On July 17 Virginia-based bank Capital One received an email tip that their data had been leaked on code-hosting site Github.  An initial investigation found that the data originated from a Capital One server hosted in the cloud that was accessed via a misconfigured firewall.

Capital One contacted the FBI who found online social media postings of the hack by former Seattle software engineer Patricia Thompson who was then arrested and charged on July 29th for computer intrusion and theft of the Capital One data.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a forerunner of cloud networks, beats the competition with a mature, developed platform.Their current offering ranks high in reliability, with a competitive track record relative to cloud-market peers, Azure and Google Cloud. AWS is not only the oldest of the three, but also the largest in terms of scale. The platform currently offers over 140 services. This article compares AWS to other cloud computing solutions looking at the following factors: compute, storage and network, billing and pricing, support and uptime & security.

The basic lego unit is the 1x1. It’s the smallest block, connects to any other piece and hurts a lot when you step on it with bare feet.

In AWS, the equivalent of the 1x1 is a Virtual Machine (VM). And yes, a lot of the “managed” services like RDS, ELB, and EMR are abstracted to provide the convenience of the service without managing the underlying infrastructure but behind the scenes, they all use virtual machines.

Springtime brings April showers, May flowers...and the California-based AWS Summits! These are designed as free-to-attend events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Stratus10 was proud to host a booth as an onsite sponsor at the AWS Summit in Santa Clara, California, and Anaheim, California. Couldn't make it to the events?

Here are our team's top 3 takeaways:

Really? Again?

When will companies learn how to properly protect their data?  Starting with Target and Yahoo in 2013, Sony and OPM in 2014, Ashley Madison in 2015, the Democratic National Committee in 2016, Equifax in 2017 and now Marriott and Quora back-to-back to cap off 2018, data breaches are becoming a mainstay in the news. It begs the question: what are so many of these organizations missing?  

And if it can happen to companies with big budgets like these, then how can a mid-market or small business be expected to keep up?

According to a recent survey by LA CTO Forum, the challenges CTOs face in 2019 are complex and rooted in a wide range of areas.  From human resources to time management, security to tech debt, it's clear is that the modern-day CTO needs to have a broad skill set in order to achieve success. 

Today we’re proud to announce that Stratus10 has been named a Top 20 Most Promising AWS Solutions Providers. Hailed as the leading source for helping CIOs and IT leaders make the right decision, CIO Review nominates and selects the winners based on their ability to build solutions and services that can effectively yet economically support an AWS solution offering. Read the Article

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What Is DevOps?

You are probably continually on the lookout for dynamic new ways to streamline your software productivity. In your research, you might have come across the concept called DevOps and wondered what it’s all about and how you can make it work for your team.

As a software development company in today’s highly competitive marketplace, where just about every business needs a mobile app and other proprietary software, you need to constantly search for ways to add speed and efficiency.

Managed Services is the practice of outsourcing management responsibilities to an expert party in order to improve operations, efficiency, and costs. More and more companies are starting to see the value of outsourcing the management of their cloud infrastructure to expert companies called Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

Even for someone who works with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a daily basis, the pace and scale of new announcements coming from AWS can be daunting. For example, in 2016, AWS made 640 announcements covering a range of topics from price drops, new services, and even new features to existing services. We are only three-quarters of the way through 2017 and AWS has already exceeded that number and still going strong with re:Invent (Amazon's annual conference for all things AWS, with features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities) still six weeks away.