Daniel Jones
Educational
In this article:

Evolution is a natural phenomenon. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but either there is progression or regression. That’s what we see reflected in the natural world all around us.

At Runecast we are inspired to better ourselves and to better our product. There is no such thing as treading water, whether we’re talking about technology in general, or security and operations in particular. There’s only progression or regression. 

For years now we’ve been comparing Runecast to a Swiss Army Knife. The do-it-all tool for your Security and Operations teams. But recently an internal conversation led to new way of explaining what Runecast offers. An evolution in explanation, if you will. Allow me to present it below.

Simplify and avoid the Fake Beautiful

You know your business. You know the challenges that you face, from personal to technological. We know those technological struggles too, and know how demanding life as a CISO can be. Perhaps those struggles are a new security audit coming up, or a software or hardware upgrade in your data centre. Or perhaps you’re transitioning from your private cloud to public cloud.

There are a few ways to do this, starting with the most obvious: manually. Your teams wade in and quickly find themselves at the deep end, configuring each parameter and variable themselves. And most likely there are a ton of meetings and management overheads at every step.

What normally happens at this point is that the people around you suggest something. They’re probably well meaning, well intentioned folks who have seen a small sliver of the issues you’re dealing with and they have an idea. Or maybe they’re someone trying to sell you something.

“Here, why not use this solution? It’s designed specifically for this issue!” 

For many people that’s the solution: find another tool which fixes your issue. We call this The Fake Beautiful Idea. Switching from manual solutions to a specialist tool. For a moment it sounds ideal, but only for a moment.

Because, as you know, each added tool brings bloat. You’ve probably felt it in multiple places, even somewhere like your smartphone: how many apps are sat in your launcher and how many do you use day to day? Even the venerable Swiss Army Knife can get so wide it’s no longer viable to be held comfortably in one hand. 

What you know is that the solution is never more complexity. It’s never more tools, it’s actually fewer tools.

Anticipate & mitigate

Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus Cars, liked to say ‘Simplify, then add lightness.’ Now, to be clear, this isn’t about asceticism, or some kind of monastic self-discipline. It’s not about learning to cope with less than you need. It’s about removing the weight from the system, removing the mental load from your teams.  Imagine how quickly you could get new team members up to speed if they only had one tool to learn, one window to navigate. 

But it’s more than that. It’s more than just adding simplicity, it’s prediction and anticipation. Even the most efficient reactive tools are still a step behind. Runecast’s unrivalled coverage makes it possible to anticipate issues and security risks, putting your teams on the front foot. It’s moving from playing catch-up to racing ahead.

Being able to anticipate and mitigate compliance issues means reduced financial risk and liability. Being able to see holes in your cloud security posture, or exploited vulnerabilities you’re open to ahead of time, allows you to move beyond reactive firefighting and into proactive prioritsation of work. 

Runecast is not just a do-it-all tool that helps you solve problems in your infrastructure, it’s a tool for anticipating issues and liabilities and mitigating them before they even happen. 

It’s a bold claim, and one we’re prepared to stand by with the Runecast Challenge. If Runecast doesn’t find 10 new issues on your systems you’ll get a 12 months subscription for free.

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