Transcript

Alicia: Hello everybody, thank you for joining us today, my name is Alicia Kay, I am the Social Media Analyst here at VM Racks, which is an MSSP specializing in HIPAA compliant cloud solutions, and here we have Josh, the Automation Engineer. So can you tell us a little bit about the importance of automation in a HIPPA environment?

Josh: Yeah! So automation is really important because it takes out human error. In a previous video we touched on how we use automation during new customer deployments, and that’s important because there’s a lot of  moving parts and different steps, and automation can ensure that’s done reliably each time. Something else that we would do is we have scripts that set permissions for apache web servers. This is important because developers might change permissions while they’re developing – that’s okay until it’s in production, and once it’s in production, you want things conforming to best practice and our automation ensures that happens, it ensures directories don’t get missed, and everyone’s happy.

Alicia: Have you noticed that the numbers of errors have gone down since you started really implementing the automation here at VM Racks? 

Josh: Yeah, to speak to the last point I made about the script about apache permissions, we used to have developers come to us all the time about permissions, that they were having problems, or we would be reaching out to them because they had permissions that were too lax and we needed to enforce them. With the automation that runs regularly, everyone’s on the same page, the permissions are always correct, so developers contact us less, and we have to reach out to them less.

Alicia: Okay awesome, thank you Josh! Thank you for watching and let us know if you have any questions.