First reported on Sunday, software provider SolarWinds suffered a massive breach that has global implications on both public and private organizations. Acknowledged by SolarWinds, a supply chain attack trojanized the security vendor’s Orion product, which provides IT health and performance monitoring for large networks. The attack breached SolarWinds’ codebase and attached malicious code to Orion’s upgrade patch as early as last March. This allowed the attackers to create a backdoor to spy and steal data from government, critical infrastructure, and other major verticals for months.
Solar Winds has more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including most Fortune 500 companies, all five branches of the U.S. military, and several agencies, including the highest levels of the federal government. According to the company, less than 18,000 of its customers have installed the malware-laced Orion update. Thus far, the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Treasury are known victims of the breach, but more agencies and commercial enterprises are likely to disclose that their systems were compromised. U.S. officials suspect a Russian group known as APT29 is behind the intrusion campaign.
How can Centerity help?
Business continuity is one of the top objectives for supply chains, enterprises, and government agencies. Ensuring true 360-degree business continuity means monitoring three main pillars:
Health
Performance
Security
In addition to comprehensively monitoring them, it’s critically important to be able to correlate among the pillars and translate the outcomes to business impact. This pivotal ability to prioritize actions shortens mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) whether there’s a glitch, a bug, or a breach.
Learn more
To learn more about how Centerity approaches 360-degree business continuity, please read our Platform Overview or contact us.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Centerity-dash-on-computer-730-x-480_0008_Layer-7.jpg7891200Arin Karimianhttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngArin Karimian2020-12-15 13:26:262020-12-15 13:26:26Briefing on the SolarWinds breach
As we all use printers, we usually select them based on standard criteria; however, it appears we are missing the most important one.
Getting access to your internal network is a severe security risk creating an enormous potential opportunity for hackers around the world.
How can we fix something we are blind to that can happen behind our backs?
You have to be notified about critical events or misconfigurations and be able to automatically block any malicious devices or potential threats.
Why choosing a printer is not just a matter of ink?
Canon, HP, Epson, Brother. This is just a short list of the most popular printers. You and your company most likely own one of them if not a few. How did you choose the most reliable ones? Depending on the line of work and the business of the company, some of the main factors to consider will be price, service quality, printing volume & speed and perhaps color contrast.
However, since they are connected to your network, did you ever stop to think that besides those factors and feedback on forums, you will need to address something as critical as security protection? Think again.
Your printer is a threat!
Even if you review your paycheck on a regular basis with a magnifier to ensure all the numbers are correct, you need to be aware of the security breaches your printer is exposing you to. First, document theft or hijacking – a potential GDPR breach but also think about hijacking your paycheck and changing the numbers. Second, changing settings to alter and reroute the printer jobs and get valuable data. Third, printers exposuring your network via rogue device thus adding a new area of vulnerability.
What if, a hacker (internal or external) would find the first security breach and alter the numbers on your salary sheet? Instead of the real numbers, they would modify it and reroute the actual money to their bank account. How big of an impact would that be on your company? On your own salary as an employee or the entire company’s employees? Just think about the bad reputation or the potential financial damage to everyone.
Getting access to your internal network presents a severe security breach and vulnerability with an enormous potential threat from hackers around the world. Just read about “Stackoverflowin”1 to know the potential damage that could have done!
Protect your printer!
How can we fix something we are blind about and can happen behind our backs (and let’s just say we are not teachers)?
Be notified about misconfigurations of devices and network, exposed assets & security postures and be alerted about malicious hardware and “uncontrolled” devices.
Secure & Block – protect the “innocent” printers internally and externally by applying the relevant configuration (i.e., use complex password) and securing their USB interfaces. You can also validate the connection on the physical layer or generate “two-way” authentication, but the most important method is to identify and block any malicious device once discovered.
