Does Oracle run the world? I would have to say no but Raj (Larry Ellison is his idol) and the 40,000 Oracle customers that descended upon SF last week might beg to differ. What do James Carville and Mary Matalin have to do with enterprise software? Pretty much nothing, except for the fact that they delivered the opening keynote for Oracle OpenWorld. (And that’s the only and last politically-oriented thing you’ll hear from me as we run up to the election). For a surprisingly funny and extensive photo gallery of the eye-popping event, check out cdye1’s photostream on Flickr.

But UB40, Elvis Costello and Seal aside, Oracle OpenWorld did offer training, certifications, and always entertaining speeches by Ellison. Ben Worthen’s favorite – “Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant” delivered to analysts on Thursday. From Ben’s slightly-edited excerpt:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

So did everyone catch that? Cloud computing is complete gibberish and idiocy, but apparently Oracle’s already been doing enough around it to advertise the fact. I will have my cake and eat it too!

We’ve been pumping out the posts from the shows we went to – let me tell you, live-blogging is hard when you’re trying to share apparently miniscule amounts of bandwidth with 14,000 other attendees – and we have even more to share as we step back, contemplate and describe how some of the announcements, info and especially roadmaps fit into our overall picture over here at ScienceLogic.

For example, we released the results of our annual industry IT survey last week. Twice a year – at FOSE (for Government IT) and at Interop NY (for enterprises) – we take advantage of the fact that we have a big beautiful booth at these shows and offer a fabulous ScienceLogic t-shirt in return for a couple of minutes time with attendees living the problems we try to solve. Instead of telling people what their problems and priorities are, we like to ask.
Interop NY Survey - Trends and Challenges
Detailed Reports on Trends and Comparison to Government IT

And I just had to share this one because it is so bizarre. Are VMware and Paul Maritz guilty of plagiarism? You have to check this out to get even part of the picture. Apparently this guy has posted his slides (we know they are from VMworld 2007 because it says so in the lower-right-hand corner…) which prove that the “virtual datacenter operating system” idea was his idea a year before it showed up on Maritz’s keynote this year. Hmmm. And then after posting all these slides and making all the connections between his presentation and Maritz’s, he says he’s just kidding about the plagiarism. Can anyone sort this out and let me know?

I’ll tell you who wasn’t kidding when I went by their booth at VMworld – a certain chargeback vendor and VMware “partner” who was quite shocked two months ago when they walked into a meeting with VMware about future roadmap. Apparently, the slides they saw (preview of VMware’s announcement re adding extended chargeback capability within vCenter management services) were mighty might similar to slides they had given in a presentation to VMware about their own roadmap. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide. And I’ll also say, their strategy to combat this – support for Hyper-V coming early in 2009.

Traveling towards VMworld 2008

I, along with thousands of others, wended my way through a vast dimly lit cavern of a place helped along by the strangely surreal sight of ushers in black waving wispy red flags to guide us not to the empty seats in front of us, but to the ones 50 yards on. (Ah Vegas, my feet hurt already.) Perhaps the point was to live in the moment, soak in the pre-rock concert atmosphere complete with a hip and cool soundtrack ripped off from Apple commercials. (Do they all use the same ad firm?) A better way to build the anticipation for, yes, the kickoff keynote session at VMworld 2008. (photo credit: lodev)

To the sounds of Hey Ya (Shake it like a Polaroid picture), we shifted forward in our uncomfortable temporary seating placed, as at all tech conferences, too close for all but the skinny girls. The moment was here – one of those videos started playing on the dozen or so huge monitors floating above the convention crowd. You know this video; you’ve probably seen it before from HP or someone like that. One of those videos with instrumental Coldplay music in the background with time lapse/speeded-up video of people in motion and floating captions dropping into the images that leave you with a slight smile on your face as you “get” the relationship between image and text. (Do they all use the same ad firm?)

And here he is, announced like a Vegas headliner, Paul Maritz, the new CEO of VMware. Hmm. After all that hype, I rather expected someone in a black turtleneck and jeans to come out. Instead here’s this guy with pleat-front pants and an admittedly cool accent (New Zealand?) who looks a little like Al from Home Improvement. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – everyone likes Al.

And then the real fun begins.

