Monday, June 15, 2015

Redcentric orchestrates networks-intensive merger using advanced configuration management database

The next BriefingsDirect performance management discussion uncovers how Redcentric PLC in the UK tackled a major network management project due to a business merger. We'll hear how Redcentric used an advanced configuration database approach to scale management of some 10,000 devices across two disparate companies and made them accessible as a single system.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more about how two major networks became merged successfully using automation based on systems data, we're joined by Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric in Harrogate, UK. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your company and this merger. What two companies came together, and how did that prove to be a complicated matter when it comes to network management?
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Jackson: The two companies coming together were InTechnology and Redcentric. Redcentric bought InTechnology in 2013. Effectively, they were reasonably separate in terms of their setup. Redcentric had three separate organizations, they had already acquired Maxima and Hot Chilli. And the requirement was to move their network devices and ITSM platform base onto the HP monitoring and ITSM platforms in InTechnology.

It’s an ongoing process, but it’s well on the way and we've been pretty successful so far in doing that.

Gardner: And what kind of companies are these? Tell us about your organization, the business, rather than just the IT?

Jackson
Jackson: We're a managed service providers (MSPs), voice, data, storage, networks, and cloud. You name it, and we pretty much deliver it and sell it as part of our managed portfolio..

Gardner: So being good at IT is not just good for you internally; it's really part and parcel of your business.

Jackson: It's critical. We have to deliver it and we have to manage it as well. So it's 100 percent critical to the business.

Gardner: Tell us how you go about something like this, Edward, when you have a big merger, when you have all these different, disparate devices that support networks. How do you tackle that? How do you start the process?

Data cleansing

Jackson: The first phase is to look at the data and see what we've got and then start to do some data cleansing. We had to migrate data from three service desks to the InTechnology network, and to the InTechnology ITSM system. You need to look at all the service contracts. You need to also look at all the individual components that make up those contracts, and effectively all the configuration items (CIs), and then your looking at a rather large migration project.

Initially, we started to migrate the customer and the contact information. Then, slowly, we started to re-provision devices from the Redcentric side to the InTechnology Managed Services (IMS) network and load it into our HP management platforms.

We currently manage over 11,000 devices. They are from multiple types of vendors and technologies. InTechnology was pretty much a Cisco shop, whereas at Redcentric, we're looking at things like Palo Alto, Brocade, Citrix load balancers and other different types of solutions. So it's everything from session border controllers down to access points.

It was a relatively challenging time in terms of being able to look at the different types of technology and then be able to manage those. Also, we've automated incidents from Operations Manager to Service Manager and then notifying customers directly that there is a potential issue ontheir service. So it's been a rather large piece of work.

Gardner: Was there anything in hindsight that you did at InTechnology vis-à-vis the data about your network and devices that made this easier? Did Redcentric have that same benefit of that solid database, the configuration information? In doing this, what did you wish you had done, or someone else had done, better before that would have made it easier to accomplish?
It was a relatively challenging time in terms of being able to look at the different types of technology and then be able to manage those.

Jackson: Unfortunately, the data on the Redcentric side of the business wasn’t quite as clean as it was on the InTechnology side. It was held in lots of differnet sources, from network shared drives to Wiki pages. It all had to be collated. Redcentric had another three service desks. We had to extract all the data out of them as well. The service desks didn’t really contain any CI information either. So we had to collate together the CI information along with the contacts and customers.

It was a rather mammoth task. Then, we had to load it into our CRM tool, which then has a direct connection automatically using Web Services and into Service Manager. So it initially creates organizations and contacts.

We had a template for our CIs. If they were a server CI or a network CI, it would be added to a spreadsheet, and would use HP Connect-IT to load into Service Manager. It basically automatically created CIs against the customer and the contacts that were already loaded by our CRM tool.

Gardner: Is there anything now moving forward as a combined company, or in the process of becoming increasingly combined, that these due diligence efforts around network management and configuration management will allow you to do?

Perhaps you're able to drive more services into your marketplace for your customers or make modernization moves towards perhaps software-defined networking or other trends that are afoot. So now that you are into this, you are doing your due diligence, how does that set you up to move forward?

New opportunity

Jackson: It opens up a new sphere of opportunity. We were pretty much a Cisco shop, but now we have obviously opened up to a lot more elements and technologies that we actively manage.

We have a lot of software-based type of firewalls and load balancers that we didn’t previously have -- session border controllers, etc and voice products that we didn’t deliver previously -- that we can deliver now due to the fact that we've opened up the network to be able to monitor and manage pretty much anything.

Gardner: Any words of advice for other organizations that may have been resisting making these moves. You were forced to do it across the board with the merger. Do you have any advice that you would offer in terms of doing network management and modernization sooner rather than later, other than the fact that people might just think good enough is good enough, or if it's not broken, don’t fix it?

Jackson: When you're looking at a challenge like this, you have to make sure you do your due diligence first. It’s down to planning, an "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail" kind of thing, and it’s very true.
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You need to get all the information. You need to make sure that you normalize it and sanitize it before you load it. The cliché is garbage in, garbage out, so there’s no point in putting bad information into a system once again.

We have a good set of clean data now across the board. We literally have 150,000 CIs in our CMDB. So it’s not an insignificant CMDB by any stretch of the imagination. And we know that the data from the Redcentric side of the business is now clean and accurate.

Gardner: How about proving this to the business? For MSPs it might not be as critical, but for other enterprises, this might be a bit more of a challenge to translate these technical benefits into financial or economic benefits to their leadership. Any thoughts about metrics of success that you've been able to define that would fit into a return on investment (ROI) or more of an economic model? How do you translate network management proficiency into dollars and cents or pounds or euros?

Jackson: It’s pretty difficult to quantify in a monetary sense. Probably the best way of quantifying the success of the project has been the actual level of support that customers have been given and the level of satisfaction that the customers now have. They're very, very happy with the level of support that we have now achieving due to Redcentrics ITSM and business service management (BSM) systems. I think, going forward, it will only increase the level of support that we can provide our customers.

As I said, It's quite difficult to quantify in a monetary sense. However, when churn rates are now as low as 4 percent, you can basically say that you're doing something good.

Fundamental to the business

In terms of things like the CIs themselves, the CI is fundamental to the business, because it describes the whole of the service, all the services that we offer our customers. If that’s not right, then the support that we give the customer can’t be right either.

You need to give the guys on support the kind of information they need to be able to support the service. Customer satisfaction is ever increasing in terms of what we are able to offer the migrated customers.

