By: Nik Korba

Cybersecurity failures have become incredibly common. Google “data breach” and you’ll get a virtually endless list of articles reporting on recent incidents in every industry — from government to finance to technology — affecting millions of records and at least as many people that seem to indicate cyber attackers are winning the cybersecurity war.

As experts assess the reasons for the growing number of cybersecurity failures, human vulnerabilities are often cited as a leading cause.

“Cyber attacks such as social engineering attacks that seek to exploit the role humans play in security have become the focus of cyber criminals because they’ve learned humans are usually the weakest link in the cybersecurity framework,” says Yashin Manraj, CEO of Pvotal Technologies. “I refer to it as the human vulnerability factor. It plays out in several ways, all of which compromise the effectiveness of conventional cybersecurity systems, which leads to data loss, financial loss, and reputational loss.”

Pvotal, where Manraj leads a world-class team of technology experts, is on a mission to turn the tide in the cybersecurity war by mitigating human-induced vulnerabilities. Manraj describes his company’s approach as LowOps, which leverages an innovative approach to security that systematically reduces human involvement in the development, deployment, and maintenance process. 

“Embracing the LowOps approach gives enterprises a solution that empowers the creation of an enterprise infrastructure where agility and growth go hand-in-hand with security,” Manraj says. “LowOps puts security at the core of development because it prioritizes control over the end-to-end infrastructure, enabling us to rapidly eliminate the common cybersecurity concerns our clients face and significantly strengthen their entire technology infrastructure.”

The Key Components of a LowOps Approach

LowOps leverages the thinking behind DevOps, which blends technology development with technology operations to achieve greater efficiency, but elevates it by streamlining processes. LowOps optimizes processes by automating routine development and deployment tasks, thereby decreasing the workload human agents need to contribute.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a key player in the automation capability LowOps delivers. IaC uses scripts and codes to define and manage the infrastructure environment. Once the code is established within an enterprise’s system, it supports more reliable maintenance.

“LowOps minimizes the workforce needed for resource-intensive operations like quality control, user interface design, and DevOps coding,” Manraj explains. “It’s a next-gen solution that boosts operational efficiency in the software development process. With LowOps, organizations can expedite development and achieve higher levels of productivity. It compresses the timeline, allowing ideas to be transformed into enterprise-grade cloud applications in half the time, at half the cost, and with half the effort traditional approaches require.”

Fixing Security with LowOps Solutions

By empowering greater capability for automation, LowOps also empowers greater security.

“The human component is often the single point of failure in a cybersecurity breach,” Manraj shares. “Minor, routine events managed regularly by human agents, such as updating system components with security patches, can break down for many reasons — say someone gets distracted or confused and suddenly there is a gaping hole in an enterprise’s security system. LowOps prevents those breakdowns by automatically deploying environments, removing sensitive information from pushed code, securing standard protocols, testing terminals, addressing security issues associated with certain development components, and managing a host of other processes.”

The issues human involvement brings to cybersecurity can be seen in the popularity of social engineering attacks. When cyberattackers seek to manipulate humans into providing unauthorized access to systems, the attacks are known as social engineering. Phishing, which typically involves an attacker posing as a company representative to obtain security credentials, is a common type of social engineering attack.

Many companies have responded to the steady rise of social engineering attacks with zero-trust policies, which essentially encourage employees to trust no one when it comes to requests for system access. LowOps takes zero-trust to the next level by replacing human agents with automated processes as often as possible, thus reducing the number of people with access to systems and the potential entry points that hackers can exploit with social engineering schemes.

Giving Enterprises More Cost-Effective Solutions

In addition to decreasing security vulnerabilities, LowOps also reduces overall costs associated with supporting systems by simplifying complex systems by leveraging IaC and other automated processes. As a result, enterprises become less dependent on highly skilled employees who demand high salaries.

“When enterprises adopt a LowOps approach, they can restructure their technology teams in a way that optimizes productivity and costs,” Manraj says. “Routine tasks get shifted to automated processes, which means developers have more time for innovation. Enterprises looking for a solution that drives business efficiency and expansion will find it in LowOps.”

LowOps is the leading solution for many of the challenges today’s enterprises face due to its ability to improve security capabilities at a time when hackers are more active than ever, while also bringing cost-saving efficiencies to business operations. LowOps provides companies with the security and agility they need to develop the solutions to their most pressing problems.

Published by: Martin De Juan