Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The N-able Head Security Nerd, Lewis Pope, just published a blog outlining the top 25 cybersecurity bad practices demonstrated by MSPs today. To accompany his post, I wanted to add one more risky bad habit to his list. It’s something I commonly see being practiced by too many MSPs from a business perspective—allowing a customer’s budget to dictate what a cybersecurity offering should look like.

The CISA (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency) recently started an initiative to create a catalogue of exceptionally risky cybersecurity bad practices. While this will be a welcome and very useful tool once it is complete, only two practices are currently listed. Since cybersecurity and business decisions can be time-sensitive, we wanted to expand on the CISA’s list.

For the newest instalment in our series of interviews asking leading technology specialists about their achievements in their field, we’ve welcomed Mark Kerzner, software developer and thought leader in cybersecurity training who is also the VP at training solutions company, Elephant Scale. His company has taught tens of thousands of students at dozens of leading companies. Elephant Scale started by publishing a book called ‘Hadoop Illuminated‘.

Following the security issues in the MSP market over the past 24 months, our customers, who are understandably concerned, have been asking what we do to keep the N-central® appliance (hosted or on-premises) updated and secure for them. I will do my best in this short article to outline how our engineering team keeps up with security. Please note this is valid as of the time of writing, but can change at any point.

Last year’s IDC’s Cloud Security Survey found that nearly 80 percent of companies polled have suffered at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months.

In a never-ending game of cat and mouse, threat actors are exploiting, controlling and maintaining persistent access in compromised cloud infrastructure. While cloud practitioners are armed with best-in-class knowledge, support, and security practices, it is statistically impossible to have a common security posture for all cloud instances worldwide. Attackers know this, and use it to their advantage. By applying evolved tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), attackers are exploiting edge cases.

Public sector organisations are in the middle of a massive digital transformation. Technology advances like cloud, mobile, microservices and more are transforming the public sector to help them deliver services as efficiently as commercial businesses, meet growing mission-critical demands, and keep up with market expectations and be more agile.