Category: Guardian

Cloudhouse costs are split into two elements – the licensing required to deploy application compatibility packages, and the professional services needed to create the application compatibility packages.

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Cloudhouse recommend packaged applications are tested in the standard UAT environments used for natively installed applications, or applications packaged in App-V. The more representative the test environment is of the live environment, the greater the chance of finding any issues prior to go-live.

Service packs and updates can be applied to the applications in a package using the Editor, refer to Updating, Editing and Maintaining Containers which describes how a new snapshot is created for the update, and how it is then applied to the package.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Applications running in Application Compatibility Packages can be deployed, and managed with same tools, or scripts used to deploy natively installed applications e.g. SCCM, InTune, LAN Desk. Please refer to Supported 3rd Party Products and Versions for details.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

The Cloudhouse Package does not include OS components, it only contains the packaged application plus Cloudhouse components. Cloudhouse recommend the same team that is responsible for supporting applications packaged with App-V, or delivered as natively installed applications, support Cloudhouse Application Compatibility Containers.

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

Cloudhouse offers a full packaging service that can scale to meet any requirement. In the event, however, that a partner wishes to offer application compatibility packaging as part of a wider solution, Cloudhouse will work with that partner. Please contact us here for details.

October 03, 2023 | DTX-EUROPE-2023 | GUARDIAN | SERVICE-MANAGEMENT

We are now in full swing with our Service Management series and are back for part 3! If you missed parts 1 or 2 you can catch up here. This week’s topic is about managing change within a technology infrastructure and the importance of this within Service Management as a whole. We continue our journey of building solid foundations and ensuring change is not only carried out but that it happens successfully.

Making change happen

Change is at the heart of progress when it comes to Service Management, however, orchestrating it effectively within complex environments can be a challenge. It’s not just about implementing new systems or updating existing features, it’s about ensuring these changes fit seamlessly into the current estate. This means evaluating the environment, implementing changes, and trialling them – making sure they happen at the right time in the right place and are successful.

Fulfilling change promises

Change initiatives often come with grand promises of dramatically improving tech, but that’s not always the case, sometimes they’re just a small adjustment to keep things running smoothly for both the organisation and customers. A crucial step in change management is evaluating the change post-implementation – ensuring all that was promised actually followed through. For instance, if the change was meant to solve an issue or update a particular system, the team should check this actually happened and all the parts are now working as expected.

Successfully carrying out change is one thing, but it is important to make sure the required change happens to all of the necessary items, not just some of them, and at the right time. By proactively planning and considering the need for change to align with the organisation’s requirements, the team can effectively manage the transition process. With these measures in place, the team can prioritise and stay ahead of the change and ensure that it is carried out in the desired timeframe. As a result, the likelihood of any disruptions or system outages is minimised.

Navigating successful change initiatives

If you’ve read our previous blogs in this series, you’ll know exactly what Guardian is and how it can help with your Service Management needs. If you haven’t, then check out the last blog post for the low down – Enhancing incident management: How to streamline your efficiency.

Previously, we’ve discussed how Guardian is a great partner to have in the realm of Service Management, but let’s delve into how it can specifically assist you in change management. One of Guardian’s key roles is overseeing changes and monitoring upcoming ones, relieving the Change Management team of this responsibility and allowing them to focus their efforts on enabling change to occur and undertaking their vital oversight function.

If you wish to discuss this topic further or just come and say hello, we will be at DTX Europe on the 4th and 5th of October – located in booth L30 in the ServiceDesk zone.

Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in contact today, to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

September 28, 2023 | DTX-EUROPE-2023 | GUARDIAN | SERVICE-MANAGEMENT

Welcome to the second instalment in our newly launched Service Management series! In this blog post, we explore the pivotal role of effective incident management and the importance of data in achieving smooth service delivery. We’re also going to discuss how you can use specific tools to enhance your incident management process and as a result, heighten efficiency.

Building foundations

In order to build effective incident management systems, you’ll need to start by understanding what it actually means to efficiently resolve incidents.

