Daily Tech Digest - August 15, 2024

Better Cloud Security Means Getting Back to Basics

Securing the cloud isn’t rocket science – it just requires a little extra knowledge. While it’s tempting to think of the cloud as a new frontier in computing (and, in some ways, it is), cloud security solutions have been around for almost as long as the cloud itself. The trouble is that most organizations don’t know how they should think about cloud security in the first place. ... A good starting point for many organizations is simply evaluating how effective their existing cloud security is. It isn’t enough to implement security solutions – even if they’re the right solutions. It’s also important to know that they are functioning as intended. Today’s organizations have more testing and validation tools at their fingertips than ever, and conducting breach and attack simulation, automated red teaming, and other exercises can lay bare where vulnerabilities and inefficiencies exist. Recent testing reveals that the basic security suites offered by the leading cloud providers are not enough to detect all – or even most – attack activity, highlighting the areas where organizations need to implement new protections and providing insight into what additional solutions may be necessary.


Cloud Waste Management: How to Optimize Your Cloud Resources

To better understand cloud waste, we need to understand the iron triangle of project management, which states that there is always a tradeoff between speed, quality, and cost. If you want to deliver a quality product/feature quickly, it will cost you more. Businesses are always trying to innovate and deliver continuous value to their customers. Often, it means putting pressure on the delivery teams to improve time to market. As an effect, there is the over provisioned capacity of resources; multiple resources that were provisioned to validate theory or concept were not deleted as the teams moved on either delivering the accepted solutions or to another project assignment. This is one of the major factors of cloud waste. ... Since you pay for each resource provisioned in the cloud, managing cloud waste becomes critical, as it directly impacts your business’s bottom line. CFOs and finance teams struggle to manage the forecast and budget for cloud spend as they never know what capacity is wasted in the cloud, and there is no good way to review it regularly.


Campus NaaS: Transforming Enterprise Networking

The flexibility of the NaaS model allows businesses to experiment with new technologies and use cases without the risk of large, upfront investments in hardware and expertise. This is particularly valuable as emerging technologies like AI and edge computing become more prevalent in enterprise environments. ... The potential benefits of Campus NaaS are significant and organizations must carefully evaluate potential NaaS providers. Standards-based solutions ensure interoperability between different NaaS components and service providers allowing businesses to seamlessly integrate NaaS solutions from various vendors without compatibility issues. Security capabilities, and long-term roadmaps should also be considered. Campus NaaS is poised to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of enterprise networking, enabling businesses to build the agile, high-performance foundations needed to thrive in an increasingly digital world. As the technology continues to evolve and mature, we can expect to see even more innovative use cases and deployment models emerge, further cementing the role of Campus NaaS as a cornerstone of modern enterprise IT strategy. 


Applying Security Everywhere – How to Prioritise Risks Across Multiple Platforms

For IT architects and security teams, the joint challenge here is actually one of the oldest ones in IT – knowing what you have. Getting an accurate inventory of all your software assets and components is a hard task on one platform, let alone across internal datacenter deployments, web applications, public cloud implementations and modern cloud-native applications. Keeping this inventory up to date is harder still, given how much change will take place over time across the entire application estate. Alongside this inventory, there are other factors to consider. Not all applications are created equal, and an issue in an internal web application that is used by a few people every month will not be as important as a critical vulnerability in a business application that is responsible for generating revenue every day. Yet both of these applications may have a flaw, and alerts sent to request fixes or updates get made. Internal processes and workflows will also affect the situation. While security teams might spot potential issues in an application or software component like an API, they will not be responsible for making the change themselves. 


Attempting Digital Transformation? Try Embracing Team Resistance

Resistance to transformation has several causes, Dewal says. First off, many logistics professionals already feel slammed, and don’t welcome the idea of new work. “It can feel like an add-on, creating competing priorities,” she says. Then there’s a fear-based resistance to the perceived complexity of the new tasks involved. “It’s too complex and we don’t have the right skill sets to be able to execute on them,” she says, describing this mindset. “Collectively, let’s call it the fear of failure, of getting it wrong.” Finally, there’s the familiar human tendency to prefer sticking with the status quo. “That can hide variations underneath it,” Dewal says. “Sometimes the team is not even sure why the transformation is needed. Sometimes, they feel like they’re not getting enough support in terms of executing it.” Further, the survey dug into two types of resistance – productive and unproductive. Productive resistance is the type that comes from on-the-ground knowledge and expertise that relates to the implementation itself. ... Leaders who avoided a top-down, change-or-die approach, and instead focused on communication and collaboration, had much better chance of success, the survey found.


