Page 5 - CT Innovation in Education, November 2021

interdependencies and pinpoint where the problem occurred, providing a boost to the help desk, so they don’t have to do the mental merging themselves: “Hey, check this server! All of a sudden, the CPU on it spiked up to 100%. Something’s going on. You need to investigate.”
USE CASE #3:
Helping identify the full attack surface
With every new service a college or end user adopts, the attack surface grows. Whether that’s a cloud service from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or another company, an internal application running on-premises, or a slate of devices getting onto the network at the start of a new semester, all of them are generating traffic and logs and opening up potential security risks into your organization.
When your institution leverages third-party resources, it
has placed a certain amount of trust in them — that they have the appropriate security controls in place, they’re doing the appropriate testing, and they’ll hold up to their end of the shared responsibility deal. On the university end, IT remains responsible for making sure users are authenticating, two-factor is turned on, and operations are being audited.
By keeping an eye on the full stack — traversing on-premises, hosted solutions, and the cloud — SolarWinds analyzes all the data generated, standing by, primed to flag possible anomalies in the crowd before they turn into full-fledged security events.
Troubleshooting for Friction-Free
Experiences
What these use cases have in common is the need to troubleshoot problems across products and platforms and thereby ensure a frictionless experience for users.
Whether you face an immediate problem — a security incident, an outage — and need help solving it, want to make your team more effective, or have a compliance need that
calls for new levels of visibility and auditability, SolarWinds produces tools to help IT stay on top of potential issues, improve performance, and keep the institutional mission on track. X-ray vision really does have its advantages.
Brandon Shopp is the group vice president of product strategy for security, compliance, and tools at SolarWinds. Previously, he was the vice president of product management at AlienVault and senior director of products at Embarcadero Technologies.
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