Articles

Idea 11 Consulting

How to Create a PowerShell Profile

By Idea 11 Consulting / December 3, 2014

Here at Idea 11 we’re big fans of PowerShell. We use it every day to support our customers and develop scripts and tools to help with our services and support. When you spend as much time in PowerShell as we do it is useful to create a PowerShell profile. A PowerShell…

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Amazon Web Services Migration

By Idea 11 Consulting / October 22, 2014

The introduction of ‘pay for what you use’ and ‘pay as you go’ consumption models in cloud infrastructure are a dramatic departure from the traditional capital budgeting process that has underpinned decades of previous IT projects. Many business and IT managers are currently evaluating a cloud project and in weighing up…

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Dropbox Password Leak Highlights the Importance of Multi-Factor Authentication

By Idea 11 Consulting / October 15, 2014

The news that up to 7 million Dropbox usernames and passwords may have been compromised is a good opportunity for businesses to review their use of multi-factor authentication for the online services that they rely on. At this stage the Dropbox leak appears to be a result of re-use of passwords…

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Shellshock Exploit Prevention Using Palo Alto Networks IPS

By Idea 11 Consulting / September 29, 2014

The Threat Prevention feature of Palo Alto Networks firewalls protects your network in several ways. One of these is an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that enables you to block known vulnerabilities at the network gateway. This approach to intrusion prevention helps to protect your network by detecting and blocking known attack signatures for security…

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What is Shellshock, and How Can You Protect Your Networks?

By Idea 11 Consulting / September 26, 2014

A new security vulnerability called Shellshock has been discovered. Security experts are already calling it one of the most serious vulnerabilities of all time, even more serious than Heartbleed. The Shellshock vulnerability is present in Bash, a remote shell commonly used to remotely administer Linux-based systems. This includes many Linux distributions…

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System configuration, hold the sauce

By Idea 11 Consulting / November 21, 2013

Let’s dive into building systems that build themselves. Sound complicated? It’s not. And making the switch can unlock some huge efficiency and flexibility improvements in your environment. Too much secret sauce Traditionally you build a system by gathering the recommended specifications from your software vendor or dev team, perform some sizing…

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Configuring virtual desktops

By Idea 11 Consulting / April 18, 2011

Since the introduction of Windows 2000, IT departments have used group policies to control and configure workstations. A corporate workstation build will typically contain the operating system, service packs and hotfixes and core applications common to all user groups – Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, and the like. Whilst some configuration of…

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The easiest way to create a bootable USB flash drive for MDT

By Idea 11 Consulting / February 21, 2011

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is an excellent – and free – tool for automated desktop and server builds. We use it all the time. Sometimes, for whatever reason, installing a PXE server or using a boot CD ISO isn’t desirable. Using a boot USB flash drive is the best bet…

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