Complex IT security risks can only be treated with comprehensive response, not point products

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

This latest BriefingsDirect discussion takes on the rapidly increasing threat that enterprises face from complex IT security breaches.

In just the past year, the number of attacks are up, the costs associated with them are higher and more visible, and the risks of not securing systems and processes are therefore much greater. Some people have even called the rate of attacks a pandemic.

The path to reducing these risks, even as the threats escalate, is to confront security at the framework and strategic level, and to harness the point solutions approach into a managed and ongoing security enhancement lifecycle.

As part of the series of recent news announcements from HP, this discussion examines how such a framework process can unfold, from workshops that allow a frank assessment of an organization’s vulnerabilities, to tailored framework-level approaches that can transform a company based on its own specific needs.

Here to describe how a "fabric of technology," a "framework of processes," and a "lifecycle of preparedness" can all work together to help organizations become more secure -- and keep them secure -- is Rebecca Lawson, Director of Worldwide Security Initiatives at HP. 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: Why has the security vulnerability issue come to a head?

Lawson: Open up the newspaper and you see another company getting hit almost every day. As an industry, we've hit a tipping point with so many different security related issues -- for example, cyber crime, hacktivism, nation-state attacks. When you couple that with the diversity of devices that we use, and the wide range of apps and data we access every day, you can see how these dynamics create a very porous environment for an enterprise.

So we are hearing from our customers that they want to step back and think more strategically about how they're going to handle security, not just for the short term, when threats are near and present, but also from a longer term point of view.

Gardner: What do you think are some of the trends that are supporting this vulnerability?

For more detail on the the extent of security breaches, read the
Second Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study.

Lawson: In HP’s recent research, we've found that thirty percent of the people know that they've had a security breach by an unauthorized internal access, and over 20 percent have experienced an external breach. So breaches happen both internally and externally, and they happen for different reasons. Sometimes a breach is caused by a disgruntled customer or employee. Sometimes, there is a political motive. Sometimes, it's just an honest error ... Maybe they grab some paper off a printer that has some proprietary information, and then it gets into the wrong hands.

There are so many different points at which security incidents can occur; the real trick is getting your arms around all of them and focusing your attention on those that are most likely to cause reputation damage or financial damage or operational damage.

We also noticed in our research that the number of attacks, particularly on web applications, is just skyrocketing. One of the key areas of focus for HP is helping our customers understand why that’s happening, and what they can do about it.

Gardner: It also seems to me that, in the past, a lot of organizations could put up a walled garden, and say, "We're not going to do a lot of web stuff. We're not going to do mobile. We're going to keep our networks under our control." But nowadays that’s really just not possible.

If you're not doing mobile, not looking seriously at cloud, not making your workers able to access your assets regardless of where they are, you're really at a disadvantage competitively. So it seems to me that this is not an option, and that the old defensive posture just doesn’t work anymore.

Lawson: That is exactly right. In the good old days, we did have a walled garden, and it was easy for IT or the security office to just say “no” to newfangled approaches to accessing the web or building web apps. Of course, today they can still say no, but IT and security offices realize that they can't thwart the technology-related innovation that helps drive growth.

Our customers are keenly aware that their information assets are the most important assets now. That’s where the focus is, because that’s where the value is. The problem is that all the data and information moves around so freely now. You can send data in the blink of an eye to China and back, thru multiple application, where it’s used in different contexts. The context can change so rapidly that you have to really think differently about what it is you're protecting and how you're going to go about protecting it. So it's a different game now.

Gardner: And as we confront this "new game," it also appears that our former organizational approach is wanting. If we've had a variety of different security approaches under the authority of different people -- not really coordinated, not talking to each other, not knowing what the right hand and left hand are doing -- that’s become a problem.

So how do we now elevate this to a strategic level, getting a framework, getting a comprehensive plan? It sounds like that’s what a lot of the news you've been making these days is involved with.

No silver bullet

Lawson: You're exactly right. Our customers are realizing that there is no one silver bullet. You have to think across functional areas, lines of business, and silos.

Job number one is to bring the right people together and to assess the situation. The people are going to be from all over the organization -- IT, security and risk, AppDev, legal, accounting, supply chain -- to really assess the situation. Everyone should be not only aware of where vulnerabilities might be, or where the most costly vulnerabilities might be, but to look ahead and say, "Here is how our enterprise is innovating with technology -- Let's make sure we build security into them from the get-go."

There are two takeaways from this. A structured methodical framework approach helps our customers get the people on the same page, getting the processes from top-down really well-structured so that everyone is aware of how different security processes work and how they benefit the organizations so that they can innovate.

One of the other elements is that every enterprise has to deal with a lot of short-term fixes.

[But] it's also about long-term thinking, about building security in from the get-go; this is where companies can start to turn the corner. I'll go back again to web apps, building security into the very requirement and making sure all the way through the architecture design, testing, production, all the way through that you are constantly testing for security.

Gardner: What are the high-level building blocks to the framework approach?

Read more on HP's security framework
Rethinking Your Enterprise Security:
Critical Priorities to Consider

Lawson: The framework that I just mentioned is our way of looking at what you have to do across securing data, managing suppliers, ensuring physical assets, or security, but our approach to executing on that framework is a four-point approach.

We help our customers first assess the situation, which is really important just to have all eyes on what's currently happening and where your current vulnerabilities may lie. Then, we help them to transform their security practices from where they are today to where they need to be.

Then, technologies and services to help them manage that on an ongoing basis, so that you can get more and more of the security controls automated. And then, we help them optimize that, because security just doesn't stand still. So we have tools and services that help our customers keep their eye on the right ball, as all of the new threats evolve or new compliance requirements come down the pike.

Gardner: What is HP Secure Boardroom, and why is it an important as part of this organizational shift?

