EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

To celebrate Star Wars Day, I thought I would share a few ways in which the Empire did not adhere to information security best practices, and that enabled the Rebels to win.

To be clear: I do not support the Empire, the Sith Lords, or any other types of scum and villainy. Nor am I trying to portray the Rebel Alliance as a weird, Force-wielding, Galactic hacker consortium or something. But had the Empire not been so lax in their security controls, Emperor Palpatine and his buddies might have been able to bring their “order and peace” to the galaxy.

A working definition: ServiceOps is a technology-enabled approach to unifying IT service and IT operations management for excellence in delivery of digital business services.

Although the two teams have different charters and skillsets, IT service and IT operations are inextricable. There is no service without effective IT operations.

This is a sponsored blog post.

With most companies now operating in multiple cloud providers, network and security complexity are increasing. For instance, 96% of multi-cloud enterprises are using more than one networking vendor across their cloud estates, according to new research from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

Seemingly every day, we hear about the next batch of layoffs from the household-name tech companies: 10,000 here, 1,700 there. As we continue into earning seasons for these publicly traded (and some not publicly traded) companies, we will likely hear more. The substory is that unemployment is at an all-time low, with the job market adding over 500,000 jobs in January. 

As of January 2023, Over 194,000 Systems on Internet Still Vulnerable to Heartbleed

The Bleeding Heart of the Internet

In April 2014, the Heartbleed vulnerability was publicly disclosed, sending the information technology world into a panic and rushing to patch this critical vulnerability in OpenSSL, which was allowing the theft of information directly from the memory of vulnerable systems, including private keys and other secrets. This vulnerability featured extremely easy exploitation by attackers, leaving no trace of attacks. Heartbleed ultimately resulted in many late nights for most of the information technology industry, who worked to implement and validate patches for open and closed source products that have integrated the OpenSSL libraries – which accounts for an extremely large percentage of technologies connected to the internet.

The WAN edge is becoming more distributed and dynamic, which is overburdening IT organizations that are already at a breaking point. Software-defined WAN technology has solved some of the issue, but they haven’t gone far enough. The cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the work-from-home (WFH) revolution demand something more.

It’s time to circle the wagons and defend the data and users

As the world reopens, the conference booths light with excitement and empty expo halls are once again filled with hustle and bustle. I thought it important to take a moment and look at what changed in the past two years and where the security industry has room for improvement. This was the first in-person RSA Conference, and likely the first major security conference at all for that matter, with large in-person attendance after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the conference looks very similar to conferences before the pandemic, the cybersecurity industry landscape has drastically changed.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend Informatica World 2022 (IW22) in Las Vegas. Returning to the in-person conference scene caused some apprehension; however, reflecting on takeaways and engaging in discussions around data integration made this trip a worthwhile experience. I want to thank IW22 for a thought-provoking week of discussions centered on data management, data integration, interoperability, artificial intelligence, and navigating a complex, hybrid, multi-cloud digital environment with Informatica experts, sponsors, and customers.

Long gone are the days of simple, signature-based defenses against cyber-threats.

Cyber-threats are growing at an exponential rate in the perpetual cat-and-mouse game of cybersecurity, and traditional approaches to cybersecurity are struggling to keep pace. In 2021, anti-malware vendors estimated that they detected between 300,000 and 500,000 new pieces of malware every day. That means than in 2021 alone, over 100 million new pieces of malware were created. Even if cybersecurity vendors can keep up with the sheer volume of new pieces of malware, traditional signature-based and even heuristic-based detection algorithms will struggle to keep up – and that’s only for known malware.

Data center network automation delivers four primary benefits to a business, according to Enterprise Management Associates research: operational efficiency, reduced security risk, improved compliance, and network agility.