Friday, October 5, 2012

Internet of mobile and cloud era demands new kind of diverse and dynamic performance response, says Akamai GM Mike Afergan

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Akamai Technologies.

New realities of delivering applications and content in the cloud and mobile era demand a more situational capability among and between enterprises, clouds, and the many popular end devices.

That is, major trends have conspired to make inadequate a one-size-fits-all approach to today’s complex network optimization and applications performance demands, says an executive from Akamai Technologies. Rather, more web experiences now need a real-time and dynamic response tailored and refined to the actual use and specifics of that user’s task.

To spotlight this new dynamic, cloud-to-mobile network reality -- and to evaluate ways to make all web experiences remain valued, appropriate, and performant -- BriefingsDirect welcomes Mike Afergan, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Web Experience Business Unit at Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Akamai Technologies is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Trends that seem to be spurring a different web, a need for a different type of response, given the way that people are using the web now. Let’s start at the top. What are the trends, and what do you mean by a "situational response" to ameliorating this new level of complexity?

Afergan: There are a number of trends, and I'll highlight a few. There’s clearly been a significant change, and you and I see it in our daily lives in how we, as consumers and employees, interact with this thing that we call the web.

Only a few years ago, most of us interacted with the web by sitting in front of the PC, typing on a keyboard and with a mouse. Today, a large chunk, if not a majority, of our interaction with the web is through different handheld devices or tablets, wi-fi, and through cellular connections. More and more it's through different modes of interaction.

For example, Siri is a leader in having us speak to the web and ask questions of the web verbally, as opposed to using a keyboard or some sort of touch-screen device. So there are some pretty significant trends in terms of how we interact as consumers or employees, particularly with devices and cellular connectivity.

Behind the scenes there’s a lot of other pretty significant changes. The way that websites have been developed has significantly changed. They're using technology such as JavaScript and CSS in a much heavier way than ever before.

Third-party content

We're also seeing websites pull in a variety of content from third parties. Even though you're going to a website, and it looks like it’s a website of a given retailer, more often than not a large chunk of what you are seeing on that page is actually coming from their business partners or other people that they are working with, which gets integrated and displayed to you.

We're seeing cellular end-devices as a big trend on the experience side. We're seeing a number of things happen behind the scenes. What that means is that the web, as we thought about it even a few years ago, is a fundamentally different place today. Each of these interactions with the web is a different experience and these interactions are very different.

A user in Tokyo on a tablet, over a cellular connection, interacting with the website is a very different experience situation than me at my desk in Cambridge, in front of my PC right now with fixed connectivity. This is very different than me or you this evening driving home, with an iPhone or a handheld device, and maybe talking to it via Siri.

Each of these are very different experiences and each of these are what I call different situations. If we want to think about technology around performance and we want to think technology involving Internet, we have to think about these different situations and what technologies are going to be the most appropriate and most beneficial for these different situations.

Gardner: So we have more complexity on the delivery side, perhaps an ecosystem of different services coming together, and we also have more devices, and then of course different networks. And as people think about the cloud, I think the missing word in the cloud is the networks. There are many networks involved here.
There are some trends in which the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Maybe you could help us understand with these trends that delivery is a function of many different services, but also many different networks. How does that come together?

Afergan: There are some trends in which the more things change, the more they stay the same. The way the Internet works fundamentally hasn’t changed. The Internet is still, to use the terminology from over a decade ago, a network of networks. The way that data travels across the Internet behind the scenes is by moving through different networks. Each of those has different operating principles in terms of how they run, and there are always challenges moving from one network to another.

This is why, from the beginning, Akamai has always had a strategy of deploying our services and our servers as close to the users as possible. This is so that, when you and I make a request to a website, it doesn't have to traverse multiple networks, but rather is served from an Akamai location as close as possible to you.

And even when you have to go all the way across the Internet, for example, to buy something and submit a credit card, we're finding an intelligent path across the network. That's always been true at the physical network layer, but as you point out, this notion of networks is being expanded for content providers, websites, and retailers. Think about the set of companies that they work with and the other third parties that they work with almost as a network, as an ecosystem, that really comes together to develop and ultimately create the content that you and I see.

