Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Business partnerships require trust, but knowing whether your vendors merit that trust is difficult. With the rise of information technology, the ways in which trust can be broken, intentionally or unintentionally, have multiplied and become more complex. Vendor security assessment questionnaires are one method to verify that service providers follow appropriate information security practices so your business can weigh the risk of entrusting them with your data.

Vendor risk scoring is a practice that has emerged to address the complexity of vendor management by assigning vendors a single score– typically a number or letter grade– to facilitate comparison between vendors and portfolios. The past decades of digital transformation have provided both the need for innovative IT security hygiene assessment techniques and the technological capabilities to gather and analyze the data necessary to give those risk scores predictive power.

Adding a little bit of structure into one's affairs never hurts, especially when it comes to IT business processes and IT assets. To this end, various frameworks offer blueprints for achieving key organizational objectives like compliance and security. Three of the more popular IT governance frameworks—COBIT, ITIL, and TOGAF—are widely used by enterprises in this regard—let's see how they compare when it comes to bolstering cybersecurity and digital resilience.

LXC (LinuX Containers) is a OS-level virtualization technology that allows creation and running of multiple isolated Linux virtual environments (VE) on a single control host. These isolation levels or containers can be used to either sandbox specific applications, or to emulate an entirely new host. LXC uses Linux’s cgroups functionality, which was introduced in version 2.6.24 to allow the host CPU to better partition memory allocation into isolation levels called namespaces .

Ticketing systems are essential to today's enterprise IT help desk operations—without them, service requests and issues would end up lost inside a flurry of emails and handwritten notes. Both JIRA's Service Desk and ServiceNow are leading solutions in this category; the latter has a 25% share of the IT service management (ITSM) market, while Atlassian—though more software developer-focused—is a household name when it comes to project management and collaboration tools.

When it comes to modern software development, collaboration is the name of the game; to this end, development teams have more than ample selection of tools at their disposal these days.

Many enterprise software hopefuls tackle the final stretch to becoming a mature offering through the development of an easy-to-use management GUI. This is especially true of DevOps and automation tools, as quite a few solutions have recently rounded out their platforms with web-based UI consoles for easier, visual management of resources and services.

The Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 (PDP Bill 2019) was introduced to the Lok Sabha by Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, on December 11, 2019. This comes after more than two years of debate about the bill's provisions. As of March 2020, the bill is being analyzed by a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) in consultation with industry experts and stakeholders.

Cybersecurity is important because cybersecurity risk is increasing. Driven by global connectivity and usage of cloud services, like Amazon Web Services, to store sensitive data and personal information. Widespread poor configuration of cloud services paired with increasingly sophisticated cyber criminals means the risk that your organization suffers from a successful cyber attack or data breach is on the rise.

Traditional cybersecurity risk management remediation efforts start with cybersecurity risk assessments and penetration testing. This commonly involved outsourcing to a consultant who would offer the assessment as a standalone service or as part of a larger risk management program. The issue is cyber risk assessments offered by third-parties only provide a point-in-time assessment of your (or your vendor's) security controls, an inaccurate measure of the true level of risk.