At its core, incident management involves the resolution of unforeseen disruptions in service delivery. This could be due to a fault in the system, a change that has gone undetected, a change that didn’t quite go according to plan, human error or many other reasons. A good incident management process has the ability to swiftly navigate and overcome any hiccups, big or small, and restore systems to their normal operations while ensuring minimal impact.

Effective incident management usually comes down to having the right data, at the right time, for the right job. Having the right tools and the right data at the right time can improve resolution time, improve customer satisfaction and enhance the profile of your Incident handling teams within the organisation.

Guardian – the ultimate tool

Cloudhouse Guardian is a powerful, vendor-agnostic tool that continuously monitors your entire technology estate, providing transparency into the changes occurring in your environment – approved, or not. By providing critical data to understand incidents, Guardian expedites the resolution process, allowing the Incident Management team to quickly address disruption. This not only saves resources and time but also enhances incident detection and management automatically.

With its versatile capabilities that help streamline incident handling, Guardian excels in collecting and processing data, providing valuable insights for swift and accurate resolutions. Integrating this tool with your incident management framework enables organisations to quickly respond to incidents and mitigate potential damage.

When seamlessly integrating Guardian into your Service Management processes, it silently performs essential work in the background; detecting and notifying the incident team of any issues. This ensures swift action and efficient resolution. To learn more about Guardian’s role in service management, check out the previous episode in this series – Navigating the world of Service Management.

All about the data

In today’s fast-paced environment, the ability to handle unexpected disruptions quickly and effectively is crucial. Guardian enriches your existing Incident Management framework by providing transparency into the environment. However, Guardian doesn’t just speed up the process, it also produces valuable data for your Service Management teams to utilise in the future. Analysing the data helps to determine likely causes and patterns in disruption that can then be addressed proactively to minimise disruption or eliminate them altogether.

So, to reiterate the point made at the beginning of this blog, effective Incident Management is all about having the right data, at the right time, for the right job.

If you wish to discuss this topic further or just come and say hello, we will be at DTX Europe on the 4th and 5th of October – located in booth L30 in the ServiceDesk zone.

Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in contact today, to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

September 26, 2023 | DTX-EUROPE-2023 | GUARDIAN | SERVICE-MANAGEMENT

As we gear up for DTX Europe on the 4-5th October 2023, we’re excited to be starting a new series dedicated to everything Service Management. The aim of this series is to understand the importance of Service Management while exploring how to implement it seamlessly into service delivery.

To kick off, let’s start by unravelling the foundations of Service Management, its role in delivering great customer experiences and some of the challenges.

What is Service Management and why is it important?

The role of ‘Service Management’ is to provide services to IT that enable the smooth delivery of services to end users or consumers of them. Service Management teams tend to follow ITIL-based frameworks and processes. This enables them to deliver services in a standard way and benefit from industry best practices.

You will likely know them as the Service Desk, Change Management, Configuration Management and Service Delivery teams, each with their own core responsibilities but together ensuring that IT delivers and runs services to a standard set of practices with the minimum of disruption to the rest of the organisation.

Service Management detection and challenges

So what does service management actually entail? There are several practices and they vary from organisation to organisation but essentially you will have a group handling Incidents (interruptions to services that are unplanned or unexpected by the consumer of that service), Problems (looking at systemic issues within the IT Infrastructure and services), Change Management/Enablement (ensuring that change within the infrastructure and applications is undertaken in a coordinated fashion and with as little disruption to consumers as possible) and Configuration Management (Configuration Managers are responsible for ensuring that the IT estate is understood, provide a point of reference and documented, usually but not necessarily in a CMDB supporting the other teams in their goals).

For instance, at Cloudhouse, if an issue affects more than 50 people and persists for a long time, it is known as a ‘major incident.’ This term emphasises the urgency and scale of the issue; demanding immediate attention. When an issue persists and is not easily resolved, Service Management professionals begin a ‘problem investigation.’ This phase requires an examination of the technical infrastructure. The objective is to uncover the probable causes behind the issue or a series of related issues.

Service Management teams work to determine where the issue started, what caused it, and how it has developed (if at all). The first step they need to take is to look over the last 24 hours; combing through recent changes and activity to pinpoint what might have triggered an error in the system. It could be due to a software update, a security breach or a software bug.