Gardner: How about feedback from your help desk, your support, and remediation of people. Do they find that with this data in place, with it cleansed, and with it complete that they're able to identify where problems exist perhaps better, faster, and easier. Do they recognize whether there is a network problem or a workload support problem, the whole help desk benefit. Anything to offer there?
The CI is fundamental to the business, because it describes the whole of the service, all the services that we offer our customers. If that’s not right, then the support that we give the customer can’t be right either.

Jackson: About 80 percent of the tickets raised in the organization are raised through our management platform, monitoring and performance capacity monitoring. We can pretty much identify within a couple of minutes where the network error is. This all translates into tickets being auto raised in our service management platform.

Additionally, within a few minutes of an outage or incident we can have an affected customer list prepared. We have fields that are defined in Service Manager CI’s that will actually give us information regarding what devices are affected and what they are connected to in terms of an end to end service.

We run a customer report against this, and it will give you a list of customers, a list of key contacts and primary contacts. You can convert this into an email. So for a network outage, within a few minutes we can email the customer, create an incident, create related interactions to that incident, and the customer is notified that there is an issue.

Gardner: That’s the sort of brand reinforcement and service quality that many organizations are seeking. So that's enviable, I'm sure.

Is there any products or updates that could make your job even easier going forward?

Jackson: We're looking at a couple of things. One of them is HP Propel, which is a piece of software that you can hook into pretty much anything you really want. For example, if you have a few disparate service desks, you can have a veneer over the top. They'll look all the same to the customers. They'll have like an identical GUI, but the technology behind it could be very different.
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It gives you the ability then to hook into anything, such as HP Operations Orchestration, Service Manager, Knowledge Management, or even Smart Analytics, which is another area that we are quite keen on looking at. I think that’s going to revolutionize the service desk. It would be very, very beneficial forRedcentric..

There are also things like data mining. This would be beneficial and also help the auto creation of knowledge articles going forward and giving remedial action to incidents and interactions.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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Tuesday, June 2, 2015

HP at Discover delivers the industry's first open, hybrid, ecosystem-wide cloud architecture

Kicking off Discover 2015, HP today made a wide range of announcements, including industry-wide inclusive enhancements to their heterogeneous Helion cloud portfolio, new DevOps-friendly agile test automation solutions, expanded converged infrastructure offerings with partner Arista, as well as an all-flash expansion of their 3PAR StoreServ products.

HP's open, ecosystem-wide cloud vision marks, in my opinion, the IT industry's first and most inclusive architecture that cuts across all major cloud services, "pubic" and "private," PaaS and IaaS. The HP approach, leveraging open source and standards, provides much more choice to how enterprises exploit cloud-centric hybrid IT -- but without running the risk of being exploited themselves.

"We're the only company that brings it all to you. ... A cloud that works with your infrastructure. ... The way that you want to transform. ... With the right financial architecture for you. ... And we don't dictate to you how to do it," said HP CEO Meg Whitman in her opening keynote address that the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas.

Specifically, HP announced updates to the HP Helion portfolio, designed to help enterprises transition to a broadly hybrid IT. HP introduced HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0, the next release of its flagship integrated enterprise cloud solution, and enhancements to HP Helion Managed Cloud Services for managing enterprise workloads in hosted cloud environments.
The expanded support for multiple hypervisors and cloud environments in HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 gives enterprises and service providers added flexibility to gain cloud benefits for their existing and new applications.

"Enterprise customers have a range of needs in moving to the cloud. Some need to cloud-enable traditional workloads, while others seek to build next generation 'cloud native' apps using modern technologies like OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and Docker," said Bill Hilf, senior vice president, HP Helion Product and Service Management. "The expanded support for multiple hypervisors and cloud environments in HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 gives enterprises and service providers added flexibility to gain cloud benefits for their existing and new applications." [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP Helion CloudSystem forms a cross-cloud, private-cloud solution, designed to help enterprises and service providers attain hybrid infrastructure capabilities -- enabling automation, orchestration and control across multiple heterogeneous clouds, workloads, and technologies, says HP. HP is calling itself a transition partner, not just a vendor or cloud provider.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 expands support for multiple hypervisors and multiple clouds to provide enterprises and service providers with maximum flexibility. Additionally, HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 integrates HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Development Platform to provide customers an enterprise grade open source Cloud Foundry PaaS for cloud native application development and infrastructure.

Features and benefits

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 features and benefits include:
  • Simultaneous support for multiple cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Helion Public Cloud, OpenStack technology and VMware, with the ability to fully control where workloads reside.
  • The latest release of HP Helion OpenStack, exposing OpenStack software APIs to simplify and speed development and integration with other clouds and offering developer-friendly add-ons with the HP Helion Development Platform based on Cloud Foundry.
  • Support for multiple hypervisors, now including Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat KVM, VMware vSphere, as well as bare-metal deployments, offering customers additional choice and avoiding vendor lock-in.
  • Support for AWS-compatible private clouds through integration with HP Helion Eucalyptus, giving customers the flexibility to deploy existing AWS workloads onto clouds they control.
  • Support for unstructured data through the Swift OpenStack Object Storage project
  • The latest version of HP Cloud Service Automation, providing the management capabilities to control hybrid cloud environments and a built-in path to support distributed compute, efficient object storage and rapid cloud native application development
  • An intuitive setup model delivered as a virtual appliance, allowing for installation in hours
    HP Helion Managed Cloud Services provides enterprise security and high availability capabilities needed to run mission-critical business applications.
Given that enterprises spend up to 90 percent of their IT budget on maintaining existing systems, HP estimates that enterprises can reduce IT maintenance costs by approximately 40 percent by migrating existing systems to a clouds-based architecture.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 is available as standalone software supporting a multiple-vendor hardware environment or as a fully-integrated blade-based or hyper-converged infrastructure with HP ConvergedSystem. Availability is planned for later this year.

HP Helion Managed Cloud Services will launch into beta later this year HP Helion OpenStack Managed Private Cloud and HP Helion Eucalyptus Managed Private Cloud, both of which will be consumable as a service via an easy access portal.

In addition to these new beta offerings, HP Helion Managed Cloud Services will support the development of cloud native applications within a managed cloud service via the HP Helion Development Platform and automation of select virtual private cloud services.

HP Helion Managed Cloud Services features and benefits include:
  • New automated provisioning capabilities through a self-service portal based on HP Cloud Service Automation, enabling clouds to be deployed more quickly.
  • Support for multiple platforms to enable hybrid cloud proof-of-concepts using HP Helion OpenStack and HP Helion Eucalyptus.
  • Cloud native application development capabilities through integration with the HP Helion Development Platform, allowing enterprises to rapidly develop, deploy and deliver cloud native apps.
Helping developers "shift left"

HP also announced a new functional test automation solution, HP LeanFT, which allows software developers and testers to leverage continuous testing and continuous delivery methodologies to rapidly build, test, and deliver secure, high-quality applications. In many ways, it accelerates the adoption of agile and DevOps, but in a managed way.

