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A semiconductor icon depicting IT hardware

Hardware

Eoin Higgins

itbrew.com

You’ve been tasked to look for new hardware, and cost is a priority. There’s the potential for buying recycled equipment, but you’re wary—who knows if the previous owner properly wiped the device, or, more worryingly, if it’s still accessible from the outside?

Those concerns are part of the calculation IT teams need to make when looking for replacement hardware. As Rapid7 Principal Security Research of IoT Deral Heiland told IT Brew, it comes down to firmware: how it’s managed on the devices and whether the hardware has been sufficiently cleaned of prior data.

“If you’re buying network infrastructure gear, you can usually come in, purchase it, flush everything, factory reset, put all new firmware on, all new passwords, accounts, everything, and you got a perfectly safe device,” Heiland said. “If there is a cloud or internet component to that, then you need to consider, ‘Can I properly flush that disconnect and ensure the device can’t be registered by somebody else after I’ve purchased it that would give them some level of access?’”

The possibility that something can slip is enough to bother security professionals who are 

. For David Redekop, founder of DNS and security firm ADAMnetworks, the concern isn’t just how the device has been decommissioned and cleaned, it’s whether it can actually do the job.

“You need a little bit more horsepower or maybe a little bit more storage, because the drives weren’t as big back then,” Redekop said. “But what you can do with that now is practically the same thing you can do with the brand new one, and so there’s huge economic value in buying used equipment for those that want to run a sustainable business and would like to go on-prem versus on the cloud. Huge, huge value.”

Replacing the firmware on used devices allows for removing data the purchaser doesn’t want; removing embedded data is a chance to ensure the hardware is safe, no matter where you get it from. You don’t want another user, maybe half the country away, being able to access your “new” device, in other words. But for most branded tech, even when it’s used, that’s not an issue—nonetheless, the risk isn’t zero.

Doing a risk assessment is what anyone buying used hardware needs to keep in mind. There’s always the possibility that recycled devices could be used by malicious actors to infiltrate the systems of the buyer, but the likelihood of that happening is minimal unless you’re the specific target.

“If you’re really, really paranoid about security, then obviously buying new stuff is the way to go,” Heiland said. “If you’re fine with a little bit of risk, even if it’s very minimal, then buying on the secondary market may have some real value.”

Cost is often a motivating concern, and that gives the chance to compare and contrast new and used devices. While the newer hardware may have a higher upfront cost, used devices often need the aforementioned extensive patching and wiping, making it a wash. But supply chain uncertainty could change the calculation, offering attackers another way in by alteration between the factory and the user.

Redekop called it “buyer dependent, buyer beware.” It comes down to making the right decision for the specific user, much like a used car.

“If you know what you’re doing, buy it used, because you’re going to get tremendous value,” Redekop said. “If you are a buyer that just needs to go through a tremendous amount of checks and validations, new is going to be the way to go. So, it really is going to vary quite broadly on when I would make a recommendation one or the other. There is no simple answer.”

Aerial view of trucks unloading trash into a landfill

Buying recycled hardware has ups and downs—here’s what to look for

“If you’re really, really paranoid about security, then obviously buying new stuff is the way to go,” IoT researcher tells IT Brew. 

Hacks are a pain, and that’s the truth.

 on a train vulnerability based on remote-control linking got the railway industry to work on resolving a problem that had existed for years. Attackers could, hypothetically, infiltrate a packet that links the head and end of the train, and then control the brakes.

While the Association of American Railroads (AAR) was made aware of the vulnerability as early as 2012, the organization more or less ignored the danger for years, researcher Neil Smith 

 on X on July 11. According to Smith, who was working closely with the federal government’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) at the time, AAR declined to take action because the danger of the exploit had not been sufficiently proven.

Sounds bad. But hold on, said Hussain Virani, Dragos response command lead and principal incident responder. The danger might not be quite as dire as it sounds.

“Is this something which we can kind of put off to the side and not pay attention to? Certainly not,” Virani said. “It is important. After all, it involves the safety system. Does it deserve full-out panic? No, it doesn’t.”

In an emailed comment, AAR spokesperson Jessica Kahanek said that “every operational strategy, safety protocol, and piece of equipment is viewed as an opportunity to enhance performance and safety.”

