In today’s digital landscape, businesses are increasingly seeking ways to optimize their IT infrastructure. One approach gaining traction is the creation of a private cloud using Proxmox as the virtualization platform and Ceph for distributed storage. This combination offers enhanced data security, cost efficiency, scalability, and flexibility.

Benefits of a Private Cloud

The private cloud model allows businesses to maintain full control over their IT infrastructure while leveraging modern technologies like virtualization and distributed storage systems.

Small Clouds: A Money Saving Alternative

The Cloud is Not Just for Big Business

Cutting Costs with Small Cloud Providers: How DigitalOcean Can Save Your Business

In today’s digital landscape, businesses are constantly seeking ways to optimize their operations and reduce expenses. One area where companies can make significant savings is in cloud computing. While larger cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure offer robust features, they often come with a hefty price tag. For smaller businesses or individuals, these costs can be prohibitive.

Streamlining Your AWS Account: How Infrastructure as Code Can Help

As a small business owner, managing your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account can be a daunting task. With so many moving parts to consider, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the complexity of cloud infrastructure. But what if you could simplify this process and ensure that your AWS setup is optimized for performance, security, and cost-effectiveness?

The Power of Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a game-changer for managing complex cloud environments like AWS. By defining your infrastructure in code using tools like Pulumi, you can automate the provisioning and management of your resources, reducing the risk of human error and increasing consistency across your environment.

Proxmox, VMWare, and Broadcom

So long, VMWare

It’s 2024, and we live in a world where Broadcom now owns VMWare. Enterprises are scrambling on next steps for license renewal and support. The cost of VMWare has skyrocketed, and the support has gone down the drain. What is the next step? If you ask Fries Consulting, we would say Proxmox. Proxmox is a free, open-source hypervisor that is based on Debian. It has a similar look and feel to VMWare, and it is very easy to migrate VMs from VMWare to Proxmox.

Monitoring

Why is it important?

Infrastructure monitoring and alerting is something that all organizations, from small to large, should strive to do. It can be the first line of defense when it comes to malware spread or system unavailability. There are many solutions to monitoring depending on the current infrastructure. Grafana, InfluxDB, and Telegraf are a common stack for visualization, alarms, and alerting to your endpoint of choice. Implementing all of these technologies together can be a daunting task; however, starting with a goal in mind and working piece by piece is the way to accomplish what we like to call “alerting with purpose”.

Automation is more than turning lights on and off at certain times or controlling HVAC with outside temperature fluctuations. It is something that can save businesses many man hours, especially tasks that require human interaction. Every department in a business can benefit from some form of automation.

Some examples of automation tasks that can help save time for general office use would be combining many PDFs into one document for printing purposes, or copying/pasting data from one spreadsheet to another as part of a daily task. It could also be batch renaming files in a directory or comparing devices on a network between days of the week. There are countless other examples of automation that a business can take advantage of that will enable higher productivity and employee mental health.

If you were asked what new devices appeared on your network in the last 24 hours, would you be able to answer that question? If there was a catastrophic internal breach and you were asked to provide a list of authorized devices, would you be able to?

Network inventory that is always up to date and can send automated reports is imperative to a secure network. There are many pieces of software that can provide this from varying automation and cost. This software generally links assets such as computers to users, and those users can have assets such as printers, monitors, keyboards, etc. This keeps users accountable for their equipment and allows the IT department to monitor any peripheral changes to workstations.

We recently performed a full internal network audit for a client that from a physical point of view was in decent shape. It wasn’t until we started to dig into the logical networking that things became more incoherent. Their logical network choices caused issues that plagued them for over half a year before we were able to sort things out.

Internal network audits offer a detailed view into the devices on your network, how they’re connected, what network access they have, and automated reports to show changes in devices. This ensures that devices are on the proper VLAN, network switches are configured correctly, and automated reports can help keep mischievous users in check.

Welcome to Fries Consulting Services!

We strive to offer the best IT services in the Northern Colorado area.
Our rates are very affordable and flexible for your project budget.

Here is a list of our services. If your project doesn't fit with any of the below, or if you'd like to get started drop us a line.

• Network Security Auditing
• Server Installation/Configuration
• Desktop Imaging
• Custom Automation
• API Development
• Data Analysis/Visulization
• Ubiquiti Unifi Configuration
• Kubernetes setup/support
• Gitlab CI/CD Pipelines
• Cloud Migration
• Cloud Solutions (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Ransomware Recovery Operations
• And a lot more!