HP LeanFT embraces the Agile methodology "shift left" concept by leveraging the key tools of the modern Agile developer ecosystem, says HP. It's built specifically for continuous testing and continuous delivery, and fits naturally into existing ecosystems (such as Microsoft TFS, GIT, and Subversion) and frameworks that support test driven and behavior driven development. It has powerful test automation authoring with either C# or Java, and IDE integration. It forms an enabling test foundation for improved DevOps.
LeanFT will be the bridge from UFT to the future with increased focus on Agile developers, flexible licensing, better cross-browser testing, mobile testing, and IoT testing.

In the most recent Forrester Wave on Modern Application Functional Test Automation, Forrester states: "HP UFT vision will appeal to developers. HP's vision and three-year road map is anchored on LeanFT, which, if executed in a timely fashion, will appeal to testers and developers. In fact, LeanFT will be the bridge from UFT to the future with increased focus on Agile developers, flexible licensing, better cross-browser testing, mobile testing, and Internet of Things (IoT) testing as further key elements of the road map."

The new solution integrates with HP Application Lifecycle Management, Quality Center, and Mobile Center, which allows developers and testers to reduce maintenance costs, share testing resources, and deliver new mobile applications at Agile speed. HP also introduced major upgrades to its flagship HP Unified Functional Testing and HP Business Process Testing products, including support for GIT integration as a repository option and scriptless keyword-driven testing, says HP.

"HP LeanFT beautifully balances the twin imperatives of velocity and quality by allowing developers to operate in the modern Agile and DevOps ecosystem, while also leveraging our proven capabilities in application testing and application lifecycle management," says Raffi Margaliot, SVP and GM, HP Application Delivery Management.

HP LeanFT will be available in July 2015 on http://saas.hp.com. HP Unified Functional Testing 12.5 and HP Business Process Testing 12.5 will also be available in July. Customers who upgrade to HP UFT 12.5 will receive HP LeanFT free of charge.

HP Application Defender is available now for free on five pre-production application instances. For more information, please visit http://go.saas.hp.com/application-defender-trial.

In other news

In other news, HP announced that it was expanding its converged infrastructure portfolio, including enhancements to its HP OneView 2.0 management platform, a new partnership with Arista Networks, and a series of new workload optimized reference architectures. These new offerings will give customers the flexibility they need to transform to hybrid architecture and at the same time, protect their existing IT investments.

OneView unifies processes, UI’s and APIs across HP server, storage, and Virtual Connect networking devices. HP states that OneView can be configured in 96 percent less time, taking only five steps to deploy a VMware vSphere Cluster, and has nine times faster error resolution.

New features include automated server change management, server profile templates (making it easier to define firmware and driver baselines as well as server, LAN and SAN settings), and new profile mobility that enable migration and recovery of workloads across server platform types, configurations, and generations.
The partnership with Arista Networks is beneficial for customers who are looking for flexibility in infrastructure that handles performance-intensive, virtualized and highly dynamic workloads.

The partnership with Arista Networks, which delivers software-defined networking solutions for data centers, cloud computing, and HPC environments, is beneficial for customers who are looking for flexibility in infrastructure that handles performance-intensive, virtualized and highly dynamic workloads.

These new solutions are designed to support private, public and hybrid cloud applications while providing a flexible and open choice across compute and storage, including all-flash solutions with HP 3PAR StoreServ.

HP announced new 3PAR flash storage models. The HP 3PAR StoreServ 20000 enterprise family is due to ship in August and features a 20850 all-flash model and a 20800 converged flash array that supports hard-disk drives and solid state drives.

Both start at two controllers and can scale out to eight. The 20850 can hold up to 1024 solid state  drives, ranging from 480 GB to a new 3.84 TB drive.

HP also took advantage of Discover to announce that DreamWorks Animation has selected HP to automate its IT infrastructure. By deploying  HP Datacenter Care - Infrastructure Automation, HP is enabling DreamWorks Animation to manage its infrastructure as code for continuous delivery of applications and services.

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Friday, May 29, 2015

How Tableau Software and big data come together: Strong visualization embedded on an agile analytics engine

The next BriefingsDirect big data innovation discussion highlights how Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers. They're looking for ways to improve their businesses effectively and productively, and to share the analysis quickly and broadly.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more, BriefingsDirect sat down with Paul Lilford, Global Director of Technology Partners for Tableau Software, based in Seattle, and Steve Murfitt, Director of Technical Alliances at HP Vertica. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why is the tag-team between Tableau and big data so popular. Every time I speak with some one using Vertica, they inevitably mention that they're delivering their visualizations through Tableau. This seems to be a strong match.
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Lilford: We’re a great match primarily because Tableau’s mission is to help people see and understand data. We're made more powerful by getting to large data, and Vertica is one of the best at storing that. Their columnar format is a natural format for end users, because they don’t think about writing SQL and things like that. So, Tableau, as a face to Vertica, empowers business users to self serve and deliver on a depth of analytics that is unmatched in the market.

Lilford
Gardner: Now, we can add visualization to a batch report just as well as a real-time. streamed report. What is it about visualization that seems to be more popular in the higher-density data and a real-time analysis environment?

Lilford: The big thing there, Dana, is that batch visualization will always common. What’s a bigger deal is data discovery, the new reality for companies. It leads to becoming data driven in your organization, and making better-informed decisions, rather than taking a packaged report and trying to make a decision that maybe tells you how bad you were in the past or how good you might think you could be in the future. Now, you can actually have a conversation with your data and cycle back and forth between insights and decisions.

The combination of our two technologies allows users to do that in a seamless drag-and-drop environment. From a technical perspective, the more data you have, the deeper you can go. We’re not limiting a user to any kind of threshold. We're not saying, this is the way I wrote the report, therefore you can go consume it.

We’re saying, "Here is a whole bunch of data that may be a subject area or grouping of subject areas, and you're the finance professional or the HR professional. Go consume it and ask the questions you need answered." You're not going to an IT professional to say, "Write me this report and come back three months from now and give it to me." You’re having that conversation in real time in person, and that interactive nature of it is really the game changer. 

Win-win situation

Gardner:  And the ability for the big data analysis to be extended across as many consumer types in the organization as possible makes the underlying platform more valuable. So this, from HP's perspective must be a win-win. Steve?

