5 Ways to Protect Your Organization from a Cyberattack in 2024

Posted on by Jeff Stewart

As we say goodbye to 2023, we need to prepare to say hello to new cybersecurity threats in 2024. The Department of Homeland Security is already there, having published its annual Homeland Threat Assessment, which predicts “more evasive cyberattacks” thanks to cyber actors using artificial intelligence (AI) and other modern technologies to circumvent company defenses.

Protecting your organization will require a sound strategy that wards off threats and takes the fight to the attackers. Here are five best practices to help you do both.

1. Develop a playbook of response strategies and tactics

Your playbook should include detailed instructions on how to handle a cybersecurity incident, from start to finish, and who’s responsible for what. Key components of a cybersecurity playbook include:

Descriptions of potential attack methods
Steps required to effectively respond to and contain an attack
Roles and responsibilities of response team members
Remediation procedures
Details on how to handle media inquiries, customer, and partner communications, etc.
Processes for a post-incident review and analysis

Hopefully, you will never have to use your playbook. If you do, it will provide you with a standardized blueprint that will allow you to respond to an attack methodically and effectively.

2. Conduct fast and effective diagnostics

Time is of the essence during a cyberattack. Therefore, it is essential to conduct accurate and effective diagnostics as fast as possible.

Not only will you want to identify where the attack originated, but you’ll also need to quickly ascertain where it has or could spread. This requires finding gaps and vulnerabilities in your network where a virus or piece of malicious code could take root. Unfortunately, network complexity gives attackers better cover and more opportunities to hide.

Observability solutions cut through the noise and provide visibility across your entire ecosystem. Observability is different from traditional network monitoring; whereas the latter is more reactive, observability proactively detects anomalies before they become real issues. Plus, with complete visibility into the entire ecosystem, there’s no need to waste time sifting through alerts or hunting down problems. Teams can respond quickly, ensuring high resiliency.

3. Communicate openly, honestly, quickly, and continuously

Effective communication is critical to cybersecurity threat mitigation. When a threat manifests, alert impacted internal departments through secure channels so as not to tip off the attackers that you know they’re in your network. Then, communicate with law enforcement, including the FBI. Finally, reach out to customers and partners. Keep all parties apprised in the weeks and months following the attack.

If you have created a playbook, you will know who to contact and how—because you will have planned for it. You will know, for example, that it will be up to your communications team for outreach to the press, customers, and other third parties.

Your communication must be clear and honest. Tell your stakeholders what you know when you know it. Inevitably, someone is going to ask, “Am I affected?” You may not know, and that is OK—just tell them what you do know. Likewise, you will likely be fighting misinformation. Do not get sidetracked. Continue to tell the truth and communicate openly as much as possible.

4. Enlist third-party partners for help

There are many reasons why you should not take on a cyberattack alone. First, an attack can be too complex and far-ranging for your internal team to handle on its own. It is better to have an outside party that can help with auditing your networks to ensure gaps have been remediated in the wake of an incident. Second, third-party cybersecurity experts can be invaluable in providing guidance, investigative support, and consultation as you navigate through the attack. Your team is going to be busy handling any number of tasks and will appreciate their perspectives.

Outside parties can also help get your truth out to the public. Following the SUNBURST attack, we enlisted the help of reputable organizations like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), the Krebs Stamos Group, and others. In addition to assisting in the investigation, they helped us tell the story of what happened, which went a long way toward combatting misinformation.

5. Implement a “Secure by Design” approach

You have likely heard about shifting left—building security into the foundation of your products, rather than adding it on later. I recommend taking this mindset a step further and adopting a Secure by Design approach, where security becomes a cornerstone of your entire organization.

Secure by Design includes all the best practices listed here, as well as building out your cybersecurity team, auditing applications throughout their development, and engaging with the broader community to learn and share information. It also entails adopting an “assume breach” mindset, where you assume that an asset has already been breached, determine the possible implications, and come up with fixes to limit exposure.

As we turn the calendar page, attackers may have the advantage, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Hopefully, these best practices will help gain the upper hand—and protect your organization in 2024 and beyond.

Reach out to the SolarWinds team to learn more about how you can prepare your organization.

EdTech Talks: Exploring the Impact of Technology on Student Growth and Development

Posted on by Tim Boltz

Schools and universities strive every day to give their students an effective, fulfilling, successful personal growth and academic learning experience. Harnessing technology innovations can pave the way to achieving those goals. During Carahsoft’s annual EdTech Talks Summit, experts in education and the IT industry discussed how existing and emerging solutions such as observability, the ‘secure by design’ approach and analytics can enhance education to personalize experiences, provide developmental insights on learning approaches and achieve maximum support for all students.