How leading CISOs build business-critical cyber cultures

In information security, where risk is widespread, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and so much is on the line, one defining attributes of successful CISOs is their courage. The good news is, courage is a muscle that can be developed just like any other. It’s also a mindset. The CISOs on this panel described various internal motivators that keep them in the game, resilient, and adaptable, even in the face of daunting challenges. They made it clear that it’s a lot easier to be courageous when you’re driven by a love for what you do and maintain a clear line of sight to the impact you’re making. One of the common threads is their focus on “moments of truth,” those points of contact between cybersecurity and various stakeholders. Leaders who are intentional about this find they’re better able to see around corners and show up more strategically as business enablers. Rodgers says it’s a lesson she learned in the early days of her career when she worked on a help desk. Fielding complaints all day takes its own kind of courage. “But the beauty of it is, you get to know people and how they work,” she says. “I got to a point where I could anticipate what they were going to want, so I started proactively providing those things. ...”


How passkeys eliminate password management headaches

There are several usability challenges that could affect the adoption of passkeys. Key among them is compatibility, as passkeys may not work on outdated operating systems or older devices. Bypassing the technical roadblocks, user resistance is often the reason for a failure to adopt new technology such as passkeys. After all, users have been leveraging passwords since the early 1960’s. Emphasizing training and education on how to provision passkeys is essential to adoption, as registration could be challenging for non-tech-savvy users. It may be best to start with small groups or departments to address unique challenges within the organization’s diverse culture and educate users. Organizations are starting to adopt passkeys to enhance security and optimize productivity, and as with any new implementation, there will be challenges. Passkey implementation should begin with top-level leadership as early adopters, which will help employees buy in and ensure a smooth transition from traditional passwords to passkeys. Upfront investment in planning, and creating robust policies and processes, will be critical to the implementation’s success.


Six Common Digital Transformation Challenges

Aligned leadership helps in allocating resources efficiently, prioritizing initiatives that drive the most value, and mitigating risks associated with digital transformation efforts. Clear, consistent communication from aligned leaders also builds trust and motivates teams to adapt to new paradigms. Ultimately, leadership alignment serves as the backbone of successful digital transformation by driving coherent strategies and fostering an environment conducive to innovation and agility. Effective communication is paramount, with transparent discussions about goals, challenges, and expected outcomes. Additionally, establishing cross-functional teams can help integrate diverse perspectives, facilitating smoother transitions during technology adoption. By embedding these practices into the organizational fabric, leaders can drive successful digital transformation while maintaining strategic coherence. Addressing resistance to change and fostering a digital mindset among leaders is pivotal in navigating this digital transformation challenge. Resistance often stems from a fear of the unknown and a reluctance to abandon established processes. 


Why Can’t Automation Eliminate Configuration Errors?

The emergence of configuration intelligence changes the game in several ways. First, it means that anyone tasked with maintaining configurations can save a lot of time and trouble that used to involve manual, tedious but cognitively intense tasks like reading through YAML manifests or config files to identify tiny errors. Yes, some tools existed to do this before, but they mostly functioned more like “linters,” spotting obvious syntax errors. By simplifying the process, time to manually maintain configs is drastically reduced. ... The lack of detailed expertise has been a traditional problem of IaC products, which struggle to keep up with configuration recommendations across the dozens of software applications and infrastructure components they manage and automate. The lack of detailed configuration expertise also creates a cadre of in-house experts, who become key sources of institutional memory — but also major risks. When your load-balancing guru walks out the door to take another job, then everything they know that’s not clearly documented goes out the door too.


Enterprise spending on cloud services keeps accelerating

“Enterprises are also choosing to house an ever-growing proportion of their data center gear in colocation facilities, further reducing the need for on-premise data center capacity. The rise of generative AI technology and services will only exacerbate those trends over the next few years, as hyperscale operators are better positioned to run AI operations than most enterprises,” he wrote. Dinsdale told me the workloads staying on-premises tend to be workloads that are either very complex and cannot easily be transitioned, are focused on highly sensitive data, are governed or influenced by regulatory issues, or are highly predictable and can be managed economically on premise. Enterprises worldwide are spending around $100 billion per year on their own data center IT hardware and associated infrastructure software, which has held flat for the last several years/ By comparison, enterprises are now spending $80 billion per quarter on cloud services; not to mention another $65 billion per quarter on SaaS. “And those cloud and SaaS numbers are growing like gangbusters,” he said.



Quote for the day:

"The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone." -- Lady Stella Reading

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