For DevOps and platform teams working with containers and Kubernetes, reducing downtime and improving security posture is crucial. A clear understanding of network topology, service interactions, and workload dependencies is required in cloud-native applications. This is essential for securing and optimizing the Kubernetes deployment and minimizing response time in the event of failure.

Are you familiar with CFEngines special variables? Probably you are familiar with sys variables like sys.fqhost (the fully qualified host name) and sys.policy_hub (the IP address of the machine the host is bootstrapped to) but I want to highlight a few other special variables you may not be so familiar with.

Everybody wants to have a more secure network – and everybody has various tools at their disposal to at least improve the security of their network. But which tool is the best for the job, and where do you start? The answer to this question is somewhat easier (and more structured) for organizations that have to adhere to compliance frameworks (ISO, CMMC, PCI, SOC, …), but a little harder for business that have no such requirements.

Even the largest global companies have challenges operating across multiple countries, moving and storing data and navigating multiple jurisdictions. In the globalised digital economy, data can flow across borders in milliseconds. But the legal frameworks governing this data vary widely from one jurisdiction to another. If the UK, Europe and the US are characterised by robust data protection laws, so are many other countries, including the Nordics, Australia, India and China, to name a few.

Discover the two simple steps you can take to secure your open source dependency chain. Open-source software (OSS) has become the backbone of modern software development, empowering developers with a vast ecosystem of freely available libraries, frameworks and tools. However, as the old saying goes, ‘there's no such thing as a free lunch’, and the over reliance on OS components introduces significant security risks that can compromise the entire software supply chain.

Security is and will always be a huge concern, and Platform Engineering is here to stay: so, what are some Platform Engineering best practices that can support your data security and privacy efforts? You’d be surprised where they overlap, and what you can learn about putting security and productivity together — we’ll explain.