This notion of having these third party application programming interfaces (APIs) in the cloud is a very powerful trend for enterprises that are building websites, but it also obviously creates a number of challenges, both technical and operational, in making sure that you have a reliable, scalable, high-performing web experience for your users.

Big data

Gardner: I suppose another big trend nowadays -- we've mentioned mobile and cloud -- is this notion of analytics, big data, trying to be more intelligent, a word you used a moment ago. Is there something about the way that the web has evolved that's going to allow for more gathering of information about what's actually taking place on the networks and these end-devices, and then therefore be able to better serve up or produce value as time goes on?

Is the intelligence something that we can measure? Is there a data aspect to this that comes into that situational benefit path?

Afergan: One of the big challenges in this world of different web experience and situations is a greater demand for that type of information. Before, typically, a user was on a PC, using one of a few different types of browsers.

Now, with all these different situations, the need for that intelligence, the need to understand the situation that your user is in -- and potentially the changing situation that your user is in as they move from one location to another or one device to another -- is even more important than it was a few years ago.

That's going to be an important trend of understating the situations. Being able to adapt to them dynamically and efficiently is going to be an important trend for the industry in the next few years.
More and more employees are bringing their increasingly powerful devices into the office.

Gardner: What does this mean for enterprises? If I'm a company and I recognize that my employees are going to want more variety and more choice on their devices, I have to deliver apps out to those devices. I also have to recognize that they don't stop working at 5 pm. Therefore, our opportunity for delivering applications and data isn't time-based. It's more of a situational-based demand as well.

I don’t think enterprises want to start building out these network capabilities as well as data and intelligence gathering. So what does it mean for enterprises, as they move toward this different era of the web, and how should they think about responding?

Afergan: You nailed it with that question. Obviously one of the big trends in the industry right now, in the enterprise industry, bring your own device (BYOD). You and I and lots of people listening to this probably see it on a daily basis as we work.

In front of me right now are two different devices that I own and brought into the office today. Lots of my colleagues do the same. We see that as a big trend across our customer base.

More and more employees are bringing their increasingly powerful devices into the office. More and more employees want to be able to access their content in the office via those devices and at home or on the go, on a business trip, over those exact same devices, the way we've become accustomed to for our personal information and our personal experiences online.

Key trends

So the exact same trend that you think about being relevant for consumer-facing websites -- multiple devices, cellular connectivity -- are really key trends that are being driven from the outside-in, from the employees into the enterprise right now. It’s a challenge for enterprise to be able to keep up. It’s a challenge for enterprises to be able to adapt to those technologies, just like it is for consumer websites.

But for the enterprise, you need to make sure that you are mindful of security, authentication, and a variety of other principles, which are obviously important once you are dealing with enterprise data.

There’s tremendous opportunity. It is a great trend for enterprises, in terms of empowering their employees, empowering their partners, decreasing the total cost of ownership for the devices, and for their users to have access to the information. But it obviously presents some very significant trends and challenges. Number one, obviously, is keeping up with those trends, but number two, doing it in a way that’s both authenticated and secure at the same time.

Gardner: Based on a lot of the analyst reports that we're seeing, the adoption of cloud services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services by enterprises is expected to grow quite rapidly in the coming years. If I'm an enterprise, whether I'm serving up data and applications to my employees, my business partners, and/or end consumers, it doesn’t seem to make sense to get cloud services, bring them into the enterprise, and then send them back out through a network to those people. It sounds like this is moving from a data center that I control type of a service into something that’s in the cloud itself as well.

So are we reading that correctly -- that even your bread and butter, Global 2000 enterprise has to start thinking about network services in this context of a situational web?
You're now talking about putting those applications into the cloud, so that those users can access them on any device, anywhere, anytime.

Afergan: Exactly. The good news is that most thoughtful enterprises are already doing that. It doesn’t make it easier overnight, but they're already having those conversations. You're exactly right. Once you recognize the fact that your employees, your partners are going to want to interact with these applications on their devices, wherever they may be, you pretty quickly realize that you can’t build out a dedicated network, a dedicated infrastructure, that’s going to service them in all the locations that they are going to need to be.

