Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Software performance issues come in all shapes and sizes. Therefore, performance tuning includes many aspects and subareas, and has to adopt a broad range of methodologies and techniques. Despite all this, time is one of the most critical measurements of software performance. In this multi-part series, I’ll focus on a few of the time-related aspects of software performance — particularly for security software.

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.

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.

President Joe Biden recently signed an executive order which made adhering to cybersecurity standards a legal requirement for federal departments and agencies. The move was not a surprise. It comes after a string of high-profile cyber-attacks and data breaches in 2020 and 2021. The frequency and scale of these events exposed a clear culture of lax cybersecurity practices throughout both the public and private sectors.