 

 

Naughty CANbus odometer "interface". (Fakes mileage.)

An Infinity Mirror Guitar

What is load balancing

 

 

Load balancing is a technique used to distribute workloads uniformly across servers or other compute resources to optimize network efficiency, reliability and capacity.

 

Load balancing is performed by an appliance -- either physical or virtual -- that identifies in real time which server in a pool can best meet a given client request, while ensuring heavy network traffic doesn't unduly overwhelm a single server.

In addition to maximizing network capacity and performance, load balancing provides failover. If one server fails, a load balancer immediately redirects its workloads to a backup server, thus mitigating the impact on end users.

Load balancing is usually categorized as supporting either Layer 4 or Layer 7. Layer 4 load balancers distribute traffic based on transport data, such as IP addresses and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port numbers. Layer 7 load-balancing devices make routing decisions based on application-level characteristics that include HTTP header information and the actual contents of the message, such as URLs and cookies.

 

Evolution of USB

Another awesome video from PowerCert 

on the evolution of USB.