“Accordingly, railroads have, and will continue to, put concerted effort into advancing next-generation end-of-train devices and the technical standards that govern them,” Kahanek wrote. “Next generation devices and standards have the potential to significantly improve communication between lead locomotives and the end of the train, securely enhance reliability, and streamline operations.”

Any unexpected braking would be noticed and acted upon by the conductor, Virani continued, so while there is a danger the actual effects are unlikely to be life-threatening. The human element is helpful, putting people in the process. Plus trains have a system called Positive Train Control, a technology that prevents accidents.

“There’s this overarching safety system in place to mitigate against a system like an end-of-train device failing,” Virani said.

Impacts of the potential exploit go further than the trains and the AAR. Houbing Herbert Song, an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers fellow, told IT Brew that he sees the AAR’s inaction as symptomatic of the way the transportation industry as a whole addresses security concerns.

“The infrastructure is very old, so a lot of people don’t care about the cybersecurity issues here,” Song said. “This problem, this issue, is one vulnerability that has existed for many years.”

A patch for the problem is expected in 2027, 

. That’s a slow fix that could appear to indicate the flaw isn’t a major priority—but, Fortinet Head of Cyber Policy and Global Field CISO Jim Richberg said, the reality is more that in the OT space, security is often a distant third, after safety and reliability. IT security considerations and processes are simply not the first priority for this space, and transportation is no different.

“We’re always going to be playing catch-up,” Richberg said.

In order to manage the threat going forward, Song said, defenders will need to adjust how they approach security as a whole. Transportation isn’t fundamentally different from other sectors of the tech space, though it’s often treated as such; understanding it as a part of the IT security framework—something that experts have called on IoT to do 

“The perspective is to treat transportation infrastructure as a cyber, physical, human system—a social, technical ecosystem,” Song said.

Like most OT-capable infrastructure, the transportation industry moves slowly and solutions are cost-dependent. Virani said that the hard realities of specific maintenance windows and mitigated controls allow for repair, but not on an accelerated schedule.

“If we know this system is prone to a certain vulnerability, then we can put additional measures in place in order to prevent anything from happening, or at least to reduce the consequences,” Virani said.

The fix might not come for a few years, and it’s unlikely that security will become one of the top two priorities for the OT space. But for the train vulnerability, the fact there’s a patch at all is a sign of a positive change that Richberg hopes continues.

“At this point, something like 95% of organizations have got OT reporting up to the corporate CISO,” Richberg said. “They’re starting to say OT affects more than just the OT operating environment, it’s part of the whole business.”

a train with computer error messages overlaid

OT moves slow to handle threats, and transportation is no exception

“We’re always going to be playing catch-up,” longtime OT exec tells IT Brew.

Billy Hurley

As a fungal researcher, the University of Wisconsin–Madison PhD candidate analyzes the DNA of the microorganism’s 500 different strains, or genomes, preferably all at once. A program outputs a file that tells Pratt every single gene and its location.

A fungal genome has thousands of genes. The high-computational task, on her machine, would take 12 hours…per genome.

A management tool called HTCondor helps researchers like Pratt connect to powerful computers on campus to do hardware-heavy jobs. The open-source software, developed at UW–Madison’s Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC), has also received funding from orgs like the National Science Foundation.

University pros—and one software engineer who has worked with the computing scheduler for almost 20 years—shared with us why HTCondor helps with research needs.

“I can run analyses in parallel, and I don’t have to sit with my computer open for hours on end. I can just submit something, close my computer, go do whatever else I need to do, and then come back later when it’s done,” Pratt told us.

HTCondor, first installed as a production system in the UW–Madison Computer Sciences department in the 1990s, has now been put to work by almost 200 academic, government, and private-sector groups, according to 

 containing volunteered info. (There are even users in Antarctica. The “IceCube” experiment researchers use HTCondor as they search for subatomic particles in the South Pole.)

The map also cites 22 private-sector partners. According to Greg Thain, senior software engineer at the CHTC, the private sector “absolutely” uses high-throughput computing in production and not just for research. DreamWorks Animation, he wrote, uses the system to render the frames of their movies. (DreamWorks did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding if and how the company uses the tool.)

Institutions can limit computing capacity to their own campus hardware, as well as pull from an “

,” composed of thousands of cores contributed by sites all over the country.