Conclusion
Now that we understand that choosing a printer is not just by the amount of ink it consumes. It can do much more than print expense receipts. It can facilitate a change to your (precious) salary and be a conduit to an even more critical organizational content. Centerity wants to offer a solution.
You have to be notified of critical events or misconfigurations and be able to automatically block any malicious device or potential threats. For this purpose, Centerity’s Cyber AIOps platform includes rogue device mitigation and observability modules. Centerity knows how to identify and block malicious hardware attacks as they happen, while keeping your printer’s configuration safe based on security best practices.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Featured-Did-You-Know-scaled-2.jpeg25601710Arin Karimianhttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngArin Karimian2020-11-22 15:25:142020-11-22 15:25:14Did you know Hackers can reduce your salary
Writers: Stanislav (Stas) Siganevich, Retail Sector Manager and Snir Zarin, Solution Architect, Centerity.
I just wanted to have lunch but instead I’ve spotted a security breach. Does it make sense that a CISO needs to be physically present in a retail store to know about those threats?
Highlights
It appears there are physical threats which are not covered by the standard security tools.
Only by arriving locally to one of our retail stores, I could identify a huge potential unknown security breach.
How easy is it to use a malicious device to penetrate our organization defenses? Quite simple to be honest.
Found it by chance
I’m hungry, I thought to myself as I was finishing with the last of the FW rules and distributing them to all of the stores. The daily dilemma of “where to get my calories today” was irrelevant today because yesterday the retailer I worked with to opened a brand-new store with a deli nearby that looks very promising.
As I was marching to the elevator, I remembered that I didn’t distribute the latest patches to the new equipment in that very store I was going to get my lunch from, but… it can wait an hour, I guess. When I entered the store the smell of the fresh baked bread and smoked meat fills my lungs and I joined the long line on my quest to fulfill my gastronomic desires.
The line was moving slowly, so I decided to try to catch up with all of the emails, though it’s not really possible. The reception in the store was not that good so connecting to a corporate WIFI sounded like the quickest solution (the bonus of being an information security officer), but when I was searching for a desired network in the list something caught my eye – an unknown network clearly transmitting from within the store with a really strong signal.
Red alert, red alert, all warning signs went off. I pulled my Laptop from the briefcase and left the line – my smoked beef sandwich will have to wait for me.
I started looking around to see if I can spot something or someone unusual. Everyone was pretty much busy with their food, god I’m hungry, except for one young lady that was sitting with a laptop, but without even a coffee cup in sight, right next to her there was a slightly displaced digital billboard that we had just recently installed. When I started walking towards her to see what she’s doing she must have noticed my corporate badge and quickly close the lid of the computer and started to go towards the exit. I checked my phone and… the network was still transmitting. I got a bit closer, just close enough to see a small black device sticking out of the network sockets that were in use by the billboard. When I pulled that sucker out, the unidentified network went down. Another one under the belt. A few moments later I was again in the line for that divine sandwich, feeling like a hero, wondering, why can’t I clone myself, though the thought of “why my NAC solution did not stop this” had me a bit (a megabit to be frank) worried.
“45!” the teller shouted. That’s me!!!! Oh joy!! “One Brisket with pickles and Coke please”, I approved the payment with my watch and the guy turned away to prepare my meal. In the meantime, I had nothing to do but to explore the POS in front of me, one of those I have to distribute with the latest patches once I get back to the office. Big screen, wireless payment terminal, the new Verifone model is prettier than the previous one I thought to myself, but wait, what is that I see? 3 shining USB ports just staring at me, without any barrier, just 20 centimeters from my hand, unsupervised, unprotected, exposed to the whole world for abusing. Sometimes I just wish I could unsee things, but this is not the case. In case you do not see an issue with this situation, let me draw a picture for you: Anyone, yes, anyone, a customer, a supplier, an employee, can connect a rogue device to this USB, oh, sorry, first lets say a few words about “Rogue Device”:
By definition, Rogue devices are malicious by nature. They are devices that have intentionally been compromised to carry out cyberattacks including data breaches, malware and ransomware attacks. Manipulating a peripheral device with a small computer, such as the Beagle Bone Board, allows bad actors to remotely gain access to an organization’s network by creating an out of band connection to bypass an air-gapped network. From here, data can be extracted, or malware/ransomware can be installed without the end-user knowing it, causing organizations to be vulnerable to both exfiltration and injection. Often, rogue devices help attackers perform man in the middle (MiTM) attacks, whereby the device intercepts the message from the victim to the entity. The consequences are impactful, and these attacks can even allow attackers to bypass biometric authentication.