Murfitt: It definitely is a win-win. When you have a fantastic database that performs really well, it's kind of uninteresting to show people just tables and columns. If you can have a product like Tableau and you can show how people can interact with that data, deliver on the promise of the tools, and try to do discovery, then you’re going to see the value of the platform.

Murfitt
Gardner: Let’s look to the future. We've recently heard about some new and interesting trends for increased volume of data with the Internet of Things, mobile, apps being more iterative and smaller, therefore, more data points.

As the complexity kicks in and the scale ramps up, what do you expect, Paul, for visualization technology and the interactivity that you mentioned? What do you think we're approaching? What are some of the newer aspects of visualization that makes this powerful, even as we seek to find more complexity?

Lilford: There are a couple of things. Hadoop, if you go back a year-and-a-half or so, has been moving from a cold-storage technology to more to a discovery layer. Some of the trends in visualization are predictive content being part of the everyday life.

Tableau democratizes business intelligence (BI) for the business user. We made it an everyday thing for the business user to do that. Predictive is in a place that's similar to where BI was a couple years ago, going to the data scientist to do it. Not that the data scientist's value wasn’t there, but it was becoming a bottleneck to doing things because you have to run it through a predictive model to give it to someone. I think that's changing.

So I think that predictive element is more and more part of the continuum here. You're going to see more forward-looking, more forecast-based, more regression-based, more statistical things brought into it. We’ll continue to innovate with some new visuals, but the standard visual is unstructured data.

This is the other big key, because 80 percent of the world's data is unstructured. How do you consume that content? Do you still structure it or can you consume it where it sits, as it sits, where it came in and how it is? Are there discoverers that can go do that?

You’re going to continue see those go. The biggest green fields in big data are predictive and unstructured. Having the right stores like Vertica to scale that is important, but also allowing anyone to do it is the other important part, because if you give it to a few technical professionals, you really restrict your ability to make decisions quickly.

Gardner: Another interesting aspect, when I speak to companies, is the way that they're looking at their company more as an analytics and data provider internally and externally. The United States Postal Service  view themselves in that fashion as an analytics entity, but also looking for business models, how to take data and analysis of data that they might be privy to and make that available as a new source of revenue.

I would think that visualization is something that you want to provide to a consumer of that data, whether they are internal or external. So we're all seeing the advent of data as a business for companies that may not have even consider that, but could.

Most important asset

Lilford: From our perspective, it's a given that it is a service. Data is the most important asset that most companies have. It’s where the value is. Becoming data driven isn’t just a tagline that we talk about or people talk about. If you want to make decisions and decisions that move your business, so being a data provider.

The best example I can maybe give you, Dana, is healthcare. I came from healthcare and when I started, there was a rule -- no social. You can't touch it. Now, you look at healthcare and nurses are tweeting with patients, "Don’t eat that sandwich. Don't do this."
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Data has become a way to lower medical costs in healthcare, which is the biggest expense. How do you do that? They use social and digital data to do that now, whereas five, seven years ago, we couldn't do it. It was a privacy thing. Now, it's a given part of government, of healthcare, of banking, of almost every vertical. How do I take this valuable asset I’ve got and turn it into some sort of product, market, or market advantage, whatever that is?

Gardner: Steve, anything more to offer on the advent or acceleration of the data-as-a-business phenomena?

Murfitt: If you look at what companies have been doing for such a long time, they have been using the tools to look at historical data to measure how they're doing against budget. As people start to make more data available, what they really want to do is compare themselves to their peers.
As people start to make more data available, what they really want to do is compare themselves to their peers.

If you're doing well against your budget, it doesn't mean to say you gaining or losing market share or how well you’re doing. So as more data is shared and more data is available, being able to compare to peers, to averages, to measure yourself not only internally, but externally, is going to help with people making their decisions.

Gardner: Now for those organizations out there that have been doing reports in a more of a traditional way that recognize the value of their data and the subsequent analysis, but are yet to dabble deeply into visualization, what are some good rules of the road for beginning a journey towards visualization?

What might you consider in terms of how you set up your warehouse or you set up your analysis engine, and then make tools available to your constituencies? What are some good beginning concepts to consider?

Murfitt: One of the most important things is start small, prove it, and scale it from there. The days of boiling the ocean to try come up with analytics only to find out it didn’t work are over.

Organizations want to prove it, and one of the cool things about doing that visually is now the person who knows the data the best can show you what they're trying to do, rather than trying to push a requirement out to someone and ask "What is it you want?" Inevitably, something’s lost in translation when that happens or the requirement changes by the time it's delivered.

Real-time conversation

You now have a real-time, interactive, iterative conversation with both the data and business users. If you’re a technical professional, you can now focus on the infrastructure that supports the user, the governance, and security around it. You're not focused on the report object anymore. And that report object is expensive.

It doesn’t mean that for compliance things the financial reports go away, it means you've right sized that work effort. Now, the people who know the data the best deliver the data, and the people who support the infrastructure the best support that infrastructure and that delivery.

It’s a shift. Technologies today do scale Vertica as a great scalable database. Tableau is a great self-service tool. The combination of the two allows you to do this now. If you go back even seven years, it was a difficult thing. I built my career being a data warehouse BI guy. I was the guy writing reports and building databases for people, and it doesn’t scale. At some point, you’re a bottleneck for the people who need to do their job. I think that's the biggest single thing in it.

Gardner: Another big trend these days is people becoming more used to doing things from a mobile device. Maybe it’s a “phablet,” a tablet, or a smartphone. It’s hard to look at a spreadsheet on those things more than one or two cells at a time. So visualizations and exercising your analytics through a mobile tier seem to go hand in hand. What should we expect there? Isn't there a very natural affinity between mobile and analysis visualization?
Most visuals work better on a tablet. Right-sizing that for the phone is going to continue to happen.

Lilford: We have mobile apps today, but I think you're going to see a fast evolution in this. Most visuals work better on a tablet. Right-sizing that for the phone is going to continue to happen, scaling that with the right architecture behind it, because devices are limited in what they can hold themselves.

I think you'll see a portability element come to it, but at the same time, this is early days. Machines are generating data, and we're consuming it at a rate at which it's almost impossible to consume. Those devices themselves are going to be the game changer.

My kids use iPads, they know how to do it. There’s a whole new workforce in the making that knows this and things like this. Devices are just going to get better at supporting it. We're in the very early phases of it. I think we have a strong offering today, and it's only going to get stronger in the future.

Gardner: Steve, any thoughts about the interception between Vertica, big data, and the mobile visualization aspect of that?

