Using Orca: A Summary Orca is a unified application release and configuration automation platform that delivers 1) Central, Secure Control & Compliance Enforcement 2) Intelligent Workflow Automation of Linux and Windows ecosystems 3) Application Ecosystem Modeling & Visibility and 4) Audit-ready & Reporting. For more information on How Orca Works, please view our Orca product sheet and whitepapers or request a demo overview. 1) Central, Secure Change Control & Compliance Enforcement Orca inventories...
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Comparing Multi-step Scripting with Drag & Drop Deployments When it comes to deploying changes throughout your enterprise-scale, Linux and Windows application environment, there is Scripting-Centric “Automation”…and there is Intelligent Workflow Automation. Puppet, Chef and Orca are all used to maintain desired state and deploy routine configuration changes. But how they manage configurations and deploy those changes is very different. Puppet and Chef use scripting-centric automation while...
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Modeling Your Application Ecosystem Ecosystem Modeling for Visibility & Compliance Enforcement Modeling your application ecosystem (including related applications, databases, middleware and servers in mixed Linux-Windows environments) is a powerful way to create intuitive birds-eye views of your environment as well as granular views of the full stack configurations that tie your infrastructure together - physical, virtual and cloud. Due to limited choices many IT organizations resort...
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MenuNEW! Announcing Unified Application Release AND Configuration Management In today’s world of "“automate all the things"” we hear a lot of questions about the difference between application configuration management and application release automation solutions. We understand the confusion between these related but different concepts and at Orca, we love to simplify things. So here goes... Most Application Release Automation is limited in scope Whether you call it application...
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5 Steps for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday Readiness Ho. Ho. Ho. It’s that time of year again. Seriously. It is. It’s too late for April Fools but it’s definitely not too early for ecommerce holiday readiness planning. In fact now is the perfect time to get your ecommerce house in order well before the planned lockdowns of your critical web based applications. Balance is...
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NEW White Paper: Achieving and Maintaining PCI Compliance with Centralized, Automated Change Control Enhance Security with DevOps Change Control Devops teams value fast-moving, efficient releases, updates and improvements. Security teams value caution and analysis. So the topic of "DevOps Security" is a timely one. A few things are already clear: DevOps Security cannot simply be an add-on. If only it were that simple. No silver bullets....
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NEW White Paper: Achieving and Maintaining PCI Compliance with Centralized, Automated Application and Middleware Change Control How to Win at Compliance Reporting and Compliance Audits In IT, it’s hard enough satisfying your customers, colleagues, calendars and bosses with the software that you build and operate. But signing up for a life in IT should not mean that you signed up for a never ending root...
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(Looking for our ROI tool? Click here.) Sometimes you just ‘get it’. When you see and experience a true DevOps tool, you quickly and intuitively understand the savings in time and hassle that come from using it. Sometimes though it can be difficult to quantify the value of those savings and other benefits to colleagues, managers and finance people who have not used the tool or very possibly may not even understand...
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When we talk to systems administrators and other IT leaders about what they expect from their management solutions, we tend to hear a few common themes – and one those themes is “Control”. Controlling when, how and where changes are promoted is central to Orca. But that is not quite enough. We also know that you need to control who can view and manage changes....
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What about agentless configuration management (CM)? First impressions can be lasting impressions We have found that the arguments against agents are usually related to really bad experiences with really poorly written agents. In many cases companies develop agents without really considering what the right tool for the job is. That means you wind up with a Java based agent that brings along with it a massive runtime...
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Configuration change management is difficult enough. But planning configurations, coordinating personnel, using proper technologies and scheduling them within tight windows just seem to complicate an already complex task. What would make it better? Scheduling configuration changes, blackout dates and maintenance windows within your existing calendar system More than 2/3 of IT professionals preferred a tool that managed upcoming configuration dates, blackout dates and maintenance windows. Coordinating your...
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Drift Happens Configuration drift is a widely experienced problem felt by most, if not all IT departments. While there are a variety of causes of configuration drift, the degree of impact can vary from merely annoying to catastrophic. It usually plays out like this: Your team is rolling out a new web based application. Everyone is fired up because it works great in Dev, and...
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