A customer posed this question to me recently; after pausing and smiling (a little too) broadly, he continued, “Their lips are moving.” I thought this would be funnier if it weren’t partly true. The software industry has over-promised and under-delivered for years, making technical executives rightfully skeptical when they hear a new promise. Unfortunately, it’s common for software to lack promised features or to create new headaches when deployed across the enterprise.

When it’s ensuring that tens of thousands of visitors have the best experience possible every single day. Keeping people entertained is a 24/7 endeavor, even the smallest hiccup results in a social media firestorm. Keeping things running requires thousands of dedicated employees and a staggeringly complex network that sprawls the area of a major city and is comprised of millions of endpoints - each of which plays a critical role in ensuring everyone is safe and has a great time.

We are asked to purchase something 4,000 times every day; that’s roughly once every 13 seconds during our waking hours. These “requests to purchase'' often come in the form of marketing messages that test the bounds of credibility. In the software industry, most of us have trained ourselves to question vendor promises vociferously.

Your network, security, and cloud teams spend a lot of time and energy trying to extract timely insights from your enterprise network data, so your organization stays on top of risks and continually improves network performance. But what if they could quickly search your network environment like a database to better understand everything in it — and whether those objects were operating as they should?

Network automation has many benefits for organizations adopting a DevOps model for managing their infrastructure, including speed, agility, and a consistent change control process. However, with improvements in speed, there comes an added risk of configuration errors rapidly propagating through the network. To safeguard against potential mistakes, network and security verification become an essential part of the network DevOps lifecycle.

Headline grabbing vulnerabilities, like SolarWinds and Log4Shell, target management software and end hosts, but if you search for “most exploited vulnerabilities” on Google, you will quickly learn that some of them directly target network and security devices as well as server load balancers. These are the 3 most exploited CVEs in the last couple of years: Would you be surprised to learn that network device operating systems can be vulnerable to security flaws like any other software?