Murfitt: The important thing is having the platform that can provide the performance. When you're on a mobile device, you still want the instant access, and you want it to be real-time access. This is the way the market is going. If you go with the old, more traditional platforms that can’t perform when you're in the office, they're not going to perform when you are remote.

It’s really about building the infrastructure, having the right technology to be able to deliver that performance and that response and interactivity to the device wherever they are.

Working together

Gardner: Before we close, I just wanted to delve a little bit more into the details of how HP Vertica and Tableau software work. Is this an OEM, a partnership, co-selling, co-marketing? How do you define it for those folks out there who either use one or the other or neither of you? How should they progress to making the best of a Vertica and Tableau together?

Lilford:  We're a technology partnership. It’s a co-selling relationship, and we do that by design. We're a best-in-breed technology. We do what we do better than anyone else. Vertica is one of the best databases and they do what they do better than anyone else. So the combination of the two, providing customers options to solve problems, the whole reason we partner is to solve customer issues.
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We want to do it as best-in-breed. That’s a lot what the new stack technologies are about, it’s no longer a single vendor building a huge solution stack. It's the best database, with the best Hadoop storage, with the best visualization, with the best BI tools on top of it. That's where you're getting a better total cost of ownership (TCO) over all, because now you're not invested in one player that can deliver this. You're invested in the best of what they do and you're delivering in real-time for people.
It's the best database, with the best Hadoop storage, with the best visualization, with the best BI tools on top of it.

Gardner: Last question, Steve, about the degree of integration here. Is this something that end user organizations can do themselves, are there professional services organizations, what degree of integration between Vertica and Tableau visualization is customary.

Murfitt: Tableau connects very easily to Vertica. There is a dropdown on the database connector saying, "Connect to Vertica.” As long as they have the driver installed, it works. And the way their interface works, they can start query and getting value from the data straight away.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The Open Group panel explores how standards thwart thorny global cybersecurity issues

How can global enterprise cybersecurity be improved for better enterprise integrity and risk mitigation? What constitutes a good standard, or set of standards, to help? And how can organizations work to better detect misdeeds, rather than have attackers on their networks for months before being discovered?

These questions were addressed during a February panel discussion at The Open Group San Diego 2015 conference. Led by moderator Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technology Officer, The Open Group, the speakers included Edna Conway, Chief Security Officer for Global Supply Chain, Cisco; Mary Ann Mezzapelle, Americas CTO for Enterprise Security Services, HP; Jim Hietala, Vice President of Security for The Open Group, and Rance DeLong, Researcher into Security and High Assurance Systems, Santa Clara University.

Download a copy of the full transcript. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] 

Here are some excerpts:

Dave Lounsbury: We've heard about the security, cybersecurity landscape, and, of course, everyone knows about all the many recent breaches. Obviously, the challenge is growing in cybersecurity. So, I want to start asking a few questions, directing the first one to Edna Conway.
Lounsbury

We've heard about the Verizon Data Breach Investigation of DBIR report that catalogs the various attacks that have been made over the past year. One of the interesting findings was that in some of these breaches, the attackers were on the networks for months before being discovered.

What do we need to start doing differently to secure our enterprises?
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Edna Conway: There are a couple of things. From my perspective, continuous monitoring is absolutely essential. People don't like it because it requires rigor, consistency, and process. The real question is, what do you continuously monitor?

It’s what you monitor that makes a difference. Access control and authentication, should absolutely be on our radar screen, but I think the real ticket is behavior. What kind of behavior do you see authorized personnel engaging in that should send up as an alert? That’s a trend that we need to embrace more.

Conway
The second thing that we need to do differently is drive detection and containment. I think we try to do that, but we need to become more rigorous in it. Some of that rigor is around things like, are we actually doing advanced malware protection, rather than just detection?

What are we doing specifically around threat analytics and the feeds that come to us: how we absorb them, how we mine them, and how we consolidate them?

The third thing for me is how we get it right. I call that team the puzzle solvers. How do we get them together swiftly?

How do you put the right group of experts together when you see a behavior aberration or you get a threat feed that says that you need to address this now? When we see a threat injection, are we actually acting on the anomaly before it makes its way further along in the cycle?

Executive support

Mary Ann Mezzapelle: Another thing that I'd like to add is making sure you have the executive support and processes in place. If you think how many plans and tests and other things that organizations have gone through for business continuity and recovery, you have to think about that incident response. We talked earlier about how to get the C suite involved. We need to have that executive sponsorship and understanding, and that means it's connected to all the other parts of the enterprise.

Mezzapelle
So it might be the communications, it might be legal, it might be other things, but knowing how to do that and being able to respond to it quickly is also very important.

Rance DeLong: I agree on the monitoring being very important as well as the question of what to monitor. There are advances being made through research in this area, both modeling behavior -- what are the nominal behaviors -- and how we can allow for certain variations in the behavior and still not have too many false positives or too many false negatives.

Also on a technical level, we can analyze systems for certain invariants, and these can be very subtle and complicated invariance formulas that may be pages long and hold on the system during its normal operation. A monitor can be monitoring both for invariance, these static things, but they can also be monitoring for changes that are supposed to occur and whether those are occurring the way they're supposed to.

Jim Hietala: The only thing I would add is that I think it’s about understanding where you really have risk and being able to measure how much risk is present in your given situation.

DeLong
In the security industry, there has been a shift in mindset away from figuring that we can actually prevent every bad thing from happening towards really understanding where people may have gotten into the system. What are those markers that something is gone awry and reacting to that in a more timely way -- so detective controls, as opposed to purely preventative type controls.

Lounsbury: We heard from Dawn Meyerriecks earlier about the convergence of virtual and physical and how that changes the risk management game. And we heard from Mary Ann Davidson about how she is definitely not going to connect her house to the Internet.

So this brings new potential risks and security management concerns. What do you see as the big Internet of Things (IoT) security concerns and how does the technology industry assess and respond to those?

Hietala: In terms of IoT, the thing that concern me is that many of the things that we've solved at some level in IT hardware, software, and systems seemed to have been forgotten by many of the IoT device manufacturers.

Hietala
We have pretty well thought out processes for how we identify assets, we patch things, and we deal with security events and vulnerabilities that happen. The idea that, particularly on the consumer class of IoT type devices, we have devices out there with IP interfaces on them, and many of the manufacturers just haven’t had a thought of how they are going to patch something in the field, I think should scare us all to some degree.

Maybe it is, as Mary Ann mentioned, the idea that there are certain systemic risks that are out there that we just have to sort of nod our head and say that that’s the way it is. But certainly around really critical kinds of IoT applications, we need to take what we've learned in the last ten years and apply it to this new class of devices.