It disappoints Thain when researchers prematurely limit the scope of their inquiry to what can be done on a laptop.

“Computers are cheap. They’re not free; they’re cheap. They’re widely available. We don’t ever want lack of access to computation when there are so many computers, in your office, in your building, in the world,” he said.

To run the fungi analysis, Pratt logs into the CHTC.

A “condor_q” line command allows Pratt to see jobs completed and jobs running. A “condor_submit” command points to the relevant submit file.

A submit file contains, essentially, the program that Pratt wants to run: components like GPU requirements, the executable (

), and text files that the executable requires. (Some command-line expertise is required, Pratt notes; she attended trainings and learned from the HTCondor team.)

Hardware is a precious commodity when dealing with the latest technologies, like large language models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this year shared on X how his company’s latest GenAI tool was “

” available GPUs, and Big Tech companies like 

 have dedicated major investments to provide data-center support to train and run their LLMs.

Institutions like the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign 

, too, and that means plenty of computers and a tool like HTCondor to schedule the jobs.

Users submit their tasks to HTCondor, and the management system queues them up based on scheduling policy and priority scheme, runs them, and informs the user of the result.

The tool tries to run a “fair share” of resources, Thain said; if you’ve used 5,000 CPU hours, you’ll move to the back of the line after your job is done. The resource providers, however, can influence the setup substantially, he added—maybe a physics department that’s paid for the machines gets primary access, or an astronomy team gets the computing at night.

The setup came in handy during Covid-19 lockdowns, according to Gianni Pezzarossi, computational system analyst for the Grainger College, given HTCondor’s handling of workloads across unused computers, like abandoned Linux lab machines after students left campus.

“We were able to utilize all these idle computers that were sitting in the computer labs,” he said.

A primary benefit of HTCondor is to help with resource contention within research groups, Pezzarossi told us. Before HTCondor, there wouldn’t be enough CPU to go around, he said, and jobs would be halted by the Linux Out of Memory Killer.

Following the campus-wide usage during Covid, Grainger began to offer individual research groups their own smaller clusters made up of only their research-group nodes. The school currently runs six of these smaller clusters.

Pratt, on June 20, had one project completed in the HTCondor queue and one currently running.

Five-hundred strains is still a big job, no matter who or what is handling it.

Credit: Brittany Holloway-Brown, Photos: Adobe Stock

For high-compute jobs, HTCondor matches hardware with researchers

University pros share how the tool saves them time and takes advantage of unused resources.

If there’s one thing people in the tech industry are talking about—other than AI—it’s data centers. The critical infrastructure is becoming even more important in an era where computing technology relies on information and developers are rapidly building out capacity.

Despite that increase in production, however, data centers are also 

 at a rapid rate. In large part, this is due to an increased reliance on the usage of offsite hyperscale data centers, which has resulted in the closure of on-premises sites. But with the rise of larger off-prem centers comes 

 could lead to a spate of decommissioning in the future.

Decommissioning involves migration of system data and workloads and wiping, or sanitizing, data on older hardware. Migration is a relatively simple process, F5 CTO of Government Solutions Bill Church said, because the risk involved 

“It’s almost inconceivable that we would design an application today that would not have some sort of fallback or backup capacity,” Church told IT Brew.

But overall, decommissioning is a procedure that carries with it no small amount of security risk, as NCC Group Senior Advisor and Director of Security Tim Rawlins told IT Brew. Hardware that’s been cleared of data often retains information.

“Time and time again, it’s been shown that if you go out onto eBay and buy second-hand computing equipment, there’s a very good chance that it hasn’t been properly wiped, that there is still data on that system,” Rawlins said.

It’s not cheap. Kiersten Todt, former CISA chief of staff and current president of communications firm Wondros, noted that the cost of decommissioning often starts with moving assets and data to the cloud. Transitioning to a new facility is frequently the reason for decommissioning; managing, minimizing, and mitigating costs are the priorities for organizations.

“As this data center boom continues, and as we’re seeing more of this—both from an energy perspective, but also physical—cloud first are easy to scale, and it helps to sync and create the efficiencies across them,” Todt said.

