In recent years, with the rapid rise of cloud computing, the virtualization of applications and infrastructure has been replacing traditional in-house deployments of applications and services. It’s currently more cost-effective for organizations to rent hardware resources from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google and spin up virtual instances of servers with the exact hardware profiles required to run their services.
Systems are constantly changing. Change and configuration management best practices allow organizations to keep track of configuration changes in a way that allows for rapid feature updates without any service outages, but many organizations struggle to find the ideal formula to make this process successful. So, what are the best practices in change and configuration management?
In order to maintain the integrity of a Windows file system, File Integrity Monitoring is applied to ensure no unauthorized changes are made to files, folders or configuration settings.
Within the FIM technology market, there are choices to be made. Agent-based or agentless is the most common choice, but even then there are both SIEM and ‘pure-play’ FIM, solutions to choose between.
Being the victim of a cyber-attack can be scary, expensive and potentially business-crippling. So how do you prevent a cyber-attack? Start with making security a priority for all IT operations, and the first place to start is by making systems as ‘hacker proof’ as possible: Gold Build Standard? Corporate Build / Hardened Build? Controlled Image? Baseline Configuration?
Despite the increased sophistication employed by hackers for both external and internal attacks, around 80% of all reported breaches continue to exploit known, configuration-based vulnerabilities. Server or system hardening is, quite simply, essential in order to prevent a data breach.
As data breaches continue to increase in severity and scale, more than ever organizations need to ensure they have the basic security controls in place to keep their data safe from attack. In response to today’s growing threat landscape, the SANS Institute, together with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) have developed the 20 CIS Controls (CSC) to give organizations clarity on what really needs to be focused on in terms of security best practices.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is designed to protect the personal data of EU residents by regulating how that information is collected, stored, processed and destroyed. The data security and privacy law applies to all organizations that collect the personal data of European Union citizens, regardless of location. The penalties for noncompliance with GDPR requirements are stiff. Many organizations are struggling with how to comply with GDPR.
Cybersecurity attacks are increasing at an alarming rate every day. According to the Statista Cybercrime Incidents Report, over 29,000 cases were recorded in 2020 and the target nowadays are small firms as well as large businesses although in the past hackers were not interested by “small fish”.
Privileged access management (PAM) solutions have been around in various forms for decades now. Whether you want a password vault, session management, reduced privilege or a combination of privileged management workflows, there’s been no shortage of vendors to choose from. So why does the thought of PAM still make admins shudder? Surely, it should be enjoyable to have a PAM solution humming along, reducing your organization’s risk while you, the admin, focus on your other duties.
