Bi101 "In the Cloud" Blog

Blackbird Management Suite Wins Windows IT Pro “Editors Best” Award second year in a row.

Posted by Kevin Lalor in Windows Auditing/Compliance on November 21st, 2011

November 18, 2011, New York, NY – Blackbird Group, Inc. today announced that its Blackbird Management Suite received, for the second year in a row, the gold award for the “2011 Editor’s Best Awards” in the Best Active Directory and Group Policy Product category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro® magazine.

“Blackbird Auditor for Active Directory offers real-time visibility into Active Directory, monitoring and alerts you when changes are made,” said Penton Media Editor, Caroline Marwitz. “As important, it’s an AD solution that will actually be used, as it’s simple, affordable, and integrates with Windows native tools.”

“The 2011 Editors’ Best Awards is presented as part of our 2011 Community Choice Awards, and recognizes our editors’ and contributors’ favorite products of the year,” said Jason Bovberg, senior editor at Windows IT Pro. “We select winners based on a product’s strategic importance in the market, its competitive advantages, and its value to the customer. Our winners should be extremely proud of this recognition.”

“We are thrilled to receive this award from the editors at Windows IT Pro,” said Blackbird CEO, Christian Ehrenthal. “This confirms for us that, in an award category formerly dominated by Quest Software, our approach to solving the problems of Windows auditing, data governance and compliance is paying off for our customers and the market.”

The Blackbird Management Suite helps enterprises deal effectively with internal security initiatives and regulatory compliance requirements. It guides IT administrators through the entire identity and access lifecycle, consolidating tasks into a single easy-to-use console. It’s unique integrated approach, which now includes Microsoft Azure cloud support, simplifies real-time auditing, compliance reporting, continuous recovery, Windows event management, and access entitlement management.

active directory, award, blackbird, windows auditor

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Got Google? On-Ramp service for Google Apps offered at no cost!

Posted by Kevin Lalor in GoogleApps & Postini on October 24th, 2011

With the purchase of Google Apps in October and November, Bi101 will provide On-Ramp service at a $600 discount*.

Are you ready to go Google? Seems like everyone is going Google around us – the Business Times just reported that in Silicon Valley 97% of startups within the last two years are running on Google Apps. There are tons of cities booming with startups and other small and medium-sized businesses, and they all have one thing in common: they are benefiting from taking a 100% web approach. Google Apps allows you to focus on your business, not your IT.

This rapid adoption could be partly because Google Apps are allowing you to be productive anywhere, anytime. Flexibility is key as more companies need to do work on the go – while at the airport, in a coffee shop or at a hotel using a public wireless network. The great thing about Google Apps is that it protects your data by establishing an encrypted connection while you work. Without it, an unauthorized person could hack into your session and obtain access to your account.

Using an Internet standard known as HTTPS, Google will encrypt your data as it travels from your browser to their servers. This makes it much harder for an impostor to access your account. Google has supported encrypted connections from the day Google Apps launched over five years ago, and they made it the default setting for all users at the beginning of last year.

Bi101′s On-Ramp implementation Offer ($600 value)

Best practices, strategic advice and hands off implementation help. Up to 5 hours of consulting to be delivered over 5 weeks.

• Help with creating users

• Guidance in setting up dual delivery.

• Recommendation on migration strategy and method.

• Best practices on transition logistics.

Our consultants at Bi101 are committed to full service On-Ramp of your Google Apps purchase so you are set-up without disruption or distraction. We’re offering this service at no cost in October and November if you sign up for Google Apps with a minimum of 50 users by November 30th. This is just another way we are working hard to deliver our customers that best service and products available today.

Kevin Lalor
President & Founder

cloud computing, Google Apps, Postini, SaaS

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Blackbird Management Suite given top scores by Redmond Magazine with a score of 9.0 out of 10.

Posted by Kevin Lalor in Windows Auditing/Compliance on October 12th, 2011

By: Greg Shields from Redmond Magazine

Our industry has long suffered from an interesting yet potentially dangerous paradox. Its activities can be broken down into two discrete halves: building things and maintaining things. For good reason, our most experienced professionals get tasked with building things: new services, new servers, new integrations. Conversely, those least-experienced are usually responsible for keeping things running.

Active Directory represents what is perhaps the perfect example of this split. For most of us, our AD infrastructure was constructed a decade ago. It’s now stable; it works, and it has become so “platform” that its services are a utility. Senior staff has moved on to new activities, but someone still must keep it running.

At issue, however, are the controls AD natively contains for limiting which administrators can accomplish which tasks. Some exist, but they’re challenging to implement and are nowhere near comprehensive. As a result, IT shops are forced to hand incredible power to their least-experienced professionals. If you’ve ever watched a brand-new help desk person accidentally delete an entire OU of accounts, you know this pain.

Maintain More with Blackbird

The Blackbird Management Suite from Blackbird Group Inc. offers to resolve this paradox via a unified toolset for reining in those maintaining things activities. Its seven components — Auditor for Active Directory, Auditor for File System, Event Vault, Recovery for Active Directory, Privilege Explorer, Protector and Privilege Manager — are advertised separately but in reality are facets of a singular, unified platform. They introduce much-needed auditing, reporting, data protection, customizable workflow and permissions management to AD — and the file systems within it.

