Page 17 - EngineerIT December 2022

AUTOMATION

Go beyond manual IT operations

management, compliance and

monitoring with automation

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

odern businesses rely on digital technology to survive and thrive. Just as
a power failure or dry taps can halt operations, companies rely on digital
Msystems 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-premises 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 Compliance and standards on
TACO consolidates the metrics from different servers and services onto one tap
dashboard. Rather than log onto different management portals to get individual TACO delivers robust compliance
statuses, TACO provides comprehensive and real-time insight into on-premise, virtual monitoring and implementation
and cloud server nodes. features. You can use TACO to implement
frameworks across physical, virtual and
Automated server onboarding cloud nodes, including GDPR and POPIA,
Use TACO to automate server onboarding, whether a physical server or a virtual CIS, PCI DSS, STIG and internal standards.
machine. Once you set the parameters for new servers, TACO automates their TACO audits different environments,
deployment and applies the required standards ensuring consistency in how reporting their compliance status to a
environments are deployed and configured. central dashboard, and you can apply
compliance and standards updates
Self-service and integrated tools manually or through automated
Administrators can use TACO’s rich tools to monitor and manage infrastructure estates. processes.
You can also continue using third-party tools - TACO will liaise with these tools and pull
their data into a single dashboard environment. Clear governance and risk
assessment
Automation capabilities A healthy, responsible and prepared
Using Obsidian’s extensive knowledge, TACO provides numerous playbooks and business needs healthy, responsible
automation profiles for infrastructure configuration and deployments. Our automation and prepared technology. But it’s very
capabilities establish elaborate process automation, such as detecting compliance time-consuming to ensure good IT
status, applying patches, testing, and managing approvals for updates. TACO has many governance, conduct risk assessments,
playbooks to cover requirements in modern IT environments. and communicate those statuses to the

EngineerIT | December 2022 | 17