Addressing Post-Pandemic Digital Transformation with Observability

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many education challenges including a rapid shift to remote learning, the need to adapt quickly to new technologies and evolving cybersecurity threats. Schools and universities play a major role in the nation’s critical infrastructure along with the transportation sector, water and pipeline management, utilities and more making them vulnerable to cyberattacks. Bolstering the strength of cybersecurity infrastructure is a key component of the student experience as schools are responsible for safeguarding student’s educational, health and personal identification records.

One step towards achieving cybersecurity is observability. In a time when education leaders are asked to do more with less, observability allows institutions to understand what is happening within their networks and why. Observability should be used to empower education IT teams and in conjunction with active monitoring platforms, which will help them understand the full scope of the data in their network management systems to then apply actionable intelligence to solve issues. When exploring this data, IT staff should consider these questions:

Is the network following the proper compliance rules that are in place? If not, what change was made to take the network out of compliance?
What is the user experience like right now?
What vulnerabilities are there within the network?
Are students able to reliably access what they need and are those systems performing correctly?
Are the internal safeguards working as efficiently as external safeguards?
Do students have proper online safety awareness to aid in avoiding potential risks?

Implementing observability best practices can boost the security and manageability of schools’ network infrastructures, leading to improved experiences for students, faculty and cross-campus communities.

Secure by Design for Education

One of the leading ways manufacturers, developers and education institutions can ensure their products are safe and efficient for students and staff is to create and utilize products that are secure by design. This holistic approach establishes that each product code, solution bundle and packages is tested and validated before an end user receives them, and therefore, contains a built-in cybersecurity insurance policy. In the future, this will save schools time and costs by decreasing the number of cyber threats they face. Students and faculty will experience an increased learning capacity. For example, these solutions help keep students in schools and experiencing less interruption and downtime because of ransomware attacks. This approach empowers faculty to seamlessly adopt and integrate the use of secure solutions into their curriculum and lesson plans. With secure by design solutions, educators and students can rely on the fact that their data will be protected by modernized products tailored with them in mind.

The Importance of Analytics in Higher Education

Data plays a crucial role in educational infrastructure, offering valuable insights into the ever-evolving trends in learning. Most schools have siloed data in multiple areas such as learning management systems, enrollment systems and alumni engagement systems. Some colleges and universities within the Public Sector are only able to perform localized, descriptive analytics such as running spreadsheets and creating dashboards to see enrollment and graduation rates. The key to valuable, actionable and intelligent analytics is being able to discern how data intersects and correlates for more predictive and prescriptive analytics across the various digital spaces where institution data is stored. To do this, schools can leverage the power of automation through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to augment data and use the insights gained to improve analytic maturity, helping faculty and administrators better serve students and their education missions.

From increased security through observability and intentional technology designs to data-driven insights, the impact of these solutions on student growth is reshaping the educational landscape and creating an environment where students can thrive both academically and personally.

Visit the EdTech Talks Conference Resource Center to view panel discussions and other innovative insights surrounding security, AI and student success from Carahsoft and our partners.

About Carahsoft in the Education Market

Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Education IT Solutions Provider™.

Together with our technology manufacturers and reseller partners, we are committed to providing IT products, services and training to support Education organizations.

Carahsoft is a leading IT distributor and top-performing E&I Cooperative Services, Golden State Technology Solutions, Internet2, NJSBA, OMNIA Partners and The Quilt contract holder, enhancing student learning and enabling faculty to meet the needs of Higher Education institutions.

Learn more at http://www.carahsoft.com/education.

Innovation in Government: How to Change Things Up (and Make it Stick)

Posted on by Mike Adams

In government, we could say that innovation is invention that solves a problem or meets a need — in the community or within an organization undertaking the work. Big changes make government agencies more effective, prepared and useful, and they touch all aspects of agency operations — from IT to employee morale to digital services and more. In recent years, federal agencies such as the Census Bureau, General Services Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Office of Personnel Management have launched innovations labs, innovation libraries, and other innovation-focused resources and programs. Cities and states have as well, such as through Philadelphia’s Technology and Innovation group within the city’s Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT). Being innovative is not easy, of course: It requires a little bravery and lots of planning. But local and federal agencies are creating the space and resources to launch innovations that will, in the future, become standard operations. In this guide, we share case studies and best practices regarding some of government’s most pressing issues — workforce, customer experience and data use, to name a few — and we hear from government experts who know a thing or two about helping innovative initiatives succeed.