The process of decommissioning comes with other concerns. Energy and infrastructural hook-ups to the grid are frequently important, whether you’re seeing strict decommissioning or augmentation, Energy Exemplar CEO David Wilson told IT Brew. Scaling up existing sites that are operating on older generation technology is more frequently seen, meaning that when these sites are closed by one organization, another is only too happy to pick up the slack. That’s not unique.

“Typically, what we’re seeing in the US is…whenever a large load is disconnected from the grid, whether that’s a data center or an aluminum smelter or some other industrial process, there’s a list of candidates who are quite happy to pick up that load,” Wilson said.

Disconnecting the center from the grid is easier than connecting it. Energy research firm Rystad Energy found in February that in excess of 2 terawatts of potential projects are 

, but “historically, the approval rate for queued projects has hovered around 15%.”

Even if the centers are augmented, rather than being decommissioned outright, the infrastructure has a finite lifespan. Eventually the assets in the centers will become obsolete, and with the technology moving forward rapidly, the capacity and scale of existing facilities is often already behind the times.

“They just become uncompetitive because they’re sub-scale, and they will retire,” Wilson said.

Technician working on a large LED screen, connecting and adjusting cables for optimal performance and troubleshooting any issues

Decommissioning data centers is often necessary, but carries risk

“Time and time again, it’s been shown that if you go out onto eBay and buy second-hand computing equipment, there’s a very good chance that it hasn’t been properly wiped,” NCC Group exec says.

Brianna Monsanto

 whip out your backup redundancy strategy.

 or storage methods for data that allow for systems to remain operational in the event of a failure, are essential in an industry where data breaches, 

, and ransomware incidents remain a threat to business continuity. Jon Kuhn, SVP of products at Delinea, told IT Brew that recent disruptions such as the 

 have highlighted the importance of having redundancies in such events.

“That really caused a tremendous amount of damage due to the fact that it didn’t allow computers to reboot and I think there were very few people that saw that one coming, as wide-scale [as] it was,” Kuhn said.

Kuhn added that having adequate backup systems will remain “critical” for organizations as they continue to increase the amount of data in their systems.

“With video and audio content on the rise…you have a lot more to store and therefore, that’s going to continually be a problem as we get further on into the next 10 years,” he said.

IT Brew asked Kuhn and Kirkham IronTech CEO and founder Tom Kirkham how to craft a well-rounded redundancy strategy. Kirkham told IT Brew that businesses should have three components in their redundancy strategy: data restoration, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

Kirkham said there are different redundancies to consider for different purposes. Hard drives, for example, are an example of a fault-tolerant redundancy strategy for servers, he said.

“They can be configured in such a manner that if one disk fails…the data is still recoverable,” Kirkham said. “And in fact, if it’s done properly, the user won’t even know.”

At the data center level, Kirkham said redundancy should be considered for the power, heat, cooling, and internet service providers of a facility. He said cloned data centers, which he described as facilities with duplicated data centers, are an example of this type of redundancy strategy.

“The entire data center on one side is cloned over to the other one and they’re designed to be…hot swappable,” he said.

Kuhn said redundancy for account access is an overlooked area among businesses, a factor that some companies struggled with during the CrowdStrike incident.

“An approach for that might be to allow personal computers, then, access on a temporary basis. That might be what we call a break-glass account to get access to a specialized system in a time of need,” Kuhn said. “That’s really only used for emergencies.”

Kirkham said it is essential that businesses periodically test their different backup systems to ensure that they will work as needed in any given event.

“If you’re not testing it and improving it and looking at all your different backup time frames, and thinking about business continuity, you really don’t have a backup or redundancy,” Kirkham said. “You kind of have a wing and a prayer.”

Making the business case for pricier backup options. 

For IT leaders who need to plead their case for more premium backup equipment or services to stakeholders, Kuhn suggests that professionals showcase the impact downtime can have on their organization. Kirkham said downtime can be quantified as monetary productivity loss.

“How much downtime would be [for] one hour of your call center being offline, or your employees not being able to work?” Kuhn said. “And with that ROI in mind, you start to see where the cost of downtime actually far exceeds what protections you could put in place.”

Kuhn compared the need for enterprises to have 

“Would you drive without a spare tire to save a few dollars?” Kuhn said. “What would be the impact if you were on a lonely road in the middle of the desert when you don’t have a tire there?”

