The Internet of Things (IoT) has long since made its way out of pure technology showcases and into productive use in mid-sized companies. Machines, equipment, and buildings now continuously deliver data – but the real challenge no longer lies in capturing the data, but in processing and integrating it meaningfully.
Microsoft Entra ID – still known to many as Azure Active Directory – is already in use at most companies and reliably manages user accounts, groups, and login access to M365 services. But herein lies a common misconception: a directory service alone is not yet Identity & Access Management. IAM begins where the pure administration of accounts ends – at the question of who holds which permission and why, how long it remains valid, and who reviews it regularly.
For a long time, the firewall was seen as a castle wall: whoever was inside the company network was trusted – whoever was outside had to stay outside. Home office, cloud applications, and BYOD have long since made this wall porous. The classic network perimeter effectively no longer exists; the endpoint has become the new security boundary. This is exactly where Zero Trust comes in: no device, no user, and no process is automatically classified as trustworthy – every request is verified, regardless of where it comes from.
Most AI assistants deployed in enterprises today follow a simple pattern: a request comes in, a response goes out — and with the next chat, everything starts over from scratch. Hermes Agent, an open-source project from Nous Research, breaks with this pattern. Rather than running as a wrapper around a cloud API, Hermes installs itself persistently on your own server, retains context across sessions, and builds up a growing repertoire of reusable capabilities over time. For companies seriously evaluating local AI agents – as already described in our post on Ollama – this deserves a closer look.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has long since made its way out of pure technology showcases and into productive use in mid-sized companies. Machines, equipment, and buildings now continuously deliver data – but the real challenge no longer lies in capturing the data, but in processing and integrating it meaningfully.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is often perceived as a topic for large tech corporations – with massive cloud environments and dedicated DevOps teams. Yet mid-sized companies in particular benefit significantly from automated infrastructure management, often with a manageable entry effort.
Kubernetes is now considered the quasi-standard for orchestrating containerized applications. For many mid-sized IT departments, however, the technology remains a mystery – there’s often a noticeable gap of uncertainty between the hype and the real benefit. It’s worth taking a look at the fundamentals before an implementation is planned.