Data-Enabled: Post Nudge Campaign Results

A lot of Organizations have adopted things like CIS Controls and part of those controls are around patching and vulnerability management. Depending on what version of the CIS controls you are using, this could be CIS 3 or CIS 7. This can already be confusing as the controls are very similar between versions but the have moved places in the CIS framework. One thing I think most tech and security professionals can agree upon, is that patching often to the latest operating systems is a great way to avoid your fleet of devices from being exploited. Known vulnerabilities have a shelf life, and bad actors know that some organizations do not patch, or patch extremely slow. So, they develop attacks against known published vulnerabilities.

Creating a Data-enabled Culture

I think the term data-driven is common, and a lot of people are aware of the term. It also has a broad area of application across many practices. I feel my Org is already data-driven. We use data in all our metrics, planning, discussions, collaboration and more. However, today during a cross team meeting I realized that we are also a data-enabled organization. When the term popped into my head I thought maybe I was on to something new, or perhaps maybe something a bit esoteric. Turns out, I was wrong, and this term is commonly used in areas already. A quick Google search will show lots of results for data enabled, and here is a blog post I found from the first page of results.

Snowflake, osquery and Fleet is Pure Magic!

Many of you have probably heard of osquery, which is software you can install onto a computer that allows humans to query the OS to return fast and reliable system data. Osquery is not new, and many Organizations have been using it in various capacity for years now. Vendors and developers also ship osquery with their products these days as well. This allows a developer or vendor to collect local data fast and reliably for their software and solutions.

JNUC 2021 Recap

Hello everyone, this will be a quick recap of my experience from the JNUC 2021 virtual conference, and a companion update to the talk I gave. First, I need to really thank Jamf for putting on a well produced virtual conference. I will admit that I was a bit skeptical of things like audio and video quality, participant interaction, and the look and feel of pre-recorded talks. Everything exceeded my expectations. The audio and video quality were very well done. The recorded sessions were great to watch, and the attendee interaction was a lot better than I expected. We all hopped into various Slack channels to interact with each other on subjects or about specific talks that were given. While this does not come close to seeing everyone in person, it still felt great to see everyone virtually. Some of us even hopped on several web conference calls to interact with each other, talk shop, have a drink, and just in general have some fun.

Gain Oversight of your Asset Inventory with Snowflake

Welcome to Part III of my mini blog series on being data driven with Snowflake. This post will be solely dedicated to how an organization can leverage a platform like Snowflake to improve their asset and inventory controls. Both Part I and Part II can be viewed with those links if you haven’t read them yet. This post will focus on end user devices for the most part and not networking hardware, application catalogs, servers, and so forth. The concepts in this post could be applied to those things though.

Working with Data in Snowflake

Welcome to Part II of my miniseries blog around Snowflake with IT & Ops Data. If you have not read Part I, you may click that link to read it first. Data has always been very important, and Snowflake just makes using the data a ton easier than we have ever had before. This post will focus on some basic ways one can work with data with in Snowflake. For this blog I will be focusing on JSON data stored in Snowflake columns. JSON documents are very common all over tech. Especially in things like REST APIs, so if you haven’t worked with JSON you will work with JSON data most likely at some point.