“What’s interesting here about the SolarWinds hack, in particular, is that it’s what’s called a supply chain attack,” says Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel. “This means the attack was made on the code that was shipped to the SolarWinds customer. Then there is this new notion in security called shifting left. By left, it means is closer to the developer and earlier in the development process.”

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel discusses how the SolarWinds hack signals an increased focus by hackers to target software earlier in its development:

The SolarWinds hack was definitely a very big one. It’s not especially surprising to see new important hacks like this one but definitely a very impactful one. What it makes very clear is that there’s going to be even more of an arms race when it comes to security. It’s not surprising companies are transforming. They’re having more and more of their activity that is happening online is happening in software. So there’s much more that can be done by attacking that software.

What we do is we gather as many signals as possible across observability and monitoring. This is the way we come from and across security. What’s interesting here about the SolarWinds hack, in particular, is that it’s what’s called a supply chain attack. This means the attack was made on the code that was shipped to the SolarWinds customer. Then there is this new notion in security called shifting left. By left, it means is closer to the developer and earlier in the development process.

There’s something really interesting there when it relates to us (Datadog) in how we can solve the problem for our customers by bringing security earlier into the development process and tied in more to the operations and the development of the application. That’s definitely something that we’re investing in and something that we think is going to be a big area of investment for customers in the future.