Make Time to Learn from the Free Microsoft Security Assessment Tool

Today I discovered the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool.  Although the tool came out nearly three years ago I still discovered it to be very useful in helping you to identify the security areas in which your organization or software development shop may be weakest.  It also provides a lot of links and useful recommendations to assist you with improving security.  Security should be near the front of every developer’s mind as the world moves toward cyberattacks that are increasingly more damaging to businesses and people.

Download the free tool here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=12273

Expect to spend 30 to 90 minutes answering the questions.   You must first answer all the Business Profile Assessment questions, then you can move to the more interesting “Defense In Depth” assessment.  Follow that with generating a report of the results and if you’d like, posting your results to Microsoft and see how you compare to other organizations.

 

 

 

SP_WhoIsActive is a Superior Alternative to sp_who on SQL Server

I recently learned about the sp_WhoIsActive stored procedure written and maintained primarily by Adam Mechanic.  For DBAs like myself who have always wanted something better than sp_who and sp_who2 to diagnose the active connections on your SQL Server, this is a tool for you.  You can download it at http://sqlblog.com/files/default.aspx and you can learn all about it through Adam’s many blog posts.  I recommend starting with this one: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/archive/2011/04/05/less-data-is-more-data-a-month-of-monitoring-part-5-of-30.aspx

Find more tool gems like this at http://tinyurl.com/ITPortals