Again, I pick up the phone, and realized our existing MDM and NAC systems can’t recognize those kind of devices, as they appear legit to the operating system. I guess I need to find a solution which can track those malicious hardware foes instantly, without visiting our entire retail store network on a daily basis. Dam, do you remember that I have not eaten yet??
My sandwich is packed and I’m all set to go. I start walking toward the exit when I pass the new digital billboard that is being installed and… oh my eyes!!!! Corporate network socket is just waiting there for anyone to connect to, but I’m hungry, so we will pick it up in the next episode.
Conclusions
As existing security tools are not covering the new era types of Rogue devices, we need to find a resolution to close this vulnerability and fast. Rogue devices are cheap and available to all, especially to bad guys with bad intentions. Any open hardware slot is similar to any open port. We can compare it to a closed but unlocked door which can be opened simply by turning the door knob, open it and get full access.
What can you do? A lot. Centerity’s Cyber AIOps Module for Rogue Device Mitigation can prevent those malicious hardware devices from penetrating your network. We will be more than happy to show you how simply you can avoid those kinds of attacks and keep your organization safe.
Written by: Matan Reiman, VP of Business Development, Cyber AIOps Lead, Centerity.
Many people wish to be an internet celebrity in order to gain fame, influence and notability. Although, it is still hard work to become one, there is a good chance that you already are one of those internet stars and you just don’t know it yet…
Highlights
While security professionals often lack visibility of their organizations’ internet exposed assets, hackers are always on the lookout for such targets and case easily detected them
The statistics around misconfigurations are alarming and cybersecurity teams struggle to keep up and stay on top of this phenomenon
Using the right tools and increasing cyber hygiene can keep your organization from harm’s way
Be an internet star for the right reasons
When it comes to your personal brand, increasing your internet presence is important and can be very exciting. The prospect of becoming a powerful known influencer can bring along both social and financial benefits. But when it comes to your organization’s IT infrastructure, online exposure is a whole different story. Instead of fame and glory, your organization is risking a feature in the Wall Street Journal but for all the wrong reasons.
The reality on the ground is that all security teams today face unknown unknowns. With 70%1 of attacks being perpetrated by external threat actors, its crucial to understand what your organization’s digital footprint looks like and which unknown internet exposures you may have which hackers can easily find.
An average security tech stack today includes dozens of tools as well as awareness programs aiming to increase cyber resilience and improve the security posture. Nevertheless, millions of sensitive assets end up unintentionally exposed to the web and pose imminent threats to organizations. Such unknown exposures are low hanging fruit that are “waiting” to be exploited by hackers.
With so many tools and investment that goes into security programs, how come such blind spots are so prevalent? Simply put, misconfigurations and human errors.The natural maturation of businesses as well as digital transformation processes often translate into business growth but also mean that your IT ecosystem and digital footprint are growing and are in constant flux.
Spinning up new cloud instances, frequent deployment of development environments and adoption of new software tools are just a few examples of ongoing activities which often remain under IT and security teams’ radars and can easily result in risky misconfigurations.
Traditional tools are built for your known network ranges. Once set up, they will detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations within pre-defined environments. But all your other connected assets will remain in the dark.