After sifting through the possibilities and once the Service Management teams have identified the cause, they then look into fixing it. Once they have identified a fix, they engage the Change Management/Enablement teams to identify the best time for implementation, while understanding the urgency, risk and approach for minimising impact to those unaffected. Additionally, the teams will ensure that the plans are in place to ensure the problem is not only resolved but also prevented from recurring.

The scenario above is of course a vastly simplified scenario and situations and conditions vary from organisation to organisation so your mileage may differ. However, as a high-level illustration, this is the general approach.

Simplifying Service Management

How can we help you enhance and enrich your Service Management processes? Cloudhouse Guardian is a configuration drift detection and management system that allows businesses to continuously monitor their entire system estate for updates and potential threats. As well as many other benefits, it allows your Service Management teams to have visibility over their systems and reduces the time taken to identify changes that have occurred within your estate. Ultimately cutting down the time to get an issue resolved and a customer back up and running.

If you wish to discuss this topic further or just come and say hello, we will be at DTX Europe on the 4th and 5th of October – located in booth L30 in the ServiceDesk zone.

Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in contact today, to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

August 01, 2023 | CMDB | CONFIGURATION-MANAGEMENT

In May, we introduced the topic of how to be successful with Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) this is the 2nd in our blog series on the topic and in this post, we’ll be going over how to onboard and manage stakeholders into Configuration Management.

As a Configuration Manager, one of the expectations many have for your role and the processes and tools you support is that they will be a magic bullet and solve the world’s problems. Of course, we all know this is an unreasonable expectation! Configuration Management is a supporting set of processes and tools which enrich everything they interact with. Because of the disconnect in expectation vs reality, it is important that those that own Configuration Management processes and tools are clear about the role they play.

Onboarding new groups, teams or tools into the Configuration Management ecosystem can be fraught with challenges. The largest obstacle to overcome is usually ensuring that people understand that Configuration Management owns very little data, whether that is published into the CMDB or consumed by the consumers of the CMDB. Data is owned, and always owned, by those that publish it – if there are issues or errors in data then the owner must be accountable for resolving the errors.

The needs of Configuration Management are varied and onboarding new groups who have sources of data you need is critical as the goal is to enrich and provide the highest quality data to the consumers. BUT you must ensure you are not onboarding providers of data for the mere sake of doing so, you have to have a consumer for any data you onboard, otherwise, things will get messy fast! it is easier to add data than take extraneous data out of your Configuration Management tools.

Based on this, it is important to ensure your Configuration Management Policy contains clear criteria for data onboarding – When do you research new data sources? How will you assess potential data sources? You must also ensure the data you onboard is ‘worthy’ of inclusion in your Configuration Management data published for consumers. Is it reliable? Is it appropriate? Is it of sufficient quality? All these questions need to have guidelines for assessment to provide the quality data your consumers expect and deserve.

Onboarding consumers of Configuration Management is more difficult than providers of data because you need to understand their needs to a detailed level. If you don’t take the time to do that your CMDB and other tools will become cluttered with data your consumers don’t need. It is critical that when you onboard new consumers, you have a structured methodical approach where you build close relationships, and understand the processes they expect your data to support and the touchpoints between you, your data and their needs. Ideally, as a result of onboarding a consumer, you should be able to build a map between each attribute of data and the consuming endpoint. Yes, you will most likely have multiple consumers for a given attribute. This is a GOOD thing! The more shared data in your ecosystem, the more supportive of the business needs your Configuration Management becomes and thus is seen to be delivering core business value.

So to summarise: onboard data from providers only when you have a use case to fulfil for that data; understand the consumer needs, what the data means to them and the work they are trying to achieve with the data you are providing; keep a map of consumers vs the data you hold; and keep in touch with both providers and consumers to ensure value delivery for your organisation.

Next time we’ll discuss approaches for managing your CMDB and Configuration Management practices ‘in-life’ so you continue to deliver value and also ensure Configuration Management remains relevant within your organisation.

Stephen Earl, Product Manager

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

May 22, 2023 | CMDB | CONFIGURATION-MANAGEMENT

Let’s take this back a step and just remind ourselves of what a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is supposed to be. The CMDB was born in the days of ITIL v2 when Configuration Management was introduced as a formal process within the framework.

