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The 5 Principles of IT Infrastructure Management

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Challenges Addressed and Overcome Applying the principles outlined above allows IT teams to address the most pressing challenges they face today: Combatting the Sprawl and Security Risk of Shadow IT Easy access to cloud resources leads developers and others to simply go out and get what they want, bypassing IT altogether. Such "shadow IT" not only creates unchecked (because unseen) cloud sprawl and drives runaway costs, it threatens security. For example, serious security flaws have been found in Kubernetes, the de facto container orchestration platform for cloud applications. "Kubernetes, like all software, is not immune to security issues - the privilege escalation flaw makes it possible for any user to gain full administrator privileges on any compute node being run in a Kubernetes cluster. This is a big deal." (Red Hat) More than the security issues associated with specific emerging technology, the lack of visibility into and control over the configuration of "shadow" resources means lapses in DevSec go completely undetected. For example, developers sometimes embed credentials in their code, leading to serious breaches. To cite but one example, Uber was breached "because engineers failed to secure credentials on a GitHub site they were using." The credentials were then used to gain access to Amazon AWS instances supporting Uber (VictorOps). Combined data breaches and losses from shadow IT applications (those outside of the IT department's control) are estimated to cost companies between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion every year (CloudCodes). When self-service simplifies the provisioning process, developers have no need to acquire their own resources. And by automating configurations, consistent DevSec is maintained. Supporting Digital Transformation As enterprises pursue digital transformation, embracing new models for innovation and undertaking radical improvement in operations, they need agility and speed. An approach to infrastructure management built around extensibility provides this agility and speed, allowing companies to rapidly adopt and integrate new technologies. Such an openly extensible approach is critical. With over 60% of IT spend now driven by new business opportunities and the need to support the demands of the workforce (including DevOps), there is no way for IT to keep up without it. 1 2 W H I T E P A P E R

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