One of the main problems in counterterrorism today is that there are so many people and vehicles, and so much data and material, moving through globalization's myriad networks that it seems virtually impossible to track it all effectively. Nowhere has this problem been more acute than on the high seas.

In 2006, Adm. Harry Ulrich, then U.S. commander of NATO Naval Forces Europe, decided to do something about it. Despite having virtually no resources, his dream was to transpose the global air-traffic control system onto sea traffic.

Worldwide, aircraft are transparent, because they're all required to carry an identification beacon that allows them to be tracked leaving and entering airports, and monitored between airports, by a global network of sensors. Act suspiciously and somebody's fighter aircraft will soon be on your tail.

No such pervasive system currently exists globally for maritime traffic. While bigger ships carry an ID beacon similar to aircraft, without a shared monitoring network, that's like tracking only selected commercial jets and giving everyone else a pass.
So Ulrich, upon taking command, asked a simple question: "If we can do that in the air, why can't we do it on the sea?" He made a point of pioneering his sea-traffic-control effort first inside the Mediterranean, where NATO's southern naval forces have historically been concentrated, but his real target was waters off Africa -- the most ungoverned maritime space in the world.

Ulrich knew the U. S. Navy couldn't do it alone, much less bring Africa's meager coast-guard-like navies up to snuff so they could do it on their own. So he quickly created a network of assets -- both public and private -- to manage that space, modeling his monitoring system on international air-traffic control.

Ulrich began stitching together a network of shore-based sensors ringing the Mediterranean. His naval command then began initial monitoring by tapping into the International Maritime Organization's existing Automated Identification System, transforming NATO's ability to track ship traffic in the Med.

Almost overnight, NATO went from tracking dozens of ships on the Mediterranean to thousands, and instead of getting the data sometimes up to 72 hours late, now the contacts were being tracked in one to five minutes -- to an accuracy within 50 feet on the earth's surface.

When the classic big-firm systems integrators told Ulrich it would be too costly to pull it off, the admiral turned to the Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a U.S. Department of Transportation research center. Instead of hundreds of millions of dollars, Ulrich's initial network cost $900,000. The shore-based receivers are small, roughly the size of a radar dish you might find on a pleasure craft.

The strength of the system is a function of its reach: the more countries join, the larger the shared operational picture. By the time Ulrich retired at the end of 2007, he had enlisted 32 countries throughout the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, along the west coast of Africa, around the Black Sea, and in the Pacific. Today, the network continues to spread around the planet.

With Ulrich's system in place, local police, coast guards, and border patrols catch most bad guys, obviating American military responses. As Harry told me for an article I wrote about his work in a fall 2007 issue of Esquire, "I don't do defense; I do security. When you talk defense, you talk containment and mutually assured destruction. When you talk security, you talk collaboration and networking. This is the future."

The admiral's legacy program, the Maritime Safety and Security Information System, earned the Volpe Center a prestigious "Innovations in American Government" award this month from Harvard University's Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

• Moderator: Jim Metzler, Vice President, Ashton, Metzler & Associates
• Rowan Snyder, CIO, KPMG
• David Michael, CIO, United Business Media Group
• Joanna Young, Chief Information Officer, Corporate Information Systems & Enterprise Services, Liberty Mutual

Jim: Is the CIO a technical job anymore? For example, inside Liberty there are business projects with an IT component.

Joanna: We are organized to partner with internal business clients or vendors who provide objectives and business requirements. We strive to figure out the smallest amount of an IT investment we can make to get this to work.

Rowan: We have both. Part of the dilemma is that the thing that sells the best is fear. I don’t want to use that to get business.

Joanna: One good example is security from an application perspective. It’s hard to talk about security investments in business terms. We put it into terms like “this is what it will cost us if we DON’T do this.” For example, a solution for spam required us to do research into what it was costing us overall. Once we put it together, the business was all for it. You have to put your business hat on and think “how can I make this important for a businessperson?” If you can’t, you may need to ask yourself why you’re pushing services on them that they may not need.

