January 03, 2024

5 best practices for digital twin implementation

Rather than wait until post-build, consider initiating digital twins during the planning, design, and construction phases of your projects. At the planning stage, this can enable plan simulation and various what-if scenario testing prior to committing to real-world investment. Part of the benefit of digital twins is they can address the full lifecycle from construction twins to operational twins. The digital twins, therefore, know far more than after-the-fact asset management systems, and the learnings and insights captured by the twin during design and build can improve operations and maintenance. According to Rapos, early incorporation allows for better data collection, more accurate modeling, and immediate feedback during the construction or development phase. It’s crucial to understand that digital twins aren’t just a final product, but a dynamic tool that evolves and adds value throughout the project’s life. Delaying its development can result in missed opportunities for optimization and innovation.

Why exit the cloud? 37signals explains

37signals was a significant cloud user with a $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022. The company pledged $600,000 to procure Dell servers, envisioning significant savings during the next five years. Of course, there were questions, and Hansson did an excellent job of addressing them one by one in the FAQ, such as the additional costs in terms of humans needed to run the on-premises systems, how optimization only took them so far in the cloud, and how they handled security requirements. Hansson also explained the limited abilities of cloud-native applications to reduce costs and highlighted the need for a world-class team to address security concerns, which the company has. Notably, privacy regulations and GDPR compliance were underscored as reasons for European companies to opt for self-owned hardware as opposed to relying on the cloud. Of course, this is not the case for everyone. ... Everyone is looking for a single answer, and it doesn’t exist. The requirements of your systems will dictate what platform you should use—not whatever seems trendy. Sometimes the cloud provides the most value, but not always.

Size doesn’t matter!

Small enterprises are less likely to have dedicated IT staff, let alone afford cyber security specialists. Security solutions are usually considered too expensive(Chidukwani 2022) and their technical features come across as overwhelmingly complex to be handled in-house. As a consequence, there is a tendency to rely heavily on external IT vendors that provide sub-optimal support without customized care(Benz 2020). Fear-driven, some business owners take up the reactive route. Instead of a unified threat solution, they continue to buy off-the-shelf security products in response to recent emerging threats, leaving may leakages unplugged and ineffective protection. These human, financial, and technical resource constraints create a puzzling gap between the cyber security awareness of small business leaders and their commensurate commitment to address the risk. Alongside the well-known construct of the ‘digital divide”, academic literature now also acknowledges a ‘security divide’, what with lagging investments in cybersecurity solutions coupled with increasing cyber incidents at SMEs (Heidt et al., 2019).

Cybersecurity challenges emerge in the wake of API expansion

APIs are already the fundamental building blocks of any modern organization today, and that will become even more evident going forward. As organizations look to transform their digital business and enter the era of the API economy, we expect that we will be building and using more and more APIs. That’s especially true if we take a look at some of the trends that are happening in technology nowadays. Things like VR/AR glasses, wearable devices, and voice-controlled devices all require APIs to work. APIs will play a more critical role as the world transitions to more browserless devices. All this growth and expansion means more APIs, requests, and security challenges. The toughest thing about API security is that, in most cases, organizations don’t know that hackers exploit their APIs because they don’t have access to API data in real-time. That’s why tooling, which allows you to do that, will become even more critical.

Attackers Abuse Google OAuth Endpoint to Hijack User Sessions

OAuth enables applications to get access to data and resources to other trusted online services and sites based on permissions set by a user, and it is the mechanism responsible for the authentication handoff between the sites. While the standard is certainly useful, it also presents risk to organizations if it's not implemented correctly, and there are a number of ways attackers can abuse vulnerable instances and the standard itself. For example, security researchers have found flaws in its implementation that have exposed key online services platforms such as Booking.com and others to attack. Meanwhile, others have used malicious OAuth apps of their creation to compromise Microsoft Exchange servers. In the case of the Google endpoint, the OAuth exploit discovered by Prisma targets Google Chrome's token_service table to extract tokens and account IDs of logged-in Chrome profiles, according to CloudSEK. That table contains two "crucial" columns, titled "service (GAIA ID)" and "encrypted_token," Karthick M explained.

Observability in 2024: More OpenTelemetry, Less Confusion

Observability has transcended its traditional association with monitoring to find bugs and to resolve outages, and now extends its influence across different interfaces, tools, and demonstrating enhanced openness and compatibility to increasingly make forecasts. These frecasts can involve predicting outages before they happen, cost shifts, resources usage and other variables that certainly would be much harder and mostly involve trial and error previously. ...  “This means that organizations can now use a single agent to collect observability data across their increasingly distributed and therefore complex universe of microservices applications,” “This could significantly simplify one of today’s most significant pain points in observability: instrumentation. Developers can now benefit from the continuously increasing auto-instrumentation capabilities of OpenTelemetry and no longer have to worry about instrumenting their code for specific observability platforms,” Volk said. However, such a freedom of choice due to a proliferation of tools has created challenges of its own.

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