Get more information on the executive dashboard:
Introducing the HP Secure Boardroom.

Lawson: The Secure Boardroom combines dashboard technology with a good dose of intellectual property we have developed that helps us generate the APIs into different data sources within an organization.

The result is that a CISO can look at a dashboard and instantly see what's going on all across the organization. What are the threats that are happening? What's the rate of incidents? What's going on across your planning spectrum?

To have the visibility into disparate systems is step one. We've codified this over the several years that we've been working on this into a system that now any enterprise can use to pull together a consistent C-level view, so that you have the right kind of transparency.

Half the battle is just seeing what's going on every day in a consistent manner, so that you are focused on the right issues, while discovering where you might need better visibility or where you might need to change process. The Secure Boardroom helps you to continually be focused on the right processes, the right elements, and the right information to better protect financial, operational, and reputation-related assets.

... Because we've been in the systems management and business service management business for so long, I would elevate this up to the level of the business service management.

We already have a head start with our customers, because they can already see the forest for the trees with regard to any one particular service. Let's just say it's a service in the supply chain, and that service might comprise network elements and systems and software and applications and all kinds of data going through it. We're able to tie the management of that through traditional management tools, like what we had with OpenView and what we have with our business service management to the view of security.

When you think about vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks, the first thing you have to do is have the right visibility. The technology in our security organization that helps us see and find the vulnerabilities really quickly.

Integration with operations

Because we have our security technology tied with IT operations, there is an integration between them. When the security technology detects something, they can automatically issue an alert that is picked up from our incident management system, which might then invoke our change management system, which might then invoke a prescribed operations change, and we can do that through HP Operations Orchestration.

It really is a triad -- security, applications, operations. At HP, we’re making them work together. And because we have such a focus now on data correlation, on Big Data, we're able to bring in all the various sources of data and turn that into actionable information, and then execute it through our automation engine.

... For example, we have a technology that lets you scan software and look for vulnerabilities, both dynamic and static testing. We have ways of finding vulnerabilities in third-party applications. We do that through our research organization which is called DVLabs. DV stands for Digital Vaccine. We pull data in from them every day as to new vulnerabilities and we make that available to the other technologies so we can blend that into the picture.

Focused technology

The right kind of security fabric has to be composed of different technologies that are very focused on certain areas. For example, technologies like our intrusion protection technology, which does the packet inspection and can identify bad IP addresses. They can identify that there are certain vulnerabilities associated with the transaction, and they can stop a lot of traffic right at the gate before it gets in.

The reason we can do that so well is because we've already weaved in information from our applications group, information from our researchers out there in the market. So we've been able to pull these together and make more value out of them working as one.

Gardner: Is there a path now toward security as a service, or some sort of a managed service, hybrid model?

Lawson: A lot of people think that when the words cloud and security are next to each other, bad things happen, but in fact, that’s not always the case.

Once an enterprise has the right plan and strategy in place, they start to prioritize what parts of their security are best suited in-house, with your own expertise, or what parts of the security picture can you or should you hand off to another party. In fact, one of our announcements this week is that we have a service for endpoint threat management.

If you're not centrally managing your endpoint devices, a lot of incidents can happen and slip through the cracks -- everything from an employee just losing a phone to an employee downloading an application that may have vulnerabilities.

So managing your endpoints devices in general, as well as the security associated with the endpoints, make a lot of sense. And it’s a discrete area where you might consider handing the job to a managed services provider, who has more expertise as well as better economic incentives.

Application testing

Another great example of using a cloud service for security is application testing. We are finding that a lot of the web apps out in the market aren't necessarily developed by application developers who understand that there's a whole lifecycle approach involved.

In fact, I've been hearing interesting statistics about the number of web apps that are written by people formerly known as webmasters. These folks may be great at designing apps, but if you're not following a full application lifecycle management practice, which invokes security as one of the base principles of designing an app, then you're going to have problems.

What we found is that this explosion of web apps has not been followed closely enough by testing. Our customers are starting to realize this and now they're asking for HP to help, because in fact there are a lot of app vulnerabilities that can be very easily avoided. Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them, and we can help customers do that.

So testing as a service as a cloud service or as a hosted or managed service is a good idea, because you can do it immediately. You don't incur the time and money to spin up a testing of center of excellence – you can use the one that HP makes available through our SaaS model.

Gardner: As part of your recent announcements, you're moving more toward a managed services provider role.

One of the great things about many of the technologies that we've purchased and built in the last few years is that we're able to use them in our managed services offerings.

Lawson: One of the great things about many of the technologies that we've purchased and built in the last few years is that we're able to use them in our managed services offerings.

I'll give you an example. Our ArcSight product for Security Information and Event Management is now offered as a service. That's a service that really gets better the more expertise you have and the more focused you are on that type of event correlation and analysis. For a lot of companies they just don't want to invest in developing that expertise. So they can use that as a service.

We have other offerings, across testing, network security, endpoint security, that are all offered as a service. So we have a broad spectrum of delivery model choices for our customers. We think that’s the way to go, because we know that most enterprises want a strategic partner in security. They want a trusted partner, but they're probably not going to get all of their security from one vendor of course, because they're already invested.

We like to come in and look first at establishing the right strategy, putting together the right roadmap, making sure it's focused on helping our customer innovate for the future, as well as putting some stopgap measures in so that you can thwart the cyber threats that are near and present danger. And then, we give them the choice to say what's best for their company, given their industry, given the compliance requirements, given time to market, and given their financial posture?

There are certain areas where you're going to want to do things yourself, certain areas where you are going to want to outsource to a managed service. And there are certain technologies already at play that are probably just great in a point solution context, but they need to be integrated.