• 30 years ago, Paul Maritz started off his business career as a developer
• 10 years ago, VMware was founded by Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum (BTW, 10 seconds spent showing a slide with cartoon-ized images of the founders, “thanks for what you did for the company for the past 10 years”. 10 seconds after 10 years…but maybe more would have been hypocritical…)
• a retrospective of centralized vs. decentralized computing initiatives from the 1960’s to today
• of course VMware milestones from 1998 to today
• and then an analyst-ready diagram showing the product roadmap (to be delivered in 2009) with, you guessed it, finally a connection between VMware and cloud computing (remember Maritz’s cloud-computing company was bought by EMC just a couple of years ago and that’s the section he headed up at EMC before being brought into VMware).

Forward Looking

2008 (and probably much of 2009) will be a very busy year for VMware. If you believe the roadmap, VMware seems to be taking on the management of everything – from chargeback and capacity planning to virtual storage and virtual networking (more to come on just what the planned vStorage and vNetwork will deliver) – but all of it VMware-centric. As we said in an earlier post, they’ve moved away from “defending” the hypervisor business proposition to focusing on management services on top of their own hypervisor platform. Revenue pressures must be excruciating – who wants to be a public company these days?

The best part of that new “Virtual Data Center Operating System” diagram/roadmap was the addition (and I mean addition) of something called Cloud vServices. (Did anyone else find it odd that Cloud vServices is kind of on its own in the Infrastructure vServices area? AND, I’ll have to get the other version of the diagram/roadmap I actually saw at the show because that one shows an inexplicable 4^th box in the Application vServices area titled “…”. Really. Maybe to balance out the addition of Cloud vServices?)

What was clear is that the move from VirtualCenter to vCenter –and the new vServices for rolled-up management of virtualization components/capability to span multiple VirtualCenters (or future vCenters) for reporting, monitoring and management at scale – has been in the works for a bit (but in tech time, that could mean 6 months), but the cloud stuff…not so much.

Beyond the very high-level speak appropriate to a keynote (100+ service provider partners for off-premise cloud…suspended VM’s that you don’t have to pay for until you need it), the details are uber-fuzzy. There was a session that Dave went to which was supposed to shed more light, but when questions were asked about how it really works, the answers seemed to be TBD. Does anyone know more? If VMware really has figured out practical cloud computing for enterprises, kudos to them. But I fear they’re like everyone else (except maybe AT&T) and are still working out the details.

I arrived in Austin Sunday night to get ready for a factory tour on Monday, a kickoff dinner and then two days of briefings from Dell executives, including Michael Dell himself! Dell’s ISG business is growing at a very fast pace and continues to build momentum and focus within the broader organization.

We had a nice overview of the product roadmap, including some of the exciting enhancements Dell is making to their storage products such as the MD3000 and the new EqualLogic PS5000 series iSCSI solutions.

I really enjoyed the Council meeting and it reminds me all over again; what I admire about Dell is the way they and Michael Dell himself stay close to the customer. The entire purpose of this event is to “get it right” and determine meaningful ways to embrace change (including change in the manufacturing process) in order to make their customers more successful. Ah shucks, you may say that all companies behave this way… well I must tell you that is not true and at times, I find it difficult as we continue to grow to stay as close as I would like to all of our customers varying needs and directions.

This concept of gathering, internalizing and embracing customer feedback is a simple principle of Business Success stories. Always trying to improve the pace of change and build meaningful sticky relationships with customers. Dell’s very successful Ideastorm site where customers post product feedback and are active participants in the Dell community is a great example of how to do this right. No other hardware vendor that we have worked with or attempted to work with has ever gone to the extent of embracing change that Dell has during our 5-year relationship.

From the custom factory integration services to the attention to detail in the order and manufacturing, and logistics processes, Dell helps us execute for our customers and I must admit that we could not have built the business as quickly or efficiently without Dell!

So thank you Michael Dell for building a business that embraces change and is focused on helping your ISG customers succeed.

Preface

The TCP/IP protocols were conceived during a time that was quite different from the hostile environment they operate in now. Yet a direct result of their effectiveness and widespread early adoption is that much of today's global economy remains dependent upon them.

While many textbooks and articles have created the myth that the Internet Protocols (IP) were designed for warfare environments, the top level goal for the DARPA Internet Program was the sharing of large service machines on the ARPANET. As a result, many protocol specifications focus only on the operational aspects of the protocols they specify and overlook their security implications.

