RESEARCH

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Helping Different Companies With Information Management

Procurement Efficiency with the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace

March 30, 2023

In this benchmark, we set out to test the value of the marketplace.

We used the marketplace to buy and deploy three well-known products and contrasted that experience with buying each service separately. We selected a public cloud cost-saving solution provided as a service, an event streaming platform, and an application delivery solution frequently used for its load balancing and web firewall capabilities.

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Security Information and Event Management: A MITRE ATT&CK Framework Competitive Evaluation

February 4, 2023

We tested four SIEM products in this report: Micro Focus ArcSight, Splunk Enterprise Security, IBM QRadar, and Microsoft Sentinel. Micro Focus ArcSight and Splunk Enterprise Security both excelled in detecting and logging the battery of attacks, each scoring 10 out of 10 in our series. IBM QRadar failed to catch many of the attacks in our tests and fell short of Micro Focus and Splunk in the quality of results presentation. Finally, we included in our evaluation Microsoft Sentinel, which at the time of this testing was equipped with a pre-release implementation of the MITRE ATT&CK framework. While we provide a hands-on assessment of the Sentinel product in this report, the tool did not produce usable results in our detection tests and therefore was not included in that portion of our evaluation.

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SQL Transaction Processing and Analytic Performance Price-Performance Testing: Microsoft SQL Server Evaluation: Azure vs. Amazon Web Services

February 4, 2023

This report outlines the results from two Field Tests (one transactional and the other analytic) derived from the industry-standard TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E) and TPC Benchmark™ H (TPC-H) to compare two IaaS cloud database offerings.

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Dealing with Data System Complexity in Your Applications

December 27, 2022

In conventional information architectures, enterprise needs requires two different database technologies: online transactional processing (OLTP) database management systems (DBMS) to handle transactional workloads and online analytical processing (OLAP) DBMS to perform analytics and reporting. Data types also drive multiple technologies since many databases specialize in types like time series, geospatial, graph, JSON, etc. If there is a single database that can be used to avoid the overhead, it is worthwhile to look into that database for complete application management.

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Advantages of DataStax Astra Streaming for JMS Applications

December 27, 2022

Competitive markets demand rapid, well-informed decision-making to succeed. In response, enterprises are building fast and scalable data infrastructures to fuel time-sensitive decisions, provide rich customer experiences enable better business efficiencies, and gain a competitive edge. In our comparative study, we used the Starlight for JMS feature included in DataStax Astra Streaming along with self-managed open-source Apache ActiveMQ Artemis JMS instances. We found several notable differences and benefits for modernizing a JMS-based data streaming stack.

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ABAC vs RBAC: The Advantage of Attribute-Based Access Control over Role-Based Access Control

December 27, 2022

Data security has become an undeniable part of the technology stack for modern applications. No longer an afterthought, protecting application assets—namely data—against cybercriminal activities, insider threats, and basic human negligence needs to happen early and often during the application development cycle and beyond. This benchmark report captures the number of policy changes required to manage ever-evolving data security policies seen in a modern data-driven enterprise. The more policy changes required, the more likely a required change will not take place or an error is made when implementing the change. With this study, we show the impacts of data security governance policy management.

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CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale Benchmark Report: Log Management and Analytics Platform

December 27, 2022

Real-time observability and enterprise systems monitoring have become critical functions in information technology organizations globally. As organizations continue to digitize and automate key functions, they are introducing more complex systems, hypervisors, virtual machines, Kubernetes, devices, and applications—all of which are generating more log and event data. While the amount of usable log data is growing, there is not an attendant growth in the tools, skilled professionals, and other resources to capture, manage, and analyze this complexity.

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Cloud Parallel File Systems

November 25, 2022

We benchmarked the usability, effort, and performance of the WEKA Data Platform against Amazon FSx for Lustre on AWS. In this hands-on benchmark, we found that WEKA provided comparable or superior usability and outperformed FSx for Lustre at similar capacities by up to 300% or more. On some of our tests, WekaFS IO latency was less than 30% that of FSx for Lustre. Our usability tests also found WEKA to be a mature and easily deployed and operated solution in AWS specifically.

Get the report here (wall).

Managing Microsoft Azure Arc-Enabled Infrastructure from the Azure Portal

November 25, 2022

An Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure is a cloud infrastructure that is managed and monitored by Microsoft Azure. It includes features such as Azure Resource Manager, Azure Monitor, and Azure Security Center. The Azure portal is a web-based management tool that provides a unified experience for managing all Azure resources. The Azure portal allows you to create, manage, and monitor Azure resources in a single, unified console. Many are managing their Microsoft Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure from an Azure portal.

Get the report here (wall).

High-Performance Web Application Firewall Testing

November 25, 2022

This report focuses on web application security mechanisms deployed in the cloud and closer to your apps. The cloud enables enterprises to rapidly differentiate and innovate with microservices and allows microservice endpoints to be cloned and scaled in a matter of minutes. It reviews F5 NGINX App Protect WAF vs. AWS WAF, Azure Web Application Firewall, and Cloudflare WAF.

Get the report here (wall).