Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Business services firms are built on people’s time, judgment, and credibility. When a consultant loses half an hour before a client workshop, a legal team is stuck waiting for a document system, or a service delivery group has to move conversations elsewhere because collaboration tools are unreliable, it may not register as a major IT event. It still changes the economics of the work, because skilled time is being spent compensating for the environment instead of serving the client.

In 1846, Britain poured roughly 7% of its national income into railways, proportionally about three times what the U.S. spends on AI infrastructure today. The technology delivered everything it promised, and a generation of investors still lost their shirts. What sorted the winners from the wreckage wasn't conviction about the technology; it was whether ROI was measured or asserted. The man who fixed that problem gave his name to the S&P 500.

When engineering teams evaluate AI agents, the first questions are usually about capability. Which model performs best? How much faster can it write code? What's the return on investment? Security, if it enters the conversation at all, tends to come later. Patrick Dawkins, Principal Software Engineer at Upsun, thinks that's backward. Over the past year, he's been building the infrastructure that enables AI agents to operate safely within engineering teams.

Most IT operations teams cannot say how much of the MITRE ATT&CK framework they already cover. The framework gets explained in the language of threat hunting and red teams. The parts that belong to infrastructure work are easy to miss. And then, coverage questions get answered with a guess. The mismatch costs time on both sides. Security asks for a coverage answer that ops has no clean way to produce. Yet the controls that stop a large share of those techniques already sit with your team.

What do you say when an auditor asks for evidence that your security controls hold, and all you can produce is a scan report from last month? A scan lists weaknesses. It says nothing about whether an attacker could chain three of them together and reach the customer database. Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing answer two different questions about the same environment. The first asks what is exposed right now. The second asks what someone with intent and skill could do with that exposure.

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is rapidly growing in popularity as modern way to deliver virtual desktops and apps to users, with Azure providing the infrastructure as alternative to on-prem VDI environments. As organizations expand their use of AVD in Azure, monitoring becomes critical.