Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a legal mandate across the EU, requires enhanced protection for EU personal data transferred to countries with inadequate levels of data protection safeguards—including the US. The EU-US Privacy Shield, which was in place until 2020, facilitated these protections but was invalidated by the Schrems II ruling as a result of US surveillance concerns.

This third installment of the “Succeeding with Backstage” series explores how you can improve the adoption of Backstage within your organization. The previous two parts dealt with customizing the look and feel of Backstage and creating and maintaining custom plugins.

This final article in the “Succeeding with Backstage” series focuses on how you can incorporate Backstage as part of a broader developer productivity engineering (DPE) initiative. The previous parts dealt with customizing the look and feel of Backstage, creating and maintaining custom plugins, and improving Backstage adoption.

Until fairly recently, software releases happened once or twice a year, maybe once a quarter. This gave IT teams plenty of time to verify and manually sign off on every change before they were released in big batches during a bank holiday weekend or off-peak hours. Typically, they’d produce paperwork to show that all changes had been properly tested, and then those changes would be approved for release in a change advisory board meeting (CAB).

This second installment of the “Succeeding with Backstage” explains how to create a custom Backstage plugin. For many use cases, customizing the platform’s look using the methods from the last part and integrating existing plugins will be enough to align Backstage with your organization’s needs. But what happens when the plugin directory doesn’t have a plugin that solves your particular problem? You create a custom plugin, of course.

This is the first article in the “Succeeding with Backstage” series. This series is for those with a working Backstage implementation who want to ensure smooth adoption and ongoing successful use of the tool. If you’re still trying to decide if Backstage is for you, you can check out the first article in the “Evaluating Backstage” series.

No internet-connected code is truly secure. Today’s development process is deeply iterative, and this ever-shifting landscape of code can sometimes expose critical vulnerabilities. When these flaws are discovered by attackers first, zero-day exploits threaten not just your own integrity – but that of business partners and team members across the organization.

Robust app security is non-negotiable, but the spiraling costs that can come with it are. In the context of application delivery, security plays a pivotal role in maintaining business continuity, protecting sensitive data, and upholding a solid reputation. However, the journey to build a formidable defense at the load balancing and reverse proxy layer can quickly become costly with a few wrong turns. Security is important, but buyers don’t have to break the bank to implement it.

While cloud computing has ushered in a new era of connectivity and convenience, it has also exposed organizations to a myriad of vulnerabilities. Cyberattacks, data breaches, and security incidents have become all too common, leaving no room for complacency. The need for proactive cybersecurity measures has never been greater. It's in this context that vulnerability assessments play a vital role in safeguarding organizations against malicious threat actors.

Securing access to online resources is more critical than ever. As applications and services become interconnected, there is an ever-increasing need for a standardized and robust authentication and authorization method. Enter OAuth, a protocol that enables secure and standardized authorization across various web services.