Jim: Can you give us insight into business-IT alignment? What about governance?

Rowan: Governance is the hardest part of IT. It’s not like the technology is easy. If it’s a business project with an IT component, I don’t usually get involved. It comes down to overall budget. The infrastructure we own and let people know exactly what it will cost to do it. We are a distributed IT firm, there are multiple groups. This is the most distributed and risk-prone organization I’ve worked in. It can be difficult for the business to exert control. It demonstrates risk, in security, compliance, methodologies, etc.

Joanna: Governance has become a word that nobody wants to use. It suddenly implies that IT is the holder of all the money and they are the ones that get to decide. We stopped using that word and position IT as a strategic business partner.

David: We have a highly decentralized IT set-up. We have about 600 globally and around 40 in the headquarters. We have 10 CIOs for each division, and within each division it is decentralized. We try to run each unit as autonomous. This is a close alignment with IT and business. However, then the problem of how do you have commonality between divisions and collaboration?

Jim: How can you minimize risk in distributed environment using standards and procedures?

David: The reality is it can be impractical for an organization. You end up with a patchwork of platforms and technologies. We have to accept that we’ll have multiple solutions. We can attempt to push a standard, but overall have a much more relaxed approach to manage everything. There is a lot of equality between divisions in what they can choose to purchase.

Joanna: Standards are easier to apply the further down the staff you are. The most important thing with any of this is to understand why you are making the decisions. If there is a process and pros and cons are identified, there is a clear record of why decisions were made.

Audience Poll: Everyone raised their hand that MORE standards were needed.

Audience Question: Are there inefficiencies in the data center in terms of energy and green IT? What are you doing about it?

Joanna: Everyone focuses on cars for carbon footprints. But, it’s really buildings…and then data centers. The data center has the same importance as any other efficiency. They need to be running as cheaply as possible. Corporations have a responsibility to make sure they are energy efficient.

Rowan: We recently did a carbon footprint analysis, and found that half of carbon comes from electricity, with half of that from the data center.

David: Every company does have a responsibility to look at its carbon emission globally. Consider international travel, flying, etc. As much as possible, we are not building data centers. We are using other people’s data centers in an effort to get out of the data center business.

Audience Question: How do you balance the good from standards with agile development and possible roadblocks?

Joanna: Luckily agile development is under the CIO’s control. You can see the lifecycle and savings that occur. When I look, I check what the standards are that I’m measuring by.

Jim: Does web 2.0 have any business meaning in your environment? If so, what are you doing about it?

Joanna: I’ve been in IT for 20 years. It’s another component to business IT investment, and has to be presented as such. As IT professionals we have a responsibility to identify what Web 2.0 is, and then translate to see if there is anything the company should be doing with it. Monitor it based on your current portfolio, and consider its impact.

David: It’s pretty important to our business as a media company. I don’t think it means one thing, it’s a term people use to talk about the web and what’s going on online. From mobile, to ajax, cloud computing or mashups - you can draw multiple conclusions. More and more business is being done online. We have a lot of growth opportunities online.

Rowan: Compliance, security, and privacy issues just explode with Web 2.0.

Which of the following initiatives are likely to be a major telecommunications technology related priority for 2007? Mobility is a huge issue.

We’re starting to see traction with mobility.

• The evolution of enterprise mobility:
  • Voice –> messaging –> e–mail –> web, –> business applications –>  instant messaging/presence –> what’s next?
• Cell phone to Smartphone:
  • 1G –> 2G –> 3G

Converging IT Responsibilities

Collaboration, Web/Internet, Desktop Computer, Deskphone/PBX, Mobile Phone and Applications. All of this is under the umbrella of IT. IT departments are not a single cohesive unit where everyone gets along. They have different motivations, budgets, goals, etc.