Analytics Innovations Draw a Complete Data Picture

“Spreadsheets are structured things: They have clearly defined lines, cleanly labelled columns, and rules that govern what goes where. Government analytic programs have become skilled at working within those parameters, even if it means spending hours manually manipulating data to fit. Spreadsheets are 30-year-old desktop technology. But other data exists, doesn’t it? The world is full of PDF documents, audio and video files, social media posts and other ‘messy’ data sources — the unstructured data that most agencies overlook. And most agency analytics programs are fragmented and overly manual. Recent innovations seek to change this.”

Read more insights from Alteryx’s Solutions Marketing Director for the Public Sector, Andy MacIsaac.

Driving Innovation to the Edge

“Across government, innovation is happening at the edge. By leveraging cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and related technologies, agencies can deliver services more quickly and effectively at the far reaches of operations, whether that’s in the battlefield or on the International Space Station (ISS). At the Red Hat Government Symposium held in late 2022, government and industry leaders discussed how agencies were leveraging these technologies to accelerate mission delivery. Their discussions and examples help illuminate how agencies are adapting to make the most of modern technological opportunities.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Government Symposium.

Build an Innovative Ecosystem Through Cloud Architecture

“In data transformation and innovation, it helps to view things through a different lens. Within the data ecosystem are three core pillars for transformation: people, processes and technology. Simple, singular data platforms should work with an architecture that breaks down information silos rather than creates them. That facility comes through in qualities such as data mesh or a decentralized data architecture that’s organized by business domain and operates through self-service. The architectural design also must help strengthen system security. That’s enormously important for federal data.”

Read more insights from Snowflake’s Chief Technology Officer for the Global Public Sector, Winston Chang.

Overcoming Challenges With Observability

“As agencies take steps to innovate — such as expanding reliance on the cloud and adding new apps, integrations, and automations — their IT ecosystems become more complex. There are more places where things can go wrong and more pressure to fix them quickly. The task of monitoring these complex systems gets more complicated, too. ‘The question is, how do I know there’s an issue?’ said Brian Mikkelsen of Datadog. ‘Is it when the tickets start flowing, when complaints increase, when your leadership team asks why something isn’t working?’ None of those options are ideal. Datadog’s application performance management platform provides a real-time window into the digital environment, identifying performance and security issues quickly. Its ‘full stack’ hybrid infrastructure capability means everything from the back end to the front end is monitored and reported via infrastructure metrics, application performance traces, and correlated logs.”

Read more insights from Datadog’s Vice President and General Manager, Brian Mikkelsen.

Download the full GovLoop Guide for more insights from these digital transformation leaders and additional government interviews, historical perspectives and industry research.

3 Strategies the State Department Can Adopt to Successfully Balance Infrastructure Modernization and Security

Posted on by Chip Daniels

The Department of State’s (DOS) plan to modernize American diplomacy has two focuses: adopting critical and emerging technologies and strengthening cybersecurity. Secretary Antony Blinken cites these initiatives as an “aspect of foreign policy that has become critical in recent years.”

Yet, a recent survey indicates IT complexity is a top challenge when it comes to protecting against cybersecurity threats. The more technology added to a network, the harder it is to defend.

That’s why the DOS must adopt a security-first approach when building and deploying new IT infrastructure. By shifting security left, the organization will be better positioned to successfully balance modernization with security.

Here are three ways the DOS and other government agencies can achieve this objective.

Adopt a “secure by design” approach

Infrastructure modernization isn’t just about the tools that are added to a network. It’s also about the people who must manage the tools, and the different processes teams might use to ensure that everything works as it should. All of this creates additional complexity and increases how an attacker could infiltrate a network.

That’s why it’s critical to weave cybersecurity throughout every phase of infrastructure deployment. Every time a new system or application is installed, its introduction and implementation should be carefully vetted by a dedicated security team. All endpoints should be carefully monitored and inspected to ensure their fortification and all systems tested by red teams to verify their security postures and resiliency.

Simultaneously, all IT professionals should follow predetermined security guidelines throughout the software implementation process. These guidelines should be easily accessible and understood by everyone involved in the process. Simple, direct, and sequential instructions can help prevent vulnerabilities.

Implement observability for proactive cybersecurity

As the DOS’s software factories continue to develop and deploy new technologies, the agency must adopt methods that allow it to keep close tabs on how those technologies connect and interact with one another. Implementing a process of observability is a good way to accomplish this task.

