Best Practices for AWS Tagging With Yor
On the surface, AWS resource tags are simple, informational key:value metadata that you can assign to most AWS resources. They also have many hidden benefits, as outlined in this AWS Tagging Best Practices guide for improving cloud operations. There are six use cases author Brian Yost calls out in particular: AWS console organization and resource […]
Managing Cloud Governance Costs Collaboratively
For those responsible for managing infrastructure, the concept of governance is common, especially as it relates to cloud services. For cloud services, it’s defined as a framework that guides how end users use these services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment. The term is often […]
The Forces Massing Against the Data Center
We’ve come a long way over the last few decades. A ton of stuff about IT has changed, even in the last five years. And it is true in IT that the only constant is change. We like to have control of our environment to provide the most stable platform for user satisfaction that we […]
Fugue Aims to Simplify Securing Infrastructure-as-Code
Fugue today unveiled a 1.0 release for Regula, an open source policy engine for infrastructure-as-code (IaC) security that comes with prebuilt libraries for implementing hundreds of policies that validate configurations on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud services. Regula is based on the Open Policy Agent (OPA) software being advanced under the […]
Best Practices for Cloud Incident Response
Cloud computing is now mainstream, with almost all organizations running at least some resources in the public cloud—whether software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Security teams have been scrambling to adapt to cloud environments, and with the growing adoption of DevSecOps, they are working together with DevOps teams to secure cloud systems from the […]
Report: The State of Cloud-Native Application Security
The cloud brings tremendous capabilities in terms of increased deployment fluidity and automation. Along with cloud adoption has come the use of cloud-native tools built specifically for developing applications for this domain. However, cloud-native tools carry some nuanced security concerns, such as misconfigurations, known vulnerabilities and leaked secrets. As such, 83% of organizations recognize security […]
Automatic Right-Sizing is Magical Thinking
Some months ago, AWS evangelist Corey Quinn wrote a short blog post titled “Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense.” As usual, Corey was spot-on in his takedown of cost-reduction-magic-AI industry hype. But his piece only scratches the surface. I would take the argument a step farther and say that anyone who tells you they can […]
Akamai Adds Service to Optimize API Traffic
Akamai today launched an API Acceleration service specifically designed to accelerate application programming interface (API) calls using special purpose hardware, reserved capacity and prioritized routing. At the same time, the company is also making available a globally distributed key-value store dubbed EdgeKV that enables stateful applications to be deployed on its EdgeWorker nodes. Finally, Akamai […]
There’s No Innovation Without Automation
Companies of all sizes and across virtually every industry today have ready access to hyperscale compute, storage and myriad other technologies — without needing the significant budget or technical expertise of a hyperscale cloud provider like AWS. This is a boon for innovation. Cloud opened the door to cost optimizations, previously out-of-reach cloud-native tools, security […]
Designing Cost-Efficient Cloud Environments
Today, the days of on-premises data centers are mostly behind us, and the cloud has largely taken over with the promise of scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency. Despite these promises, the cloud often falls short of these ideals. Why? Because managing the cloud is hard—especially when it comes to managing its costs. There are no automatic […]
Majority of Orgs Lack Visibility Into Container Vulnerabilities
Today’s blend of third-party application dependencies and polyglot software development often makes assessing risk difficult. With many new cloud-native deployment models, it can be tricky to discover potential vulnerabilities. These threats take the form of insecure default settings in Kubernetes, over-permissive states, CVEs that threaten container integrity, and other vulnerable conditions. Plugging gaps throughout the […]
CloudBolt Adds Cloud Cost Tool to Hybrid Management Platform
CloudBolt Software this week added cost management capabilities for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds along with codeless integrations with additional platforms to its hybrid cloud management platform. Grant Ho, chief marketing officer for CloudBolt, said the Spring Release of the company’s platform, now generally available, enables IT operations teams to rely […]
Lightbend Launches Serverless Managed DevOps Service
Lightbend today unfurled a cloud service based on a serverless framework that provides developers with a managed DevOps platform to build applications that dynamically scale resources up and down as required. Brad Murdoch, executive vice president for strategy at Lightbend, said Akka Serverless provides access to its Java development platform environment that runs atop Kubernetes […]
Observe Seeks to Put More IT Metrics in Context
Observe, Inc. announced today it has updated it observability platform to add support for metrics based on time series data. In addition, the company is revamping how the platform generates alerts as part of an effort to surface more actionable intelligence. Jeremy Burton, Observe CEO, said rival observability platforms require IT teams to sift through […]
Grafana Labs Advances Open Source Visualization and Observability
During the online GrafanaCONline conference today, Grafana Labs announced that version 8.0 of its open source visualization software widely employed by DevOps teams is now generally available. In addition, version 1.0 of Grafana Tempo, an open source back end platform for collecting distributed traces that are needed to drive observability across an application environment, is […]
HashiCorp Increases Terraform’s Enterprise Appeal
During the online HashiConf Europe conference today, HashiCorp debuted the general availability of a 1.0 release of HashiCorp Terraform along with updates to HashiCorp Terraform Cloud service. Meghan Liese, senior director of product marketing for HashiCorp, said in both cases HashiCorp is moving to enable organizations to better secure and govern IT infrastructure-as-code provisioned using […]
10 Actions IT Can Take to Curb Climate Impact
Digital technology is responsible for 3.7% of total CO emissions, according to estimates from The Shift Project. This could increase, as cryptocurrency mining is leaving a massive carbon footprint. With the world’s climate at stake, every percentage point matters. Thankfully, many tech companies have announced significant climate pledges to reduce emissions or offset their carbon […]
Serverless Computing Brings New Security Risks
Attracted by lower costs and less operational overhead, serverless computing is an unmistakable undercurrent in the world of DevOps. Developers are drawn to the innovation because it requires no architecture to manage while offering continuous scaling for anything from a few requests per day to hundreds of thousands of requests per second. More than 50% […]
How to Move Fast Without Breaking Security
“Move fast and break things,” is a familiar motto. The phrase, attributed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, helps to explain the company’s stellar growth over the past decade, driven by its product innovations. However, while it’s a useful philosophy for software development, moving faster than you’d planned is a risky approach in other areas, as […]
JFrog Adds Private Distribution Network for App Binaries
At its online swampUP conference today, JFrog launched a Private Distribution Network (PDN) that makes it simpler and faster to distribute application binaries across an extended enterprise. Yoav Landman, JFrog CTO, said the PDN provides the equivalent of a content delivery network (CDN) designed specifically for distributing application binaries using a peer-to-peer network managed by […]
Adapting Security with Menlo Security
Cloud data security is top of mind for CISOs. User data is moving across clouds, platforms and applications, and if we don’t shift to a data-centric approach, we won’t be able to protect that data. Jack Miller, head of professional services at Menlo Security and former CISO of over 16 years, addresses the balance of […]
Rethinking Your Tool Chain in the Cloud
Every IT shop has a “tool chain” – all of the software other than the OS and the application that fills in the gaps and keeps everything running. This includes solutions for monitoring the application, data protection, software development, release management, provisioning and de-provisioning resources and more. These tools build up over time, often evolving […]
API Security by Design
“APIs are nothing new,” said Secure Code Warrior co-founder and CTO Matias Madou, but they have recently become more widely used. And where they were once a local mechanism, they are increasingly used in a distributed manner, partly because of changes to application architectures. Another reason is that users are increasingly likely to access systems […]