Integrative approach

Most of our customers have already lots of good things going on, but they just don't all come together. That's really the bottom line here. It has to be an integrative approach. It has to be a comprehensive approach. And the reason is that the bad guys are so successful causing havoc is that they know that all of this is disconnected. They know that security technologies tend to be fragmented and they're going to take advantage of that.

I'd definitely suggest going to hp.com/go/enterprisesecurity. In particular, there is a report that you can download and read today called the "HP DVLabs’ Cyber Security Risks Report." It’s a report that we generate twice a year and it has got some really startling information in it. And it’s all based on, not theoretical stuff, but things that we see, and we have aggregated data from different parts of the industry, as well as data from our customers that show the rate of attacks and where the vulnerabilities are typically located. It’s a real eye opener.

It’s a little startling, when you start to look at some of the facts about the costs associated with application attacks.

So I would just suggest that you search for the DVLabs’ Cyber Security Risks Report and read it, and then pass it on to other people in your company, so that they can become aware of what the situation really is. It’s a little startling, when you start to look at some of the facts about the costs associated with application breaches or the nature of complex persistent attacks. So awareness is the right place to start.

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

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Take a deep dive with Embarcadero on how enterprise app stores help drive productivity

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has energized users on the one hand, but on the other hand it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

That's why enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments alike as they grapple with the new models around consumerization of IT. The author of a recent Ovum white paper on why app stores says they are increasingly important for enterprises as they consider ways to better track, manage, and distribute all of their applications.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, on one hand, has energized users, but on the other hand, it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

Join this podcast discussion then as we examine the steps businesses can now take to build and develop their own enterprise app stores. We'll further see what rapid and easy access to self-service apps on PCs and notebook computers through such app stores is doing for businesses.

And we’ll learn how app stores are part of the equation for improved work and process success on and off the job. Furthermore, we uncover how Embarcadero’s AppWave solution brings the mobile apps experience to millions of PC users in their workplace in the enterprise.

The panel consists of Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum; Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing at Embarcadero Technologies, and Richard Copland, Principal Innovation Consultant at Logica. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Embarcadero is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Richard, in your looking over the landscape for IT innovations, is there something about the app store model that you think will encourage users to adopt new technologies and new applications faster?

Copland: Undoubtedly. The whole socialization and the social trend which I see as probably the biggest driver behind this is for the way in which people use software and the way in which people comment on a software.

The organization will cluster around the toolkits for which the feedback from the users is positive. I can think of one large global financial organization here that has 5,000 apps within their world. They would look to simplify their landscape by over 60 percent, because they recognize that they've got so many kinds of individual pockets of activity going on in the organization.

And you need to support those individual pockets of activity that, in terms of your users in the tail effect, they’ll be the mainstream enterprise apps, such as Windows-based or Office-based, which the majority will use. But if you could tap into an environment, in which you are giving the people what they want, then the return on investment (ROI) from that is going to be a lot faster.

My role as a Principal Innovation Consultant is effectively twofold. It's to find new things and introduce new things to our clients. Something innovative to me is something that's new to you and provides a benefit. This can be cash, people, or green ideas. I spend my day looking at cool new stuff, which means ways of working, technologies, partners, and even wacky research coming out of the various universities here in Europe.
At Logica, we're a business and technology service company. We provide business consulting, system integration, and outsourcing to our clients around the world including many of Europe’s largest businesses.

Generation Next

For me, these app stores are also the whole Generation Next piece which is about a whole new generation that is educated and tech-savvy. They're multitasking all the time. They work as consumers. They're purchasing products and customize them to their needs in terms of their lifestyles. So they’re regularly sharing insight and comment on things which are good for them.

That’s playing out in terms of lifestyle and that's being brought into the business scenario, whereby the formal and informal hierarchies of organizations are blurring.

Gardner: Tony, this sounds like it’s something quite new.

Baer: From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a new win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization. At least this aspect of it is really going to become more of a service provider. And there are a lot of implications for that.

From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization.

For one thing, IT has to be more responsive but they also have to work on more of a shorter fuse, almost like a just-in-time type of model.

... I was a little bit surprised because there is certainly a concept leap from a $1.99 little applet that you pull down from the iPhone app store or from the Android marketplace to a full-blown enterprise desktop application.

That being said, it’s not surprising, given that there’s been a huge demand from the bottom-up, from the people in the workplace. So it’s a phenomenon that’s probably better known as the consumerization of IT -- "I have these sophisticated mobile devices and tablets. Why can’t I get that easy to use experience on my regular machine for my day job?"

Therefore, the demand for the comfort and convenience of that was inevitably bound to spread into the enterprise environment. You've seen that manifested in a number of ways. For example, companies have basically embraced more social collaboration. And you’re also starting to see some use of many of these new form factors.

So again, what Embarcadero has been starting to introduce is symbolic in a way that’s really not surprising.

But there's no free lunch in all this, it still requires management. For example, we still need to worry about dealing with security governance, managing consumption, and also making sure that you lock down, or secure the licensing issues. As I said, there’s no free lunch, but compare that to the overhead of the traditional application distribution and deployment process.

So again, from the end user standpoint, it should be a win-win, but from the IT standpoint, it's going to mean a number of changes. Also, this is breaking new ground with a number of the vendors. What they need to do is check on things such as licensing issues, because what you're really talking about is a more flexible deployment policy.

Gardner: Michael Swindell, tell me a little bit about AppWave and what it takes for an IT organization to make the transition from that long process that Tony outlined to a more streamlined app-store approach.

Swindell: The best way to describe AppWave is that it’s just a pretty simple three-step process. The first step is taking traditional software, which is traditionally complex for end users and for organizations to manage. This includes things like installations, un-installations, considerations about applications, of how they affect the users’ environment.

