Organizations worldwide depend heavily on their enterprise information systems. These systems are critical for business success, and appropriately receive a majority of the organizational IT budget and resource allocation. Any negative impact to business-critical systems, however, far outweighs the cost and resources devoted to keeping things running smoothly.  

Monitoring enterprise systems for risk factors and cost containment is critical for business viability. Repeating that statement in the inverse may more appropriately convey its importance: Businesses face existential threats from risk events or cost overruns that are not planned for, monitored, and timely remediated. 

In planning for, monitoring, and remediating risk and cost events, most organizations have processes and requirements that guide and inform the process. Compliance with these items constitutes the governance framework that defines IT operations and strategy. The compliance framework will be different for every organization, but likely includes the following: 

• Compliance with government or regulatory requirements 
• Compliance with financial standards and principles 
• Compliance with internal processes and policies 
• Compliance with best practice configuration guidelines 
• Compliance with standard security frameworks 
• Compliance with enterprise software licenses 
• Compliance with cloud usage restrictions 

Monitoring and alerting to non-compliant events in public and private cloud environments is the core value that House of Brick offers its customers through the OpsCompass SaaS solution.  For 25 years, House of Brick has been helping our customers plan, evaluate, and respond to threatening conditions. With OpsCompass, we have saved customers literally billions of dollars in unneeded expense, and reduced risk through proactive monitoring of the risk and cost profile for enterprise systems in the cloud. 

We are launching a content series that focuses on the risk and cost of non-compliance in these critical areas. Where possible we will also calculate the quantifiable value that a compliance monitoring solution from House of Brick and OpsCompass provides for our customers.  With each scenario, we will outline a potential negative event, and then analyze the repercussions of that outcome. While no customer identifying information will be shared, these are all real-life situations that we have encountered. Where scenarios are public knowledge, we will cite the source of our information. We will identify how OpsCompass software with House of Brick support expertise can be used to help mitigate and optimize these events. 

The first topic in the series that we will address is the unintentional disclosure of sensitive United States military data that was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud, the potential negative impact of this event, and how OpsCompass would have identified the risk conditions before any breach occurred. Please see the companion blog post for our analysis and results of this threatening event. 

House of Brick and OpsCompass are dedicated to the safety and protection of our customers and their business-critical systems and data. We have developed the most advanced combination of innovative multi-cloud compliance monitoring software, and expert professional and managed services to ensure that our customers are aware of threats before they become problems. 

We look forward to sharing this content series with you.