Daily Tech Digest - December 30, 2024

Top Considerations To Keep In Mind When Designing Your Enterprise Observability Framework

Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring tools, offering a holistic approach that aggregates data from diverse sources to provide actionable insights. While Application Performance Monitoring (APM) once sufficed for tracking application health, the increasing complexity of distributed, multi-cloud environments has made it clear that a broader, more integrated strategy is essential. Modern observability frameworks now focus on real-time analytics, root cause identification, and proactive risk mitigation. ... Business optimization and cloud modernization often face resistance from teams and stakeholders accustomed to existing tools and workflows. To overcome this, it’s essential to clearly communicate the motivations behind adopting a new observability strategy. Aligning these motivations with improved customer experiences and demonstrable ROI helps build organizational buy-in. Stakeholders are more likely to support changes when the outcomes directly benefit customers and contribute to business success. ... Enterprise observability systems must manage vast volumes of data daily, enabling near real-time analysis to ensure system reliability and performance. While this task can be costly and complex, it is critical for maintaining operational stability and delivering seamless user experiences.


Blown the cybersecurity budget? Here are 7 ways cyber pros can save money

David Chaddock, managing director, cybersecurity, at digital services firm West Monroe, advises CISOs to start by ensuring or improving their cyber governance to “spread the accountability to all the teams responsible for securing the environment.” “Everyone likes to say that the CISO is responsible and accountable for security, but most times they don’t own the infrastructure they’re securing or the budget for doing the maintenance, they don’t have influence over the applications with the security vulnerabilities, and they don’t control the resources to do the security work,” he says. ... Torok, Cooper and others acknowledge that implementing more automation and AI capabilities requires an investment. However, they say the investments can deliver returns (in increased efficiencies as well as avoided new salary costs) that exceed the costs to buy, deploy and run those new security tools. ... Ulloa says he also saves money by avoiding auto-renewals on contracts – thereby ensuring he can negotiate with vendors before inking the next deal. He acknowledges missing one contract set on auto renew and got stuck with a 54% increase. “That’s why you have to have a close eye on those renewals,” he adds.


7 Key Data Center Security Trends to Watch in 2025

Historically, securing both types of environments in a unified way was challenging because cloud security tools worked differently from the on-prem security solutions designed for data centers, and vice versa. Hybrid cloud frameworks, however, are helping to change this. They offer a consistent way of enforcing access controls and monitoring for security anomalies across both public cloud environments and workloads hosted in private data centers. Building a hybrid cloud to bring consistency to security and other operations is not a totally new idea. ... Edge data centers can help to boost workload performance by locating applications and data closer to end-users. But they also present some unique security challenges, due especially to the difficulty of ensuring physical security for small data centers in areas that lack traditional physical security protections. Nonetheless, as businesses face greater and greater pressure to optimize performance, demand for edge data centers is likely to grow. This will likely lead to greater investment in security solutions for edge data centers. ... Traditionally, data center security strategies typically hinged on establishing a strong perimeter and relying on it to prevent unauthorized access to the facility. 


What we talk about when we talk about ‘humanness’

Civic is confident enough in its mission to know where to draw the line between people and agglomerations of data. It says that “personhood is an inalienable human right which should not be confused with our digital shadows, which ultimately are simply tools to express that personhood.” Yet, there are obvious cognitive shifts going on in how we as humans relate to machines and their algorithms, and define ourselves against them. In giving an example of how digital identity and digital humanness diverge, Civic notes “AI agents will have a digital identity and may execute actions on behalf of their owners, but themselves may not have a proof of personhood.” The implication is startling: algorithms are now understood to have identities, or to possess the ability to have them. The linguistic framework for how we define ourselves is no longer the exclusive property of organic beings. ... There is a paradox in making the simple fact of being human contingent on the very machines from which we must be differentiated. In a certain respect, asking someone to justify and prove their own fundamental understanding of reality is a kind of existential gaslighting, tugging at the basic notion that the real and the digital are separate realms.


Revolutionizing Oil & Gas: How IIoT and Edge Computing are Driving Real-Time Efficiency and Cutting Costs

Maintenance is a significant expense in oil and gas operations, but IIoT and edge computing are helping companies move from reactive maintenance to predictive maintenance models. By continuously monitoring the health of equipment through IIoT sensors, companies can predict failures before they happen, reducing costly unplanned shutdowns. ... In an industry where safety is paramount, IIoT and edge computing also play a critical role in mitigating risks to both personnel and the environment. Real-time environmental monitoring, such as gas leak detection or monitoring for unsafe temperature fluctuations, can prevent accidents and minimize the impact of any potential hazards. Consider the implementation of smart sensors that monitor methane leaks at offshore rigs. By analyzing this data at the edge, systems can instantly notify operators if any leaks exceed safe thresholds. This rapid response helps prevent harmful environmental damage and potential regulatory fines while also protecting workers’ safety. ... Scaling oil and gas operations while maintaining performance is often a challenge. However, IIoT and edge computing’s ability to decentralize data processing makes it easier for companies to scale up operations without overloading their central servers. 


