Ransomware attacks are increasing in frequency and severity every year. The impact to companies is devastating. These attacks typically lead to lost business for companies as they often cause increased customer turnover, system downtime, diminished reputation and other adverse side effects.

Long gone are the days where a cyber security breach inferred you just had to change your log in password, or maybe run a virus scan. Modern cyber breaches are a constantly growing and changing combination of threats and security concerns that can put organizations in a lurch, and if not solved quickly can cause significant damage not only to reputation, but to customer trust.

On two occasions in December 2021, VMware Tanzu Application Service released remediations within 48 hours of critical CVEs being announced. These remediations were both in response to the Log4j saga, enabling VMware customers to defend against attack vectors quickly after the Day 0 event. This quick response is a reflection of the dedication of the VMware engineering teams working on Tanzu Application Service today.

Security is a vital part of application development, yet it may be neglected until an attacker takes advantage of a vulnerability in the system. The consequences of a security breach can damage an application’s integrity as well as a company’s reputation and revenue. Software architects and engineers need to pay special attention to securing the systems they work on.

You’ve probably seen the term AIOps appear as the subject of an article or talk recently, and there’s a reason. AIOps is merging DevOps principles with Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Machine Learning. It provides visibility into performance and system data on a massive scale, automating IT operations through multi-layered platforms while delivering real-time analytics.

In the last few years, many organizations I worked with have significantly increased their cloud footprint. I’ve also seen a large percentage of newly launched companies go with cloud services almost exclusively, limiting their on-premises infrastructure to what cannot be done in the cloud — things like WiFi access points in offices or point of sale (POS) hardware for physical stores.