Though Internet technology has evolved, the building blocks are basically the same core protocols adopted by the ARPANET more than two decades ago. During the last twenty years many vulnerabilities have been identified in the TCP/IP stacks of a number of systems. Some were flaws in protocol implementations which affect only a reduced number of systems. Others were flaws in the protocols themselves affecting virtually every existing implementation. Even in the last couple of years researchers were still working on security problems in the core protocols.

The discovery of vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP protocols led to reports being published by a number of CSIRTs (Computer Security Incident Response Teams) and vendors, which helped to raise awareness about the threats as well as the best mitigations known at the time the reports were published.

Much of the effort of the security community on the Internet protocols did not result in official documents (RFCs) being issued by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) leading to a situation in which "known" security problems have not always been addressed by all vendors. In many cases vendors have implemented quick "fixes" to protocol flaws without a careful analysis of their effectiveness and their impact on interoperability.

As a result, any system built in the future according to the official TCP/IP specifications might reincarnate security flaws that have already hit our communication systems in the past.

Producing a secure TCP/IP implementation nowadays is a very difficult task partly because of no single document that can serve as a security roadmap for the protocols.

There is clearly a need for a companion document to the IETF specifications that discusses the security aspects and implications of the protocols, identifies the possible threats, proposes possible counter-measures, and analyses their respective effectiveness.

This document is the result of an assessment of the IETF specifications of the Internet Protocol from a security point of view. Possible threats were identified and, where possible, counter-measures were proposed. Additionally, many implementation flaws that have led to security vulnerabilities have been referenced in the hope that future implementations will not incur the same problems. This document does not limit itself to performing a security assessment of the relevant IETF specification but also offers an assessment of common implementation strategies.

Whilst not aiming to be the final word on the security of the IP, this document aims to raise awareness about the many security threats based on the IP protocol that have been faced in the past, those that we are currently facing, and those we may still have to deal with in the future. It provides advice for the secure implementation of the IP, and also insights about the security aspects of the IP that may be of help to the Internet operations community.

Feedback from the community is more than encouraged to help this document be as accurate as possible and to keep it updated as new threats are discovered.

ScienceLogic: Can you share any of the strategies/advice that you give to companies embarking on their BSM journeys?

Doug McClure: Well, first they’ve got to have a BSM strategy. Nearly all the clients I talk to or hear about wanting to do BSM do not have a BSM strategy. I talk a lot about this on my blog and with clients and it is relevant whether you’re going to think about “BSM Lite” or “BSM Heavy” approaches.

Once we have a BSM strategy, we need to establish a BSM roadmap that guides us in how we’ll implement the BSM strategy in a more tactical manner, focusing on short term iterative quick wins and 30-60-90 day projects. For more of my thoughts on BSM strategy and roadmapping, see the following blog posts.

• Elements of Business Service Management Part 3: Getting Business Service Management on the Radar Screen

• Elements of Business Service Management Part 4: What’s your Business Service Management Strategy?

As I’ve alluded to previously, a client first must define and understand what “BSM Lite” may mean to them. Don’t take what the analysts or the vendors pitch for what you should do to achieve BSM or what value you should get from it.

For any type of BSM to be successful, each client must define what BSM means to them and state what they expect to get from BSM. They must make it personal, make it a part of their company culture and elevate it to be as an important initiative as compliance, risk management, SOA, ITIL, or other initiatives may be within the company.

Please don’t get scared off from this strategy thing. Please don’t blow this off as something that the secret enterprise architecture council should be doing. If you’re unable to get an audience in these areas within your company, start within your own sphere of influence.

Your strategy could be as simple as enabling the local operations center to more efficiently classify, triage and resolve problems based on a simple business service or application contextual understanding. Focus on how this changes the game within your environment. Come up with your own metrics and measures to assess the value this has to this organizational use. Trust me, you’ll need to justify your investment some time in the future.

Another trait of successful BSM implementations is that of the formal monitoring and management tools group has established some sort of database or knowledge repository that enables them to “manage the business of IT management and monitoring” if you will. In my opinion, the vendor community has let their clients down significantly in this area. The CMDB may be the correct answer, but most companies just don’t value monitoring enough to demand that this be included in their formal CMDB initiatives.

In my last job, we developed an application that I referred to as the “Service Management Database” or “SMDB”. Others may call it something else, but in essence, it was the database that captured what was monitored, how it was monitored, who owned it, what business services and applications it supported, the impact an outage or event from it had on the business services or applications, etc.