All of a sudden, you're now talking about putting those applications into the cloud, so that those users can access them on any device, anywhere, anytime. At that point in time, you're now building to a cloud architecture, which obviously brings a lot of promise and a lot of opportunity, but then some challenges associated with it.

Gardner: I'll just add one more point on the enterprise, because I track enterprise IT issues more specifically than the general web. IT service management, service level agreements (SLAs), governance policy and management via rules that can be repeatable are all very important to IT as well.

Is there something about a situational network optimization and web delivery that comes to play when it relates to governance policy and management vis-à-vis rules; I guess what you'd call service-delivery architecture?

Situational needs

Afergan: That’s a great question, and I've had that conversation with several enterprises. To some degree, every enterprise is different and every application is somewhat different, which even makes the situational point you are making all the more true.

For some enterprises, the requirements they have around those applications are ubiquitous and those need to be held true independent of the situation. In other cases, you have certain requirements around certain applications that may be different if the employee is on premises, within your VPN, in your country, or out of the country. All of a sudden, those situations became all the more complicated.

As each of these enterprises that we have been working with think through the challenges that you just listed, it's very much a situational conversation. How do you build one architecture that allows you to adapt to those different situations?

Gardner: I think we have described the problem fairly well. It's understood. What do we start thinking about when it comes to solving this problem? How can we get a handle on these different types of traffic with complexity and variability on the delivery end, on the network end, and then on the receiving end, and somehow make it rational and something that could be a benefit to our business?

Afergan: It's obviously the challenge that we at Akamai spend a lot of time thinking about and working with our customers on. Obviously, there's no one, simple answer to all of that, but I'll offer a couple of different pieces.
For some enterprises, the requirements they have around those applications are ubiquitous and those need to be held true independent of the situation.

We believe it requires starting with a good overall, fundamentally sound architecture. That's an architecture that is globally distributed and gives you a platform where you don't have to -- to answer some of your earlier questions -- worry about some of the different networks along the way, and worry about some of the core, fundamental Internet challenges that really haven't changed since the mid-'90s in terms of reliability and performance of the core Internet.

But then it should allow you to build on top of that for some of the cloud-based and situational-based challenges that you have today. That requires a variety of technologies that will, number one, address, and number two, adapt to situations that you're talking about.

Let's go through a couple of the examples that we've already spoken about. If you're an enterprise worrying about your user on a cellular connection in Hong Kong, versus you're the same enterprise worrying about the same application for a user on a desktop fixed-connection based in New York City, the performance challenges and the performance optimizations that you want to make are going to be fundamentally different.

There is a core set of things that you need to have in place in all those cases. You need to have an intelligent platform that's going to understand the situation and make an appropriate decision based on that situation. This will include a variety of technical variables, as well as just a general understanding of what the end user is trying to do.

... You need to have an underlying architecture that allows you to operate across a variety of the parties you mentioned.

For example, we talked about a variety of networks, a variety of ISPs. You need to have one architecture that allows you to operate across all of them. You can't go and build different architecture and different solution ISP by ISP, network by network, or country by country. There's no way you're going to build a scalable solution there. So first and foremost, you need that overall ubiquitous architecture.

Significant intelligence

The second thing you need is significant intelligence to be able to make those decisions on the fly, determine what the situation, and what would be the most beneficial solution and technology applied to that situation.

The third thing you need is the right set of APIs and tools that ultimately allows the enterprise, the customer, to control what's happening, because across these situations sometimes there is no absolute right answer. In some cases, you might want to suddenly degrade the fidelity of the experience to have it be a faster experience for the user.

Across all of these, having the underlying overall architecture that gives you the ubiquity, having the intelligence that allows you to make decisions in real-time, and having the right APIs and tools are things that ultimately we at Akamai spend a lot of time worrying about.

We sit in a unique position to offer this to our customers, working closely with them and their partners. And all of these things, which have been important to us for over a decade now, are even more important as we sail into this more complicated situationally driven world.

