September 16, 2021

Zero Trust Requires Cloud Data Security with Integrated Continuous Endpoint Risk Assessment

Most of us are tired of talking about the impact of the pandemic, but it was a watershed event in remote working. Most organizations had to rapidly extend their existing enterprise apps to all their employees, remotely. And since many have already embraced the cloud and had a remote access strategy in place, typically a VPN, they simply extended what they had to all users. CEO's and COO's wanted this to happen quickly and securely, and Zero Trust was the buzzword that most understood as the right way to make this happen. So vendors all started to explain how their widget enabled Zero Trust or at least a part of it. But remember, the idea of Zero Trust was conceived way back in 2014. A lot has changed over the last seven years. Apps and data that have moved to the cloud do not adhere to corporate domain-oriented or file-based access controls. Data is structured differently or unstructured. Communication and collaboration tools have evolved. And the endpoints people use are no longer limited to corporate-issued and managed domain-joined Windows laptops.

What We Can Learn from the Top Cloud Security Breaches

Although spending on cybersecurity grew 10% during 2020, this increase fell far short of accelerated investments in business continuity, workforce productivity and collaboration platforms. Meanwhile, spending on cloud infrastructure services was 33% higher than the previous year, spending on cloud software services was 20% higher, and there was a 17% growth in notebook PC shipments. In short, cybersecurity spending in 2020 did not keep up with the pace of digital transformation, creating even greater gaps in organizations’ ability to effectively address the security challenges introduced by public cloud infrastructure and modern containerized applications: complex environments, fragmented stacks and borderless infrastructure, not to mention the unprecedented speed, agility and scale. See our white paper, Introduction to Cloud Security Blueprint, for a detailed discussion of cloud security challenges, with or without a pandemic. In this blog post, we look at nine of the biggest cloud breaches of 2020, where “big” is not necessarily the number of data records actually compromised but rather the scope of the exposure and potential vulnerability.

When is AI actually AI? Exploring the true definition of artificial intelligence

Whatever the organisation, consumers insist on seeing instant results – with personalisation being ever more important. If this isn’t happening, businesses will start seeing ‘drop off’ as customers seek an alternative, which, in today’s competitive market, could prove disastrous. There is an opportunity now for businesses to combat this by implementing true, bespoke AI models that can sift through vast amounts of data and make its own intelligent decisions. After all, the amount of data being generated across the globe is skyrocketing, and organisations are continuing to share their data with one another – so organisation and analysis at this level is a must. However, it’s important to note that AI isn’t for everyone. The move to AI is a huge leap, so businesses must consider whether they actually need AI to achieve their goals. In some cases, investing in advanced analytics and insights is sufficient to help a business run, grow and create value. So, if advanced analytics does the job, why invest in AI? Most AI projects fail because there is no real adoption after the initial proof of concept.?

How DevOps teams are using—and abusing—DORA metrics

DORA stands for DevOps Research and Assessment, an information technology and services firm founded founded by Gene Kim and Nicole Forsgren. In Accelerate, Nicole, Gene and Jez Humble collected and summarized the outcomes many of us have seen when moving to a continuous flow of value delivery. They also discussed the behaviors and culture that successful organizations use and provide guidance on what to measure and why. ... Related to this is the idea of using DORA metrics to compare delivery performance between teams. Every team has its own context. The product is different with different delivery environments and different problem spaces. You can track team improvement and, if you have a generative culture, show teams how they are improving compared to one another, but stack-ranking teams will have a negative effect on customer and business value. Where the intent of the metrics is to manage performance rather than track the health of the entire system of delivery, the metrics push us down the path toward becoming feature factories.

Intel AI Team Proposes A Novel Machine Learning (ML) Technique, MERL

What is unique about their design is that it allows all learners to contribute to and draw from a single buffer at the same time. Each learner had access to everyone else’s experiences, which aided its own exploration and made it significantly more efficient at its own task. The second group of agents, dubbed actors, was tasked with combining all of the little movements in order to achieve the broader goal of prolonged walking. Since these agents were rarely close enough to register a reward, the team used a genetic algorithm, a technique that simulates biological evolution through natural selection. Genetic algorithms start with possible solutions to a problem and utilize a fitness function to develop the best answer over time. They created a set of actors for each “generation,” each with a unique method for completing the walking job. They then graded them according to their performance, keeping the best and discarding the others. The following generation of actors was the survivors’ “offspring,” inheriting their policies.

Backend For Frontend Authentication Pattern with Auth0 and ASP.NET Core

The Backend For Frontend (a.k.a BFF) pattern for authentication emerged to mitigate any risk that may occur from negotiating and handling access tokens from public clients running in a browser. The name also implies that a dedicated backend must be available for performing all the authorization code exchange and handling of the access and refresh tokens. This pattern relies on OpenID Connect, which is an authentication layer that runs on top of OAuth to request and receive identity information about authenticated users. ... Visual Studio ships with three templates for SPAs with an ASP.NET Core backend. As shown in the following picture, those templates are ASP.NET Core with Angular, ASP.NET Core with React.js, and ASP.NET Core with React.js and Redux, which includes all the necessary plumbing for using Redux. ... The authentication middleware parses the JWT access token and converts each attribute in the token as a claim attached to the current user in context. Our policy handler uses the claim associated with the scope for checking that the expected scope is there

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