One key component of this “SMDB” was establishing the relationships of real and synthetic user and transaction monitoring steps to associated servers and applications. This is a significant gap area in many tools and vendor CMDBs.

Clients who have instituted something formal such as this generally have a very good handle on management and monitoring within their environment. Far too many clients do not have adequate monitoring (read visibility) in place to begin their BSM journey.

I’d strongly recommend a good hard look at how well the client’s monitoring and management practices are implemented and managed. Simply put, if they don’t have adequate visibility into how well those business services and applications are performing, you can’t expect to manage what you can’t “see” that may be impacting the business, clients, revenue, etc.

Just ask yourself this – can you explicitly state what monitoring is in place for a given business service or application? Can you quantify the impact of a simple event to a business service or application? Can you explain why something is red, yellow, purple or green and what causes it to change from one color to another? If you can’t, your BSM journey will be challenging.

Those with formal CMDB initiatives have their hands full with high risk, long time to value projects to just get a handle with traditional configuration management models. Taking these low level configuration items (CI’s) and establishing application and service dependencies comes after a lot of work getting through the organizational challenges of getting systems access to populate the CMDB.

I strongly recommend that the formal monitoring and management tools group create an authoritative database that enables them to establish end-to-end visibility into the service and application delivery chain and the impacts it has on the business, customer, etc. This ultimately becomes part of a more realistic federated CMDB within the business.

ScienceLogic: Can you provide an example of a successful implementation of BSM? Were there specific factors that especially contributed to its success?

Doug McClure: I’ve touched on the highlights of the most successful BSM implementations throughout my previous answers. Clients that have rallied around an organizational change or transformation focusing every team member’s efforts and energy towards ensuring that the business goals and objectives are being met through the delivery of highly available business services and applications.

Far too often the “change” never happens and it’s the “talking heads” that are preaching to the choir about what should be done. Every person on the front line, in the support teams, at the help desk, etc. must understand how they support or impact the business in business terms. Try putting this simple phrase after job titles “Hi, my name is Doug. I’m a Systems Administrator, Supporting the Business”.

That was a mouthful, but simply put, these clients have an impressively instrumented business and IT environment with the right amount of visibility into each area, joined together with an organization that thinks, operates and responds based on their understanding of the business goals and objectives and how these business services and applications enable business success.

The operational model for an organization fully adopting BSM identifies ways to establish a service management mentality across the entire business service and application delivery and support chain. The delivery, operations and support organizations must be incented to manage the services and applications being delivered with this end-to-end context.

A leading, outside the box “service management organization” may include the traditional IT silos but within a matrixed fashion focused on one or more key business services and applications. The “service management organization” is then incented to work together, as a team, for the end-to-end delivery and support of these services or applications.

It’s no longer one’s job to just be the systems administrator, database administrator or network engineer, their job is now to support specific business services and applications. They provide the subject matter expertise needed to support the services and applications together, as a team, eliminating the finger pointing or “not my problem” attitudes that exist in the majority of IT organizations today.

Overall, the KISS approach is what will enable BSM of any type (lite, heavy) to be the most successful. If it just feels natural, doesn’t take any additional effort, clicks or tasks to do then it’s going to work. BSM should be transparent and not just another buzz word. It’s not a form that gets filled out or a special process to follow in the run book. It’s doing the right thing for the business, no matter what the situation, crisis, buzz word or technology initiative of the day is.

ScienceLogic: How did you get involved in BSM?

Doug McClure: I think the foundations of my service management background and passion were initially established during my service in the US Navy. Today, I relate that experience to what I call BSM for the Military or Mission Services Management (MSM).

We had been taught over and over that extreme attention to the details of the mission at hand (aka “the business”) was the number one priority and that all of our technology, services, and applications existed for those Sailors and Marines on the other end (the “customer”). I can recall countless instances where mission critical communications services (telephony, orderwires, teletypes, command and control systems, etc.) were impacted in one way or another. It was extremely critical that we understood who was impacted and to what degree so that contingency plans could be activated. We weren’t just talking about lost revenue, poor sales or customer experience; we were talking about human lives and the security of the United States.

