By Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco Observability
Across the world, government agencies continue to be a highly attractive target for cybercriminals. These malicious entities are aware of the vast amounts of sensitive data stored by federal, state, and local institutions, and recognize the limited resources many of these have to protect legacy applications and infrastructure.
Whether it’s geopolitical strategy and cyber war through state sponsored attacks (a growing possibility with the number of countries with major elections this year) or one-off ransomware and phishing attacks, government agencies are threatened like never before. In Canada, 11 per cent of all cyberattacks were aimed at the public sector last year, with attackers looking to exploit vulnerabilities to access huge volumes of personal data for fraud, identity theft, and account takeovers.
Unfortunately, many government IT teams are struggling to handle an increasingly dynamic and sophisticated threat landscape. They simply don’t have the tools and insights needed to detect and address threats in a timely way. Unless addressed, this issue represents a huge challenge for government agencies, and for citizens around the world. The likelihood of serious security breaches will continue to rise, with all the subsequent effects to reputation, trust, and citizen engagement.
While IT teams across vast industries rely on cloud-native and SaaS-based observability tools to address security threats, public sector agencies face unique challenges. Federal, state, and local government institutions often operate in air-gapped environments with strict data privacy and security rules, limiting their access to these solutions.
Fortunately, more government institutions are now turning to self-hosted observability solutions. This shift allows them to leverage advanced AI-powered tools to enhance their security posture and proactively manage application availability, performance, and security.
Self-hosted observability is vital to protect on-premises environments
Observability offers technologists unified visibility across the IT stack, allowing them to identify vulnerabilities, understand root causes and dependencies, and address issues promptly. Additionally, it provides business context to security findings, helping IT teams assess the potential impact of vulnerabilities in cloud-native technologies and prioritize mitigation efforts based on customer and business outcomes.
Unfortunately, however, the reality is that most observability solutions only run in cloud or SaaS environments – making them unsuitable for organizations maintaining applications and infrastructure on-premises. On-premises observability has largely been overlooked, with only one or two comprehensive solutions on the market. The result is that many on-premises IT teams are struggling to respond to increasing levels of complexity and overwhelming volumes of data, and to respond to an increasingly more sophisticated threat landscape.
Fortunately, though, there is now a new breed of observability solutions which are delivering innovative functionality within on-premises environments and helping government IT teams mitigate risk and deliver secure and seamless citizen experiences.
Across federal, state, and local government, a growing number of agencies are embracing self-hosted application observability solutions to monitor their most critical business systems, end-to-end.
Self-hosted observability – or customer-managed observability – includes on-premises deployments or cloud-based deployments where the organization maintains control of all the data and associated operations. It enables technologists to proactively manage the performance, availability, and security of mission-critical applications and, in turn, delivers market-differentiating digital experiences to end users.
With observability, IT teams gain a unified view of their applications, infrastructure, and data, allowing them to monitor, manage, and optimize applications in real-time. It integrates seamlessly into the data centre while adhering to compliance, security, and operational policies.
Modernizing the on-premises control to leverage AI capabilities
IT teams managing on-premises environments need an observability solution that modernizes their installation and operates effectively within a Kubernetes environment.
Upgraded observability controls provide government agencies with the same comprehensive capabilities as cloud-native solutions, including AI-powered anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and automated transaction diagnostics. Self-hosted observability enhances security by identifying application vulnerabilities within context and offering automated business risk scores. This helps IT teams prioritize responses based on potential impact.
With the threat landscape likely to become even more severe over the coming months and years, government agencies urgently need to ensure their IT teams have access to the latest AI-powered functionality that self-hosted observability can deliver. Only with the right capabilities and insights will IT teams be able to counter rising threats and deliver the seamless and secure experiences that are now so crucial in driving improved citizen outcomes.
How Well Does PRESTO Support For Apple Watch And iPhone Work? Let’s Find Out!
Posted in Commentary with tags Presto on July 28, 2024 by itnerdAfter I wrote this how to guide that details how to add your PRESTO transit card to your Apple Watch and iPhone, I got a number of emails asking about how well things worked. So in the interest of science, I left my car at home on Saturday to visit two clients and pick up some items from a bike shop. With that out of the way, let’s get to it.
I started from my suburban Toronto home and walked over to the subway station. There, I used my Apple Watch to get into the station.
Now the PRESTO card readers in the stations are on the right side, which means that using an Apple Watch requires you to go across your body to tap your Apple Watch on the reader if you wear your watch on your left wrist. That’s likely a non issue for most. But coming from a guy that has broken both collarbones, it’s not exactly comfortable. One thing I need to note is that I have Express Transit Mode enabled so that all I have to do is tap my Apple Watch and go. I feel comfortable having Express Transit Mode enabled for the Apple Watch as someone would have to rip my Apple Watch off my wrist to use it to get onto transit. Conversely, because iPhone theft is a thing that can be snatched out of your hand, I do not have it enabled for my iPhone. That’s because I want to authenticate before I pay for transit.
I traveled to the north part of the city to visit one of my clients which took about an hour. About 30 minutes later I hopped onto the subway again. Because it was within two hours, I should be eligible for a free transfer. And when I tapped, that’s exactly what happened. But four stations into my journey to my next client, I had to go back to the first client to fix a new issue. That took another 30 minutes which required me to pay another fare. At that point I needed to refill the PRESTO card on my Apple Watch. The quickest way to do that is to use your iPhone to do it either via the PRESTO app or on the card itself via the Watch app on your iPhone. Which means that if you travel with only your Apple Watch, you need to preload the PRESTO card on your Apple Watch so that you can get to and from your destination. I chose the latter option.
One thing that is handy is that it keeps track of every time you tap the card.
That’s something that you would normally have to go into the PRESTO app to see if you have a physical PRESTO card. Which assumes that you have the PRESTO card added to the app. If you just have the card, or it’s not in the app, you’re out of luck. One thing that I noted is that the subway is called the “Metro”. Interesting.
In short, using the PRESTO card on my Apple Watch was a total non-event. Everything worked perfectly and it was as if I was using a physical PRESTO card. If you were on the fence in terms of going to using your PRESTO card on your iPhone or Apple Watch, I would say go right ahead. From what I can tell, everything seems to work fine.
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