Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IT monitoring is a requirement of the modern IT organization for ensuring the health and security of all layers in the IT stack. But, as inclusive as organizations try to be when maintaining a vigil over the moving pieces in a network, some systems ultimately escape notice. But instead of accepting this as a cost of doing business, consider the task at hand: prevent the unseen from causing harm to IT infrastructures and to the business processes reliant on them.

For years, security practitioners have kicked and screamed about their reality. There are too many alerts to fully investigate and manually resolve every day. There is a massive talent shortage of qualified security professionals across the globe. Then couple that with analyst burnout and siloed security point-products. All of these factors are preventing security operation centers (SOCs) from operating at their full potential, with increased efficiency, performance and speed.

The phrase ‘stakeholder management” assumes that stakeholders are truly informed by alerts. However, managers can only send communications out, they cannot force people to address them. To ensure your stakeholders are engaged during an incident, it is vital to set up a defined communication process. Yet, a recent Red Canary report1 found that 43% of surveyed participants lack readiness to notify the public and/or its customers in the event of a security breach.

To say that the past year presented its fair share of cybersecurity challenges to the InfoSec community would be a drastic understatement. The rapid migration to remote work at scale left 80% of CIOs unprepared, and SecOps teams struggled to confront the evolving threat landscape with disparate toolkits and skill sets. Not to mention that as more organizations shifted to hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale, cloud complexity (and cloud-based threats) skyrocketed.

By implementing these vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management best practices you will reduce the attack surface of your infrastructure. We’re human, and many things we build aren’t perfect. That’s why we take our cars for a periodic inspection, or why we have organizations certifying that products are safe to use. Software is no different.