Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Enterprise cybersecurity is no longer confined to a fixed network perimeter. Security teams now have to protect users, devices, applications, cloud services, and third-party access across increasingly distributed environments. Attackers are also targeting identities, unpatched systems, exposed services, and gaps in visibility rather than relying on a single attack method. Cybersecurity therefore needs to be treated as an ongoing program, not a project that is completed once and revisited later.

Over time, we have become increasingly accustomed to using AI in our daily work. We send customer data to ChatGPT for analysis, share customer emails to draft responses, or ask Claude to generate code for enterprise applications. All of this can happen within an enterprise environment. This is what generative AI is designed to do. It creates content for us, from text and code to images and videos.

We've heard everyone talk about digital privacy, cybersecurity, and how we should set a strong password, but what most people fail to understand is the why. Why is it important to set a strong password? Why do we have to activate two-factor authentication? Why are software updates important? Even though we have a vague idea of why we need to do these things, we really don't know the future implications if we don't secure our digital information.

If you're the entire IT team at your company, you probably wear more hats than your title suggests. Between helpdesk tickets, network maintenance, and strategic projects, patch management often gets pushed to the background—and it probably wins your attention only after an incident or an audit. The problem is, threats don't wait for a quiet day. New vulnerabilities are piling up and exploit windows are shorter than ever.

SOC metrics are quantifiable measures of how well a security operations center detects, investigates, and contains threats. The metrics that matter most are mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and incident closure rate, because together they show speed, effectiveness, and reliability, not just activity.

Let's be honest: Every IT team has that one thing. That ancient server that nobody wants to touch somehow still runs. That vulnerability that has been sitting in the remediation queue because there were more critical issues to handle, and then there's the active service account that was created for a temporary project three years ago. Or perhaps there's a security exception that was only supposed to last for 30 days and quietly became permanent. Nothing has exploded yet, so it is easy to leave it alone.

Login pages are one of the most attacked surfaces of any enterprise tool. They're often internet-facing, they're the front door to sensitive operational data, and unlike most vulnerabilities, they don't need to be discovered—they can simply be targeted with large volumes of automated attempts. For monitoring platforms like Applications Manager, which frequently sit with visibility into critical infrastructure, that front door matters even more.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's happening in the tech world and list practical ways to navigate these developments. This week, we're looking at an everyday cybersecurity concern that often goes unnoticed: the amount of access apps have to our data and devices. We install apps to make life easier. A navigation app needs our location, a messaging app needs access to contacts, and a video-conferencing app may need the microphone and camera.