Opmantek is a leading provider of powerful and competitively priced network management software and the current ICT Australian Exporter of the Year. While offering solutions which can scale to meet the needs of the world’s largest and most complex networks, including the world’s largest Telcos, Opmantek was most recently recognized by research institute Gartner, Inc. as also well-aligned to meet the needs of a midsize enterprise.

In the August 2018 report, ‘Midmarket Context: Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics,’ Gartner, Inc. positioned Opmantek to be optimal for midsize enterprise seeking a consolidated Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics tool and network automation from a single vendor. Opmantek was the only one of 16 vendors recognized by Gartner in the report to have this capability.

Opmantek’s award-winning suite of tools, including the two open-source products, NMIS and Open-AudIT, and commercial add-on modules, work together to holistically address all areas required to manage IT infrastructure. Notably, opEvents allows organizations of any size to automate event remediation and intelligently analyze event data, ensuring the root causes of issues are identified and dealt with in a convenient and timely manner.

With over 130,000 organizations now trusting Opmantek’s solutions to enable their IT professionals to identify and address any issue, request a demo today to see how our solutions align to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes, including yours.

Businesses, government organisations and individuals are being subjected to increasingly sophisticated phishing scams. These scams – designed to trick victims into disclosing sensitive information such as bank account numbers, passwords and credit card details – use a range of techniques to achieve their malicious aims.

Email is a key channel – along with phone calls and text messages – for phishing scams. Many early phishing emails were easy to detect due to poor grammar and spelling and email sender addresses that bore no relation to the person or business the message claimed to be from. However, in recent years, scammers have appropriated logos, graphics and text from legitimate organisations – including major telecommunications companies, banks, electricity providers and government organisations – and used more authentic-looking email addresses.

Government security advisory service Stay Smart Online recently provided an example of a convincing email phishing scam. The email hijacks legitimate branding from Medicare and the MyGov website to solicit information such as login details, user security questions and answers and bank account details.

The groups and individuals behind phishing scams are becoming increasingly adept at using social engineering techniques to extract information from users. These techniques may be used in attack types called ‘spear phishing’ or ‘whaling’. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission describes these attacks as targeting ‘businesses using information specific to the business that has been obtained elsewhere’. Scammers typically misrepresent themselves as business executives to convince other people within the business to disclose sensitive or financial information.

So how can businesses and government organisations minimise the risk phishing presents to their operations and to their people in business and personal contexts? A key step is to educate people about the threat presented by phishing scams. Businesses should also implement processes for the handling and disclosure of sensitive or financial information that address the risks presented by spear phishing or whaling. Finally, they should deploy sophisticated filters as part of a comprehensive email security platform to minimise the risk of scam emails entering the business environment.

If you would like to learn more, please contact Roger at info@firstwave.com.au

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just the fantasy of sci-fi movies, the future has arrived in full force!

In relation to healthcare, AI is playing an important role in saving the industry time and money, while improving patient outcomes. AI technology is helping clinicians and insurers to become more productive and back-end processes to become more efficient. According to the Harvard Business Review, when it comes to the top ten promising AI health applications, there could be up to $150 billion in annual savings for U.S. health care by 2026.

Sounds good, right? But what does AI in health really mean?

Four key AI applications for health you should know about are:

1. Robot-Assisted Surgery

Robots are already being used to assist operations on humans with great accuracy, and this trend is expected to take off in coming years. According to the Harvard Business Review, technological advancements in robotic solutions for surgery could result in $40billion in annual savings for U.S. healthcare by 2026.

2. Virtual Nursing Assistants

It is predicted AI-powered nurse assistants could save $20 billion annually in the U.S by saving 20% of the time nurses spend on patient maintenance tasks. This means robots instead of people will be the ones asking patients questions about their health, assessing symptoms and directing them to the best option for care.

3. Administrative Workflow

In the past nurses have spent over half their workday on activities which have nothing to do with patient care. AI-based technologies, such as voice-to-text transcription, are predicted to be able to improve administrative workflows and eliminate time-consuming non-patient-care activities. The Harvard Business Review consider the application of AI to administrative workflow could result in great savings in U.S healthcare, with an estimated potential annual value of $18 billion.

4. Fraud Detection

Finally, the ability for AI technologies to detect fraudulent activities is predicted by the Harvard Business Review to result in $17 billions of annual saving in the U.S., due to an increase in the speed and accuracy of the claims assessment process.

While AI in healthcare is still in its early days, there is a growing number of different applications for AI technology in the industry. As AI becomes more common in health-related activities, healthcare organization and insurers will be able to deliver better value services. The focus will be on better care, as new technologies replace older in areas including, but in no way limited to, surgery, nursing, administration and the processing of claims.

Cisco and Arista have agreed on a ceasefire regarding their ongoing legal battle. A joint statement regarding the matter is outlined below;

“Cisco and Arista have come to an agreement which resolves existing litigation and demonstrates their commitment to the principles of IP protection. They have agreed that, with limited exceptions, no new litigation will be brought over patents or copyrights related to existing products, for five years. In addition, for three years, they will use an arbitration process to address any patent issues regarding new products. As part of this agreement, Arista will be making a $400 million payment to Cisco, is committed to maintaining the product modifications it made as a result of previous rulings and will be making limited changes to further differentiate its user interfaces from Cisco’s.”

The result can be seen as a positive for both parties, even if Arista is out of pocket $400mil. Cisco was able to protect their technology while maintaining their extensive network of users. Arista has steadily grown its user base and developing enterprise success, Gartner has even shortlisted Arista as a solution for large-scale environments. Regardless of your organizational decision, NMIS will be able to monitor the performance of both Cisco and Arista devices, and over 10,000 other vendors too.

