“If you ain't first, you're last.” While that famous one-liner from Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) in the cult hit Talladega Nights is more joke than catchphrase, it hits home for those of us in the world of DevOps and Observability. Faster is better. And in our technology-driven world of online transactions and complex environments, faster isn’t just better — it’s crucial.
Published in late 2020, the DoD Data Strategy emphasizes the importance of unlocking and operationalizing data-value from across its enterprise to support mission operations and maintain battlefield advantage. The strategy highlights seven goals and objectives that the DoD believes will align the DoD's Data Strategy with industry best practices.
When you’re operating a web application, the last thing you want to hear is “the site is down." Regardless of the reason, the fact that it is down is enough to cause anyone responsible for an app to break out into a sweat. As soon as you become aware of an issue, a clock starts ticking — literally, in some cases — to get the issue fixed. Minimizing this time between an issue occurring and its resolution is arguably the number one goal for any operations team.
Operational resilience is currently a hot topic in Financial Services, largely because of the impact that COVID has had on how customers interact with financial institutions. Almost overnight, the financial services industry had to cope with a large volume of transactions moving to digital channels at the same time as its employees were forced to set up home offices so that they could continue to work remotely.
For years, security practitioners have kicked and screamed about their reality. There are too many alerts to fully investigate and manually resolve every day. There is a massive talent shortage of qualified security professionals across the globe. Then couple that with analyst burnout and siloed security point-products. All of these factors are preventing security operation centers (SOCs) from operating at their full potential, with increased efficiency, performance and speed.
To say that the past year presented its fair share of cybersecurity challenges to the InfoSec community would be a drastic understatement. The rapid migration to remote work at scale left 80% of CIOs unprepared, and SecOps teams struggled to confront the evolving threat landscape with disparate toolkits and skill sets. Not to mention that as more organizations shifted to hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale, cloud complexity (and cloud-based threats) skyrocketed.
We at Splunk know that data drives better decisions. We see this with customers, and we live it every day in our own operations within Splunk. Running large cloud services across multiple cloud providers, we have to manage data policies and data processing needs against an increasing set of use cases, as well as the backdrop of regulatory, privacy and security frameworks.
The ongoing news of massive cyberattacks on manufacturing and energy companies has been a wake-up call. Operational Technology (OT) Security had not been on the radar of many CISOs and plant managers until they got hit. After reacting in a defensive mode last year it is time to step up with a proactive security strategy including OT. Secure Factory by Splunk helps manufacturing companies better understand and address their unique security challenges.
As my colleague, Tim Frank, wrote about recently in his blog post, "The Department of Defense Data Strategy: An Important Start," in late 2020 the Department of Defense (DoD) released its new Data Strategy — providing focus and direction for the Department’s efforts to become data-centric at all levels of its enterprise.
As organizations increase their cloud footprints, it becomes more and more important to implement access control monitoring for as many resources as possible. In previous playbooks, we have shown examples of AWS and Azure account monitoring, but the series would not be complete without also supporting Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