The numbers around misconfigurations which lead to unknown exposures are overwhelming. On average 64%2 of organizations’ digital assets are unintentionally exposed to the internet and not monitored. It’s time to take control of your critical assets before someone else does.
What can you do?
Here are 4 tips for achieving complete and ongoing visibility of your external attack surface.
Accept the fact that assessing vulnerabilities from the inside only is insufficient. If you want to stay ahead of hackers, you must also gain their point of view and observe your business from the outside-in.
Periodic and limited discovery exercises such as penetration testing are insufficient. With the current rate of change, exposed asset discovery should be fully automated, continuous and done at an internet-wide scale.
Your supply chain is part of your IT ecosystem and is a source for potential unknown exposures. You need a solution which can monitor and identify the risks caused by your business partners and contractors.
Full visibility is a must but not enough. Actionable security insights enriched with your business context is needed for quickly eliminating unwanted exposures.
Our advice… ensure your organization’s fame is driven by its success and not because a cybercriminal has managed to gain access to your sensitive data.
Conclusion
By gaining better visibility and converting unknown unknowns into known risks in real time, organizations can significantly mitigate and reduce security risks.
Centerity Cyber AIOps platform, with its unique attack surface management module is designed exactly for this purpose. With no installation or set up required, this solution indexes billions of exposed assets across the entire internet and automatically maps them back to your organization. You get real time visibility and insights into every potential risk across all your environments and the supply chain.
You’ll probably be surprised by the results! Talk with us!
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/pexels-andrea-piacquadio-842548-2.jpg8531280Arin Karimianhttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngArin Karimian2020-10-15 10:41:302020-10-15 10:41:30You are an internet star and you didn’t even know
IT operations pros worldwide are instantly part of wartime environments. They are supporting a massive number of people transitioning to remote work, shifting work models, and in most cases, extended hours. While the COVID-19 virus is putting a severe strain on corporate networks, servers, and security policies, it may also be causing major traffic jams on customer-facing websites. This is especially true for consumer-facing businesses in retail, healthcare and financial services. Above all, the new IT reality is testing each organization’s ability to deal with the unexpected and unplanned1.
According to Accenture2, the transition that many leading companies have been pursuing towards digital businesses must continue and even accelerate during times of crisis. Some of the critical business areas impacted are Operations, Commerce, User Experience, Supply Chain, Leadership, and the Workplace.Each one of these areas is essential to business requiring a holistic approach to digital transformation.
While we hope there will not be another event of this magnitude, changes that became necessary during these last few months will persist – the IT evolution will need to adapt to this new reality. Agility and adaptability are not buzz words anymore and have become an essential part of modern IT managements’ DNA. IT systems must adapt to a new, ever-changing, ever-evolving reality, implying that many assumptions companies had regarding their information technology ecosystems are no longer valid.
The Unexpected Demand Scenario
What happens when operations support systems such as remote access or VPN systems suddenly expand from serving 25% of the company to 100%, becoming business-critical? As workloads shift and secondary systems become business-critical, performance management becomes the only way to cope with the lack of resources in an on-premise or hybrid operating model.
Capacity planning is usually completed in advance according to trends with relatively constant consumption dynamics. In on-premise and hybrid architectures, new purchases may take months to provision. The only answer to cope with existing systems constraints and maintain regular operations is to have automation through an AIOps platform that can: (1) detect and even predict these new demands on systems; (2) detect performance problems proactively; and (3) execute remediation measures automatically to keep the systems performing optimally.
Deal with the New Reality
In the new reality, the transition from traditional, static, rules-based monitoring to dynamic AIOps is essential. Modern IT management teams can no longer wait for trends to become obvious as future operating behaviors will become more dynamic, more frequent and less predictable. Traditional monitoring and event management systems are based on static thresholds that primarily rely on assumptions derived from past experiences. As operating scenarios change rapidly in the new paradigm, dynamic behavioral analysis becomes the new doctrine for modern IT Operations. The manual adjusting of alert thresholds, the lack of correlation across interdependent domains, and reactive alarms are no longer acceptable when an average company may have more than 2,500 performance metrics per unique business service.
