Traditional monitoring has evolved and organisations need to change the way IT teams interact and work.
The longer various departments, groups and teams – DevOps, ITOps, SecOps and more – monitor in silos and isolation, each generating their own source of truth through traditional monitoring tools, the more important a solid, forward-looking observability strategy becomes.
What makes observability so important? Think of it like a map. At face value, it shows you thousands of discrete data points: street names, restaurants, businesses and so on. In and of themselves, they’re standalone points. If, however, you want to get from A to B, your mapping tools shows you the fastest, most efficient way to do so, noting traffic, construction or other obstacles and painting a full picture of your journey ahead.
In the same way, siloed teams hold discrete data points within their monitoring panes, but they only tell part of their environment’s story. Observability pulls all these data points together to provide a complete picture of your environment—and more importantly, it offers faster insights into component relationships, deviations, and dependencies. Adding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) speeds up the process with automated analytics, actionable intelligence and predictive recommendations.
Hybrid and multicloud explosion
Of all the IT trends, the move to hybrid IT and multicloud environments is perhaps the most important. With infrastructure, apps and data spread across silos, organisations seeking agility, on-demand services and faster time to market are embracing the cloud at a dizzying rate.
Fifty-seven percent of cloud decision-makers say more than 50% of their IT infrastructure is in the cloud this year. In 2020, this number was 47%.
IDC reports 90% of enterprises will be using multicloud (eg, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) by 2022.
To help deal with this, we like to focus our energy on six key areas that executives need to explore carefully.
Single source of truth, unfocused automation and remediation, shallow operational views, cost inefficiency, patchwork visibility, prioritising security alerts and compliance.
Let's take a quick look at the latter.
From a security perspective, to make sure that we are taking care of the basics, we must make sure that we are paying attention to security. The bad guys and threat actors will adjust just as quickly as the good guys adjust; they have forever and ever, and ever and always will. So we must adjust as well. Stop thinking about security, think about risk: think about the risk that your organisation is facing in these new models. Adjust your approach to risk. Security tends to be a binary on or off; this can be a bad way to think about it. Think about risks. Think about what risk you’re willing to accept in the new model and adjust to that.
Start with good cyber hygiene. A very high percentage of the actual breaches and actual exploits that we see, occur because of the lack of basic cyber hygiene. They occur because people aren’t patching aggressively. They occur because people don’t have the basics in place. They occur because people have too many access rights to too many things.
Take care of your people, take care of your infrastructure, make sure you’re patching it, make sure that you’re not susceptible to general drive by bad guys. Always start with those before you go to the next things on your agenda.
Reassess your crown jewels and your mission and business-critical resources, because they probably have changed. The things that were not so mission- and business-critical, like people’s homes, people’s home offices, people’s equipment at home.
For your critical people who are working at home, protect them differently than protecting just your normal people. Understand that these 20% of your team can actually do material harm to you. For that 20%, you’re going to force some home to VPN for everything. Maybe you’re going to manage and control their home network. Maybe you’re going to make sure their machine gets locked down more regularly so that you can’t have common users on them. Somebody’s child can’t come in and just play on the machine and get you into trouble, or go off to browse somewhere and get it infected.
What was defined as observability in the past isn’t what observability is today. It’s an evolving practice and approach. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a traditional definition of observability of metrics, logs and application traces, but it doesn’t give you the complete picture required for tomorrow. Organisations need a comprehensive, integrated, cost-effective, full-stack solution. We’ve been at this a long time, to optimise performance, ensure availability and reduce remediation time across on-premises and multicloud environments by increasing visibility, intelligence and productivity. This provides a unique perspective to today’s evolving definition of observability.
It starts from the bottom up and meets you where you are.
Remove the blind spots so you can see the full picture around you.
Visit us at ITWeb Security Summit 2022.
Glenn Lazarus
CEO
ATS Network Management
437 Jan Smuts Avenue, Blairgowrie, 2194 South Africa
Tel: (+27) 11 886 1740 ext 8281 direct (+27) 10 040 8281
Cell: (+27) 83 273 6926
Skype: glennlaz
Email: glenn@ats.co.za
Web: https://ats.co.za/
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