NEWS SPONSORED BY rAge EXPO:

By Tania van Wyk de Vries, Chief Product Officer at Obsidian Systems

Modern businesses rely on digital technology to survive and thrive. Just as a power failure or dry taps can halt operations, companies rely on digital systems as a utility. But unlike other utilities, these systems have continual and complex demands that IT teams must administer. Managing servers, databases and applications alongside costs, security, and compliance place enormous demands on the time of IT professionals. And these demands grow more complex as digital business systems evolve and expand.

Yet many administrators who oversee several, hundreds, even thousands of servers - from on-premise stalwarts to nimble virtual machines - still rely on manual processes and tools. This approach is draining, inefficient, and ultimately self-defeating. They need a better way to monitor, manage and remediate technology infrastructure. They need TACO.

TACO (Testing Automation Compliance Observability) is a revolutionary suite of infrastructure tools that significantly advantages its users. Developed by Obsidian, TACO leverages our 27 years of working with clients to manage IT estates. Now, users of the AWS Marketplace can access TACO and use its advantages for their hybrid environments. From large enterprises to small businesses: TACO is the answer to saving IT's time, money and resources while reducing risks and ensuring business continuity.

A single metrics view of all your servers

TACO consolidates the metrics from different servers and services onto one dashboard. Rather than log onto different management portals to get individual statuses, TACO provides comprehensive and real-time insight into on-premise, virtual and cloud server nodes.

Automated Server Onboarding

Use TACO to automate server onboarding, whether a physical server or a virtual machine. Once you set the parameters for new servers, TACO automates their deployment and applies the required standards ensuring consistency in how environments are deployed and configured.

Self-Service and Integrated Tools

Administrators can use TACO's rich tools to monitor and manage infrastructure estates. You can also continue using third-party tools - TACO will liaise with these tools and pull their data into a single dashboard environment.

Automation Capabilities

Using Obsidian's extensive knowledge, TACO provides numerous playbooks and automation profiles for infrastructure configuration and deployments. Our automation capabilities establish elaborate process automation, such as detecting compliance status, applying patches, testing, and managing approvals for updates. TACO has many playbooks to cover requirements in modern IT environments.

Compliance And Standards On Tap

TACO delivers robust compliance monitoring and implementation features. You can use TACO to implement frameworks across physical, virtual and cloud nodes, including GDPR and POPIA, CIS, PCI DSS, STIG and internal standards. TACO audits different environments, reporting their compliance status to a central dashboard, and you can apply compliance and standards updates manually or through automated processes.

Clear Governance and Risk Assessment

A healthy, responsible, and prepared business needs healthy, responsible and prepared technology. But it's very time-consuming to ensure good IT governance, conduct risk assessments, and communicate those statuses to the rest of the business - and fraught with errors if done manually across multiple systems. TACO provides auditing and management features that streamline and automate these tasks.

Improve Security

Complex IT estates are a magnet for problems that lead to cybercrime and malicious staff activities. As TACO can apply frameworks from standards such as CIS, it's a powerful way to monitor security compliance and measures, and apply the best standards and configurations to close gaps in your estate's protection.

Support For Managed Services

If you rely on managed services to reduce your IT workload, TACO is an excellent companion. It helps inform you and your partners in real time about the status of servers, applications and databases. You can also combine TACO with Obsidian's managed service choices to ensure you gain maximum value from your technology investments.

Transparent Billing

You are always in charge of costs when you use TACO. Our billing system is transparent and utility-based. Pay only for what you use and see up-to-date usage reports to help keep costs within parameters.

Pragmatic Reports

TACO supports you in proactively and responsibly running your IT estate - and your many reporting needs and obligations. Whether it's for your department, to inform the exco or CEO, or provide evidence of due diligence to regulators and auditors, TACO generates reports to serve those needs.

Modern digital technology provides incredible gains to companies. But the underlying architecture can become more complex with every enhancement. Whether IT professionals run three servers or three thousand, they shouldn't do it manually. They need ways to test, automate, monitor and manage those systems and their components. They need TACO.

Don't wait until you discover you have a problem. If your teams still run server infrastructure manually, there are issues in the wings waiting to ambush you. Maintaining patching, standards, compliance and security demands shouldn't be a day-to-day struggle. Using TACO, you will enhance the visibility, reach and responsiveness of your teams, partners and service providers.

Stop biting off more IT infrastructure management than you can chew. Put it all through TACO and turn your challenges into morsels you can quickly grasp, automate and control.

To read more about our latest developments for Testing, Automation, Compliance and Observability (TACO).