For auditing and management purposes it can be advantageous to baseline individual devices against a fixed, known gold standard device. Baselines enable you to combine audit data with a set of attributes you have previously defined (your baseline) to determine the compliance of devices.

For example – you might create a baseline from a device running CentOS 6 that acts as one of your Apache servers in a cluster. You know this particular server is configured to your standards, but you’re unsure if the other servers in the cluster are configured correctly. Baselines enable you to determine this.

The steps required for this process are outlined below.

1. Identify the device that is your gold standard that you want to compare similar devices against:

• First focus on what the end goal is, are you trying to baseline software, users, or Netstat data? What are the critical aspects to compare and report on?
• Do you have a gold standard for this configuration? Perhaps a device located in a lab environment or a workstation you use to clone workstation VMs from.

2. Create a Baseline for the exemplary device:

• In Open-AudIT Enterprise, Select Manage -> Baselines -> List Baselines from the top menu
• To create a new entry click the Create button in the top right-hand corner 
• Detailed instructions on creating Baselines can be found here – Baselines

3. Determine how often you want to run the Baseline check against the database and create a Scheduled Report:

• Select Report -> Scheduled Reports from the top menu
• To create a new entry click the Create button in the top right-hand corner
• Note – Under Type make sure to select Baseline, and under Group you should select a Group of devices that apply to this baseline, selecting similar groups of devices will prevent erroneous entries to be logged.
• More information on Scheduling Tasks can be found here – How to Schedule Tasks in Open-AudIT.

Managing a network can be expensive, time-consuming, and at times confusing. Mixing different software and hardware products that are meant to assist in network management can sometimes add to the confusion. Managing different software versions, vendors, and products that only work with specific OS’s can become a job in itself. Following the best standards and practices combined with a good network monitoring and inventory software solution, can help you streamline the management process and increase performance management. No other IT standard is more valuable or praised than ITIL/ITSM (Information Technology Infrastructure Libraries, Information Technology Service Management). Adhering to this standard along with implementing FirstWave’s software solutions can reduce the number of tools your team uses, increase performance management while lowering noise and confusion.

Learning and implementing the ITIL service lifecycle will significantly improve all aspects of IT management. However, ITIL is made up of an extensive series of processes. This blog will be focusing on the big four that have the most significant impact on performance management. The big four includes Incident, Availability, Capacity, and Service Level Management.

Incident management is defined as a process for logging, recording, and resolving incidents. Not only can following ITIL help with incident management, but it also allows for operational maturity as a bonus. Operational maturity entails moving from a chaotic environment to one with value. Chaotic situations are typically ad hoc, have little to no documentation, and contain minimal IT operations. FirstWave solutions can assist you in every step towards a more mature organization. Moving from a chaotic level 0, as shown in the chart above, all the way to level 3 can be achieved merely by implementing NMIS, Open-AudIT, opEvents, and opReports. Getting to Level 4 is a matter of leveraging FirstWave solutions and planning within your organization to reach that goal.

These modules assist in inventory, alert and event management, component availability and more. The goal is to have a plan of action to resolve unexpected events and get services up and running again as quickly as possible. These solutions can help you and your team analyze network trends and predict incidents before many ever have a chance of occurring. If interested in learning more about the IT Service Management Maturity Model take a look at our webinar on this topic here.

Availability Management entails making sure that services are available for use during timeframes specified by SLAs. Another use of Availability Management is identifying and correcting issues before they have a chance to impact services. NMIS, FirstWave’s network management system, grants the ability to monitor services and create alerts when they are down or underperforming. These alerts can be seen visually through the GUI, sent as an email, or even sent as a text message. The alerts are automated and customizable and will only be sent to people you and your team deem relevant through an internal priority level system. Reliability is the key concept in Availability Management. Expanding NMIS to include opEvents will allow you to automate event handling and use proactive event management to lessen outages, improve performance, and provide a fast-track problem resolution solution while managing all your network events in one place.

As organizations grow so does the usage of IT services. With this growth in usage comes a need to upgrade CPU’s, storage, memory, etc. Proper Capacity management ensures that the resources required are the right size to meet current and future business requirements. FirstWave’s opTrend, opCharts, and NMIS modules allow your team to manage network resources and visually analyze key performance metrics proactively. This enables you to predict resource exhaustion and plan more effectively by having the ability to create actionable activities when any current or future resource exhaustion is identified.

Service Level Management’s goal is to have a negotiated SLA with customers, providing a framework by which services and service levels are defined and adhered to. Establishing the scope of services, hours of operations, and timelines to meet the SLAs are key factors in implementing a successful Service Level Management plan. Open-AudIT can assist your team with assessing the current state of your IT operations with detailed audits for Inventory Management, hardware/software changes, reporting, and more. This helps your team create more accurate infrastructure sizing and help mitigate the costs of excess or insufficient hardware capacity. Knowing exactly what is on your network makes it easier to meet SLAs and implementing FirstWave’s opSLA into your toolkit will grant you the ability to measure and monitor network and application response times with ease.

Keeping track of what is on your network, adhering to agreed upon SLAs, ensuring proper resources are allocated, automating event management and escalation, and adopting ITIL/ITSM does not require multiple tools from multiple vendors. It can all be accomplished with a group of FirstWave’s core solutions, reducing the clutter and confusion of keeping track of numerous licenses and vendors. Even if you do need to keep track of multiple licenses, FirstWave does that too.

Fully adopting the ITIL/ITSM and increasing performance management does not need to be a daunting task. Reach out to us and learn how your team can accomplish these goals and more. Schedule a demo of FirstWave solutions in action today or visit our learn portal for more information.