Hey everyone. We’re excited to announce the release of Calico v3.23! Thanks to everyone in the community who contributed to the release. We could not have fitted this many improvements in without you. To view the detailed release notes, please visit us here. While we have many improvements in this release, here’s a brief overview of some of the larger features to be aware of.

Regardless of economic conditions, IT usually operates under an axiom no one in business ever likes to hear: “We have to do more with less.” Doing more with less is essentially the default position for IT, but when it comes to security operations, that position can have real consequences.

Over the last decade or so, we have seen organizations competing to rapidly launch products and new updates. This also often meant that information security lagged behind, as evinced by the fact that we have seen many companies facing major breaches and attacks over the last couple of years. The DevOps approach which focused on rapid development proved ineffective for robust security. This is where DevSecOps emerged. In this article, we explore the concept of DevSecOps and the top ten DevSecOps tools.

Why should you use Single Sign-On? It’s simple; one less password!

It’s 3pm on a Wednesday, and you’re really just done with the week already. You hear that “ping” from your Slack and know that you set notifications for direct messages only, which means, ugh, you have to pay attention to this one. It’s your boss, and she’s telling you to check your email. Then you see it, the dreaded audit documentation request. This will take you the rest of today and most of tomorrow.

The Internet of Things needs to be part of the overall corporate information security policy to prevent adversaries from using these devices as an entry point. There are several reasons why it’s critical for organizations to defend their IoT attack surface, most importantly being that IoT devices are powerful systems containing compute, storage, and networking that threat actors view as the easiest way to breach an organization or enable exploits.

Wondering how the pandemic affected your agency’s budget? Brandon Shopp answers this question and discusses how the pandemic impacted security and service delivery through budget allocations. Amid a rising tide of ransomware attacks against governments and schools nationwide accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, tech pros are prioritizing investments in core technologies to manage risk, including security and compliance, network infrastructure, and cloud computing.

Toil — endless, exhausting work that yields little value in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — is the scourge of security engineers everywhere. You end up with mountains of toil if you rely on manual effort to maintain cloud security. Your engineers spend a lot of time doing mundane jobs that don’t actually move the needle. Toil is detrimental to team morale because most technicians will become bored if they spend their days repeatedly solving the same problems.

Organizations must update their ransomware protection at the same pace that as the attackers changes their tactics. The ransomware scourge continues, with incidents hitting a U.S. record in the second quarter of 2021, as attackers expand into vertical industries and target critical infrastructure. Ransom demands have also been growing. According to IT Governance, the average decryption key rate from attackers is $140,000 yet many organizations end up paying much more than that.

Who would have thought software could rattle the White House? But a vulnerability in Log4J, a popular open source software project, exposed critical digital infrastructure to remote code execution attacks. This prompted the US Government to engage big tech, infosec professionals, and open source organizations to come together to help secure open source software.