Observability provides a complete view of every asset that comprises an organization’s IT infrastructure, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid environments. IT teams can observe how assets operate and interact with each other and rapidly identify issues as they arise, including potential security risks.

Observability goes beyond traditional network monitoring, but both are essential. The latter pushes alerts to IT teams whenever there’s a deviation from a predetermined metric, while the former allows teams to detect and analyze abnormalities in real time. So, while monitoring is reactive, and observability is proactive, both work together to form a critical foundation for infrastructure security.

Take an “assume breach” mentality

Zero-trust is an effective best practice that the DOS has adopted from the Department of Defense’s leadership. In the wake of continually evolving cybersecurity threats, adopting a zero-trust posture should be considered the minimum protection standard.

The DOS can take this approach even further by taking an “assume breach” mentality. An assume breach mindset includes several strategies designed to protect the agency throughout the entire lifecycle of a cyberattack. In addition to incorporating zero-trust principles, assuming a breach involves:

Identifying and addressing gaps in security coverage
Planning how to react and respond to an attack
Detailing the steps needed to recover from an attack
Learning from an attack
Implementing processes to prevent future attacks

Assuming a breach is just as it sounds—embracing a position that it’s not if a breach will happen, it’s when it will take place. If agencies base their cybersecurity efforts around this mentality, they will be more prepared to both deal with and prevent the eventuality.

Cyber resiliency must be a top focus as the DOS continues its push toward modernization, but without a systematic plan in place, the agency’s efforts to contain and prevent vulnerabilities can easily become overwhelming. Adhering to the three strategies outlined here can help the DOS prioritize cybersecurity and tackle potential threats in a way that will not only protect the organization but also do so in a manner that is efficient and effective.

These best practices are fundamental elements to SolarWinds’ Secure by Design approach, developed in collaboration with leading cybersecurity experts in the wake of the 2020 SUNBURST attack. It’s a solid blueprint for the DOS to refer to as it continues its modernization efforts.

States Can Build Economic Efficiencies Into Complex, Sophisticated IT Environments

Posted on by Brandon Shopp

Modernizing IT is a priority for all levels of government. Despite its importance, a recent National Association of State Technology Directors study found only 50% of the 38 states surveyed have “budget mechanisms for specifically addressing IT modernization.” At the same time, 84% reported they had increased cloud services—and 76% increased their network infrastructure and bandwidth—because of the pandemic. To put it mildly, growing and scaling services without a budget isn’t ideal. However, building economic efficiencies into an increasingly complex, sophisticated IT environment is possible.

One way to approach cost containment is to build it into the approach taken when developing cloud-native applications and instilling the management of these applications with this mindset. This will likely pose challenges—developers are rarely responsible for the decisions about how their apps are implemented, used, or scaled. Likewise, those responsible for making decisions about infrastructure resources, maintenance, and operations may not understand or account for how much it costs to keep these cloud-native apps going. Here’s a look at how developers and operations management teams can better understand and manage the cost of application modernization programs:

The Relationship Between Cost Containment and the Modern Developer

The application development phase offers an opportunity to lay the foundation for cost containment and is a vital part of developer maturity.

An easy way to move toward cost-effective, sustainable applications is to adopt the underpinning of reliable operations—monitoring and observability. When developers ensure new and modernized applications include monitoring from the outset, DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams can better understand the state of their systems and proactively debug systems in production. This benefits the organizations who own these applications in the long run.

Here’s an example: suppose an application relies on platform-managed serverless or orchestrated containerization. There’s no shortage of opportunities to provide rich performance data for both developers and operations using commercial cloud-native or open-source monitoring options.

Through monitoring, developers can quickly get a sense of application durability and develop more sustainable applications to support cost containment. Considering sustainable cost containment during the dev phase isn’t best left to IT leaders; agency leaders will greatly appreciate the developer who builds the foundation into their apps.

Keys to Containing Cost

It’s also crucial to address agency leaders’ responsibility for ensuring the high performance of cloud-native applications once deployed. As much as we’d like them to, cloud-enabled technologies don’t maintain a minimum latency or uptime on their own. IT and network operations teams continuously monitor the health of cloud applications, infrastructure, and the networks they rely on to ensure a quality user experience and an uninterrupted mission.

They need full-stack observability without added costs for procuring and managing multiple monitoring tools and accommodating new reporting, alerting, and automation needs as time progresses. IT leaders can control costs in a cloud-native future by ensuring their developers and IT operations teams utilize the same centralized and automated monitoring tools—from launch to sunset.