Five blue servers with arrows pointing to one another.

Why redundancy is required now more than ever

“With video and audio content on the rise…you have a lot more to store and therefore, that’s going to continually be a problem as we get further on into the next 10 years,” one expert says.

Caroline Nihill

The iPhone 4S, released in 2011, brought with it a virtual assistant that is still alive and kicking to this day: Siri. The device also signaled Apple’s eventual dominance over both personal and professional device markets, upending the mobile device market thanks to improved connectivity, processing power, and graphical capabilities.

 from Apple the day of the iPhone 4S’s launch in October, the company called the product, “the most amazing iPhone yet,” pointing to the device’s dual-core A5 chip for improved graphics (which had made its appearance previously in the iPad 2, according to 

 by Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Philip Schiller).

Amélie Koran, chief enterprise security architect for the Department of Interior at the time and self-proclaimed “Apple fan-girl,” told IT Brew that the multimedia capabilities of the iPhone was a big “sea change,” since Apple was known for iPods then—which were eventually rendered obsolete by the capabilities of the iPhone.

Koran was in charge of understanding the security risks and potential implications of government use of the iPhone 4S and other Apple devices, specifically for DOI.

“I always loved the usability of that over Android,” Koran said. “The idea of speech to text, or an assistant in some fashion or another, was just really freaking cool.”

They continued: “I was super excited about it, to be honest. I just realized it’s gonna be a management nightmare.”

In the product release announcement, Apple introduced the “intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.”

The company described Siri as understanding context, which allowed it to speak naturally when asked questions. Users could ask Siri if they needed to use an umbrella outside, and the assistant could pick up the conversational cues about weather.

Additionally, the tool at the time was capable of setting reminders, sending text messages, searching the internet, finding facts, performing complex calculations, and more.

Some, however, were underwhelmed by the natural language processor and speech recognition-powered tool.

Almost a month after the iPhone 4S launch, TechCrunch’s then-deputy editor, Jordan Crook, released a piece 

, stating that, “Siri isn’t perfect, and perfect is what I expected.”

Crook detailed that, “The disappointment can all be traced back to the hype, which began with Apple’s demo. I don’t blame Apple for this—I guess it’s just a product of success—but with each new capability introduced, hope grew.”

Siri also presented security concerns. Koran told IT Brew that in conversations with Apple about making the 4S friendly for professional use within the government, Siri had to be turned off for the time being, “Because we couldn’t get a straight answer out of Apple, how that was processed.”

Koran pointed to the device’s use of iCloud, which Apple stated in the release was a “breakthrough set of free cloud services that work with your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices.”

“The idea of everything’s [becoming] cloud based, everything’s being updated on demand, really forced a lot of organizations to change their risk and threat models,” Koran said. “So, for Siri, it was like, what’s being sent out to Apple and how are they processing it?”

Philip Schiller, Apple’s then-SVP of worldwide product marketing, said in the release that the 4S, with the iOS 5 model and iCloud, was, “a breakthrough combination that makes the iPhone 4S the best iPhone ever.”

 of the iPhone, said that the device’s camera, antenna, and processor were “minor” compared to the addition of Siri, and that “Siri is the reason people should buy this phone.”

Others focused their attention to the speed of the phone, instead.

While the iPhone 4S was, externally, almost identical to the previous iPhone 4,Schiller said, in his remarks, that the inside was brand new.

“[A5] is an Apple-designed chip that’s remarkable, it’s a dual-core processor, it delivers performance that’s up to twice as fast at CPU tasks,” Schiller said. “It’s also dual-core graphics, which means the graphics can be up to seven times faster than they were in the previous iPhone. This is going to help across all the kinds of applications you might use.”

“The one area we really see it screams are games,” Schiller said.

Eurogamer reported that Donald Mustard, chair entertainment creative director of Epic at the time, acknowledged that the company was working with Apple—of the A5 chip, he said that, “Having that much power in a device that small—really, there’s a lot we can do with it.”

“I’m still shocked that, with the iPhone 4S, I’m literally running around with a 1080p video camera in my pocket, with an eight megapixel camera, 64GB of hard drive space and an A5 chip with 512MB of memory,” Mustard told Eurogamer in 2011. “This is a really powerful computer, right?”

