Persistence is effectively the ability of the attacker to maintain access to a compromised host through intermittent network access, system reboots, and (to a certain degree) remediation activities. The ability of an attacker to compromise a system or network and successfully carry out their objectives typically relies on their ability to maintain some sort of persistence on the target system/network.

Last week Sumo Logic announced our new Observability Suite, which included the public introduction of the closed beta for our distributed tracing capabilities as part of our Microservices Observability solution. This new solution will provide end-to-end visibility into user transactions across services, as well as seamless integration into performance metrics and logs to accelerate issue resolution and root-cause analysis. In this blog, we’ll explore the new solution in detail.

Today, we made an important announcement that builds on and extends our category leadership in Continuous Intelligence. This blog is to put that announcement into context for our customers, partners and the broader industry. In 2017, we shared our strategy to democratize machine data by building a cloud-native, Continuous Intelligence Platform™ to 1) unify modern application and machine data; 2) support the ongoing proliferation of users and access; and 3) leverage cloud-scale economics.

As more and more applications move to the cloud, the complexity of application architectures inevitably increases. It is a burden we willingly take on because the benefits—flexible deployment, technology diversity, independent scaling, and much more— tend to far outweigh the costs. But along this transition, most organizations face a dilemma, to divert resources to the necessary tooling for effective monitoring and troubleshooting of these systems – i.e.

Automation is a key component in the management of the entire software release lifecycle. While we know it is critical to the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery process, it is now becoming equally essential to the underlying infrastructure you depend on. As automation has increased, a new principle for managing infrastructure has emerged to prevent environment drift and ensure your infrastructure is consistently and reliably provisioned.

Sumo Logic is taking the next step towards Moderate authorization under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Today Sumo moved from “Ready” to “In Process” on the FedRAMP Marketplace, an important step toward expanding our ability to serve U.S. governmental agencies. Sumo Logic expects to achieve FedRAMP-Moderate Authorization quickly while working closely with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as our agency partner.

I am spending a considerable amount of time recently on distributed tracing topics. In my previous blog, I discussed different pros and cons of various approaches to collecting distributed tracing data. Right now I would like to draw your attention to the analysis back-end: what does it take to be good at analyzing transaction traces?

There has been increasing buzz in the past decade about the benefits of using a microservice architecture. Let’s explore what microservices are and are not, as well as contrast them with traditional monolithic applications. We’ll discuss the benefits of using a microservices-based architecture and the effort and planning that are required to transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture.

Today’s organizations have the challenge of managing several different applications and software within their technology stack. The more public-facing platforms an organization utilizes, the greater their public attack surface risks. Without proper protection, they and their community can become an easy target for malicious actors.

Technology has a way of circling around to the same ideas over time, but with different approaches that learn from previous iterations. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Microservices Architecture (MSA) are such evolutionary approaches. Where lessons learned made sense, they were reused; and where painful lessons were learned, new methods and ideas were introduced.