It is that military bearing, attention to detail and real world experience that drives me with many of my modern day BSM endeavors. That migration from “Mission Services Management” to BSM was honed working for over 10 years working in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and datacenter, hosting and colocation business.

In those rapid growth businesses during the Internet boom, service differentiation was what “made you millions” or paved your way to bankruptcy. The companies I worked for had an extreme passion and focus on ensuring that their services, applications and Internet access products were of the highest quality, highly reliable and just plain better than the competition.

Again, the IT infrastructure, service quality and customer experience relationship was ingrained in all of our heads. It was all hands on deck when Webmail, Internet access, DNS, or the network experienced problems. We were measured in terms of how many customers experienced a busy signal or dropped connection or if you couldn’t log in fast enough to read your email. Companies like Keynote Systems and LionBridge/Veritest/Inverse tested the quality of our networks, services and applications and publicly ranked us against our competition. We thought in terms of customer experience and impact every minute of the day, 24×7.

It was in my last job managing a traditional enterprise management and monitoring development group for a nationwide ISP where I was able to work with emerging technology to help get a handle on the complexities of these rapidly growing IT environments filled with emerging technologies and products. Applying this early technology to complex service problems in our environment proved to me that the technology, coupled with the right emphasis on how the technology was implemented and an emphasis on the people and processes within the organization could bring BSM to life.

Where I felt left out in the cold was with my vendor relationship. While their technology gave me the potential, they didn’t teach me how to work through the organizational and technological problems to successfully implement the BSM strategy. My very first end-to-end BSM pilot was extremely successful and provided visibility into the IT environment and business service impact that have never been available before.

And here I am today, working at a software vendor for the first time. Welcome to the “dark side” as they say. The approach and methodology we followed for BSM has become the basis of the core BSM Methodology that I teach IBMers and our clients around the world today.

My personal mission and drive here at IBM Tivoli is to ensure that BSM is something that the typical monitoring tools administrator can actually implement and that our BSM story is something that any of our clients can be successful with. The sales and marketing slicks must be backed up by something like this whomever you are these days. Clients shouldn’t put up for “marketecture”, me too and gee whiz buzz words.

BSM takes a partnership and commitment to every client’s success, and I want to be involved in those BSM efforts in every industry or market worldwide. We need more thought leaders collaborating together in an open and public forum to change legacy attitudes about BSM and do what we can to enable client’s to be as successful as they can be.

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ScienceLogic: What is “BSM Lite” and how is it different from “heavy” BSM?

Doug McClure: I think the concepts that Peter Sevcik from Net Forecast initially outlined in his blog post sum up what “BSM Lite” is all about: a simpler, less expensive, more responsive way of achieving the goals and objectives of Business Service Management (BSM).  He’s contrasted this nicely against what he termed “BSM Heavy” being the larger investments in time and resources to deploy domain specific tools and solutions each providing a view into the business service delivery with some aggregation and consolidation to tie up all of the disparate tool’s information into a concise end-to-end business service management story.

I’m pleased that he leveraged some of my thinking around a better working definition of what BSM really is from the BSM Defined page on my blog. Of course, these definitions are going to vary depending on whom you talk with and how they see the overall BSM Maturity Model.  I’ve created a BSM Maturity Model that aligns with the famous Gartner IT maturity model.  I’d like to think that a “BSM Lite” solution is one attacking the low hanging fruit, enabling one to achieve value quicker, and in a more tactical manner.  The “BSM Heavy” solutions are capable of the same, but span all along the BSM Maturity Model by adding additional point solutions, products and technologies from their broader portfolio. 

ScienceLogic: Does “BSM Lite” just refer to the tools, or can it refer to the process and methodology as well?

Doug McClure: I think that BSM is as much a philosophy as it is technology, process, people and methodology.  If we can get people to think, operate and respond differently than they do today with a focus on the business, customers, quality, revenue, or whatever else is most important to their business goals and objectives, than that is Business Service Management and could be “BSM Lite” if you will. 

Being that I work for IBM Tivoli, one of my personal objectives is to identify ways to use our key BSM enabling products in a more efficient, effective and BSM centric way. This was a huge driver for trying to hold DevCampTivoli focused on “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. 