The skeptical IT professional might admit that point solutions for these activities already exist elsewhere. The greatest strength of Blackbird is perhaps in unifying each into a comprehensive platform.

Features that Follow Use Cases

Of particular note is how well the Blackbird functionality aligns with the typical AD use cases. Consider some examples of how the centralized Blackbird approach eliminates the dangerous in the AD paradox.

With it, changes to AD objects are alerted in real time. All changes on every domain controller (DC) are consolidated into a simple interface. Gathering everything into a single view eliminates the pain of searching across separate DC logs. The Blackbird interface also includes a “rollback” function to immediately undo any change considered inappropriate. The granularity is impressive, with even single values within a multi-value change able to be rolled back individually.

The auditing goes in reverse as well, resolving an important use case not easily fixed with other tools. In the reverse case, Blackbird will report on every change made by a specific individual. This feature enables you to swiftly roll back the entirety of one person’s maleficence.

The heavy lifting by Blackbird doesn’t rely on the native logs inside DCs. As you know, querying for anything within massive DC databases automatically impacts performance. Blackbird eliminates that impact by offloading the logs elsewhere, such as to a SQL or SQL Express database. This externalizing of AD data also fulfills a common auditing requirement for out-of-band controls on audit data. I hope this SQL offloading is augmented in future versions to support long-term archival of data.

Simplify Workflow and Auditing

Adding real workflow to AD is yet another notable area for Blackbird. Using an approach similar to Outlook mail rules, users outside IT can be given approval authority for actions. Inserting business rules into IT workflows solves a major IT use case that for too long required giant, expensive solutions. Advanced workflow items like multiple approval steps, scheduling and even commenting can be incorporated into the Blackbird workflows.

Auditing obviously extends past AD. Setting and validating file permissions are other activities not well exposed by the Windows OS. Blackbird also consolidates file-permissioning inventory, reporting and modification steps into its unified interface. Like the others, these grueling activities are often tasked to entry-level IT pros, giving them poor tools with which to make big mistakes. The Blackbird privilege management interface essentially replaces Windows Explorer, which reduces the potential for error as well as the impact.

Finally, when the worst occurs, data recovery is absolutely important. Incorporated into the Blackbird suite is a graphical AD backup and recovery solution that reanimates objects across Forests. Its reach extends past simple users and computers to include Group Policy Objects, Sites and Subnets, and even replication settings. A continuous data protection approach means any object is always restorable from just about any period of time.

Component Solutions, Unified Platform

The Blackbird DC agent links directly with AD APIs. Acting as a kind of “shim” within the AD eventing infrastructure, Blackbird is well-positioned to monitor for and report on changes. While a truly malicious attacker might, with difficulty, navigate around its protections, the separate Blackbird database means inappropriate changes can always be identified and rolled back. Copious reports, e-mail alerts and a wide range of interactive queries ensure changes get noticed.

The Makings of a Market Leader

The Blackbird Management Suite is licensed on a “per-heartbeat” basis, which effectively means per human with data in AD. As mentioned earlier, components can be purchased individually or as the entire suite. Components — irrespective of purchase — are always pieces within the unified platform, which means adding or removing them is a relatively seamless process.

It’s the unification of workflow, recovery, auditing and reporting into a single solution that defines the value proposition of Blackbird in a competitive market segment. While the features of its competitors may spread further across IT’s other services and applications — SQL Server, SharePoint, Hyper-V, vSphere and so on — Blackbird stands alone in meeting IT’s primary auditing use cases within a refreshingly unified framework.

active directory, blackbird, windows auditor, windows solution

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What are Software Companies Looking to Improve Most with Cloud Technology?

Posted by Kevin Lalor in Bi101 News on September 21st, 2011

We ask our software clients what they want most from cloud technology and this is what we hear:

“Efficiency, Reliability, Security, Price of IT, Mobility & Collaboration”

The volatility in the financial markets is just another reminder that companies now more than ever need to run their businesses leaner than ever before. We’re finding our clients also need to be operating on the most recent version of their software in order to stay ahead of the competition. With cloud-based technology you can automatically upgrade to the latest versions as you like – fully customizable and always secure. This is surprising to many but very familiar to us here at Bi101. We’ve helped hundreds of clients make the switch over to the cloud and have found each client has unique needs and custom requests that can be accommodated with cloud technology.

We have found it helps for new clients to hear how others are using the cloud to run their businesses faster and more efficiently. So this month, we’d like to introduce you to two Bi101 success stories. The following client testimonials demonstrate the different ways our clients have improved their businesses with better Efficiency, more Reliability, increased Security, new Mobility & Collaboration all at a good Price

• Sepialine Case Study

• North Naples Fire District Case Study

Are you ready to move your business to the cloud? Not sure? Try our Cloud Readiness Assessment Survey. This will give you a Bi101 Cloud Readiness Score that you can use to see how your business compares to others considering making the move to the cloud