EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

In late July, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about a growing number of malicious cyberattacks aimed at ERP systems based on a research project conducted by Digital Shadows and Onapsis. This warning comes at the heels of the first-ever DHS CERT Alert focused on SAP Business Applications released in May of 2016. According to the report, hackers exploited old, unpatched vulnerabilities to successfully hack multiple organizations, including government agencies, energy businesses, and financial services companies. Onapsis and Digital Shadows found significant evidence of increased interest on ERP applications, including bad actors in criminal forums on the dark web asking for exploits specifically targeting ERP technology vulnerabilities. The study, “ERP Applications Under Fire: How Cyberattackers Target the Crown Jewels,” found that the attackers do not need to use advanced techniques to breach their targets because the current state of ERP application security across organizations is such that old vulnerabilities still affect these systems. This means that attackers don’t need to develop new zero-days or advanced exploitation techniques.

EMA recently published primary research on the topic of “Adopting Effective Solutions in Endpoint Detection and Response,” which included a detailed comparison of two of the most popular platforms on the market today: Tanium and 1E Tachyon. Put simply, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions represent a classification of management tools designed to proactively provide the holistic visibility and rapid automation necessary to respond to endpoint security threats and administration requirements in real-time. The purpose of the evaluation was to provide an example of how to conduct a side-by-side comparison of EDR solutions in order to determine the optimal platform for meeting current endpoint management requirements.

For years network engineers have built lucrative careers upon their wizardly knowledge of things like network protocols, hardware specifications, and the Cisco command line interface (CLI). These skills are still essential to network engineering, but they are emblematic of a highly manual, box-by-box era of network engineering and operations. Today’s enterprises need agile, programmatic networks that leverage software, automation, and more

In the course of researching, documenting and advising on user experience management needs and directions for more than a decade, I’ve found myself waging a quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) war with several industry assumptions. Chief among these is the notion that user experience management (UEM) is purely a subset of application performance management (APM). This APM-centricity misses some of UEM’s most critical value points, and in a basic sense fails to recognize what UEM is truly about.