By consolidating tools and achieving observability across services and agencies from a single integrated pane of glass, these teams can occupy the same monitoring domain and ensure peak performance of the entire application, infrastructure, and network environment while saving time and containing costs.

The cost-containment advantages of automation also can’t be overstated. Instead of IT pros spending hours trying to identify, diagnose, and fix hard-to-find performance issues, modern monitoring tools run in the background, automatically identifying performance issues and recommending optimization fixes.

As new systems and cloud-native applications come online, these systems allow agencies to quickly and easily scale their monitoring capabilities without additional expense, no matter how complex their cloud, multicloud, or hybrid environment becomes.

The results? A pathway for states without the budget for cloud and IT modernization to create economic efficiencies.

To learn more about SolarWinds’ observability platform, click here.

3 Ways DoD Can Strengthen Network Security and Resilience

Posted on by Brandon Shopp

In October 2022, CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) revealed that multiple hackers had compromised a defense industrial base organization, gaining long-term access to the environment and exfiltrating sensitive data. And those threats are increasing. Since, 2015 the DoD has experienced over 12,000 cyber incidents.

Strong, resilient next-generation networks that protect sensitive data and DoD missions and functions have never been more critical. But, with a complex interconnected information environment, how can federal IT teams strengthen cybersecurity and become proactive instead of reactive? Army leaders have spent much time discussing resilient next-generation networking, but action needs to be taken soon.

To achieve greater network resilience, here are three steps that federal IT leaders can take to prepare for an unpredictable future and safeguard its networks – and those of its contractors – from malicious cyber activity.

Progress the DoD’s “defend forward” strategy

The DoD’s “defend forward” strategy is nothing new. First outlined in the 2018 DoD Cyber Strategy, the initiative is designed to “disrupt malicious cyber activity at its source.” This refers to any device, network, organization, or adversary nation that poses a threat to U.S. networks and institutions or is actively attacking them.

Notably, the strategy shifts DoD and U.S. Cyber Command’s cybersecurity program from reactive to proactive. Rather than detect and remediate threats as they arise, defend forward actively seeks out threats and eliminates them.

U.S. Cyber Command restated its pledge to “defend forward” in October 2022, but it’s principles and standards must be extended across the defense industrial base – the networks and systems that contribute to U.S. military advantages.

Government contractors are held accountable for their cybersecurity practices and choices, but for true resilience, DoD security leaders must establish new standards for information sharing with their private sector counterparts.

In addition to standing by DoD’s pledge to share indications and warnings of malicious cyber activity, DoD must continue to move beyond transactional vendor relationships. Toll-free numbers are not enough for federal CISOs – they need a dedicated, trusted, point of contact within each defense contractor. Someone with whom they can have frequent and honest conversations, conduct deliberate planning, and oversee collaborative training that enables mutually supporting cyber activities.

Embrace AIOps: The next big thing in networking

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, AIOps is a relatively new approach to network monitoring that boosts resilience by reducing the time it takes to discover issues, detect anomalies, and gives network engineers the context they need to remediate – before a threat materializes.

AIOps-powered observability works by automating the complex task of collecting and analyzing network data across the vast DoD network infrastructure and turning that data into actionable intelligence. With this insight, teams can proactively address network or cyber issues and even predict certain situations – such as signs of network intrusion. A key advantage of AIOps is that it observes remedial action taken and uses these observations to automatically respond to future problems without the need for IT’s involvement – thereby ensuring a more resilient, autonomous network.

Layer in multipath monitoring

Enterprise networks have traditionally been comprised of multiple hub and spoke topologies with linear routing paths and clearly defined traffic flows. But hybrid IT, hyperconverged infrastructure, and modern networking have created complex multipath network environments – any given packet can take any number of different routes, all of which are changing at any moment.

Unfortunately, these multipath topographies can’t easily be visualized using traditional network monitoring tools. There’s simply not enough time in the day to diagram the network, let alone proactively monitor the application traffic and hardware links that comprise it.

The answer lies in finding a network performance monitoring tool that combines multipath monitoring with traditional infrastructure monitoring for greater visibility into network security. Having this insight will allow federal network pros to proactively manage multiple networks, identify issues, and fix them before they get out of hand.

A smarter and more collaborative defense

Network resiliency can be achieved at scale, but it will take a concerted effort. Through greater collaboration between the DoD and private sector, as well as the adoption AIOps-powered observability, the DoD will be better prepared to manage and secure increasingly complex, dynamic military network environments.