The goal of a CMDB is to provide a repository that can be deemed authoritative for all the things an organisation cares about, there are philosophical debates and discussions about what a ‘thing’ is but they are separate from what a CMDB is intended to accomplish. Normally a ‘thing’ would be a server, a piece of network equipment, Desktop PC or Laptop and even things like HVAC systems and in some cases, we’ve seen Laundry equipment and lightbulbs be stored there.

Whatever a customer wants to track, apply Change Management processes to or deems important enough to reference on an ongoing basis likely belongs in a CMDB.

Once defined the next step is to work out what information you actually want to hold about those things, the attributes of interest. Many CMDB tools will come with a prebuilt data model for this but that doesn’t mean you have to follow that data model in your situation. The normal guidance would be to adhere to the provided model and deviate only where you need to and I would go along with that approach. In fact, in previous lives, I’ve had many conversations with organisations around how to fit esoteric devices into the packaged data models and 99% of the time we’ve found a home with appropriate attributes provided out of the box, so don’t overthink how unique your requirements are as it might be they likely aren’t.

Only store what you need to meet the needs of your consumers, what do I mean by consumers? Well, think about how the data in your CMDB is going to be used within the business, what reports, processes or activities will make use of your CMDB data? These are what you are building the CMDB for, do NOT fall into the trap of ‘dumping everything into the CMDB’ and then ‘working out what you’ll use it for later’. All that happens is your data will build up, become stale and be deemed useless and die on the vine. Your CMDB WILL fail, and by fail I mean it will not be used for the purposes it was created, data will not be maintained, you will not find owners for the data held in it and thus it will be seen as a problem rather than a solution to business challenges.

Do not over promise. Building a CMDB is a significant undertaking and requires effort, quite a lot of effort to be fair, this effort is from all areas of the business not just IT or the Configuration Management team. Consumers have input, Configuration Managers are the control point, data providers also contribute significantly to the implementation. Everyone has their role to play and this alone makes the implementation of CMDB ‘hard.’

Critical to the success of building and maintaining your CMDB is a Configuration Management Policy. One of the key elements here is defining what ‘things’ are interesting enough to be stored in the CMDB, with this in place everyone has a common understanding of ‘if’ something should be in the CMDB and then expectations are managed and set appropriately. Of course, this is not a one-time definition and depending on your situation you will want to review the criteria of ‘interesting’ as and when you deem fit. Critically, do not leave this on the shelf, keep it alive, keep it refreshed and keep it relevant.

The key to CMDB success is truly being transparent, communicative and sharing the vision of what Configuration Management means to your organisation, the contribution it will make and the value it will bring. Never lose sight of the value!

This is the first in a set of blog posts we’ll be making on the topic of CMDB. In our next thrilling instalment, (I know you are all on the edge of your seats!) we’ll talk about managing the stakeholders, strategies for on boarding and also how do you look after, feed and water the beast you are creating and keep it happy so it can continue to provide the value your organisation is investing in.

That’s it for now!

Stephen Earl, Product Manager

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

November 23, 2022 | CLOUDHOUSE | GUARDIAN

What is Cloudhouse Guardian?

Cloudhouse Guardian manages your organisation’s internal security, configuration risks and technological changes.

Guardian scans your entire estate (servers, desktops, laptops, network infrastructure etc), and detects and tracks the configuration of each device or software to determine what is out of date/non-compliant. It uses that information and automatically updates the technology to its best practice.

The importance of protecting your technology

Protecting your technology is vital to avoiding many types of cyberattacks and security breaches, which could result in business interruption. This could not only have an effect on your day-to-day business operations but your customers too. If data breaches occur, private information could be leaked, allowing your customers to become targets of ransomware attacks and in turn causing reputational harm to your organisation.

How can Guardian protect you?

1. Guardian identifies gaps in your technology, spots security flaws early and detects misconfiguration.
Misconfigurations are a common way for attackers to access your devices – even though you may be unaware of any, ports left open on the internet are easy points of entry for attackers. Guardian detects these flaws before they can be exploited and automatically heightens your security by adjusting any out-of-date configurations to their optimal form, covering the gaps for potential security breaches.