Driverless, IT Operations
Proactive analytics and automated responses are the new norm and ensure optimal system performance. Functionality like these will allow modern IT management teams to rapidly adapt to these new, unexpected realities without serious disruptions to current operations.
Centerity offers a modern AIOps platform married with Cyber AIOps capabilities that automatically learns the behavior of critical applications and business processes by using machine learning on a Big Data, Time-Series platform that can adapt dynamically without the need for human intervention.
As a result, IT management is empowered to adapt to new, unexpected realities in a matter of days without disrupting current operations.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/remote-it-operations-100.jpg9011501Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2020-04-15 14:40:132020-04-15 14:40:13Remote IT Operations is the New Norm
Centerity is an AIOps Platform that Delivers Dynamic Service Views and Business Service Level Analytics for Digitalization and Digital Transformation Initiatives to the business constituents responsible for these services. Each Dynamic Service View calculates the performance and availability of a critical business service as shown below.
Centerity Complements APM Solutions
APM solutions like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Instana, and New Relic trace the execution of business transaction through the custom code that implements these transactions. Metrics like response time, calls per second and error rate are collected for each transaction, tier and application monitored by the APM tool. Centerity complements APM tools in the following respects:
APM tools cannot cover the entire IT stack down into virtualized and physical hosts, networking and storage – Centerity can
APM tools cannot roll up the performance and availability of the entire stack into Dynamic Service Views for business constituents – Centerity does this and incorporates the transaction and application metrics from the APM tools into the DSV’s.
The manner in which Centerity complements the APM tools is shown in the image below. The transaction, tier and application metrics for an application is which part of a business service monitored by Centerity are the top three layers in the Dynamic Service View. Centerity itself monitors the entire virtual and physical infrastructure that supports the applications including the VMware environment, the virtual and physical network and the storage.
Centerity is therefore uniquely able to translate IT infrastructure metrics, and application level metrics from APM tools into value for the business constituents who rely upon the entire IT stack to work correctly in order for the business service to deliver revenue or other business results to the business.
The Layers of a Centerity Dynamic Service View
Centerity is able to build the Dynamic Service Views out of the layers that comprise each business service by having a comprehensive platform that collects events, logs, and relationships from across the entire stack. The platform then builds the relationships in real-time over time and applies AI to automate anomaly detection.
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity Functional Overview
Summary
APM tools are excellent at helping the teams that develop and support custom applications in production ensure that their code is working and performing as it should be, and in pointing to issues in the code when there are problems.
Centerity integrates in with the APM tools, to combine APM metrics with infrastructure metrics into valuable Dynamic Service Views for business constituents.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_288623191.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-10-15 14:54:122019-10-15 14:54:12Centerity Brings Business Value To APM
What is Digital Transformation? Digital Transformation means taking advantage of the fact the software based processes can be evolved and enhanced more frequently to dramatically drive up the business agility of the company, and to gain market share and revenue as a result. This is sometimes stated as “Compete online or die”, but it does not always have to involve people using browsers and mobile devices to access web services. The Imperative to Digitalize Core Business Processes The leading initiative for nearly every CIO (especially the ones who have rebranded themselves as Chief Digital Officers) is digitalization. Digitalization means that the key business processes of the company get implemented in software. This creates the following imperatives:
Drive online business results – revenue, customer acquisition, customer service, customer satisfaction, market share, and reputation
Time to Market – Implement key businesses in software more quickly than both current and emerging competitors
Rapid and Continuous Improvement – Rapidly improve those digitized processes in order to compete and gain market share
Great Customer Experience – Web and mobile experiences must be available all of the time, and offer excellent performance (responsiveness to user actions).