In my opinion, we don’t make things very easy for our clients and the answer can’t be to “buy this product, module or widget” to fill in the gaps.  In my opinion, we must establish a BSM overlay within IBM Tivoli’s development and product management organization that ensures that we have clearly thought about how to enable BSM with the hundreds or products that we sell.  In my opinion, every product release must incorporate the fundamentals of enabling BSM in addition to the core domain specific functionality intended. I hope to keep this spirit alive and get our smartest IBMers and clients thinking about the best way to take a “BSM Heavy” solution and make it “lighter”. I hope to share more about my plans here and guidance for the industry in general soon.

That said, I am always interested in consulting with clients and collaborate with peers in the industry to figure out how to get the focus on the people, process and technology as key components of their BSM strategies.  I am absolutely convinced that without a documented BSM strategy, roadmap and top level sponsorship within the business and IT, the chances of BSM success greatly diminish.

ScienceLogic: Given the complexities involved in implementing a BSM strategy and dealing with the people and processes components of any business, how does “BSM Lite” really work? Should the expectations and outcomes be “lite” as well?

Doug McClure: Time will tell if “BSM Lite” will work.  I’m seeing emerging companies that are already breaking down some of the barriers to BSM success.  I do not expect that those choosing to begin with a “BSM Lite” approach should expect “lite” outcomes. 

The outcomes are the same regardless of the approach IF you’ve got a documented BSM strategy, roadmap and top level sponsorship in place before you begin. New features, capabilities and technologies will be needed as the needs of the business change and companies mature in BSM and fundamental IT management. This will likely force companies to move in more “BSM Heavy” directions to fill those gaps. 

In my opinion, this is the ideal scenario now as it gives “BSM Lite” vendors opportunities to grow their products and solutions. It also GREATLY improves the chances for success with a “BSM Heavy” solution because the organization would have already had matured enough to approach a “BSM Heavy” solution than if they hadn’t done a “BSM Lite” solution in the past.

ScienceLogic: Is “BSM Lite” more appropriate for a small or midsized organization, or does it apply equally to large companies? Is there an ideal profile for a company that can successfully implement a BSM strategy? Is there a different profile for “BSM Lite”?

Doug McClure: From an economic perspective, the concepts of “BSM Lite” are appropriate for all companies.  Remember, with “BSM Lite” we’re focused on identifying ways to make the goals and objectives of BSM easier to implement and in a more cost effective way.  Any company concerned about their IT cost overhead should care about this, especially when the risks of starting out with a “BSM Heavy” type deployment are much greater and the time to value generally much longer.

The “ideal” profile for any company is one where the BSM initiative begins by establishing top level buy in through creation of a formal BSM strategy for the company. This BSM strategy personalizes how the company defines what BSM is, what value the company expects from it, and how it will use BSM as a competitive differentiator for delivery of its business and IT services, products, etc.

The organizational “profile” I’ve seen most successful is when implementing a BSM strategy originates from within or actively includes a group that many companies have now that serves as a liaison or relationship management role between the various lines of business and IT. Sometimes this group is often seen as the gatekeeper to filter (and hinder) business driven requirements into the IT organization. In the ideal scenario, this group works very closely with the business and IT (usually staffed by business people and not IT people) to understand both the business side and IT side of complex business services and applications. 

Apart from the traditional IT components, what this group can do is help IT really understand the business perspective.  Analysis of the impact on the business in business terms is only possible by collaborating with a group such as this.  True value oriented BSM becomes attainable when we get to this level of IT and business alignment, cooperation, collaboration and communication.

If BSM is an IT only initiative, this will likely result in an IT centric perspective severely lacking in the necessary business perspective.  In these cases where IT doesn’t invest their BSM efforts with the business as an equal partner, the implementation ultimately becomes a “CYA” tool for IT and not achieve the desired value oriented expected.

To some degree “BSM Lite” may have an entirely different profile. If we see the price points, complexity and time to value change significantly we may see these types of deployments originate exclusively within the Line of Business. The possibility may exist where large enterprises operating in a shared IT services or IT outsourcing type model that the Line of Business brings in a “BSM Lite” solution to gain the visibility, checks and balances needed to ensure that the LoB’s needs are being met from the internal/external provider. I’d envision that “BSM Lite” may even be capable of operating within a “SaaS” model or other managed service type offering where the price points are below the signing levels triggering broader IT involvement and review.