New architectural approach

DeLong: I'd like to add to that. We need a new architectural approach for IoT that will help to mitigate the systemic risks. And echoing the concerns expressed by Mary Ann a few minutes ago, in 2014, Europol, which is an organization that tracks criminal  risks of various kinds, predicted by the end of 2014, murder by Internet, in the context of Internet of Things. It didn't happen, but they predicted it, and I think it's not farfetched that we may see it over time.

Lounsbury: What do we really know actually? Edna, do you have any reaction on that one?

Conway: Murder by Internet. That’s the question you gave me, thanks. Welcome to being a former prosecutor. The answer is on their derrieres. The reality is do we have any evidentiary reality to be able to prove that?

I think the challenge is one that's really well-taken, which is we are probably all in agreement on, the convergence of these devices. We saw the convergence of IT and OT and we haven't fixed that yet.

We are now moving with IoT into a scalability of the nature and volume of devices. To me, the real challenge will be to come up with new ways of deploying telemetry to allow us to see all the little crevices and corners of the Internet of Things, so that we can identify risks in the same way that we have. We haven't mastered 100 percent, but we've certainly tackled predominately across the computer networks and the network itself and IT. We're just not there with IoT.

Mezzapelle: Edna, it also brings to mind another thing -- we need to take advantage of the technology itself. So as the data gets democratized, meaning it's going to be everywhere -- the velocity, volume, and so forth -- we need to make sure that those devices can maybe be self-defendable, or maybe they can join together and defend themselves against other things.
The real challenge will be to come up with new ways of deploying telemetry to allow us to see all the little crevices and corners of the Internet of Things.

So we can't just apply the old-world thinking of being able to know everything and control everything, but to embed some of those kinds of characteristics in the systems, devices, and sensors themselves.

Lounsbury: We've heard about the need. In fact, Ron Ross mentioned the need for increased public-private cooperation to address the cybersecurity threat. Ron, I would urge you to think about including voluntary consensus standards organizations in that essential partnership you mentioned to make sure that you get that high level of engagement, but of course, this is a broad concern to everybody.

President Obama has made a call for legislation on enabling cybersecurity and information sharing, and one of the points within that was shaping a cyber savvy workforce and many other parts of public-private information sharing.

So what more can be done to enable effective public-private cooperation on this and what steps can we, as a consensus organization, take to actually help make that happen? Mary Ann, do you want to tackle that one and see where it goes?

Collaboration is important

Mezzapelle: To your point, collaboration is important and it's not just about the public and the private partnership. It also means within an industry sector or in your supply chain and third-party. It's not just about the technology; it's also about the processes, and being able to communicate effectively, almost at machine speed, in those areas.

So you think about the people, the processes, and the technology, I don't think it's going to be solved by government. I think I agree with the previous speakers when they were talking about how it needs to be more hand-in-hand.

There are some ways that industry can actually lead that. We have some examples, for instance what we are doing with the Healthcare Forum and with the Mining and Minerals Forum. That might seem like a little bit, but it's that little bit that helps, that brings it together to make it easier for that connection.

It's also important to think about, especially with the class of services and products that are available as a service, another measure of collaboration. Maybe you, as a security organization, determine that your capabilities can't keep up with the bad guys, because  they have more money, more time, more opportunity to take advantage, either from a financial perspective or maybe even from a competitive perspective, for your intellectual property.
You need those product vendors or you might need a services vendor to really be able to fill in the gaps, so that you can have that kind of thing on demand.

You really can't do it yourself. You need those product vendors or you might need a services vendor to really be able to fill in the gaps, so that you can have that kind of thing on demand. So I would encourage you to think about that kind of collaboration through partnerships in your whole ecosystem.

DeLong: I know that people in the commercial world don't like a lot of regulation, but I think government can provide certain minimal standards that must be met to raise the floor. Not that companies won't exceed these and use that as a competitive basis, but if minimum is set in regulations, then this will raise the whole level of discourse.

Conway: We could probably debate over a really big bottle of wine whether it's regulation or whether it's collaboration. I agree with Mary Ann. I think we need to sit down and ask what are the biggest challenges that we have and take bold, hairy steps to pull together as an industry? And that includes government and academia as partners.

But I will give you just one example: ECIDs. They are out there and some are on semiconductor devices. There are some semiconductor companies that already use them, and there are some that don't.

A simple concept would be if we could make sure that those were actually published on an access control base, so that we could go and see whether the ECID was actually utilized, number one.

Speeding up standards

Lounsbury: Okay, thanks. Jim, I think this next question is about standards evolution. So we're going to send it to someone from a standards organization.

The cyber security threat evolves quickly, and protection mechanisms evolve along with them. It's the old attacker-defender arms race. Standards take time to develop, particularly if you use a consensus process. How do we change the dynamic? How do we make sure that the standards are keeping up with the evolving threat picture? And what more can be done to speed that up and keep it fresh?

Hietala: I'll go back to a series of workshops that we did in the fall around the topic of security automation. In terms of The Open Group's perspective, standards development works best when you have a strong customer voice expressed around the pain points, requirements, and issues.

We did a series of workshops on the topic of security automation with customer organizations. We had maybe a couple of hundred inputs over the course of four workshops, three physical events, and one that we did on the web. We collected that data, and then are bringing it to the vendors and putting some context around a really critical area, which is how do you automate some of the security capabilities so that you are responding faster to attacks and threats.
Standards development works best when you have a strong customer voice expressed around the pain points, requirements, and issues.

Generally, with just the idea that we bring customers into the discussion early, we make sure that their issues are well-understood. That helps motivate the vendor community to get serious about doing things more quickly.

One of the things we heard pretty clearly in terms of requirements was that multi-vendor interoperability between security components is pretty critical in that world. It's a multi-vendor world that most of the customers are living with. So building interfaces that are open, where you have got interoperability between vendors, is a really key thing.

DeLong: It's a really challenging problem, because in emerging technologies, where you want to encourage and you depend upon innovation, it's hard to establish a standard. It's still emerging. You don't know what's going to be a good standard. So you hold off and you wait and then you start to get innovation, you get divergence, and then bringing it back together ultimately takes more energy.

Lounsbury: Rance, since you have got the microphone, how much of the current cybersecurity situation is attributed to poor blocking and tackling in terms of the basics, like doing security architecture or even having a method to do security architecture, things like risk management, which of course Jim and the Security Forum have been looking into? And not only that, what about translating that theory into operational practice and making sure that people are doing it on a regular basis?

DeLong: A report I read on SANs, a US Government issued report on January 28 of this year, said that that many, or most, or all of our critical weapons systems contain flaws and vulnerabilities. One of the main conclusions was that, in many cases, it was due to not taking care of the basics -- the proper administration of systems, the proper application of repairs, patches, vulnerability fixes, and so on. So we need to be able to do it in critical systems as well as on desktops.

