Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

“Please enter the code we just sent you.” – most people have seen this message when logging into an online service. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is no longer reserved for banks or enterprises. It’s now common in email, social media, and shopping accounts. The idea is simple: in addition to a password, you need a second factor so that attackers can’t break in with just one piece of information. But what methods are actually used – and how secure are they really?

At Logz.io, we speak with hundreds of companies every month. One thing is consistent across the board: everyone ships logs. But the challenges are equally common: What are the best practices for logging? How do we reduce noise? How should we architect our logs to make them truly useful? The reality is that logs are noisy for everyone. The best time to standardize your logging practices is when you write your first line of code—though that rarely happens. The second-best time is now.

Incident management is a high-stakes function. IT operations teams and SRE teams may play different roles, but when a priority incident surfaces, it is often all-hands-on-deck to ensure it is resolved in minimal time. That’s because of the high impact of incidents-if not resolved in time, they can cascade and impact other IT systems, leading to downtime, business disruptions, monetary losses, and impacting brand value, compliance, and regulatory rules.

With Black Friday and the holiday season looming, IT teams everywhere are bracing themselves for what is, year after year, the most daunting stress test of your entire service delivery chain. Under relentless peak demand, every link in your digital experience is scrutinized by customers whose tolerance for friction is at an all-time low. It’s not just about uptime, monitoring dashboards, or technical metrics.

In any type of software that involves the movement of data or information, there is a pressing need to make the passage of data secure. One way of achieving this is by authentication. You must have experience authenticating API calls or other data streams. In modern systems, where even a small mishap can wreak havoc and you might wake up to a $$$ bill the next day, we should do whatever is within our capacity to secure our systems.