Gardner: We're almost out of time, but I wonder about on-ramps or adoption paths for organizations like enterprises to move toward this greater ability to manage the complexity that we're now facing. Perhaps it’s the drive to mobility, perhaps it’s the consumption of more cloud services, perhaps it’s the security- and governance and risk and compliance-types issues like that, or all of the above. Any sense of how people would find the best path to get started and any recommendations on how to get started?
Each company has a set of challenges and opportunities that they're working through at any point in time.

Afergan: Ultimately, each company has a set of challenges and opportunities that they're working through at any point in time. For us, it begins with getting on the right platform and thinking about the key challenges that are driving your business.

Mobility clearly is a key trend that is driving a lot of our customers to understand and appreciate the challenges of situational performance and then try to adapt it in the right way. How do I understand what the right devices are? How do I make sure that when a user moves to a less performing network, I still give them a high quality experience?

For some of our customers, it’s about just general performance across a variety of different devices and how to take advantage of the fact that I have a much more sophisticated experience now, where I am not just sending HTML, but am sending JavaScript and things I could execute on the browser.

For some of our customers it's, "Wait a minute. Now, I have all these different experiences. Each one of these is a great opportunity for my business. Each one of these is a great opportunity for me to drive revenue. But each one of these is now a security vulnerability for my business, and I have to make sure that I secure it."

Each enterprise is addressing these in a slightly different way, but I think the key point is understanding that the web really has moved from basic websites to these much more sophisticated web experiences.

Varied experiences

The web experiences are varied across different situations and overall web performance is a key on-ramp. Mobility is another key on-ramp that you, and security would be a third initial starting point. Some of our customers are trying to take a very complicated problem and look at it through a much more manageable lens, so they can start moving in the right direction.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Akamai Technologies.

You may also be interested in:

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Security officer sees rapid detection and containment as new best IT security postures for enterprises

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

The next edition of the HP Discover Performance podcast series unpacks the concept of intelligent containment of risk as an important approach to overall IT security. We'll examine why rapid and proactive containment of problems and breaches -- in addition to just trying to keep the bad guys out of your systems -- makes sense in today's environment.

Here to share his perceptions on some new ways to better manage security from the vantage of containment is our guest, Kaivan Rahbari, Senior Vice President of Risk Management at FIS Global, based in Jacksonville, Florida. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What's different about the overall security landscape today, compared to five years ago?

Rahbari: A lot has changed in the past five years. Two key economic trends have really accelerated our security changes. First, the US recession pushed companies to consolidate and integrate technology footprints and leverage systems. New deployment models, such as software as a service (SaaS) and cloud, help address some of the lack of capital that we've been experiencing and the ability to push cost from fixed to variable.

The second major economic trend that has continued in the past five years is globalization for some of the companies. That means a network topology that's traversing multiple countries and with different laws that we have to deal with.

We always talk about how we're only as strong as our weakest link. When larger and more sophisticated companies acquire smaller ones, which is pretty commonplace now in the market, and they try to quickly integrate to cut cost and improve service, they're usually introducing weaker links in the security chain.

Strong acquirers now are requiring an acquisition to go through an assessment, such as an ISO 27001 certification, before they're allowed to join “that trusted network." So a lot of changes, significant changes, in the past five years.

Gardner: Tell us about FIS Global.

Largest wholesaler

Rahbari: FIS is a Fortune 500 company, a global company with customers in over 100 countries and 33,000 employees. FIS has had a history in the past 10 years of acquiring three to five companies a year. So it has experienced very rapid growth and expansion globally. Security is one of the key focuses in the company, because we're the world's largest wholesaler of IT solutions to banks.

Transaction and core processing is an expertise of ours, and our financial institutions obviously expect their data to be safe and secure within our environments. I'm a Senior Vice President in the Risk Management Group. My current role is oversight over security and risk functions that are being deployed across North America.

Gardner: What is the nature of security threats nowadays?

Rahbari: Attackers are definitely getting smarter and finding new ways to circumvent any security measure. Five years ago, a vast majority of these threats were just hackers and primarily focused on creating a nuisance, or there were criminals with limited technology skills and resources.