Then, converting those traditional software applications into the concept of apps where they are self-contained, don’t require installation, can be streamed and run to a user anywhere they are, and really delivering the mobile-like experience of mobile software to the more complex traditional desktop PC software.

AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application- commercial application or internally developed.

AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application -- commercial application or internally developed.

That's the first step. The second is to centralize those apps in an app store, where users can get to them, and where organizations can have visibility into their usage, manage access to them, etc. So the second step is simply centralizing those apps.

The third is the user experience. One of the key drivers behind the success of apps in the mobile space has been the visibility that users have into application availability. It’s very easy for users to search and find an app as they need it.

Think about how a user uses a mobile phone to come up with an app. Maybe they’re walking down the street, they see a business, and they have an idea, or they want directions to something. They can simply search in an app store on their mobile device and immediately get an app to solve that problem.

If you look in the business space and inside the workplace, when a user has a problem, they don’t really have a mechanism to sit down and search to solve a problem and then get an application to solve it immediately.

As we talked about earlier, and Tony really well-described that the process, once they identify an application to solve a problem, that can take weeks or months to roll out. so you don’t have that instant feedback.

Instantaneous experience

The user experience has to be instantaneous. An area that we focused on very heavily with AppWave is to provide the users an ability to search, find apps based on the problems that they’re trying to solve, and instantly run those apps, rather than having to go through a long process.

Gardner: Can we perhaps make the association that app stores can fundamentally change the way workers behave in an innovation sense?

Copland: Absolutely. You’re on the money. We talked a little bit about looking at the mobile aspects of it and moving to this on-demand usage and the challenges for the organization to do that.

Certainly, the components within the AppWave solution give you the opportunity to move to more of what I would describe as smart working or remote working, by which the user doesn't necessarily have to come into the office to access the tools, which are traditionally being provided to them at their desk in their environment.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance. So if you're in a situation where you’ve got a young family and you need to take the kids to school, you can come on and go off the company network and use the tools which are provided to you in a much more user-friendly flexible environment. That would be certainly from the user's perspective.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance.

From the business’s perspective, I start moving to a scenario where I don't necessarily need to maintain a real estate where if I’ve got 5,000 users, I need to have 5,000 desks. That certainly becomes quite empowering across the rest of the organization, and other stakeholders -- the facility’s officers, business managers -- start taking real notice of those types of savings and the nature of how work is achieved.

Gardner: How far can the app store model be taken in terms of legacy, the installed base of apps?

Swindell: Our vision is any type of application in the organization will eventually be supported by AppWave. The initial support is for PC apps in organizations, which is the vast majority of productivity applications that end users need. It also is where the largest problem set is, both from an end-user perspective and from an organization's perspective.

So we're tackling the hardest problem first and then our plan is to roll in other type of apps, web apps, and applications that you might be using in an organization, using other types of delivery technologies.

But the idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem. So a user can have a centralized way to search for any type of app whether it’s a corporate HR, a web application, a hosted software as a service (SaaS ) application, or a PC application. Certainly, mobile would be an obvious direction as well.

The idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem.

There are really two sides to the benefit of using the app store methodology. There's an organizational side of understanding application usage, as you said maybe sunsetting applications, understanding how applications are used within their organization, so that they can make good decisions.

Then we have the user side, where users have a lot more information that they can provide that’s very useful for both the organization and other users.

The app store metaphor works very well in sharing that type of information. It gives the organization usage information and statistics, and the demand information that's valuable for the organization to plan and understand their application usage. It also provides information to other users on the applicability of applications for certain scenarios, whether applications are good or bad for a particular scenario.

This has worked well in the mobile space with public app stores, and we see that there's a lot of applicability inside the firewall, inside organizations, to be able to use this information and create more value out of their applications and to help users get more value and understanding about their applications.

One of the things that AppWave and the app store concept can do is to help create a centralized app view of the different types of applications and even the different types of services in your organization, and to be able to understand what’s available.

Common presentation

There are also opportunities for the same types of socialization and sharing of information and knowledge about services using the app store concept, as there is with apps.

The important thing is to take these different types of applications and present them in a common way in the same place, so that it really doesn’t matter whether the app is a web app or it’s a PC app. Users can find them, run them, and share information about them at the same place.

Gardner: Tony, back to your Ovum white paper, what do you see as the efficiency aspects to this?

Baer: Compare this model to the traditional application deployment model ... Number one, it's a much more of a long-fused process. There is elaborate planning of the rollout. You're trying to figure out all the different client targets that you're trying to address. Even if you do have locked-down machines, you're still going to have issues. Then, package the release,. Then, regression test it to death. Then distribution, and you actually get the thing installed. Hopefully, it's up during some off hour, let's say, at 3 a.m. Then, you prepare for all the support calls.

That's a pretty involved process. That consumes a lot of time both for the end user, who is waiting for the functionality that he or she may want -- or not. And it's also, of course, a considerable overhead in the IT organization.

If you take that all away into a more modular model, more like a radio broadcast model, essentially it becomes a lot more efficient. You lose all this lead time, and as Michael was talking about, you then get all the visibility for all these apps being consumed. End users have more sway. As long as they are authorized to use these apps, they have this choice.

So it's not that all of a sudden they have a whole number of apps that are loaded on their machine, whether they like it or not. We haven't done anything to quantify this, because trying to quantify productivity is like asking “what's the cost of downtime?” And in a lot of sectors that can be a very subjective number. But intuitively, this model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.

This model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.

Gardner: Richard Copland, as someone who is out there hunting down innovations that they can bring to their user organization and their clients, was there anything about AppWave or app stores in general for enterprise use that was interesting and attractive to you that we perhaps haven’t hit on yet?

Copland: In AppWave and the Embarcadero team, we have a global innovation venture partner program. They were our recent winner. They went up against competition from around the world. We believe that the app store concept has got so much within it in terms of the user experience, the socialization aspects, and the collaboration aspects of it.