2. Avoid configuration drift through continual monitoring of your estate.
Guardian doesn’t just detect issues but builds and maintains resistance in your technology. It compares the changes in your systems and environments over time and provides visibility and control of your configuration flaws. Guardian allows you to proactively act on misconfigurations and reduce the risk of cyberattacks.

3. Software auditing – ensure the right processes are being used, in the most effective and secure way.
Guardian validates all of your processes in one solution and alerts the correct parties if something goes wrong. This allows you to understand how well your current processes are or are not working and the necessary software/patches to install to improve them.

Guardian helps prevent exploitation of your technology, helping to avoid attacks against your business and customers.

To find out how Guardian can help you, drop us a message on our contact page.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

Transformation is the trending buzzword in the IT space, but question marks remain around the visibility that professionals have over devices, systems and applications currently undergoing this process. This oversight is particularly crucial in the era of rapid change. The Covid-19 pandemic era for example presided over a drastic shift in working practices, bringing remote strategies to the fore, while consumption of products is moving into the digital space. Keeping tabs on all devices is pivotal to maintaining compliance, resilience and the ability to provide optimum customer service.

Considering cloud complexity

Cloud migration remains one of the biggest transformations currently in the IT industry. The global market value of the cloud computing industry is set to reach just shy of $600bn by 2023, as small and medium enterprises look to take advantage of big data, AI and machine learning. Now, using multiple cloud providers has increasingly become the standard, with many using a mix of both public and private clouds in a hybrid model. However, spreading out the IT estate can be problematic, with oversight of every element a complex and time-consuming undertaking.

With human resources busy enabling positive change in the business, technology needs to bring monitoring capabilities to these developments. Monitoring is essential to minimise disruption and ensure a seamless customer experience, while also enabling maintenance of regulatory standards and compliance. The risks posed by breach of regulatory compliance are significant and well documented, including hefty fines and reputational damage.

2021 data shows that data breach costs rose to an average total of $4.24 million, which was the highest ever on record. The report also discovered that costs were much higher for businesses that fell behind in areas such as security, AI, automation and cloud security. Alongside the financial damage, reputation can also take a hit, particularly for those in heavily regulated industries such as finance and healthcare where fines can be significant.

The complete toolkit for oversight

Maintaining jurisdiction and oversight over IT transformation is now critical for CTOs and CIOs. However, management across numerous devices can be a daunting and laborious task, especially with a matrix structure. How can they achieve the oversight needed with a modern IT suite?

Enter Cloudhouse Guardian. This solution provides a centralised view and unambiguous assessment of every element across a comprehensive IT suite. Any compliance and change management issues can be detected quickly, enabling quick fixes to be made. Omnipresence facilitates an effective level of oversight on the most complex transformation projects, while having data in one easy-to-access place also helps to bring disparate teams together.

Comparisons made between different environments across the estate help professionals gain clarification on where they are on their migration journey. Full visibility of tracking, testing and deployment of updates can enable potential issues to be identified before they arise. Compatibility across server, desktop and networks plus multiple vendors means the solution provides full peace of mind for those working with hybrid cloud systems.

Policy and permissions setting also provides another layer of protection for CTOs and CIOs. To help pre-empt compliance problems before they occur, policies can be selected from the Center for Internet Security’s 20 critical security controls, which cover the requirements of regulations such as PCI DSS and SOX. Automatic compliance is made possible with policies aligning to best practice configuration. Businesses can essentially set up an early warning system thanks to automated health checks, enabling misconfigurations to be caught before they are exploited.

Never missing a trick

IT transformation can include a minefield of different processes across a range of devices. Without technology-driven oversight, CTOs, CIOs and other professionals are left vulnerable to the potential of a regulatory or change management issue slipping by unnoticed. With Cloudhouse Guardian, professionals have a powerful solution that provides complete visibility of the most complex IT suites, enabling them to move forward with confidence when it comes to transformation projects.

