One of the challenges of building and running information technology systems is solving novel problems. That's where frameworks like scrum and agile come in– getting from the unknown to the known with a minimum of frustration and waste. Another challenge is performing known tasks correctly every single time. Here runbooks, checklists, and documentation are your friend. And yet, despite a crowded market for IT process automation offerings, misconfigurations and missed patches are still a problem– and not just a problem, but the root cause of 75-99% of outages of breaches depending on platform.

Executable Documentation

Nearly all large enterprises use the cloud to host servers, services, or data. Cloud hosted storage, like Amazon's S3, provides operational advantages over traditional computing that allow resources to be automatically distributed across robust and geographically varied servers. However, the cloud is part of the internet, and without proper care, the line separating the two disappears completely— a major problem when it comes to sensitive information.

Given the complexity of modern information technology, assessing cyber risk can quickly become overwhelming. One of the most pragmatic guides comes from the Center for Internet Security (CIS). While CIS provides a comprehensive list of twenty controls, they also provide guidance on the critical steps that "eliminate the vast majority of your organisation's vulnerabilities." These controls are the foundation of any cyber resilience platform and at the center of UpGuard's capabilities.

Global in scale, with across the board press coverage, the WannaCry ransomware attack has quickly gained a reputation as one of the worst cyber incidents in recent memory. Despite the scale, this attack relied on the same tried and true methods as other successful malware: find exposed ports on the Internet, and then exploit known software vulnerabilities. When put that way, the attack loses its mystique. But there’s still a lot we can learn from this incident, and we’ve summed up the five most important takeaways to keep in mind going forward.

UpGuard makes a cyber resilience platform designed for exactly the realities that necessitate regulations like New York State Department of Financial Services 23 NYCRR 500. On one hand, businesses need to store, processes, and maintain availability for growing stores of valuable data; on the other, the very conditions for market success open them to attacks from increasingly sophisticated and motivated attackers. Balancing these requirements makes a business resilient, and UpGuard provides the visibility, analysis, and automation needed to thrive while satisfying regulations like NYCRR 500.

Why dashboards?
Nobody’s perfect. Success is almost always determined through trial and error, learning from mistakes and course-correcting to avoid them in the future. The length of this cycle— from experiment to result, incorporated into future decisions— determines how quickly a trajectory can be altered, which in turn offers more opportunities to succeed. However, capturing and using hard data to make these adjustments is more difficult than it seems. Dashboards visualize real time data and recent trends, giving people insight into whether their efforts are succeeding— assuming they’re using the right metrics.

So I've finally gotten the go-ahead from higher-ups to join the twenty-first century and use cloud hosting. Now I need to prove that running in AWS is not just easier than maintaining our own farm, but more stable and secure. To do this, I need to be able to monitor each of my instances for configuration drift, ensure that they are properly provisioned, and maintain visibility into dependencies like load balancers and security groups. Fortunately, UpGuard provides all of this information, so even if something were to go wrong I could catch it before someone else does.

UpGuard is proud to announce that security expert Chris Vickery is joining our team as a cyber risk analyst, bringing with him a stunning track record of discovering major data breaches and vulnerabilities across the digital landscape. Chris comes to us from his previous role as a digital security researcher, where among other achievements, he discovered a publicly accessible database containing the voter registration records for 93.4 million Mexican citizens, protecting more than seventy percent of the country’s population from the risk of exposure of their personal information.

A funny thing that’s happened as the digitization of business has sped up in the last ten years is that process cadence has not done well in keeping up. Regulatory compliance standards often use quarters, or even years, as audit intervals, and in unregulated industries that interval can be yet longer. But in the data center, changes happen all the time, changing the risk profile of the business along with it. Determining which changes are the root cause of a problem can be the difference between fixing it and having it happen again.

Going from nothing to automation using one of the many tools available can be a daunting task. How can you automate systems when you’re not even 100% sure how they’ve been configured? The documentation is months out of date and the last guy to configure anything on that box has since left the company to ply his trade somewhere that will more fully appreciate his Ops cowboy routine.