Bridging point

The area which we haven't touched on so much is that it's a bridging point between your legacy systems and your more visionary cloud-type solutions where you really are SaaS, on-demand and pay-per-click.

The thing that will kill innovation is just operating slowly. One of the biggest blockers that organizations face with regard to innovation is the nature of how that sets out and the speed at which they react to what are their internal ideas.

Swindell: You can look at this as being in a way a cultural preparation for transition to the cloud, if indeed the cloud is suitable for specific parts of your application portfolio.

... Having an on-premise private app store that runs within your organization that is on site really addresses a lot of those concerns and uses the cloud simply to deliver new applications and apps from ISVs and from other vendors.

Once they are inside your organization, they're operating within your security and governance environment. So you don't really have to worry about those concerns, but it still delivers a lot of the benefits of the user experience of cloud and the on-demand nature.

Gardner: I know this is going a little bit out further into the future and perhaps into the hypothetical. It sounds as if you can effectively use this app store model and technology and approach like AppWave to be a gateway for your internal PC apps, but that same gateway might then be applicable for all these other services.

Driven by demand

Swindell: The foundation is there, and I think it will be demand driven by users. Every time we talk to a customer with AppWave, the list of possibilities and where customers want to use and take the environment is exciting, and the list continues to grow on how they can use it in the long-term.

So we're building facilities today to connect the private AppWaves into our cloud infrastructure, so that we can deliver certainly apps but there could be other types of services that connect into that as well.

Gardner: Okay, and just to be clear. AppWave is available now. I believe we have a 30-day free trial, is that correct?

Swindell: Yes, there is a free trial, and we also offer free version of AppWave that organizations can download and use today with free apps. There's an entire catalog of free apps that are included and are streamed down from our cloud.

So you can get set up and started with AppWave, using free apps in your organization. What can be added then is your own internal custom apps or commercial licenses that organizations have. So if you've hundreds of commercial licenses, you can add those in or add your own internally developed apps. You can go to www.embarcadero.com/appwave and try it for free.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

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Enterprises should harness the power of social media to better know their markets, says Capgemini

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Capgemini.

Social media and the increased role that linked communities of users have on issues, discourse, and public opinion are changing the world in many ways -- from how societies react such as in the Middle East turmoil to how users flock to or avoid certain products and services.

The fact is that many people are now connected in new ways and they’re voicing opinions and influencing their peers perhaps more than ever before. Businesses cannot afford to simply ignore these global -- and what now appeared to be long-term -- social media trends.

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion then focuses on the impact that social media is having on enterprises. We specifically examine with an executive at Capgemini on what steps businesses can take to manage social media as a market opportunity, rather than react to it as a hard-to-fathom threat. Hear too how services are being developed to help businesses to better understand and exploit the potential of social media.

The discussion with Paul Cole, Vice President of Customer Operations Management and Business Process Outsourcing at Capgemini, is the first in the series of podcasts with Capgemini on social media issues and business process outsourcing. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Capgemini is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: It seems a bit of a twisted logic when we say that social media can be both a threat and an opportunity. How could social media be both?

Cole: It's all in how you decide to respond. Social media, in and of itself, is a neutral topic. It could be viewed as a utensil or a platform, upon which you can do things. And depending on your intent, whether you’re an enterprise or a customer, those activities could be viewed favorably or negatively. And that's true as much in the sociopolitical world as in business.

The important thing is that social media is the platform, not the action itself, and it’s really what you decide to do over that platform that makes the difference in business and in the world at large.

Gardner: Do you have any evidence, research, or findings of any sort that bolster this notion that social media is a sea change and not just a blip?

Game changer

Cole: Well, based on a survey we commissioned last winter, somewhat surprisingly, a bit more than one in 10 executives did characterize it as a fad relative to the business world.

However, you can look at it in the everyday world around us and the media as it relates to impact on society and in the sociopolitical spectrum, and there's very little doubt that it’s changing the game there. I believe it will have an equally profound impact on business over time.

Social media has become the bullhorn of the 21st century. It allows people to spread their message, to amplify that message, to mobilize the community, and also to monitor in real time the events as they unfold.

We are having to deal with it across the political, social, and cultural spectrums. Witness, unfortunately, the emergence of something that we’re now calling flash mobs, a case where the platform is being misapplied toward organizing a community of people who have damaging intentions.

So back to your question on threat or opportunity, significant or insignificant impact, it’s all based on the intent and actions of the individuals utilizing the utensil.

It’s all a matter of how you take that information and translate it into actionable insights, against which you can make some smarter business decisions.

Gardner: On one hand, we seem to see a lack of control or at least different aspects to how people behave. We don’t have the necessary tools. But on the other hand, we're seeing a lot more information generated, and information often is the lifeblood of how organizations react and adjust to markets.

Cole: Information overload is one potential consequence of this. It’s all a matter of how you take that information and translate it into actionable insights, against which you can make some smarter business decisions, and from our perspective, ultimately deliver a better customer experience which will help you grow.

What’s neat about what’s happening in the world of technology, on top of the social environment, is that there is a whole new generation of tools emerging that allow you to develop that insight.

There are four steps that a company can go through to generate social intelligence. First, is listening to what is going on out there. There has not been an earpiece for us to really take the pulse of the market, and what's happening in the virtual world or the internet world until the recent development of some of these social listening tools. So the ability just to know what's going on, who is saying what, who are the influencers, what are their sentiments is an important first step.

Monitoring change

The second step is the ability to monitor that over time and see how attitudes, perceptions, and most importantly, behaviors are changing and what are the impact and implication of that for your business, either from a marketing or a selling or customer service standpoint. In addition to monitoring that, you’re also now able, with text analytics tools to not simply track and describe what happening, but also isolate cause and effect.