To learn more about SolarWinds’ AIOps-powered Hybrid Cloud Observability Solution, click here.

A Two-Step Framework for Securing and Monitoring Military Drone Networks

Posted on by Brandon Shopp

In the coming years, the Department of Defense (DoD) will spend billions of dollars on unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), which will include the expansion of the fleet through the Blue UAS effort, training, and maintenance. Drones and autonomous vehicles perform a variety of tasks in the battlespace, including mine-sweeping, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and search and rescue operations. However, there are challenges to monitoring the security and performance of these mobile endpoints—and the complex 5G networks they depend on.

How, then, can federal IT pros reap the benefits of UAS and 5G while bolstering the DoD’s IT infrastructure to realize those advantages without consequence? The answer is to introduce a two-fold focus within this ever-evolving environment.

Build a Robust, Layered UAS Security Framework

From the manufacturing process through to deployment, drones are a lucrative target for nefarious actors seeking to disrupt operations, damage infrastructure, and cause bodily harm. Common tactics include injecting malicious code into UAS parts, using GPS spoofing to hijack a drone mid-flight, and hacking communications between the drone and controller and breaching sensitive data.

Mitigating these threats requires a layered approach. This starts with basic security hygiene, including strong passwords, data encryption, and the use of automatic push update software to ensure software stays current and vulnerabilities are addressed in a timely manner.

But some hackers have the expertise to bypass this first line of defense. To combat this, military units must layer in more advanced measures. For example, snap-on deception technology can obscure the location of a drone and pilot. In addition, if a drone is lost or captured, cyber-hardening modules can protect against data exfiltration, erase log files, and shut the drone down.

Machine learning (ML) algorithms can also be leveraged to learn from drone flight patterns and behavior and flag anything deemed suspicious. Sophisticated ML and security information and event management (SIEM) tools can even continuously monitor drone-to-base communication for a complete understanding of the security status of UAS devices and network connections—in near real time.

Gain End-to-End Observability of Hybrid 5G Networks

UAS operating on next-generation 5G wireless technology benefit from various advantages, such as unlimited bandwidth for uninterrupted control and high-speed transmission of image and video. 5G also offers security benefits. These networks can be designed to route traffic through an IP tunnel encrypted by default. Plus, additional security features can be layered on top without slowing the network.

However, 5G also brings increased complexity and visibility challenges. 5G networks comprise cloud and virtualized environments incredibly difficult to configure, monitor, and manage at scale using disparate legacy tools. As a result, IT teams risk drowning in a sea of alerts and disjointed analytics and may lack actionable insights to quickly identify, prioritize, and resolve issues.

To solve the challenges of 5G’s hybrid reality, military organizations must shift from a reactive to proactive IT posture and go beyond conventional monitoring. The best way to get a handle on connected UAS is to use single-pane-of-glass monitoring coupled with actionable intelligence delivering greater visibility, dependency insights, and operational predictability into everything connected to the network. With this automated toolset, they can visualize the entire 5G hybrid environment, reduce alert fatigue, accelerate issue resolution, and eliminate tool sprawl.

Finally, because encryption is a key capability of 5G networks, it can erode observability and insights into malicious activity, such as malware originating from a suspicious IP or connected UAS. Network architects should consider advanced traffic analysis strategies capable of segmenting encrypted traffic, decrypting it, inspecting it, and re-encrypting it—continuously and in real time—without compromising classified data.

Turning Challenges Into Possibilities

The distributed nature of UAS and 5G technologies is a complex challenge for the DoD that increases the attack surface and demands end-to-end oversight.

Fortunately, as these technologies have advanced, so has observability, helping federal IT pros gain deep, holistic visibility into hybrid 5G network environments and edge UAS devices—with a low total cost of ownership.

SolarWinds Hybrid IT Observability solutions are built to fortify mission-critical services. Click here to learn more.

3 Ways Federal Agencies Can Make the Most of Microservices

Posted on by Brandon Shopp

To keep up with the current state of IT modernization, more and more federal agencies are turning to microservices to help them innovate faster and create a better end-user experience. Microservices are a development architecture that breaks down applications into their core functions, or services, allowing each to be deployed independently. The utilization of microservices has traditionally been applied alongside DevOps to allow for more simultaneous development and faster, more efficient deployment of upgrades and new features.