Fast Resolution of Problems – Every online system has issues, but they need to be prevented as often as possible and solved as quickly as possible.
Scale in Response to Demand – If the system is subject to spikes in demand (like online retail), then it needs to be able to response to dramatic increases in load without suffering from reliability and performance problems.
Be Cost Effective – Modern application teams need to be efficient with their time and need to avoid overspending on legacy and expensive toolsets.
In summary, every enterprise must now run like a highly agile, responsive and forward thinking SaaS software product company. The infographic below shows the important Digital Transformation trends for 2019.
Industry Changes caused by Digitalization Digitalization is creating unprecedented demand for the resources (primarily the people) who know how to implement business processes in software (software developers and architects) and the people who know how to operate complex application systems in production with high reliability and performance (cloud and applications operations). The most important architectural change is the shift to a microservices architecture which allows each microservice to be independently enhanced – leading to dramatically shorter application development cycle times, dramatically increased technical and business agility and dramatically increased online competitiveness. The demand to implement business processes in software exceeds the supply of knowledgeable people, which is fueling a set of innovations designed to speed the delivery of software into production, and ease the process by which highly complex, dynamic, and scaled out applications are supported in production. Complex Multi-Cloud Architectures Today the question is not whether to do cloud, but which clouds and how many different ones will be deployed. For most enterprises an on premise private or hybrid cloud based upon VMware vSphere is a reality. For these enterprises going to the public cloud often means adding the public cloud to their environment instead of replacing their on premise or collocated environment. This means that for cloud operations teams, the cloud is a source of increased complexity, not a source of simplification.
Innovation and Dynamic Behavior across the Stack The imperative to digitalize core business processes, and the resulting shortage of people who can do the work is fueling as set of process and technology innovations designed to speed business functionality implemented in software into production. These process innovations (DevOps and CI/CD) and technology innovations (containers, and the dynamic infrastructure upon which they run) are being brought to bear to help development teams be more agile and effective to help support teams deliver better reliability and performance results to the business. These layers of innovation are shown in the diagram below.
The above architectural (microservices), and process (CI/DC) innovations, combined with the diversity in the stack, and the dynamic behavior across the stack create an unprecedented monitoring and management challenge for modern online enterprises. This challenge is compounded by a high rate of innovation which constantly increases the complexity and diversity of the environment. The Problem with Legacy Monitoring Approaches Digital Transformation produces new critical business services which must be monitored and managed holistically. However, ever since the death of the monitoring frameworks from IBM, BMC, CA and HP, monitoring has devolved into a best of breed approach leaving enterprises with between 20 and 200 different tools, none of which give the business the visibility into the reliability and performance of these new critical business services. The Franken-Monitor
Monitoring Challenges with Modern Applications, Stacks and Processes The modern application, development process, and technical stack, combined with dynamic behavior across the stack, create the following new and unprecedented challenges for monitoring solutions:
Modern apps are highly scaled out (many things to monitor – hundreds and thousands of microservices in production)
Modern apps are highly dynamic (high rate of change in scale and new versions – multiple releases of new software into production every day)
Modern apps are very diverse (many different languages and stacks – with the need for developer productivity driving ever more diversity)
Business services are often comprised of not just the modern applications, but previously developed N-Tier application, monolithic applications and purchased applications.
As stated above, the environment spanning the on premise private cloud and the new public clouds is more complex than ever and more dynamic than ever.
Due to the above factors modern apps are very complex and addressing issues consumes time and expensive resources. In fact Gartner predicts that, “By 2020, 75% of enterprises will experience visible business disruptions due to infrastructure and operations (I&O) skills gaps, which is an increase from less than 20% in 2016”.