So if I'm launching a Twitter campaign, putting a new product out there, running a contest, or engaging in some kind of social care activity, what is the impact it's having in terms of the customer’s behavior and what adjustments can I make to be more successful?

It's being able to get attribution and get to a root cause by applying these analytic tools. So you've listened, monitored, and analyzed. The killer app, if you will, is the last step of closing loop in terms of your ability to respond. So many companies today are putting their toe in the water in the social world by listening with these tools and trying to understand what's being said. It's new enough where not that many have actually industrialized their process for responding.

Ultimately, your ability to now go back into that community and influence the customer or attempt to influence the customer and their behavior is where there is a tremendous upside for companies in terms of generating higher growth and profit.

Gardner: How is Capgemini working toward some solutions on this?

The question then becomes, as a provider of services, how to translate that into sets of offerings that add value for our clients.

Cole: As a global provider of consulting technology and outsourcing services, Capgemini attempts to keep its finger on the pulse of market. You have to be blind and deaf to not recognize that social media has quickly emerged on the scene. The question then becomes, as a provider of services, how to translate that into sets of offerings that add value for our clients.

At one level, you could look at social media as a wave or a phenomenon. I’ve been in the professional services, technology services business for 30 years, and we’ve seen the waves come and go, whether that would be CRM or ERP through SAP or eCommerce, which I think this mirrors quite a bit, and Y2K. So there's always an emerging area that people will try to understand, chase, and then capitalize on.

My particular area of expertise is around customer management. So I look through the lens of how a company acquires, develops, and retains its customers and how can we manage some of that process for them in a faster, better, or cheaper manner. We do that today in traditional forms with managing their call centers or their customer service operations, helping them present stronger web content, providing them with insights through analytical services, and so forth.

What social media started to suggest to us was that there was a new opportunity to bring another service to the market that allowed clients to focus on the business problem that they’re trying to solve and provided us the opportunity to provide them with everything they needed to mobilize around that objective in the social world.

Marketing enhancement

In and of itself, social media is not going to drive your business forward. As we've discussed, it's really a platform or a utility upon which you can engage customers for one or more activities based on a business objective. It does, at the end of the day, relate back to what you're trying to accomplish.

When I went to school, we were trained on the four Ps in marketing. You develop a product that the marketplace is interested in. You price that product at a level that the consumer or customer perceives value so they want to transact with you. You need to promote that in terms of distinguishing you against your competitors and bring that product to market with some form of distribution. We call that the four Ps.

Obviously you still need to do all those things, but in the social world now, there is a new twist. If you think about the product, we used to take a very linear approach to doing market research, testing concepts, via surveys and focus groups. In today’s social world, you can do that much more dynamically. There's a whole phenomenon around crowd sourcing with which you can solicit people's input and feedback and iterate on that massively, and closer to real time.

There's a whole phenomenon around crowd sourcing with which you can solicit people's input and feedback and iterate on that.

Your ability to get really close to the marketplace is enhanced tremendously by social media. In terms of promoting, it used to be broadcast media, but now you're able to do micro campaigns. You can do tweet campaigns. You can do campaigns through Facebook. Your ability to target the individual that you are trying to influence has gone up exponentially.

We've always talked about the segment of one, but it was very difficult to do. Now, you can get in there and really understand who is driving popular opinion, who are the big influencers, who do you need to convert to be an enthusiast or an advocate of your product, and launch very specific campaigns against them. It's a different form of promotion.

It's the same thing with pricing and distribution. While you still need to do many of the same activities, the way in which you will execute on those activities has evolved and become much more dynamic.

Every function within the organization has a potential application in the social world. I don't think it's the kind of thing that any one executive or any one function is going to own per se.

It's a matter of looking at it through the lens of the process that you're responsible for, and trying to understand how to apply new thinking and activities to improve your efficiency or your effectiveness of that area. That could be public relations and the brand, marketing and developing effective positioning, product development and management, selling through more targeted campaigns or, at the end of the value chain, a better servicing of the customer to generate greater loyalty.

Different ways

Gardner: Are we going to repeat history and have a fragmented approach to this or is there a better way?

Cole: You’ve really put your finger on a core issue. It all depends. What is social media? That depends on who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. That’s going to be variable based on your area of responsibility within the enterprise.

There is something to be said for standardization and taking a platform-based approach to avoid the recurring tendency of investing in your own individual solutions and then lacking interoperability or having to face integration issues and so forth.

By buying into a managed service the company can avoid having to make capital investments in the technology, avoid the potential risk of different groups going off and doing their own thing.

While the application of what you do on top of the social platforms may vary, there is potential for the organization to operate as an enterprise on top of a single instance of a platform. That’s part of why we got into offering a managed service.

We allow the client to focus on what they are trying to do in the marketing, selling or customer service world. We provide them with the infrastructure, the technology, the process discipline, the data, and importantly, the social media advocates, the human intelligence layer that is ultimately conducting the monitoring and the analytics and the interpretation of what’s happening there.

By buying into a managed service the company can avoid having to make capital investments in the technology, avoid the potential risk of different groups going off and doing their own thing. They can remain current, because they don’t have to pay attention to this fast paced dynamic technology market and what is the state of the art. That would be our responsibility.

Hopefully, it's the best of both worlds. They can each, as user communities, decide what they want to get out of social media, but be able to leverage the fact that they're all investing in a common platform. ... It is a different way of storing, distributing, and accessing the data.

What it translates into for us is the ability to provide process as a service. That’s a fundamental shift in the marketplace that’s occurring as a result of the development of cloud capabilities.

