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The latest News and Information on CyberSecurity for Applications, Services and Infrastructure, and related technologies.

From black box magic to automation transparency

The CFEngine policy analyzer is an awesome new service introduced in CFEngine 3.13. The policy analyzer allows you to quickly debug policies and inspect what is going on under hood of CFEngine. A known challenge with CFEngine, and most DSL based automation tools, relates to understanding what is actually going on during live operations. Many users view it as “black-box magic”. Unfortunately, the amount of magic and the size of the black box increases with the level of automation.

Using Cybersecurity as an MSP Sales Tool

I regularly speak with managed service providers (MSPs) and one of the biggest challenges I hear them share is selling the concept of managed services to prospects. Many small and medium-sized businesses have yet to move past the concept of break-fix—only paying an IT company to fix things when they break. They don’t fully appreciate the value of the proactive approach that is managed services.

Recapping the Top 3 Talks on Futuristic Machine Learning at Scale By the Bay 2018

As discussed in our previous post, we recently had the opportunity to present some interesting challenges and proposed directions for data science and machine learning (ML) at the 2018 Scale By the Bay conference. While the excellent talks and panels at the conference were too numerous to cover here, I wanted to briefly summarize three talks in particular that I found to represent some really interesting (to me) directions for ML on the java virtual machine (JVM).

Centralized Logging - Knowing When Less is More

A lot of firms collect massive amounts of data every day (up to billions of events) to improve their security efforts, enhance their business intelligence, and refine their marketing strategies. Their log storage drives are so big that some of them even brag about the size, to show their public and clients how advanced their technologies are.

The role of SIEM in PCI DSS compliance

Studies have shown a direct correlation between data breaches and non-compliance. This isn’t to say that compliant companies never get breached, but to reinforce the importance of incident detection and response. Businesses have begun to realize the devastating consequences of data breaches—their finances and reputation are at stake, so many have been taking steps over the last few years to comply with the PCI DSS. The main goal is often an emphasis on achieving continuous compliance.

Sumo Logic Experts Reveal Their Top Enterprise Tech and Security Predictions for 2019

We finally made it to another new year, and that means it’s time to reflect on the learnings from the previous year while also preparing for many new opportunities and challenges ahead. The enterprise tech and security industry didn’t seem to slow in 2018, so there’s no reason we would expect 2019 to be any different. So what will those “hot button” topics be this year?