Gain Relief with Strategic Secret Governance

Incorporating NHI management into cybersecurity strategy provides comprehensive control over cloud security. This approach enables businesses to extensively decrease the risk of security breaches and data leaks, creating a sense of relief in our increasingly digital age. With cloud services growing rapidly, the need for effective NHIs and secrets management is more critical than ever. A study by IDC predicts that by 2025, there will be a 3-fold increase in the data volumes in the digital universe, with 49% of this data residing in the cloud. NHI management is not limited to a single industry or department. It is applicable across financial services, healthcare, travel, DevOps, and SOC teams. Any organization working in the cloud can benefit from this strategic approach. As businesses continue to digitize, NHIs and secrets management become increasingly relevant. Adapting to effectively manage these elements can bring relief to businesses from the overwhelming task of cyber threats, offering a more secure, efficient, and compliant operational environment. ... The application of NHI management is not confined to singular industries or departments. It transcends multiple sectors, including healthcare, financial services, travel industries, and SOC teams. 


Five breakthroughs that make OpenAI’s o3 a turning point for AI — and one big challenge

OpenAI’s o3 model introduces a new capability called “program synthesis,” which enables it to dynamically combine things that it learned during pre-training—specific patterns, algorithms, or methods—into new configurations. These things might include mathematical operations, code snippets, or logical procedures that the model has encountered and generalized during its extensive training on diverse datasets. Most significantly, program synthesis allows o3 to address tasks it has never directly seen in training, such as solving advanced coding challenges or tackling novel logic puzzles that require reasoning beyond rote application of learned information. ... One of the most groundbreaking features of o3 is its ability to execute its own Chains of Thought (CoTs) as tools for adaptive problem-solving. Traditionally, CoTs have been used as step-by-step reasoning frameworks to solve specific problems. OpenAI’s o3 extends this concept by leveraging CoTs as reusable building blocks, allowing the model to approach novel challenges with greater adaptability. Over time, these CoTs become structured records of problem-solving strategies, akin to how humans document and refine their learning through experience. This ability demonstrates how o3 is pushing the frontier in adaptive reasoning.


Multitenant data management with TiDB

The foundation of TiDB’s architecture is its distributed storage layer, TiKV. TiKV is a transactional key-value storage engine that shards data into small chunks, each represented as a split. Each split is replicated across multiple nodes in the cluster using the Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data redundancy and fault tolerance. The sharding and resharding processes are handled automatically by TiKV, operating independently from the application layer. This automation eliminates the operational complexity of manual sharding—a critical advantage especially in complex, multitenant environments where manual data rebalancing would be cumbersome and error-prone. ... In a multitenant environment, where a single component failure could affect numerous tenants simultaneously, high availability is critical. TiDB’s distributed architecture directly addresses this challenge by minimizing the blast radius of potential failures. If one node fails, others take over, maintaining continuous service across all tenant workloads. This is especially important for business-critical applications where uptime is non-negotiable. TiDB’s distributed storage layer ensures data redundancy and fault tolerance by automatically replicating data across multiple nodes.


Deconstructing DevSecOps

Time and again I am reminded that there is a limit to how far collaboration can take a team. This can be because either another team has a limit to how much resources it is willing to allocate, or it is incapable of contributing regardless of its resources offered. This is often the case with cyber teams that haven't restructured or adapted the training of their personnel to support DevSecOps. To often these types are policy wonks that will happily redirect you to help desk instead of assisting anyone. Another huge problem is with tooling ecosystem itself. While DevOps has an embarrassment of riches in open source tooling, DevSecOps instead has an endless number of licensing fees awaiting. Worse yet, many of these tools are only designed to common security issues in code. This is still better than nothing but it is pretty underwhelming when you are responsible for remediating the shear number of redundant (or duplicate) findings that have no bearing. Once an organization begins to implement DevSecOps it can quickly spiral. This happens when the organization is unable to determine what is acceptable risk any longer. Once this happens any rapid prototyping capability will just not be allowed at this point.


Machine identities are the next big target for attackers

“Attackers are now actively exploring cloud native infrastructure,” said Kevin Bocek, Chief Innovation Officer at Venafi, a CyberArk Company. “A massive wave of cyberattacks has now hit cloud native infrastructure, impacting most modern application environments. To make matters worse, cybercriminals are deploying AI in various ways to gain unauthorized access and exploiting machine identities using service accounts on a growing scale. The volume, variety and velocity of machine identities are becoming an attacker’s dream.” ... “There is huge potential for AI to transform our world positively, but it needs to be protected,” Bocek continues. “Whether it’s an attacker sneaking in and corrupting or even stealing a model, a cybercriminal impersonating an AI to gain unauthorized access, or some new form of attack we have not even thought of, security teams need to be on the front foot. This is why a kill switch for AI – based on the unique identity of individual models being trained, deployed and run – is more critical than ever.” ... 83% think having multiple service accounts also creates a lot of added complexity, but most (91%) agree that service accounts make it easier to ensure that policies are uniformly defined and enforced across cloud native environments.



Quote for the day:

"Don't wait for the perfect moment take the moment and make it perfect." -- Aryn Kyle

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