Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Okay, I’ll admit it – I probably get more excited for Cybersecurity Awareness Month than most people. It’s a professional hazard. It has been 18 years since the first Cybersecurity Awareness Month, but this one feelsparticularly important.

Every security operations center (SOC) team is different, and for smaller teams, even small challenges can seem big. I started my career in cybersecurity as part of a smaller team, and eventually grew into a SOC role. During that time, I gained a good deal of knowledge about the dos and don’ts of what a small SOC team needs to do in order to be successful.

The United States is the #1 target for cybersecurity attacks in the world. 38% of targeted cybersecurity attacks so far in 2022 were aimed at the United States data and systems. That’s alarming. And we see it in the news almost every day. Solarwinds, Colonial Pipeline, The Pulse Secure VPN zero-day… There’s an increasing number of threats and attacks, to the tune of 15.1% year over year.

Customer data protection is important to every business that wants to protect its financial security and its reputation -- but it’s even more important for managed service providers (MSPs). When talking to your clients, you’ll probably tell them that a huge reason why protecting customer data is mission critical is because their entire business depends on it.

As platform engineering continues to rise in popularity, there is a new side effect to watch out for: the people using the internal developer platforms aren't the people who built it. They’re not necessarily familiar with the codebase, they may not know what's powering it behind the scenes – and the platform might even have to contend with malicious users. So how is Puppet evolving to contend with this new challenge?

Did you know Halloween isn’t the only event in October ready to send shivers down your spine? Each year, October is “National Cybersecurity Awareness Month” in the U.S. and “European Cybersecurity Month” in Europe. So, before we dress up as ghosts, vampires, or whatever, let’s have a quick look at some old and new cyber risks to be aware of and how to deal with them.

You can take a wide range of actions to nurture a culture of cybersecurity in your organization. Some of them can be directed to your employees - and include initiatives like password management and phishing training - and others are related to strategy to adopt towards cybersecurity risk. That's where the NIST cybersecurity framework comes in (as well as other best practices such as CIS controls).

Back in May, I had the pleasure of joining Michael Daniel, president, and chief executive officer of Cyber Threat Alliance, at the Forbes CIO Summit to discuss creating resilient digital ecosystems without sacrificing agility. In the past two years, we’ve evolved our product development models with a focus on a zero-trust mindset and culture.