Open-source crisis

Mezzapelle: You might consider the open-source code crisis that happened over the past year with Heartbleed, where the benefits of having open-source code is somewhat offset by the disadvantages.

That may be one of the areas where the basics need to be looked at. It’s also because those systems were created in an environment when the threats were at an entirely different level. That’s a reminder that we need to look to that in our own organization.

Another thing is in mobile applications, where we have such a rush to get out features, revs, and everything like that, that it’s not entirety embedded in the system’s lifecycle or in a new startup company. Those are the some of the other basic areas where we find that the basics, the foundation, needs to be solidified to really help enhance the security in those areas.

Hietala: So in the world of security, it can be a little bit opaque, when you look at a given breach, as to what really happened, what failed, and so on. But enough information has come out about some of the breaches that you get some visibility into what went wrong.
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Of the two big insider breaches -- WikiLeaks and then Snowden -- in both cases, there were fairly fundamental security controls that should have been in place, or maybe were in place, but were poorly performed, that contributed to those -- access control type things, authorization, and so on.

Even in some of the large retailer credit card breaches, you can point to the fact that they didn’t do certain things right in terms of the basic blocking and tackling.

There's a whole lot of security technology out there, a whole lot of security controls that you can look to, but implementing the right ones for your situation, given the risk that you have and then operating them effectively, is an ongoing challenge for most companies.

Mezzapelle: Can I pose a question? It’s one of my premises that sometimes compliance and regulation makes companies do things in the wrong areas to the point where they have a less secure system. What do you think about that and how that impacts the blocking and tackling?

Hietala: That has probably been true for, say, the four years preceding this, but there was a study just recently -- I couldn’t tell you who it was from -- but it basically flipped that. For the last five years or so, compliance has always been at the top of the list of drivers for information security spend in projects and so forth, but it has dropped down considerably, because of all these high profile breaches. Senior executive teams are saying, "Okay, enough. I don’t care what the compliance regulations say, we're going to do the things we need to do to secure our environment." Nobody wants to be the next Sony.

Mezzapelle: Or the Target CEO who had to step down. Even though they were compliant, they still had a breach, which unfortunately, is probably an opportunity at almost every enterprise and agency that’s out there.

The right eyeballs


DeLong: And on the subject of open source, it’s frequently given as a justification or a benefit of open source that it will be more secure because there are millions of eyeballs looking at it. It's not millions of eyeballs, but the right eyeballs looking at it, the ones who can discern that there are security problems.

It's not necessarily the case that open source is going to be more secure, because it can be viewed by millions of eyeballs. You can have proprietary software that has just as much, or more, attention from the right eyeballs as open source.

Mezzapelle: There are also those million eyeballs out there trying to make money on exploiting it before it does get patched -- the new market economy.

Lounsbury: I was just going to mention that we're now seeing that some large companies are paying those millions of eyeballs to go look for vulnerabilities, strangely enough, which they always find in other people’s code, not their own.
It's not millions of eyeballs, but the right eyeballs looking at it, the ones who can discern that there are security problems.

Mezzapelle: Our Zero Day Initiative, that was part of the business model, is to pay people to find things that we can implement into our own products first, but it also made it available to other companies and vendors so that they could fix it before it became public knowledge.

Some of the economics are changing too. They're trying to get the white hatter, so to speak, to look at other parts that are maybe more critical, like what came up with Heartbleed.

Lounsbury: On that point, and I'm going to inject a question of my own if I may, on balance, is the open sharing of information of things like vulnerability analysis helping move us forward, and can we do more of it, or do we need to channel it in other ways?

Mezzapelle: We need to do more of it. It's beneficial. We still have conclaves of secretness saying that you can give this information to this group of people, but not this group of people, and it's very hard.

In my organization, which is global, I had to look at every last little detail to say, "Can I share it with someone who is a foreigner, or someone who is in my organization, but not in my organization?" It was really hard to try to figure out how we could use that information more effectively. If we can get it more automated to where it doesn't have to be the good old network talking to someone else, or an email, or something like that, it's more beneficial.

And it's not just the vulnerabilities. It's also looking more towards threat intelligence. You see a lot of investment, if you look at the details behind some of the investments in In-Q-Tel, for instance, about looking at data in a whole different way.

So we're emphasizing data, both in analytics as well as threat prediction, being able to know where some thing is going to come over the hill and you can secure your enterprise or your applications or systems more effectively against it.

Open sharing

Lounsbury: Let’s go down the row. Edna, what are your thoughts on more open sharing?

Conway: We need to do more of it, but we need to do it in a controlled environment.

We can get ahead of the curve with not just predictive analysis, but telemetry, to feed the predictive analysis, and that’s not going to happen because a government regulation mandates that we report somewhere.

So if you look, for example, DFARS, that came out last year with regard to concerns about counterfeit mitigation and detection in COTS ICT, the reality is not everybody is a member of GIDEP, and many of us actually share our information faster than it gets into GIDEP and more comprehensively.

I will go back to it’s rigor in the industry and sharing in a controlled environment.
There is a whole black market that has developed around those things, where nations are to some degree hoarding them, paying a lot of money to get them, to use them in cyberwar type activities.

Lounsbury: Jim, thoughts on open sharing?

Hietala: Good idea. It gets a little murky when you're looking at zero-day vulnerabilities. There is a whole black market that has developed around those things, where nations are to some degree hoarding them, paying a lot of money to get them, to use them in cyberwar type activities.

There's a great book out now called ‘Zero Day’ by Kim Zetter, a writer from Wired. It gets into the history of Stuxnet and how it was discovered, and Symantec, and I forget the other security researcher firm that found it. There were a number of zero-day vulnerabilities there that were used in an offensive cyberwar a capacity. So it’s definitely a gray area at this point.

DeLong: I agree with what Edna said about the parameters of the controlled environment, the controlled way in which it's done. Without naming any names, recently there were some feathers flying over a security research organization establishing some practices concerning a 60- or 90-day timeframe, in which they would notify a vendor of vulnerabilities, giving them an opportunity to issue a patch. In one instance recently, when that time expired and they released it, the vendor was rather upset because the patch had not been issued yet. So what are reasonable parameters of this controlled environment?

Supply chains

Lounsbury: Let’s move on here. Edna, one of the great quotes that came out of the early days of OTTF was that only God creates something from nothing and everybody else is on somebody’s supply chain. I love that quote.

