Business partnerships require trust, but knowing whether your vendors merit that trust is difficult. With the rise of information technology, the ways in which trust can be broken, intentionally or unintentionally, have multiplied and become more complex. Vendor security assessment questionnaires are one method to verify that service providers follow appropriate information security practices so your business can weigh the risk of entrusting them with your data.

Vendor risk scoring is a practice that has emerged to address the complexity of vendor management by assigning vendors a single score– typically a number or letter grade– to facilitate comparison between vendors and portfolios. The past decades of digital transformation have provided both the need for innovative IT security hygiene assessment techniques and the technological capabilities to gather and analyze the data necessary to give those risk scores predictive power.

In the pantheon of open source heavyweights, few technologies are as ubiquitous as the MySQL RDBMS. Integral to popular software packages like WordPress and server stacks like LAMP, MySQL serves as the foundational data platform for a vast majority of websites and cloud services on the internet today. Unfortunately, its popularity translates to more commonly known attack vectors and security exploits —the following are 11 ways to shore up MySQL security and protect your data more effectively.

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is widely used in the enterprise, despite a less-than-stellar reputation for security. In fact, for many “IIS security” is a contradiction of terms—though in all fairness, Microsoft's web server solution has improved significantly over the years. IIS 8.5 for server 2012 R2 and IIS 10 for 2016 have been hardened and no longer present the dangerous default configurations of older IIS iterations, but can still be further tightened.

Adding a little bit of structure into one's affairs never hurts, especially when it comes to IT business processes and IT assets. To this end, various frameworks offer blueprints for achieving key organizational objectives like compliance and security. Three of the more popular IT governance frameworks—COBIT, ITIL, and TOGAF—are widely used by enterprises in this regard—let's see how they compare when it comes to bolstering cybersecurity and digital resilience.

LXC (LinuX Containers) is a OS-level virtualization technology that allows creation and running of multiple isolated Linux virtual environments (VE) on a single control host. These isolation levels or containers can be used to either sandbox specific applications, or to emulate an entirely new host. LXC uses Linux’s cgroups functionality, which was introduced in version 2.6.24 to allow the host CPU to better partition memory allocation into isolation levels called namespaces .

Ticketing systems are essential to today's enterprise IT help desk operations—without them, service requests and issues would end up lost inside a flurry of emails and handwritten notes. Both JIRA's Service Desk and ServiceNow are leading solutions in this category; the latter has a 25% share of the IT service management (ITSM) market, while Atlassian—though more software developer-focused—is a household name when it comes to project management and collaboration tools.

When it comes to modern software development, collaboration is the name of the game; to this end, development teams have more than ample selection of tools at their disposal these days.

Many enterprise software hopefuls tackle the final stretch to becoming a mature offering through the development of an easy-to-use management GUI. This is especially true of DevOps and automation tools, as quite a few solutions have recently rounded out their platforms with web-based UI consoles for easier, visual management of resources and services.