By utilizing microservices, agencies can update code more easily without impacting other applications. And while many agencies continue to turn to microservices because of their efficiencies, perhaps the most significant shift in the development process is a cultural one. After all, this is where DevOps comes into play, which embodies a culture of openness and collaboration. To reap the full benefits of microservices, we have put together some best practices for federal IT pros to follow. Here they are:

Shift from a traditional monitoring mindset to one of observability. The high number of moving pieces and additional services created by microservices can add significant complexity to an agency’s IT environment and among teams. While continuous monitoring throughout the application development process is still essential, agencies cannot gain precise insights into their infrastructure without an observability solution. Observability solutions combine network, cloud, system, application, services, and database metrics into a single source of truth, so users can investigate performance analytics at a deeper level and uncover where issues may be occurring.
Consider a mesh architecture, and ensure it aligns with your container infrastructure. Once you start running more than ten microservices at a time, a service mesh architecture is recommended, as it provides policy-based networking and describes the behavior of the network in the face of constantly changing conditions. Service mesh architecture uses sidecar proxies to help IT security and observability efforts keep up with the complex connections between distributed apps. With a mesh architecture, DevOps teams can get quick metrics, logs, and tracing without making application code changes.
- When deciding which service mesh to leverage, look to your agency’s infrastructure and deployment use cases to help inform your choice. For example, some infrastructures work well with Kubernetes® or Docker, but specific use cases may require a highly-capable service mesh like Istio or more straightforward tooling like Linkerd 2.0.

Build an understanding of the network’s criticality. Understanding the criticality of each workload in your agency’s IT portfolio is the first step toward establishing mutual commitments to cloud management. Some applications are mission-critical and must not fail. Others may go months without being used. While poor performance or outages for those lesser-used workloads is not desirable, the impact is isolated and limited with microservices. Federal IT pros should create scales for each application to determine the effort required to meet certain levels of criticality. Starting development with the proper observability framework and using a cloud-native approach to design scalable, independently delivered microservices can be hugely beneficial, especially when considering mission-critical activities.

Microservices can provide many benefits to agencies, particularly when applied alongside DevOps. But to reap the benefits, agencies need to take an intelligent approach to implementation and ensure they have taken steps to incorporate observability to monitor and secure their IT environments effectively.

For a deeper dive on SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability offering and how it can help agencies gain end-to-end IT operations visibility, click here.

Five Benefits Federal Agencies Gain From Observability

Posted on by Krishna Sai

More than ever before, federal agencies are responsible for managing increasingly complex, diverse, and distributed IT infrastructures. While traditional monitoring methods allow for insights into specific network activities, IT teams still face challenges viewing all the interdependencies between the various network, cloud, and IT functions. The overload of alerts and disjointed analytics from disparate tools make it challenging to provide the actionable insights necessary to identify and resolve mission-critical activities rapidly. Multiple tools can become cost-prohibitive to maintain and scale, creating operational risks. So, what’s the solution to all of this?

More agencies are implementing observability solutions, taking traditional monitoring an important step further. By using data and insights from monitoring, observability provides a holistic understanding of your infrastructure, including health and performance. With layers of data and immediately-synthesized analysis, IT pros can spot inconsistencies before they become issues. These functions give IT teams single-pane-of-glass visibility with actionable intelligence to expedite problem resolution and enable proactive management. Of course, it provides much more, and below are the top five benefits federal agencies can gain from observability.

Holistically observe end-to-end service health, security quality, and availability. Observability gives agencies deep visibility into their IT infrastructure and services so they can focus on critical issues without a flood of telemetry data to sift through. It allows agencies to make better decisions and do more, creating efficiencies and freeing time to focus on mission-critical activities.

Predict and prevent user experience degradation and service outages. Observability provides unified on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud visibility, giving agencies the insights needed to reduce outages, improve recovery time, and ensure service levels are where they should be across complex and distributed infrastructures. IT teams can quickly pinpoint component changes degrading service performance and more accurately predict and plan resource capacity to prevent issues and unplanned downtime.

Identify and resolve anomalies, issues, and incidents. Observability provides actionable intelligence about complex environments by visualizing data in an easy-to-understand format. With observability, agencies can identify and diagnose compliance issues and potential security threats, streamline data sets through aggregation, and bring cross-team collaboration to a single source of truth (SSOT).

Reduce compliance, threat, and data breach risks. Observability offers a comprehensive and cost-effective solution to consolidate toolsets, break down information silos, and reduce remediation time across multi-cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.

