Karen Lopez shows how IT pros can go beyond monitoring with AI-powered analytics to spot threats before they become breaches. From tracking encryption drift to investigating off-hours data access, here are five practical moves you can make today.
Nine months after its release, Windows Server 2025 is proving Microsoft hasn’t lost focus on on-prem. From GPU live migration to VMware alternatives, WAC upgrades, hotpatching and more, our IT pro and 1-person SOC from Down Under explains in exhaustive detail what’s new--and what’s next.
- By Paul Schnackenburg
- 07/28/2025
Big Tech is pouring billions into AI, but at what cost? Microsoft, AWS, and Google are ramping up infrastructure spend -- while cutting thousands of jobs. Are layoffs, some possibly attributed to AI replacements, quietly fueling the AI boom?
Ever since VMware sold its End User Computing business, VMware has effectively excluded EUC sessions from VMware Explore, its annual conference. says Tom Fenton, who as a result has been searching for a conference to replace it.
Our "one-person SOC" from Down Under, Paul Schnackenburg -- definiely not a dev -- tuned into the dev-heavy Microsoft Build 2025 conference and walked away with valuable insights for IT teams. From Copilot Studio to local AI agents and post-quantum cryptography, his takeaway? Even if you're not coding, there's plenty to unpack in the agentic AI wave.
- By Paul Schnackenburg
- 06/30/2025
It was introduced at VMware Explore last year as a unified platform designed to integrate all their enterprise tools to manage private and public clouds seamlessly, from a single interface.
The VMware Explore site is now live, presenting its reasons for attending the event. Tom Fenton has his own reasons for attending, some of which align with theirs, while others do not.
Paul Schnackenburg, working in the IT trenches every day as a 1-person SoC, looks at how the cybersecurity kill chain is evolving in the SaaS era, where identity is the new perimeter and attackers exploit cloud app integrations, SSO, and OAuth to gain and maintain access.
- By Paul Schnackenburg
- 05/27/2025
Our 1-person SOC from Down Under thinks Security Copilot is the new shiny for Microsoft and is worried they'll add so many features to it that they'll forget about those who can't afford it and who rely on non-Security Copilot features, thus missing out.
- By Paul Schnackenburg
- 05/02/2025
Karen Lopez (@datachick) breaks down modern disaster recovery with a restore-first mindset, immutable storage, and dark data awareness.
In today's crowded AI landscape, organizations looking to leverage AI models are faced with an overwhelming number of options. But how to choose?
After writing about Orka Desktop, Tom Fenton turns his attention to the company behind it, MacStadium, and its other wares in the macOS virtualization landscape.
We're going to be seeing more of these attacks, says our one-man SOC from Down Under, who explains how he uses Zero Trust and phishing-resistant MFA to protect his clients.
- By Paul Schnackenburg
- 04/07/2025
It's time for spring cleaning, including your enterprise data stores, says data expert Joey D'Antoni, who offers front-line data-hygiene advice straight from the IT trenches.
With a new Audio Overviews feature announced Monday, Google's Gemini AI app can now create a professional-looking Deep Research report and turn it into a professional-sounding two-person AI podcast discussion in minutes, all for free.
"So work with your partners to understand, what do they have, what do they recommend, what do they use so that then you're able to leverage those different tools to help figure out how can you get your arms around all this unstructured data. And the vendors should love having that opportunity to have that conversation."
Paul Schnackenburg looks at Microsoft's entry in the Secure Services Edge (SSE) market, Global Secure Access (GSA), and the different flavors of it, Internet Access and Private Access. Another buzzword for this kind of technology is Zero Trust Network Access, ZTNA.
- By Paul Schnackenburg
- 02/26/2025
A self-described "one-person Security Operations Center" deeply invested in Microsoft-centric security imparts commonsense advice for different target groups: IT pros, developers and end users.
- By Paul Schnackenburg
- 01/28/2025
After introducing the new device, Tom Fenton explores the Pi 500's hardware specs more thoroughly and discusses its usefulness as a home and office computer.
The Raspberry Pi 500 integrates a Pi computer into a full-sized keyboard, offering a compact computing platform, says Tom Fenton in his first look.