Organizations can just tap into a service, and that makes it easier for them to get into a new area. It’s faster, it’s less expensive. We're trying to apply that same concept to social media. We can provide a faster, better, and/or cheaper approach. The client buys the process as a service on a subscription model.

We assure the integrity and security of the data. We provide the data management, the repository, the infrastructure, and the toolset. You're buying a service around a process, whether that be listening to your customers, wanting to launch marketing campaigns, providing social care or whatever.

The whole SaaS cloud phenomenon is just changing the distribution model and also facilitating an easier approach for companies to get up and running in this area.

The whole SaaS cloud phenomenon is just changing the distribution model and also facilitating an easier approach for companies to get up and running in this area.

Gardner: How are organizations getting started?

Cole: As evidence of the fact that it is a new phenomenon, you can just notice the volume of conferences that are out there with social media in the title. It just reinforces that companies are trying to understand still what "good" looks like. They’re out there looking for best practices. They are still paying for "PowerPoint," for consultants to come in and help them understand the strategy, the power of social, what that translates into in terms of metrics and governance, and so forth.

The market is very much in its exploratory stage. I'm not sure you can over-architect what social media means to you at the moment. This is something that you have to get in and dip your toe in the water. Instead of "ready, aim, fire," it's probably "fire, fire, aim, ready, fire." This means that you need to iterate.

You don’t know what you don’t know….. until you get in to the market and you start to listen to what is happening out there, identify who the key influencers are, where they're talking about, who are the advocates for the brand, and who are the potential saboteurs who can represent a threat? What are some of the kinds of programs and activities that one can run?

Rather than the grand strategies, the big-bang approach, this particular area is deserving of more experimentation, and iteration. Then, over time, we need the development of a broader strategy. But, you need to get in there, and listen, and learn, and act, and from that you'll figure out what works and what doesn’t work.

Part of what we’re trying to offer our clients is the ability to do that faster than doing it themselves, where they have to go out, acquire the tools, hire the people, and put in place the processes.

In this case, they can say we want to launch a campaign and we’d like to understand how we can use the social world to solve customer service problems or whatever. We provide all the tools and capabilities to do that. They focus on learning and evolving their strategy of what to do in the social world.

Part of what we offer is the ability to bring to them the best of the tools that are out there, and it's an evolving world.

... As part of that, in our Social Media Management Solution, we’ve built a joint solution with a company called Attensity, which really comes at the market initially from the text analytics world, but offers a nice suite of applications that enable your ability to listen, monitor, analyze what's being done, and then respond to the customer in terms of workflow and direct customer engagement. So it's what you decide to do, but it's also having the right toolset with which to do it.

Gardner: Are there any places to which we could direct our listeners and readers for additional information, perhaps whitepapers, other research, and/or more information on your services?

Cole: Certainly capgemini.com. We do have a featured social media section on the website. We've recently published a whitepaper called "Harvesting the Fruit from the Social Media Grapevine". We hope that clients will find that insightful. It's a bit of a point-of-view on where the market is today and where it's headed.

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Case study: CharterCARE Health Partners leverages cloud and VDI to aid digital records management, security, regulatory compliance

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

Our next VMworld case study interview takes the pulse of CharterCARE Health Partners, and examines how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements.

We learn how Rhode Island-based CharterCARE has embraced private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to support its distributed, 579-bed community-based health system. The organization operates the Roger Williams Medical Center, Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, and several other caregiver facilities.

We'll hear how the tag team of private cloud and VDI has provided better data management, security, reliability, and regulatory auditing capabilities. The successful infrastructure modernization effort has also helped CharterCARE move to electronic health records and has helped improve their processes for clinicians.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to dig into more detail on the CharterCARE IT infrastructure improvement story is Andy Fuss, Director of Technology and Engineering at CharterCARE Health Partners. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: I'm interested why data management has been a primary driver for you as you've looked to adopt both the private cloud and VDI. What is it about the data equation that’s made this look like a good solution for you?

Fuss: We need our data to be accessible everywhere, at every time, no matter what provider is at what facility. Even from an engineering and technology standpoint, no matter what system analyst, what network engineer may sit down wherever they are to troubleshoot an issue, we need that common set of tools.

Common repository

We need the common repository of information for a caregiver. That would be the electronic medical information. It could be the x-rays, the slides, the CT scans, or the results that were dictated by a radiologist. Whatever it might be, that information needs to be available in a flexible manner and delivered directly to the deskside experience.

Now, if that’s a desktop, it needs to be on a regular PC, but if we're talking about a tablet, we need to accommodate the tablets that people bring in and have come into the facility and are now actively being used, or zero client technology.

We have all the different technologies and pieces. We're trying to promote these pieces to be used and trying to be flexible with accommodating them and getting people to the information that they need so they can take care of the first priority, which really is patient care.

Gardner: Tell me about the extent of your distributed campus and environment. Not only are you dealing with many different types of data and many different endpoints, but you're also distributing this across a multitude of different environments.

Fuss: We have two main acute hospitals. We have a nursing home, a cancer center, outpatient care offices, and several different offices all around the community. So the data truly needs to not be resident in one spot.

Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

We also needed to have a secured disaster recovery (DR) facility, so that if anything were to happen to our primary data center that’s on one of the campuses, we could flex seamlessly over.

So building a cloud for us made total sense. That cloud hovers between one of two data centers. One is at one of the acute facilities, and then 100 miles away in another state, we have another data center. Our cloud roams between the two, and we have data flowing from each area.

So the connection really is no longer about where it’s physically located by any restriction. It’s more of just gaining access to the internet and being able to make connections. Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

... There are a lot of people who can embrace different types of clouds. You've got hybrid clouds, private clouds, public clouds, all with different offerings. For us it made sense to do a private cloud. For others, it may make sense to do hybrid type cloud.