Cyber attacks now are a big business, at times involving organized crimes. These are intruders with PhDs. There could be espionage involved, and originate in countries with no extradition agreements with the US, making it very difficult for us to prosecute people even after we identify them.

You've also read some of the headlines in the past six months, things such as Sony estimating a data breach and cleanup of $171 million, or an RSA hack costing EMC $66 million. So this is truly a big business with significant impacted companies.
The nature of the threats are changing from very broad, scattered approach to highly focused and targeted.

Another key trend during the past five years that we've seen in this area is that the nature of the threats are changing from very broad, scattered approach to highly focused and targeted. You're now hearing things such as designer malware or stealth bots, things that just didn't exist five or 10 years ago.

Other key trends that you're seeing is that mobility and mobile computing have really taken off, and we now have to protect people and equipment that could be in very hostile environments. When they're open, there's no security.

The third key area is cloud computing, when the data is no longer on your premises and you need to now rely on combined security of your company, as well as vendors and partners.

The last major thing that's impacting us is regulatory environment and compliance. Today, a common part of any security expert terminology are words such as payment card industry (PCI), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which were not part of our common vocabulary many years ago.

Gardner: So how do we play better defense? Most of the security from five years ago was all about building a better wall around your organization, preventing any entry. You seem to have a concept that accepts the fact that breaches are inevitable, but that focuses on containment of issues, when a breach occurs. Perhaps you could paint a picture here about this concept of containment.

Blocking strategies

Rahbari: As you said, it's easier to secure the perimeter -- just don't let anything in or out. Of course, that's really not realistic. For a vast majority of the companies, we need to be able to allow legitimate traffic to move in and out of our environments and try to determine what should be blocked.

I'll say that companies with reasonable security still focus on a solid perimeter defense. But companies with great security, not only guard their perimeter well, they assume that it can be breached at any time, as you stated.

Some examples of reasonable security would include intrusion protection, proxies to monitor traffic, and firewalls on the perimeter. You would then do penetration testing. On their PCs you see antivirus, encryption, and tools for asset and patch management. You also see antivirus and patch management on the servers and the databases. These are pretty common tools, defensive tools.

But companies that are evolving and are more advanced in that area have deployed solutions such a comprehensive logging solutions for DNS, DHCP, VPN, and Windows Security events. They have very complex security and password requirements.

As you know, password-cracking software is pretty common on the Internet nowadays. They also make sure that their systems are fully patched all the time. Proactively, as you know, Microsoft publishes patches every month. So it's no longer sufficient to upgrade a system or patch it once every few years. It's a monthly, sometimes daily, event.
As the costs of attacks have skyrocketed, we're now seeing in the market some pretty great solutions.

Gardner: How do you go about such containing?

Rahbari: First, as the costs of attacks have skyrocketed, we're now seeing in the market some pretty great solutions that actively try to prevent things from happening or mitigating them when they happen.

A few of the examples that come to mind are on the perimeter. We're seeing a lot of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in recent years. Basically what that means is you detect a massive attack toward a specific IP address, and it happens with financial institutions a lot.

With some of these great solutions on the market, you would swing all of your traffic another IP address, without bringing down the environment. The attackers still think they're attacking and shutting down an environment, but they really aren't.

Five years ago, the primary objective of a DoS attack like this was just to shut something down for malicious purposes. Now, it's a pretty common vehicle for fraud.

Long gone

Here's a scenario. In a small business, Joe's Landscaping, their internet banking gets compromised and someone steals their password. Then the hackers authenticate and do a wire transfer out of his account to some bank in the Cayman Islands. That attacker then mounts the DoS attack against the service provider that Joe's Landscaping is using, so that the fraudulent activity is not discovered or it's delayed for a few days. By the time it's discovered, the money is long gone.

Another example of proactive and great security is to have software white-listing on PCs and servers, so that only legitimate software is actually installed. A key method of obtaining credentials nowadays is to install keystroke logger software on a machine. That can easily be blocked by white-listing software.

A third example of strong security posture is not just to detect, but actually actively destroy things. Traditionally, when we were monitoring wireless access into companies, we would just report that there was wireless access that shouldn't have been granted.

