Hybrid cloud brings you the best of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. But how does it stack up in terms of security and compliance? Two of the biggest vendors in the cloud space, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, have kept pace with one another in...
Data Engineering
Despite Being Second Fiddle, Azure Steadily Gains Market Share
Last time, we talked about why engineering loves AWS so much. Now we’re going to look through the other end of the telescope: Why does IT have such an affinity for Azure? Microsoft’s Cloud Market Share Is Growing While Azure has long played second fiddle in the cloud...
Engineering Inefficiency is the Enemy of Innovation
I was intrigued by the information and conclusions presented in OnShape’s recent report, “The State of Product Development and Hardware Design 2019.” However, I was not as surprised as they were to hear that the biggest problem in R&D is still complex processes,...
Clients + SPK Expertise And Skills = R&D Business Results (Q2 2018 Newsletter)
It's been SPK and Associates' privilege to support all our clients’ varied engineering and systems integration needs for over two decades. This quarterly newsletter is our way of signaling that we're fully aligned with their mission to rapidly innovate and improve...
How Azure Became the Second-Largest Cloud Platform
Azure first became associated with IT for one simple reason: It’s a Microsoft product. Since the majority of organizations are running some kind of Microsoft application (be it Windows or Office), it was an easy sell because of ease of integration. However, this alone...
Four Steps to Securing Your Company’s Medical Devices
Connected medical devices offer enormous opportunity for manufacturers and consumers alike. They also carry the burden of increased risk due to cybersecurity flaws. Think about the dangers of having your email or bank account hacked. Now consider the damage hacking a...
Multi-Cloud Is the Future of Infrastructure… For Now
Does this sound familiar? Your organization has settled into its cloud migration. You’re enjoying the increased security and resiliency. You feel like you’ve just climbed a mountain and you want to spend some time gazing out from the summit. Then you read about...
Solving CAD File Data Corruption By Looking Beyond the Obvious
One SPK client’s design engineering team was required to email CAD files to a technician to perform 3D printing. However, the CAD files were too large for regular email transmission. The designers manually converted each CAD file into a ZIP format for sending in one...
How to Best Recover your Infrastructure Systems in Case of Disaster
Every system administrator's worst nightmare is having a total disaster of their infrastructure systems. Disaster could take many forms, such as a natural disaster or even doing a physical move of a server and dropping the server, destroying it. The goal when disaster...
A Quick Start Guide to Installing Ceph
This seems to be the age of “Big Data”. Every sector seems to have a need for it -- from biotechs doing genome sequencing, to financial providers mining market data. For many, the ability to store massive amounts of structured or unstructured data is the key to...
Automatic Processing of Content on SolidWorks Workgroup PDM Server
One of the powerful features of a full enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) system is being able to post process content uploaded to it. For example, adding a watermark, or changing a revision of a document automatically. The idea behind Solidworks Workgroup...
How to Obtain Electric Commander Metrics for Use in a GWT Plugin
Developed by Electric Cloud, Electric Commander is an extremely versatile tool for enhancing and automating your organization’s software development build-test-deploy cycle. Commander makes it possible to eliminate unnecessary lag time between phases of the...