Making Sure It All Works All of the Time The applications and business services that result from Digital Transformation initiatives must work all of the time, and must provide an excellent user experience all of the time in order for these new services to meet their business objectives. The technical challenges associated with managing these applications in production mean that a new approach must be taken to monitoring them in production. The following requirements must be met:
The entire stack must now be monitored in real time (1 Min – 1 Sec) to be able to detect service quality issues in time
Flows, relationships and dependencies across the stack must be determined in real time
AI (AIOps) must be deployed to cope with the deluge of incoming monitoring data and automatically understand normal vs. abnormal
AIOps and relationships must be leveraged for automated root cause and ultimately automated remediation.
The results of monitoring must be made relevant to business constituents
The Need for Business Visibility Since these new software based business services are so critical to the business, business constituents like product managers and business executives responsible for the results of these services need consolidated visibility and manageability across the entire stack of technologies that comprise each service. Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views provide this visibility. Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views consolidate the availability, performance, throughput, and error rate of the entire software and hardware stack that supports each critical business service into a service level gauge that allows business constituents to easily understand how the business services supported by these stacks are actually working.
The Centerity AIOps Platform Centerity delivers these Dynamic Service Views through a comprehensive AIOps platform that works with the existing monitoring tools, virtualization platforms and cloud platforms in use at the customer. Metrics, events and logs are collected across the entire stack, and evaluated by an AIOps engine for anomalies. Degradations in service levels are the surfaced in Dynamic Service Views and forwarded to alert and service management systems.
Centerity Functional Overview
Summary Modern business services are composed of new applications, existing applications, custom developed applications and purchased applications. The software and hardware infrastructure for these new business services is updated frequently and operates in a dynamic manner. This creates a new imperative to be able to monitor the resulting business services in a continuous and full-stack manner.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_334109487.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-10-15 13:32:132019-10-15 13:32:13Why Digital Transformation Needs AIOps
In an era of digital transformation, stakeholders like business planners and executives find themselves increasingly dependent on IT services not only for routine business operations, but also for evolving their business models to become more competitive and more customer-aware. At the same time, IT executives and innovators find themselves increasingly pressured to show value and accelerate service delivery while minimizing costs and eliminating IT inefficiencies. This combination echoes Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in its mixture of innovative opportunity with outstanding pressures to perform faster and more effectively without breakage or loss.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_108675541.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-06-25 13:47:572019-06-25 13:47:57Recorded EMA Webinar – A Look at the Changing IT-to-Business Landscape
In an era of digital transformation, stakeholders like business planners and executives find themselves increasingly dependent on IT services not only for routine business operations, but also for evolving their business models to become more competitive and more customer-aware. At the same time, IT executives and innovators find themselves increasingly pressured to show value and accelerate service delivery while minimizing costs and eliminating IT inefficiencies. This combination echoes Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in its mixture of innovative opportunity with outstanding pressures to perform faster and more effectively without breakage or loss.
https://www.centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/AdobeStock_108675541.jpg8001200Marty Pejkohttps://centerity.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Centerity-Logo-White.pngMarty Pejko2019-06-25 13:47:572019-06-25 13:47:57Recorded EMA Webinar – A Look at the Changing IT-to-Business Landscape
The retail industry has changed significantly over the past decade and it keeps on evolving further and faster by adopting new, cutting edge technologies while transforming from a classic store to an omnichannel business that is not limited to one country or to the physical world at all.
While these businesses strive forward, some of them open new online or offline stores every day, their infrastructures can’t sometimes keep up with the pace.
The modern store is a vast collection of technologies: Points of Sale, Self-checkout kiosks, payment and security systems and operational technologies like refrigerators and baking ovens. Most of these technologies are not limited to the store and rely on many different backend systems which in their turn rely on other systems which often span multiple vendors and service providers. This huge, interconnected network of technologies is very hard to keep track of and when problems start you need to be ready to identify and solve them fast or suffer the consequences.
The State of Online Commerce
Digital transformation is no longer about if enterprises will transform, but about when. Companies that have not embraced transformation, such as Kodak, Blockbuster or Borders have disappeared, and even technology companies like Nokia, that have failed to change with the times, are now struggling to survive.
