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.
Companies today collect more data than ever before – from ERP systems, CRM applications, IoT sensors, and countless other sources. But data alone doesn’t create value. Only a properly operated data warehouse (DWH) turns the flood of data into a reliable basis for decision-making. In practice, however, it becomes clear: many DWH environments don’t suffer from a lack of tools, but from a lack of operational discipline.
Artificial intelligence has entered many enterprises first in creative and analytical areas — text generation, data analysis, code assistance. IT operations is now following with a force that is fundamentally changing how IT teams work. The combination of Agentic AI, large language models, and standardized integration protocols such as MCP makes it possible to automate routine tasks in IT operations that previously required mandatory human intervention.
Using AI language models via cloud services is quick and straightforward — but it comes with a fundamental problem: data leaves the corporate network. For many use cases — internal documents, customer data, source code, financial data — this is not an acceptable option. Local AI models provide a solution: the model runs on your own infrastructure, and no token leaves your own environment.