But given that all IT components, or all IT products, are built from hardware and software components, which are sourced globally, what do we do to mitigate the specific risks resulting from malware and counterfeit parts being inserted in the supply chain? How do you make sure that the work to do that is reflected in creating preference for vendors who put that effort into it?

Conway: It's probably three-dimensional. The first part is understanding what your problem is. If you go back to what we heard Mary Ann Davidson talk about earlier today, the reality is what is the problem you're trying to solve?

I'll just use the Trusted Technology Provider Standard as an example of that. Narrowing down what the problem is, where the problem is located, helps you, number one.
We have a tendency to think about cyber in isolation from the physical, and the physical in isolation from the cyber, and then the logical.

Then, you have to attack it from all dimensions. We have a tendency to think about cyber in isolation from the physical, and the physical in isolation from the cyber, and then the logical. For those of us who live in OT or supply chain, we have to have processes that drive this. If those three don't converge and map together, we'll fail, because there will be gaps, inevitable gaps.

For me, it's identifying what your true problem is and then taking a three-dimensional approach to make sure that you always have security technology, the combination of the physical security, and then the logical processes to interlock and try to drive a mitigation scheme that will never reduce you to zero, but will identify things.

Particularly think about IoT in a manufacturing environment with the right sensor at the right time and telemetry around human behavior. All of a sudden, you're going to know things before they get to a stage in that supply chain or product lifecycle where they can become devastating in their scope of problem.

DeLong: As one data point, there was a lot of concern over chips fabricated in various parts of the world being used in national security systems. And in 2008, DARPA initiated a program called TRUST, which had a very challenging objective for coming up with methods by which these chips could be validated after manufacture.

Just as one example of the outcome of that, under the IRIS Program in 2010, SRI unveiled an infrared laser microscope that could examine the chips at the nanometer level, both for construction, functionality, and their likely lifetime -- how long they would last before they failed.

Lounsbury: Jim, Mary Ann, reactions?

Finding the real problem

Mezzapelle: The only other thing I wanted to add to Edna’s comment was reiteration about the economics of it and finding where the real problem is. Especially in the security area, information technology security, we tend to get so focused on trying to make it technically pure, avoiding the most 100 percent, ultimate risk. Sometimes, we forget to put our business ears on and think about what that really means for the business? Is it keeping them from innovating quickly, adapting to new markets, perhaps getting into a new global environment?

We have to make sure we look back at the business imperatives and make sure that we have metrics all along the road that help us make sure we are putting the investments in the right area, because security is really a risk balance, which I know Jim has a whole lot more to talk about.

Hietala: The one thing I would add to this conversation is that we have sort of been on a journey to where doing a better job of security is a good thing. The question is when is it going to become a differentiator for your product and service in the market. For me personally, a bank that really gets online banking and security right is a differentiator to me as a consumer.
Consumers -- and they surveyed consumers in 27 countries -- think that governments and businesses are not paying enough attention to digital security.

I saw a study that was quoted this week at the World Economic Forum that said that, by 2:1 margin, consumers -- and they surveyed consumers in 27 countries -- think that governments and businesses are not paying enough attention to digital security.

So maybe that’s a mindset shift that’s occurring as a result of how bad cybersecurity has been. Maybe we'll get to the point soon where it can be a differentiator for companies in the business-to-business context and a business-to-consumer context and so forth. So we can hope.

Conway: Great point. And just to pivot on that and point out how important it is. I know that what we are seeing now, and it’s a trend, and there are some cutting-edge folks who have been doing it for a while, but most boards of directors are looking at creating a digital advisory board for their company. They're recognizing the pervasiveness of digital risk as its own risk that sometimes it reports up to the audit committee.

I've seen at least 20 or 30 in the last three months come around, asking, did you advise every board members to focus on this from multiple disciplines? If we get that right, it might allow us that opportunity to share the information more broadly.

Lounsbury: That’s a really interesting point, the point about multiple disciplines. The next question is unfortunately the final question -- or fortunately, since it will get you to lunch. I am going to start off with Rance.

At some point, the difference between a security vulnerability failure or other kind of failures all flow into that big risk analysis that a digital-risk management regime would find out. One of the things that’s going on across the Real-Time and Embedded Systems Forum is to look at how we architect systems for higher levels of assurance, not just security vulnerabilities, but other kinds of failures as well.

The question I will ask here is, if a system fails its service-level agreement (SLA) for whatever reason, whether it’s security or some other kind of vulnerability, is that a result of our ability to do system architecture or software created without provably secure or provably assured components or the ability of the system to react to those kind of failures? If you believe that, how do we change it? How do we accelerate the adoption of better practices in order to mitigate the whole spectrum of risk of failure of the digital enterprise?

Emphasis on protection

DeLong: Well, in high assurance systems, obviously we still treat them as very important detection of problems when they occur, recovery from problems, but we put a greater emphasis on prevention, and we try to put greater effort into prevention.

You mentioned provably secure components, but provable security is only part of the picture. When you do prove, you prove a theorem, and in a reasonable system, a system of reasonable complexity, there isn’t just one theorem. There are tens, hundreds, or even thousands of theorems that are proved to establish certain properties in the system.

It has to do with proofs of the various parts, proofs of how the parts combine, what are the claims we want to make for the system, how do the proofs provide evidence that the claims are justified, and what kind of argumentation do we use based on that set of evidence.

So we're looking at not just the proofs as little gems, if you will. A proof of a theorem  think of it as a gemstone, but how are they all combined into creating a system?

If a movie star walked out on the red carpet with a little burlap sack around her neck full of a handful of gemstones, we wouldn’t be as impressed as we are when we see a beautiful necklace that’s been done by a real master, who has taken tens or hundreds of stones and combined them in a very pleasing and beautiful way.

And so we have to put as much attention, not just on the individual gemstones, which admittedly are created with very pure materials and under great pressure, but also how they are combined into a work that meets the purpose.

And so we have assurance cases, we have compositional reasoning, and other things that have to come into play. It’s not just about the provable components and it’s a mistake that is sometimes made to just focus on the proof.
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Remember, proof is really just a degree of demonstration, and we always want some demonstration to have confidence in the system, and proof is just an extreme degree of demonstration.

Mezzapelle: I think I would summarize it by embedding security early and often, and don’t depend on it 100 percent. That means you have to make your systems, your processes and your people resilient.

This has been a special BriefingsDirect presentation and panel discussion from The Open Group San Diego 2015. Download a copy of the transcript. This follows an earlier discussion on cybersecurity standards for safer supply chains. Another earlier discussion from the event focused on synergies among major Enterprise Architecture frameworks. And a presentation by John Zachman, founder of the Zachman Framework.

Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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