As we move toward the future, I can see that we might be able to offload some of our services toward the public cloud. As we increase the size of some of our data and we have patient care cut over to the side, there might be some other data that does not follow the same guidelines. We can put that into a secure public cloud and attach everything.

I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

VMware is coming out with those tools and using those tools to make that kind of continuation project possible to look at. We're very excited about some of the initiatives that we've seen at VMworld -- the vCloud Director, with security, the different layers built into that that could make some of the public cloud usable for us for specific applications.

Gardner: Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds as if private cloud to you means better security.

Fuss: Oh, it does, most definitely. I'm no longer worried about the endpoint device walking away from us. I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

When we were first embracing zero client technology in a lot of places, we did some studies. We talked to some different people who had already embraced it. One particular hospital I spoke to said they had on video someone stealing a zero client device, perhaps thinking that they had stolen some great new utility tool for home, a new PC. They were all excited.

They also have them on video, bringing it back the next morning, because they couldn’t do anything with it when they got to their house. Using cloud, using the technologies that ride in the cloud, like VMware View and access to the data through VMware View, really helps to lock things down and it helps to prevent things.

No data leakage

In the past, somebody could have taken a PC, and let’s say that PC could have had metadata on it or could have had some files on it that were saved in someway. It was comical to hear that story from another person who was in a similar situation as us, where there was no data loss or data leakage, even if that device had never come back. So the cloud really has tightened things down for us.

One of the primary concerns for our electronic medical records is that it’s patient data, financial data, and so needs to be PCI-, and HIPAA-compliant. All the different compliance standards that we need to abide by are all satisfied with the ways that these machines are locked down, by the way the cloud is moving, and where we allow it to move to.

Gardner: How do you view private cloud and VDI -- separate, distinct, together? What’s the relationship?

Fuss: They're definitely together. They have to be together. In my opinion, it’s what makes sense. We want to see the data tight. We want to see the integration tight. We can have a cloud where the data roams back and forth, but the connection into the cloud actually uses that data.

As I sit here on a device, a personal device at the office that is connected to my virtual desktop instance, this device doesn't even have to be on my network. I'm utilizing a public network that we have here at the hospital system and I've connected into my virtual desktop. I have full accessibility. I'll flip over here in a few minutes when I go into another meeting. I'll bring my iPad with me, another personal device, and I'll be connected right to that same virtual desktop.

So the cloud has allowed me, with View, to seamlessly move between all these different devices. I no longer am tied to something. I'm no longer tied to a specific physical location, a physical anything. I really am completely mobile. I can work anywhere at any time and have that same common set of tools.

I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else.

It doesn't matter if I'm working out of the DR site. I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else. That ability is really the value that using a cloud and using View gives you.

I want a physician in his office, out on the road or wherever they might be, at home, in a practice have access to that same data and have a similar look and feel every time they connect from whatever device. That's what these solutions that we've opted for have provided for us.

... We can already see the expansion, the use of that technology in different areas. We have some physicians with iPads working throughout the facility, visiting the patient’s bedsides, looking at their charts, all that kind of flex room is great.

I've seen it in our administrative areas, our human resource officer using iPad remotely. We’ve had our Chief Information Officer using an iPad, using a PC at home, and connecting through the View client to her machine.

We’ve gotten support not just from forcing the technology out there, but by people asking for the technology. That’s how you can tell you have a good product. People asking, "Can I be moved to this new product, because the flexibility of my supervisor, director, whoever is using is what I need."

Hit a home run

If the director calls saying, "I need this employee to have this flexibility," you know you've hit a home run with the technology. I haven’t had anybody call asking for another PC at another location for the same person to work. I have people calling saying, "I really need to get them onto this technology as soon as it’s possible, because it's made this employee so efficient. I need to do that for everybody else."

... Also, everything that we're doing allows us not to focus on location, and that's the big thing. We break away from location. So where is the data center? Is it going to be affected by the next hurricane coming up the East Coast? Well, if we have a fear of where the hurricane is, we can move our data center 100 miles inland. Or if we think that inland is going to be more affected, we can keep it in Rhode Island, which is right on the ocean.

So we have that ability, and nobody knows where that data is other than the IT department. We know it's within the system, within the security, but nobody would ever notice the difference or question where the data is running or residing. They might ask, and we could tell them, but nobody says, "Wow, that's slow" or "I can see a difference." None of those kind of calls comes in as the cloud flexes.

Gardner: At VMworld, you've had a chance to look over View 5, and the PC-over-IP benefits there; is that something that’s in your pipeline?

Fuss: Absolutely. We’re blessed to be in the VMware 5 beta test user group, and we’re loving what we see. We like the performance. The PC-over-IP expansion is amazing. They’ve written a great protocol there with their partners, and that is the technology that’s going to continue to drive the reinvention of the desktop.

We’ve gone through the reinvention of the desktop a few times in my career, from somewhat dumb terminals to smart terminals to client server. We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos. We’re giving people a great end-user experience to give them a full PC feature-set. We’re doing it all securely and we’re doing it all with products that integrate seamlessly with one another, and that’s really the goal.

We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos.

We want the user to sit down and feel comfortable with whatever technology they use, and to have a way to take care of our patients that need our help and take care of what other important administrative business they may do, so we can keep moving forward.

... So the benefits are there, and they’re just growing now, as it's integrated and being used more in the clinical areas. We’ve seen some growth recently. Even our pharmacy staff is starting to carry iPads around, when they’re doing inventories of some of the medication machines and being able to get that information right there, but on a device that’s secure. If they were to leave it behind, nobody could connect to anything, and that data all sitting safe inside the data center.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there, and it's just growing and growing. Every time I turn around, we’re bumping another 50, another 75, virtual machines, into another pool of machines for a new purpose, and that’s the expansion that I keep wanting to encourage.

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