BlackBerry manages all of these responsibilities in one, forcing these departments to collaborate and work together. This is key for interoperability between these systems, knowing how they work together.

Desktop capabilities are expected in mobility:

• Information
• Collaboration
• Voice
• Transactions
• Presence
• Application

Mobile devices are fundamentally changing the pace of which we all work. You can reach anybody at anytime. This changes business.

All of this is working with data that is behind a corporate firewall.

The big change in IT is that for almost any industry now, the data that you have and you manage is a core corporate asset. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in manufacturing, logistics, or a bakery. Information is king. This has the benefit of moving IT up to a C-level position. You are a core part of your business success. This has benefits, and also added stress.

Voice is still the “killer app” for mobility. Deskphones and smartphones need to overlap into a mobile voice system.

Another up and coming technology is the mobilization of enterprise applications. This provides the ultimate user experience. For example, Blackberry has mobilized the SAP Business Suite on BlackBerry smartphones. SAP CRM access is as seamless and intuitive as email on BlackBerry and incorporates push, alerting, security, GPS, Wi-Fi and media.

Enterprise grade platforms will extend core competencies of enterprise systems to mobile environments.

• Secure
• Reliable
• Manage
• Control
• Administration
• Standardize

Conclusion:

Putting it together: integrating the wireless capabilities of today into the business tools of tomorrow.

Making IT work as One

How does my company stay efficient while we’re using technologies around interoperability? How can innovation help my business?

Top business needs:

• Reduce cost
• Manage complexity
• Mitigate risk

Mixed IT environments are a reality for almost all organizations. Different environments, architectural strategies, desktop profiles, etc. There are benefits to having mixed source environments, although homogenous environments are ideal. On average 46,000 hours in an organization are spent on Sarbanes-Oxley standards.

Some considerations to make IT work as one:

• Strategy
• Solutions
• Ecosystem

Strategy

Actionable strategy is key. The emergence of three silos (applications, systems and infrastructure, and operations) are now moved into one. There is a lot of pressure to make these pieces come together.

Solutions

You need focused solutions to solve problems today while keeping an eye to the future. There are three main needs: the data center, end-user computing, and identity and security. This is also what is the most important to the market right now. The end goal is the agility of the data center.

Data Center Challenges

• Create an agile IT infrastructure
• Address power and space constraints
• Deliver performance, security and availability
• Manage hardware, software and labor costs
• Meet service level agreements

Data Center Solutions

• Workload management - green IT and server efficiency, unified physical and virtual environment
• Virtualization and Consolidation - business continuity and disaster recovery
• Enterprise Servers

End-User Computing Solutions

• Collaboration
• Enterprise desktops - Novell uses Linux and Open Office, interesting to note
• Endpoint management

Identity and Security Challenges

• Minimize risk, uncertainty and policy violations
• Provide timely and secure access to information
• Ensure, document and prove information security
• Reduce the cost of proving compliance
• Reduce the cost and complexity of governance

Identity and Security Solutions

• Identity and Access Management - user provisioning, role management, access management
• Compliance Management - Audit, Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), IT controls automation, Security, Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Ecosystem

The ecosystem is powerful. Companies should challenge partners for innovation and interoperability.

Community Innovation - open source and open standards

IT Landscape - Mixed IT Environments

• Consulting, systems integration vendors
• Application vendors
• Systems software vendors (Novell)
• Hardware, network vendors

How does your ecosystem help your company? How do your partners help? What is their role in the industry to help you? How are all the vendors in the industry helping you?

IBM’s presentation was cleverly titled 2mor0@Wrk - Tomororow work and Web 2.0.

Overview

Web 2.0 is delivering a whole different paradigm of communication. The slide is Lotus Symphony - NOT PPT. Over 2 million downloads.

There is an information overload that impacts individual productivity in the workplace. It has a profound effect on organizational productivity. A more complex organization entity provides more pressure and more inefficiencies in workplace. Up to 70% of time can be used looking for the WRONG information.

