How Information Security & Cyber Security are cousins

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

—John A. Shedd

Cyber refers to the digital world and all things related to technology and the internet. This includes online communication, computers, networks, and the security of these systems from unauthorized access and harm. In short, cyber refers to the virtual world and ensuring its safety.

So, cybersecurity is the practice of protecting computer systems, networks, and internet-connected devices from digital attacks, theft, and damage. This involves implementing various technologies, processes, and practices to secure sensitive information and prevent unauthorized access, hacking, and other cyber threats. The goal of cybersecurity is to keep the internet and connected devices safe and secure for individuals, businesses, and governments.

Information security and cybersecurity are closely related but slightly different concepts. Information security refers to the protection of information and data from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction. This encompasses a wide range of practices and technologies, including access control, encryption, firewalls, and backup and recovery systems.

Information Security = Cyber + Physical

In short, information security is a broad term that encompasses all aspects of protecting information, while cybersecurity specifically focuses on the protection of digital systems and networks.

To make information security solutions precisely effective, clients focus on use cases. In the context of cybersecurity, a use case is a specific scenario or situation that describes how a security event or incident should be detected, investigated, and/or responded to by an organization’s security operations team. A use case typically includes a set of rules, criteria, or thresholds that define what constitutes an abnormal or suspicious activity that requires further investigation or response.

Purple is commonly used in information security- purple from mixing red for offense and blue for defense. Purple Teaming is a collaborative process that combines the expertise and knowledge of both the “blue team” (defenders) and the “red team” (attackers) to improve an organization’s cybersecurity defenses. The objective of Purple Teaming is to identify and close gaps in an organization’s security posture, as well as to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall security strategy. In a Purple Team engagement, the blue team provides the red team with access to its systems, tools, and processes, and then actively works with them to identify vulnerabilities, test defenses, and develop mitigation strategies. Through this collaboration, the blue team gains a better understanding of the organization’s vulnerabilities, and the red team learns how to improve its attack methodologies. The Purple Teaming approach helps organizations to prepare better for real-world attacks and to improve their security posture over time continuously.

If you have any thoughts or questions about your organisation’s security postures or initiatives, feel free to write to info@cmsitservices.com.

AIOps simplifies complex IT Environments

Complex IT Environments made easy with AIOps

Artificial Intelligence assisted IT Operations (or AIOps) is now the most pivotal technology intervention that is helping IT Services team to evaluate and identify the actual challenge in the IT estate that comprises of complex infrastructure and applications. The estate shares a volume of data that speaks a lot about the way the estate is behaving and how operations team can respond. The challenge is how to churn and analyse the data to enable the operations team.

With AIOps operations team can quickly identify the areas of concern and with faster turnaround can improve infrastructure response. AIOps helps monitoring and alerting the team for issues occurred, potential issues that may occur and by automating response to the issues. AIOps helps reduce the workload of monitoring team and allows them to focus on other critical tasks.

AIOps and Monitoring

When the IT estate is complex AIOps becomes crucial for monitoring the IT estates, as it is spread across multiple locations including cloud. The monitoring team needs to track logs, traces, and events.  The monitoring team must collect data and analyse data, to derive certain actionable. The AIOps platform does all the data collection, co-relation, analysis and combines related issues to trace the root cause and enables faster resolution. The key function of AIOps is to precisely identify problems before they occur and reduce the possibility of outage.

Areas that AIOps can deliver better success are

  1. 1. Data and its consistency: Systems generate volumes of data for monitoring and the data keeps increasing with time and addition of systems. The data need to be available for processing regularly and in a specific format for the AIOps platform to respond faster.
  2. 2. Design simplicity in complexity: The interconnections of the systems need to be designed in the simplest possible way. This helps alerts from varied systems, Applications, workloads, and other deployments to come in a proper way. The AIOps can respond better and faster to such well-designed environment.
  3. 3. Adoption to change: the adoption to changes that are due to governing policies, change in technology, migration to new systems (application and infrastructure) occur faster than ever before. The AIOps helps IT Operations team to adopt to the new platforms faster.
  4. 4. Cloud readiness: with the shift of investment to “As-a-Service” scenario, the cost optimization pushes the adoption of auto-scaling, in flight tuning, and can address higher volume of data.

With the overall complexity building up that increases the dependency on skills and systems, automation and AIOps plays a key role in helping overcome these challenges.

CMS IT Services enables deliver services with help of AIOps that enables customer derive benefits