To Be Continued…

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People pretty quickly realized that plain HTML was not enough, so developers invented CGI/PERL for more dynamic sites. Once they wanted to scale and pool they built out ASP and JSP, then to deliver middle tier components they developed EJB, J2EE, and DCOM. After that there were a lot of heterogeneous systems that needed to talk to each other so SOAP and XML came along to address that. This path diverged into ultra-simple (REST) and more powerful but baroque (SOA), and finally, the user side got some love with Web 2.0 technologies. That's a heck of a lot of engineering and innovation by the software development community for plus or minus 8 years.

Now lets' check in with the developer's brethren over in information security. Well, once the web came along the information security community quickly realized that network address translation was going to be important, and further that encrypting the communication channel between the browser and the web server was also crucial. And then, they addressed all the security issues ASP, JSP, EJB, J2EE, DCOM, SOAP, XML, REST, SOA, and Web 2.0 with....umm...more of the same!

That's a pretty poor showing for innovation considering the enterprise investment into information security. Sure the software developers' have a bigger budget, but come on infosec - show some pride!

Infosec types like to throw developers under the bus for security issues, but its a collective failure. Sure developers need to learn more about secure coding, but as the table above shows - security is not keeping pace, and the gap is getting bigger.

Here is another dimension to the problem - attackers *do* evolve. The new technologies provide far greater attack surface (data, method and channels) for the attacker's to exploit and/or launch attacks from.

Because the defenses have not evolved its a simple evolutionary adaptation for attackers to go around or through the 1995 defenses. Its not about SOAP going through the firewall, its about never bothering to secure the apps and the data. Its like saying to your opponent, remember the how the Detroit Lions played defense in a certain game in 1995, we were just going to do that.

So with the software developer's latest evolution we get Mr. O'Reilly's famous Web 2.0 meme map

but where is the co-evolution in infosec? there is non. There is co-evolution in the attacker space. here is a sample web 2.0 attacker meme map

So the firewall offers great protection if your adversary is using Visio, but otherwise its mostly useless.

So we would want to see two things happen - developers start writing more high assurance code and second - infosec needs to evolve its security services to form fit to that which they are protecting. Hint - it ain't a Visio diagram.

The thing is - we are getting getter tools. Static analysis is a very powerful tool to improve your software security from a bottom up perspective and it can scale. These tools continue to get better. We are are getting better standards - WS-Security, WS-Trust, and company enable fundamentally new security architectures. And we're getting better primitives, especially in the identity space - SAML, Cardspace, and friends will one day let us live in a world where users are not typing username and password into a web browser to do online banking.

So maybe the innovation tide is turning, but there is a lot of ground to catch up, infosec about a decade behind the developers and probably close to that far behind the attackers. Its going to take something special to catch up, but is there any other way? I think a big part of catching up is putting together a realistic pragmatic blueprint to evolve your security architecture - a roadmap that addresses your people, processes, and technology. There are standards, primitives, and tools to leverage, but by themselves they are just pieces, they have to be brought together into a cohesive design. Its not an overnight thing to realize this, but the point is for infosec to *begin* the evolutionary process. Now. For real use cases. Using the security protocols, mechanisms, and skills we have available now.

The Road goes ever on and on,

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

-J.R.R. Tolkien,The Hobbit

“Personally, I’d love to see everyone go through on OWASP-based source-code review, but certainly, that’s not going to happen,” Russo said, referring to the expensive and time-consuming process of manual code reviews. “So the application firewall is probably the best thing to do, but there needs to be some clarification around what it needs to do. That clarification is coming; that’s been the biggest question.”

Really? The WAF is the “best thing to do?” Maybe he meant to say “cheapest” or “quickest,” but how is a WAF better than fixing the root cause of vulnerabilities? I don’t deny that a WAF can be valuable to a layered security approach. For example, f I need to quickly plug a hole in my web app, I can configure the WAF to block it, thereby buying time for the development team to fix the problem. Instead of having to fix the bug immediately, it can be rolled into the next release cycle, with the WAF protecting the site in the interim.

Sure, the WAF can protect against some known attacks, and if you set it up the right way, it can attempt to detect and block other, unknown attacks — that is, if it’s configured aggressively enough. Except very few companies will actually do that. Nobody wants to risk the WAF confusing a legitimate request with an attempted attack and subsequently blocking user traffic.

This is why I argued, a while back, that a WAF really should be considered a compensating control since it is more of a band-aid than a best practice solution. That would give the requirement a lot more credibility rather than giving enterprises an easy way out.