Want to discuss more? Chat to a member of our team about Cloudhouse Guardian and your transformation project requirements

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

May 04, 2022 | GUARDIAN | SOFTWARE | STAGING-ENVIRONMENTS

Staging environments are a vital element of software testing and deployment, the point at which code, updates and builds are integrated and tested against something as close to a production environment as possible. Ideally, they would be identical, but that’s typically not the case.

Get these steps right and you can have confidence that your software will work as expected when it is deployed. However, in reality there will always be some differences between the staging environments and the production environment. For example, a staging environment is often dependent on the infrastructure developers work with, and typically they will have full control here, whereas a production environment is ‘locked down’. This means that testing will not be 100% accurate.

These differences introduce a significant risk: however careful your testing, defects can be released into the production environment. Resulting in business, operational, and environmental issues. For example this can impact security, data integrity, reliability of services leading to a business impact on customer trust. Do you know and can you measure the differences across your staging environments?

Complete visibility

Getting a good understanding of these differences between the staging and production environments can help you to identify where defects could creep in. But finding these differences can be time-consuming and labour intensive to do.

Which is where Cloudhouse Guardian comes in. Guardian gives a surface view of what is the same and what is different across your staging and production environments, allowing you to check that everything is configured as you wanted. The simple user interface shows the differences and similarities between the two so you can quickly and easily compare them.

What’s more, if you are running regular or ongoing updates, Guardian also allows you to create policies to ensure your preferred configuration criteria are adhered to each time. These policies may be your own or for example as defined by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) allowing you to achieve best practice configuration.

This oversight from Guardian can give you confidence that you won’t be caught out by the unexpected. The insight ensures consistency and efficiency, reducing the risks associated with updates.

Find out more

To find out more about Guardian and how it can be used with staging environments, please contact us for a no obligation conversation.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Commercials

Licensing is offered on a per user basis for desktop applications and a per server basis for server applications. There are discounts available based on volumes.

Professional Services costs are dependent on the nature and complexity of the application. We quote a cost for packaging once we have been able to see the application, or portfolio of applications.

Packaging and Maintaining Applications

Who is responsible for packaging desktop and server applications?

Cloudhouse provide the Professional Services to package applications.

Operations

Who manages Cloudhouse operationally within an account?

Cloudhouse recommends the same team who manage the operations of native apps.

Support

How do we know which of our departments/ teams should support the Package?

Documentation for Service Desk & Service Management

Full documentation is made available to Cloudhouse partners and customers as required.

Training

March 23, 2022 | CHANGE-MANAGEMENT | GUARDIAN | TROUBLE-SHOOTING

When IT issues arise, the first question we usually ask is “What changed?”. But this is often not a simple question to answer. Modern IT solutions rely on many different layers (from servers to operating systems, containers to microservices, cloud providers to external SAAS solutions and so on) and changes in any one of these can lead to changes in behaviour – and, potentially, cause issues.

Working back to find the source of the problem can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. You may need to pull together representatives from multiple teams – app support, development, server admins, network admins, firewall admins etc – to look for clues and try to figure out the root cause. It’s labour intensive and time consuming.

Sadly, this is an all-too-familiar scene for those working to support critical business services.

This is where Cloudhouse Guardian comes in. Guardian dramatically simplifies the process by seamlessly collecting configuration data from ALL classes of IT assets. The data are presented in a single view so you can quickly and easily highlight changes and work out which is causing the issue.
You can make comparisons such as:

What has changed on this server since yesterday?
How does it compare to last month?
How do my two web servers compare – are there any difference?
Are the cluster nodes identical?

Guardian makes this detective process quick and easy, freeing up valuable time and helping you to find a solution FAST.

And it’s not limited to servers: Guardian tracks hundreds of types of configurations, and can track changes in assets including:

Server hardware
OS Configuration
Installed packages
Service state
Application versions
Hotfixes
Database structure
Network Device configuration
Firewall Rules
AWS security Group Configuration

You can see a full list of the devices that Guardian supports here: Guardian Supported Devices

Imagine being able to collect and compare configuration data across your estate in one place. A clear view of your IT assets ready when you need it most.

If you would like to find out more about Guardian and how it could work for you, contact us for a no obligation conversation.

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