Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A recent BBC article, “Weak password allowed hackers to sink a 158-year-old company,” outlined a serious security lapse. This case reinforces the message that we, at Teneo, advocate every day: true resilience comes from defense in depth, i.e. policy, product and process, not just tools at the edge. In a recent customer engagement, we discussed a transition from VPN to ZTNA. While ZTNA offers enhanced security including continual checking, improved segmentation and a minimized attack surface.

Every system needs observability. You need to know what your CPU, memory, disk, and network are doing, and maybe keep an eye on database query latency or Redis connection counts. But setting that up isn’t always simple. You start with a couple of shell scripts. Then come exporters. Then Prometheus. Before long, you’re managing scrape configs, tuning retention, and watching dashboards fail under load after two days of data.

Last Sunday, Alaska Airlines suffered a three-hour outage that led to more than 200 flight cancellations and disrupted 15,600 passengers. The culprit? “A critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure. When that happened, it impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of a ground stop to keep aircraft in position.”