Source: Profitindustry.com May 2019
The accelerated pace of economic change is compressing the lifecycle of businesses and those that don’t digitally transform will be rendered irrelevant; and it will happen with remarkable speed, and with little warning.
Digital transformation is not just about technology; it’s about redefining your entire business strategy. The degree of difficulty is compounded by the dearth of experienced resources. According to Forrester, in 2017, 74% of companies have a digital transformation strategy, but only 15% have the skills and capabilities to implement it.
The Changes Driven by Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is a disruptive process and it will not only “transform” your IT department but also will change all aspects of your business, including; the way you relate with your customers, your partners, and your suppliers.
In this document, we will focus on the intrinsic technological requirements, not the business process aspects of the process.
At its core, Digital transformation drives some key changes:
Every key business process of the company and the interactions with every key constituency are implemented in software and are rapidly evolved to maintain competitive advantage online.
Data driven applications are deployed on cloud-based infrastructure and every facet of the supply chain is connected through the cloud.
Real-time data analytics for notifications and abnormality detection (AIOps).
Big Data to optimize system performance in reaction to change.
Users now must have a connected device to see the necessary information on cloud.
Applications should be able to adapt to different environments (on-premise, Cloud, containers, etc.), detect and inform environmental changes and proactively change their behavior accordingly.
The Omnichannel Approach
The term OmniChannel refers to better introspection of the customer experience by understanding where, when, how, and of course, what he/she wants. It means offering the customers a real-time, on-demand, cloud-based, self-service experience through the convergence of all the channels. With information coming from virtually everywhere (on premise, cloud systems, IoT, mobile applications, etc.) and in real time, it is critical to have applications that can provision these sources of information efficiently, and in real time.
OmniChannel may include:
Online browser based applications
Mobile applications (owned and 3rd parties)
Kiosks
Telephone Interactive Voice Response
Social media
Help desk
Physical locations (branches, plants, etc.)
One of the most critical components of the OmniChannel strategy is the backend.
As with any other multi-technology support (IoT, Cloud, on-premise, Mobile, etc.) it needs a myriad of connecting elements and workflows to pull, push and normalize the information flows. The business in turns needs to guarantee that these business flows are working correctly, as they are becoming the bloodline of the digital business.
An OmniChannel approach at a Global Fast Food Restaurant
What Happens When Things Go Wrong?
Online systems in retail directly support the revenue generation of the company, and when they are not working correctly also damage the reputation of the company, and the ability to retain customers. So an outage does not just represent a one-time loss of revenue, it often causes customers to leave and to never return.
Immediate revenue loss, stock market crashes and reputation damage cause retailers billions of dollars of damage every year!
The Centerity Solution
The Centerity AIOps Platform has a proven history in supporting business service outcomes across complex enterprise and managed service environments. Centerity is built on strong operational analytics and data mining, as well as powerful discovery, visualization, and dependency insights. Highlighted features include the following:
Deep and Broad Integrations: Centerity integrates with the tools and platforms that you rely upon.
Dynamic Service Views: Simple to understand gauges that show the service quality for each critical business service
In Context: Constant alignment between IT data and business objectives.
Consistent User Experience: Detect user experience degradation before your users do.
Traffic Analysis: Analyze bandwidth consumption and data flow; filter by application, packets, protocols, etc.
AI-driven Anomaly Detection: Machine learning for digital services moves the performance discipline beyond thresholds
The Centerity AIOps Platform
Centerity Functional Overview
Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views translate technical metrics and their impact on business services and resultant consequences.Each gauge represents the availability, performance, throughput and error rate of the entire stack of software and hardware supporting each digital business service.
Unified Dynamic Business Service Views
When service levels degrade, Centerity provides a bird’s eye view of how the operation of each layer that supports the digital business service is impacting the overall service level.
Drill Down Into Each Layer of a Digital Business Service
