Cyber Monday is here and we are getting excited for some bargains!

While Opmantek are offering 25% off an Open-AudIT Professional 100 device subscription with the promo code ‘CYBER17” until 5^th December 2017, we have also been trawling the internet for the best deals for technology products and services our small business customers will love.  Here are our top 5:

Adobe

Mirroring their sale from last year, Adobe has on offer a 20% discount off a year’s subscription to Creative Cloud. The offer is available via Adobe’s website until 1st December 2017.

CISCO

CISCO are offering an online Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal buy 2, save 55% off the list price of books, eBooks, video training, practice tests, and simulators with promo code ‘BF2017’.

VMware

VMware have up to 25% discount on a number of their virtualization products as well as their training and certification programs designed to grow skills so you can exploit the opportunities made possible by VMware technology.

Envato Marketplace

Envato Marketplace are offering 50% off 500 of their digital assets, templates and files.  If you are looking to replace your old wordpress theme, rebrand some documents or purchase stock videos and images for your marketing stash, check it out!

Udemy

Lastly, Learn a new skill with massive savings on all online courses until tomorrow night.  Get your IT team up to speed with NMIS core with basic courses in Perl starting from $15 and loads of other development, marketing and business courses available.

Happy shopping!

Introduction

Open-AudIT provides many useful reports about your network, the devices that exist on it and many other items.

Three quick and easy reports that will provide you with an invaluable insight to your network are: Daily Discovered Devices, Daily Discovered Software, and Devices Not Seen.

You can schedule these to run each week and to email you the report for the previous week’s items. This simple action will give you an essential view of what’s happening with devices on your network. All automated. Set and forget. Easy.

We have a quick video showing these reports, here:

Daily Discovered Devices

When you run this report you will see a list of the devices discovered each day. You will also see any devices that are “unknown”. These might be devices you do not have credentials to access or devices that do not respond to the normal discovery tests. This is a very quick and easy way to discover any unauthorized devices that have been plugged in.

Daily Discovered Software

Now you can easily see if new software has been installed. Was it authorized? Is it on the list of allowed software? Who installed it? When? Easily get a report each week that you can quickly skim through and know what’s happening.

Devices Not Seen

How would you know if a device has not been on your network for an extended amount of time? Because Open-AudIT records when it has seen devices, calculating how long since it has seen a device is easy. You might expect to not see a salesman’s laptop for a couple of weeks – but what about a couple of months? What about a desktop – why would it not have been seen? With this report, you can quickly get to the bottom of missing devices – including even who is responsible for the device in question. Quick. Simple. Easy.

Simply scheduling these three simple reports will provide you much more visibility on your network, and will even make your network safer!

Introduction

Adding fields that are specific to your requirements is an extremely simple process with Open-AudIT. You can then populate these fields with whatever data you would like recorded. Asset Numbers, Cost Codes, specific attributes, etc.

Fields can be one of two types. A freeform text field or a selectable list of values. A log is kept of any changes to a field – when it was changed, what it previously was and who changed it.

We have a quick video showing this process, here:

Community Requests

As always, if you have a field that is not already in Open-AudIT and you think would be useful to the community at large, please do send us your idea. We’re only too happy to incorporate new fields into Open-AudIT when the community requests them.

The GUI

Creating a field is simply a matter of menu -> Manage -> Fields -> Create Fields. Provide it with a name (as a minimum) and you’re done. Easy! Now the field will appear on the Device Details pages.

You can change the type to

The API

As with all collections within Open-AudIT, fields are also accessible via the JSON API. Simply send a GET request to /fields for a list. The standard POST, DELETE and PATCH requests also work as expected.

More specific details are available on the Open-AudIT wiki, https://community.opmantek.com/display/OA/Fields.

Updating the value of a device’s custom field is also available via the API. Send a PATCH to /devices/{id} with a JSON formatted, URL encoded payload of data.

data=%7B%22data%22%3A%7B%22id%22%3A%221%22%2C%22type%22%3A%22devices%22%2C%22attributes
%22%3A%7B%22My+select+field%22%3A%226%22%7D%7D%7D

An example of the JSON formatted, URL encoded data payload is below. In this instance, we are changing the value of “My select field” for device #1.

When it’s not URL encoded, it looks thus:

{“data”:{“id”:”1″,”type”:”devices”,”attributes”:{“My select field”:”6″}}}

And nicely formatted for human consumption, it looks thus:

{
“data”: {
“id”: “1”,
“type”: “devices”,
“attributes”: {
“My select field”: “6”
}
}
}

Gartner have just released their 2017 Market Guide for Network Automation with Opmantek featured for the second year in a row.

The annual market review assesses sentiment and trends as well as key developments in the platforms and tools that automate the maintenance of virtual and physical network device configurations, providing an opportunity to lower costs, reduce human error and improve compliance with configuration policies.

opConfig and Open-AudIT have long been regarded as some of the most powerful, easy to use products on the market. Check out the video below on automated configuration comparisons to see one of the many ways that you can use opConfig to reduce manual network tasks.

The demand for cloud security services in today’s dynamic cyber security landscape, is growing at a rapid pace across the globe.

But unlocking the huge new revenue opportunity in the enterprise market segment for a telco or data centre operator is a challenging task.

Having worked for many years in Telstra Corporation – the #1 Telco in Australia – developing end-to-end managed network, security and Internet products and services for enterprise and multinational customers across the world, and advising  service providers as an independent specialist consultant on ‘tapping’ the rich vein of opportunity arising from the rapidly-evolving, cloud-driven software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) ‘mega-trend’, I recognise the imperative to couple telco-ready security gateway orchestration on cloud infrastructure with best -practice  integrated service & security management and business process frameworks to enable Telcos and CSPs to cost-effectively and rapidly create, launch and deliver these cloud security  solutions to enterprise customers.

Currently, telco and data centre operators have to expend significant time and resource to engage multiple security vendors, source & integrate the latest best-of-breed technologies with legacy and ‘new-wave’ OSS/BSS IT systems and processes, deploy across a variety of telco, private or public cloud infrastructures, and, on top of all that, design, create and deliver the right service offerings for their enterprise customers.

But there is a way to unlock this potential and accelerate realisation of this opportunity by deploying the right platform that quickly transforms legacy telco solutions to the exciting cloud future.

At the heart of this platform-as-a-solution, is a sophisticated, purpose-built multi-vendor management and orchestration engine (‘MANO’)  powering  a scalable telco-grade platform that unlocks innovative, differentiated cloud security gateway solutions, and easily delivers them as ‘Your Telco’ branded cloud security services for telco business, enterprise and government customers, thus reducing the time to revenue, capex and opex investment and operational risk to deliver and support new services to customers.

First and foremost, this cloud orchestration suite is ready today for any telco and data centre operator, who wants to sell and deliver a variety of new revenue-generating security and related cloud- based solutions as a service to their enterprise customers. It incorporates already- accredited, pre-integrated product and technology solutions from a variety of world-leading security vendors, abstracted into enterprise-ready service templates  to drastically simplify offer creation and launch, and also automates the provisioning of these services for delivery in multiple cloud environments, whilst providing management and reporting for both telco and customer through a single pane of glass.

In summary, telcos need a scalable, vendor-neutral, telco-grade, cloud-delivered and fully-integrated platform-based solution that accelerates service design and deployment, delivers the required security controls and capabilities and supports governance and compliance for their customers. With the increased sophistication and breadth of best-in-class security solutions now required to protect an enterprise, telco-ready cloud orchestration puts management and control of cloud security back in the hands of telcos so they can provide a holistic approach to the complex cloud security needs of their customers.

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