AppleInsider shared Eurogamer’s reporting, and iterated on the speed of the device, calling it the “fastest phone on the market.”

The A5 processor, according to Apple, allowed for “blazing fast performance and stunning graphics,” all while the battery life is preserved.

The benefits to having the iPhone as a device were agreed upon, and it reached the federal level, too.

Koran said that, during their time at DOI, an agency official had come back from a meeting at the White House and saw other officials using tablets and decided that instead of pen and paper, they wanted tech available for the agency.

There were, of course, security concerns to hammer out—Koran being the lead for DOI to figure out how the new device, along with others, could be implemented into workflows. They 

pointed to security concerns involving a lost device or being able to authenticate a user’s identity.

“There was the requirements for being able to authenticate to a government device at the time, [which] required multi-factor authentication,” Koran said.

While the government had verification cards at the time, “there was no such thing as derived credentials, which came a couple of years later,” using a soft certificate. Koran said that the problem at the time was trying to find ways to make multi-factor authentication work.

“We’re also looking at remote-wipe capabilities, that was also something new for iOS at the time, through the carriers to allow you to block or wipe a lost device,” Koran said.

Koran said that there were growing pains with iOS at the time, starting in 2011 and lasting until 2014.

“It was a lot of fun, but I got to explore how to do that in a large-scale environment,” Koran said. “It was an interesting time, just to see that level of innovation. Now when you get iOS, you get that new Android release, it’s not a big deal. It’s just like, oh, there’s a couple other features, there’s nothing blockbuster like there was back then.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at the event introducing the new iPhone 4s in 2011 featuring Siri.

How the iPhone 4S took the market by storm

Who doesn’t want to have a virtual assistant in their pocket? 

At IT-training school MyComputerCareer, Russ Munisteri, program chair, lead instructor, and former systems administrator, teaches IT and gets learners on a path to achieving certifications. 

 on the latest and greatest tech may not come in handy if your first employment gig has lots of old servers, hardware, and software.

“What happens if somebody gets hired with modern-day certifications, but they’re walking into a legacy network? It happens all the time, because of money, and budgets, and people don’t like change,” Munisteri told us. “IT certifications are great. They get your foot in the door. They really teach you all the foundations that you need out there. But once you get on the job, that’s when you have to start to learn that company’s network.”

Munisteri spoke with us about lessons learned as orgs move from old to new tech, and all the different ways to learn on the job.

These responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Do you have any examples from your career that demonstrate a situation involving legacy hardware and having to address it?

Servers and operating systems get older. So, a very common situation: running maybe a critical business app on an old Windows Server 2008. Over time, that server would start to crash now and then. As time builds, as the databases grow, the hardware cannot keep up with the software…We bought about six to eight months of time by adding some physical RAM, just to keep the server going so it didn’t crash. And then from there, we came up with a nice, detailed budget plan to move from legacy to something more modern.

What strategies speed up that kind of upgrade?

Research. A big part of being in information technology is your ability to troubleshoot and to research. Every company has their problems, right? But when it comes to specific situations, speak to tech support; tech support becomes your best friend. If your company is paying for a solid support contract with Microsoft or whomever, those folks become very close, because they know their stuff, and they’re there to guide you to move to the next level and follow industry best practice.

When cost is a factor in keeping some of this old hardware around, what upgrade strategies are helpful?

Proper planning is huge. Communication is huge. Having your three- to five-year plans is very, very important. You can’t always think about now when it comes to IT. Always think “the future.” Always think “growth.” If you need to have one server today to run a website, think about buying three servers.

What else is important for the IT professional to get right in an upgrade situation?

Try to have a separate testing environment for yourself. You can build that out on your own desktop, making sure you have different versions and specific technologies at hand in your testing environment; you can play around with it, so you can learn it. You never want to learn on any production environment, because that could be a bad day for everybody…Have some of that legacy equipment there. It doesn’t matter whether it’s virtualized or not. Just be familiarized with it, because you never know when that knowledge is going to surface, and you’re gonna have to use it. I can remember I had all different types of virtual machines installed on my desktop: [Windows] Server, 2003, 2008, 2012. I had it all so I knew how to work with them when I had to. A lot of it comes down to just self-learning.

Tech office environment with computers and chairs