Most companies would assign a password to it, but as you know, passwords are shared sometimes, so soon enough, everyone knows the password to the wireless system in the company. One of the things that we’ve started using are solutions that actively jam wireless signals, unless it's their authorized room or a known IP address.

Another great example of a proactive approach we see in the market is when a visitor or employee plugs a non-corporate device into network, either on premise or from home. That creates a significant amount of risk. There are some great solutions out there that provide network access control. If an unknown device plugs into the network, that's immediately rejected at the network level. You can't even authenticate.
The less obvious offensive posture that people don't think about is just around discovery and disclosure.

Probably the less obvious offensive posture that people don't think about is just around discovery and disclosure. Some of the statistics I’ve read indicate that more than 90 percent of the compromises are actually reported externally, rather than the company discovering it.

It's a PR and regulatory nightmare, when someone comes to us and says, "You've been attacked or breached," versus us discovering something and reporting it. Some of the examples I gave were technology, but some of it is just planning and making sure that we’re proactive and report and disclose, rather than seeing it in the headlines.

Gardner: Are there any particular types of technology that help contain an intruder or some other breach?

Rahbari: Some of it is just process, and some of it is technology. When most companies discover a breach, they take people who are already in a full-time job function related to security and put them on the team to investigate. These people don't have the investigative skills and knowledge to deal with incident management, which is truly a specialized science now.

Dedicated team

Companies that have experienced breaches and now know how important this is have implemented best practices by having a dedicated team to plan and handle breaches. It's like assigning a SWAT team to a hostage situation versus a police patrol officer.

A SWAT team is trained to handle hostage situations. They're equipped for that. They have a machine gun and sniper rifle instead of a handgun, and they don't have another full-time job to worry about while they’re trying to deal with the crisis. So, from a process and team perspective, that's the first place I would start.

This is even more critical for targeted attacks, which are pretty common nowadays. You have to have the necessary infrastructure to prepare for an event or an incident ahead of time. During the attack, we usually don't disrupt the attacker, or alert them that we’re about to go remedy something. After the remediation is prepared, then we implement that and, in that process, learn about what the attacker is doing.

Some of the steps I recommend, once you know a breach has occurred, is to first pull the entire network off the internet until remediation is complete, blocking the known attacker, domains, and IP addresses. Other simple things include such things as changing compromised passwords.

The preparation ahead of time is important ... because the architecture is the fundamental way in which we can secure our environments.

Some of the steps that any good company should take is first make sure that their networks are separated and isolated. You need a long term network architecture and strategic plan. You also need to establish security zones to separate high risk domains, and make sure you have standards to govern the level of trust between sites and your networks, based on your business requirements.

As far as domain segregation, make sure you do things such as separating Active Directory domains with credentials for your production environments, versus your quality assurance developments and other employee-access environments.

From a trends perspective, there are a number of things that had really helped. Virtualization is one of them. It's a key technique to create segregation between applications.

Gardner: How can organizations get started on this? It looks like an awful lot to go after it once. Is there a path to this -- a crawl, walk, run approach -- that you would recommend in terms of improving your posture, when it comes to security and containment?

Rahbari: This is a very complicated and difficult thing to learn, and that's where partners and other firms really can be a tremendous help. First, I'd start with an existing organization. Five years ago, it was difficult to sell security to business leaders. Now, those same business leaders are seeing in the paper everyday -- the numbers are astronomical -- Sony, Google, and others who had breaches.

From the inside, good indication of a security culture change is when you have a dedicated chief information security officer (CISO), the company has a security or risk committee, security is a budget line in the item and not just buried within an IT budget, and security is the business issue.

Effects of breaches

With the incredible amount of regulatory burden, scrutiny, and oversight, a breach can really tank a company overnight. You read in the paper two months ago, we had a company that lost half of its stock value overnight, after a breach, after Visa was hinting that they might stop using them.

I'd highly recommend that you hire a reputable company to get started, if your particular firm cannot afford to invest in hiring the experts. There are lots of firms that can come. You can outsource to start with, and then as you feel comfortable, bring it in-house and leverage the expertise of this highly, highly specialized field to protect your company and assets.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in: