Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Any cybersecurity breach is damaging to individual companies. But when it becomes a supply chain attack, the results can be chaotic and widespread. While most businesses overlook the dangers of supply chain cyber attacks, hackers have not. Malicious actors are continuously looking for, and finding, new ways to invade company networks. With these looming threats, companies must know how to prevent supply chain attacks and find new means of securing against cybersecurity breaches.

Many US military, government or critical national infrastructure organisation workloads that require FIPS compliance are also required to be deployed in air-gapped environments to provide an extra layer of protection.

I was asked to write a pledge to help promote the importance of Safer Internet Day, which is taking place February 8. If you are not familiar with Safer Internet Day, it is a day dedicated to highlighting practical ways in which you can be involved in creating and maintaining a better online world. You can read more about it here. I took on this task and actually came up with two pledges: a personal and business one.

Today, anyone can contribute to some of the world’s most important software platforms and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, the Linux kernel or Python. They can do this because these platforms are open source, meaning they are collaboratively developed by global communities. What if we applied the same principles of democratization and free access to cybersecurity?

It takes only a glance at the daily headlines to see that cybercriminals are using increasingly sophisticated methods to breach cloud defenses and access sensitive data. The complexity of cloud frameworks makes it extraordinarily difficult to detect nefarious activities. In many cases, attackers lurk in systems for weeks or months before pulling the trigger.

Securing modern-day production systems is expensive and complex. Teams often need to implement extensive measures, such as secure coding practices, security testing, periodic vulnerability scans and penetration tests, and protections at the network edge. Even when organizations have the resources to deploy these solutions, they still struggle to keep pace with software teams, especially as they accelerate their release cycles and migrate to distributed systems and microservices.

CFEngine and Ansible are two complementary infrastructure management tools. Findings from our analysis show that they can be combined and used side by side with joint forces to handle all areas in the best possible way. Part of infrastructure management is hosts deployment, either when building a brand new infrastructure or when growing one by adding new hosts.

While MSPs have been making significant investments in security and offering services, it is a challenge to keep up with the frequency and evolving sophistication of today’s cybersecurity threats. Defense in Depth (DiD) is the foundation on which most MSPs have built a layered security approach for dealing with them.