Collaboration mitigates information overload. It allows you to identify experts and opinions.

The collaboration agenda. Enterprises are at the onset of exploring these features. Web 2.0 is giving us the capacity to do more. Collaboration optimizes business outcomes - global, secure and dynamic.The most progressive companies are looking at UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS. Making sure that directories and profiles are fully mobile.

Collaboration should be a contextual part of the workflow, going directly into applications.

IBM’s collaboration strategy is to deliver these services through online or offline services.

Demonstration

Executive IT architect Ron Sebastian provided a demonstration of IBM’s collaboration strategy. IBM’s Web 2.0 solutions span delivery platforms:

• Platform - web as  platform
• Application - development
• People - social computing

Lotus Connections - a family of social computing software that provides profile lookup and community capabilities. Think of Facebook, Yahoo Groups, and delicious combined in one portal.

Ron demonstrated these social services embedded into a healthcare provider application. Semantic tagging is available, contact information and commenting. Not only are we providing service to customers, you can integrate sync capability to directly call the person you want.

The biggest aspect of Lotus Connection? It’s all integrated.

A new service - Project Bluehouse. This is a SaaS delivery of these collaborated capabilities. The store and share can manage and share documents within and outside the company. Access control is no longer an issue.

Collaborative Web 2.0 services available as standalone products that also work in a mobile environment.

Case Study: Natural Disaster Management Mashup

Boeing came up with twenty different scenarios that they could handle through their systems. The problem was the one they didn’t count on. One example was Katrina - how to deliver supplies to the area: what airports were open? Where could they land? The problem was they could not find one list of public, private and military airports, nor what was open. The mashup took different feeds to allow the deacon maker to make a more rapid and intelligent decision based on information on where they could fly in the appropriate supplies. From open information sites like AirNav.com and personal contacts, users were able to mashup the information to make better decisions.

Conclusion

IBM announced the IBM Center for Social Software, proving their commitment to connect, collaborate, and innovate. Users and academics can work together to how these innovations can be applied to businesses and provide value to the market.

There has been some question of whether or not IBM can pull this off and move into the collaborative Web 2.0 market. Despite some criticism, it looks like IBM has really taken a step forward in advancing their products and services to meet market needs.

People drive better business outcomes. Connecting, collaboration, and innovation is key. Having the right tools and information to do that eases pressure that many organizations feel and brings Web 2.0 technologies to the heart of businesses.

Following in the footsteps of social networking projects like Intellipedia, A-Space, an online collaboration environment for intelligence analysts, will go live on September 22. A-Space allows analysts to share information, form communities, and work together all under one environment. The analysts from sixteen intelligence agencies will have access to shared and personal workspaces, wikis, blogs, widgets, RSS feeds and other tools, as well as be able to search for content on other agencies’ data sources and even on data that allied countries might share.

Karen Sage, Cisco’s director of product management for network management, said that it’s “actually a good thing when network management is struggling, because is say that innovation is really happening at a fast rate”.

Joe Weinman, Strategic Solutions Sales VP for AT&T Global Business Services, created The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics. Weinman expands upon his laws by comparing public utility cloud services, traditional data center environments and private enterprise clouds.

I’m not making this up. HP has a new reality show coming out. “Engine Room” will be broadcast on MTV and on the Web and will feature teams of designers from around the world who understake a series of challenges with the help of HP computers. Can’t hardly wait.

Before we get to security implications, we should start with a basic discussion of what virtualization does to the overall information infrastructure...]]> Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:00:00 +0000 basic discussion virtual infrastructure solutions discussion guest blog post rsas collaboration virtualization process change regular basis security implications Security and Virtualization http://securityratty.com/article/5b57fb7dc278e860bcb94e92d20f7bf8 http://securityratty.com/article/5b57fb7dc278e860bcb94e92d20f7bf8 Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:00:00 +0000 network voip network avenues business applications video attack instant collaboration e-mail Beware of UC security threats