Offer deep service-level actionable insight to determine which components can best scale performance and capacity. Observability helps federal IT pros understand interdependencies in network infrastructure and apps with full-stack data correlation. It also allows agencies oversight into on-premises and cloud costs in one solution to help simplify cloud migration efforts. Finally, network bandwidth analysis and performance monitoring give insights into where there may be opportunities to scale performance and capacity.

In short, observability solutions can help fortify the mission-critical services relied on by federal agencies. For more information on how observability can help your agency achieve optimum IT service performance, compliance, and resilience, visit https://www.solarwinds.com/solutions/hybrid-cloud-observability.

Using AIOps and Observability to Boost Network Resiliency

Posted on by Krishna Sai

When the U.S. National Science Foundation announced its intent to form a program dedicated to making next-generation networks more resilient, the message was clear. In an increasingly connected world, we can’t afford to have communication networks experience measurable levels of failure or degradation in the wake of a possible attack—we can’t even afford human error.

The Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems (RINGS) program came on the heels of the Department of Defense’s US$600 million investment in 5G technologies. Other industries, including mission-critical ones like healthcare and utilities, are also banking on next-gen telecommunications systems to advance everything from telemedicine to smart equipment management.

But to achieve true resilience, organizations must adopt approaches capable of going beyond traditional network monitoring and embrace new technologies. Solutions like AIOps and network observability can reduce the time it takes to identify and repair network failures, boosting network resiliency and performance.

What Is AIOps?

AIOps is the method of applying artificial intelligence and its components, including predictive analytics and machine learning, to IT operations. AIOps collects data from various sources and turns it into actionable intelligence, which organizations can use proactively to address and even anticipate certain situations—for example, signs of a network intrusion or service disruption.

How Is AIOps Different From Traditional Network Monitoring?

AIOps goes further than traditional network monitoring. Not only does the system provide organizations with predictive intelligence allowing systems to detect a potential problem before it occurs, it can also automatically respond to those problems without the need for IT’s involvement.

When IT needs to be involved, AIOps cuts through the noise by collecting data from connected resources (like sensors, cameras, other devices, and network elements). It streamlines information by reducing noise and identifies high-priority information so IT managers can focus on pressing items and not suffer from alert fatigue. In this way, AIOps provides the team with a high degree of observability of everything happening across their next-generation networks.

What Is Network Observability, and Why Is It Important?

Having the ability to observe the entire network gives IT managers a significant advantage for achieving true resiliency. Observability isn’t just about seeing what’s happening across the network; it’s about being able to use multiple data sets to quickly identify issues and fix them before they become disruptive. Instead of using only log data to track the root of a problem, organizations can leverage a combination of log data, application data, and other metrics.

Think of observability as being able to look to the left, center, and right:

The left is the past—what happened on the network recently.
The center is the present—what’s happening on the network right now.
The right is the future—what will likely happen given what’s happened before and what’s currently taking place.

What someone sees when they look to the right is informed by the wealth of past and present data.

How Is Observability Different From Traditional Network Monitoring?

Network monitoring is a reactive measure; IT managers are alerted to issues as they happen. AIOps-based observability is an anticipatory measure. Therefore, it’s more likely to prevent challenges and preserve resiliency.

Plus, today’s networks are highly complex. They consist of in-house, on-premises, and hybrid clouds, and they’re continually changing. Managing them effectively and ensuring they continue to operate as expected requires an unfiltered viewpoint.

How Does All This Tie Into Performance?

With the emergence of 5G, the prevalence of smart devices, and the prospect of long-term remote work environments, our world is more connected than ever before. A single loss in connectivity can lead to minor inconveniences (such as when a social media site goes dark) or large-scale disruptions (like those resulting from an attack on a utility company).

AIOps and observability provide significant layers of protection against these disturbances. AIOps can help anticipate downtime and proactively remediate threats. Even if a problem arises, observability can help teams identify the problem quickly and trace it back to the source so networks can remain high-performing and resilient.

Visit our website for more information on network observability.

1. Develop a playbook of response strategies and tactics

2. Conduct fast and effective diagnostics

3. Communicate openly, honestly, quickly, and continuously

4. Enlist third-party partners for help

5. Implement a “Secure by Design” approach

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Adopt a “secure by design” approach

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Take an “assume breach” mentality

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Progress the DoD’s “defend forward” strategy

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Gain End-to-End Observability of Hybrid 5G Networks

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What Is AIOps?

How Is AIOps Different From Traditional Network Monitoring?

What Is Network Observability, and Why Is It Important?

How Is Observability Different From Traditional Network Monitoring?

How Does All This Tie Into Performance?