Kansas Development Finance Authority gains peace of mind, end-points virtual shield using hypervisor-level security

Implementing and managing IT security has leaped in complexity for organizations ranging from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to massive government agencies.

Once-safe products used to thwart invasions now have been exploited. E-mail phishing campaigns are far more sophisticated, leading to damaging ransomware attacks.

What’s more, the jack-of-all-trades IT leaders of the mid-market concerns are striving to protect more data types on and off premises, their workload servers and expanded networks, as well as the many essential devices of the mobile workforce.

Security demands have gone up, yet there is a continual need for reduced manual labor and costs -- while protecting assets sooner and better.

The next BriefingsDirect security strategies case study examines how a Kansas economic development organization has been able to gain peace of mind by relying on increased automation and intelligence in how it secures its systems and people.

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

To explore how an all-encompassing approach to security has enabled improved results with fewer hours at a smaller enterprise, BriefingsDirect sat down with Jeff Kater, Director of Information Technology and Systems Architect at Kansas Development Finance Authority (KDFA) in Topeka. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: As a director of all of IT at KDFA, security must be a big concern, but it can’t devour all of your time. How have you been able to balance security demands with all of your other IT demands?

Kater: That’s a very interesting question, and it has a multi-segmented answer. In years past, leading up to the development of what KDFA is now, we faced the trends that demanded very basic anti-spam solutions and the very basic virus threats that came via the web and e-mail.

Kater

What we’ve seen more recently is the growing trend of enhanced security attacks coming through malware and different exploits -- that were once thought impossible -- are now are the reality.

Therefore in recent times, my percentage of time dedicated to security had grown from probably five to 10 percent all the way up to 50 to 60 percent of my workload during each given week.

Gardner: Before we get to how you’ve been able to react to that, tell us about KDFA.

Kater: KDFA promotes economic development and prosperity for the State of Kansas by providing efficient access to capital markets through various tax-exempt and taxable debt obligations.

KDFA works with public and private entities across the board to identify financial options and solutions for those entities. We are a public corporate entity operating in the municipal finance market, and therefore we are a conduit finance authority.

KDFA is a very small organization -- but a very important one. Therefore we run enterprise-ready systems around the clock, enabling our staff to be as nimble and as efficient as possible.

There are about nine or 10 of us that operate here on any given day at KDFA. We run on a completely virtual environment platform via Citrix XenServer. So we run XenApp, XenDesktop, and NetScaler -- almost the full gamut of Citrix products.

We have a few physical endpoints, such as laptops and iPads, and we also have the mobile workforce on iPhones as well. They are all interconnected using the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) approach.

Gardner: You’ve had this swing, where your demands from just security issues have blossomed. What have you been doing to wrench that back? How do you get your day back, to innovate and put in place real productivity improvements?

We wanted to be able to be nimble, to be adaptive, and to grow our business workload while maintaining our current staff size.

Kater: We went with virtualization via Citrix. It became our solution of choice due to not being willing to pay the extra tax, if you will, for other solutions that are on the market. We wanted to be able to be nimble, to be adaptive, and to grow our business workload while maintaining our current staff size.

When we embraced virtualization, the security approaches were very traditional in nature. The old way of doing things worked fantastically for a physical endpoint.

The traditional approaches to security had been on our physical PCs for years. But when that security came over to the virtual realm, they bogged down our systems. They still required updates be done manually. They just weren’t innovating at the same speed as the virtualization, which was allowing us to create new endpoints.

And so, the maintenance, the updating, the growing threats were no longer being seen by the traditional approaches of security. We had endpoint security in place on our physical stations, but when we went virtual we no longer had endpoint security. We then had to focus on antivirus and anti-spam at the server level.

What we found out very quickly was that this was not going to solve our security issues. We then faced a lot of growing threats again via e-mail, via web, that were coming in through malware, spyware, other activities that were embedding themselves on our file servers – and then trickling down and moving laterally across our network to our endpoints.

Gardner: Just as your organization went virtual and adjusted to those benefits, the malware and the bad guys, so to speak, adjusted as well -- and started taking advantage of what they saw as perhaps vulnerabilities as organizations transitioned to higher virtualization.

Security for all, by all

Kater: They did. One thing that a lot of security analysts, experts, and end-users forget in the grand scheme of things is that this virtual world we live in has grown so rapidly -- and innovated so quickly -- that the same stuff we use to grow our businesses is also being used by the bad actors. So while we are learning what it can do, they are learning how to exploit it at the same speed -- if not a little faster.

Gardner: You recognized that you had to change; you had to think more about your virtualization environment. What prompted you to increase the capability to focus on the hypervisor for security and prevent issues from trickling across your systems and down to your endpoints?

Kater: Security has always been a concern here at KDFA. And there has been more of a security focus recently, with the latest news and trends. We honestly struggled with CryptoLocker, and we struggled with ransomware.

While we never had to pay out any ransom or anything -- and they were stopped in place before data could be exfiltrated outside of KDFA’s network -- we still had two or three days of either data loss or data interruption. We had to pull back data from an archive; we had to restore some of our endpoints and some of our computers.

We needed to have a solution for our virtual environment -- one that would be easy to deploy, easy to manage, and it would be centrally managed.

As we battled these things over a very short period of time, they were progressively getting worse and worse. We decided that we needed to have a solution for our virtual environment – one that would be not only be easy to deploy, easy to manage, but it would be centrally managed as well, enabling me to have more time to focus back on my workload -- and not have to worry so much about the security thresholds that had to be updated and maintained via the traditional model.

So we went out to the market. We ran very extensive proof of concepts (POCs), and those POCs very quickly illustrated that the underlying architecture was only going to be enterprise-ready via two or three vendors. Once we started running those through the paces, Bitdefender emerged for us.

I had actually been watching the Hypervisor Introspection (HVI) product development for the past four years, since its inception came with a partnership between Citrix, Intel, the Linux community and, of course, Bitdefender. One thing that was continuous throughout all of that was that in order to deploy that solution you would need GravityZone in-house to be able to run the HVI workloads.

And so we became early adopters of Bitdefender GravityZone, and we are able to see what it could do for our endpoints, our servers, and our Microsoft Exchange Servers. Then, Hypervisor Introspection became another security layer that we are able to build upon the security solution that we had already adopted from Bitdefender.

Gardner: And how long have you had these solutions in place?

Kater: We are going on one and a half to two years for GravityZone. And when HVI went to general availability earlier this year, in 2017, and we were one of the first adopters to be able to deploy it across our production environment.

Gardner: If you had a “security is easy” button that you could pound on your desk, what are the sorts of things that you look for in a simpler security solution approach?

IT needs brains to battle breaches

Kater: The “security is easy” button would operate much like the human brain. It would need that level of intuitive instinct, that predictive insight ability. The button would generally be easily managed, automated; it would evolve and learn with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning what’s out there. It would dynamically operate with peaks and valleys depending on the current status of the environment, and provide the security that’s needed for that particular environment.

Gardner: Jeff, you really are an early adopter, and I commend you on that. A lot of organizations are not quite as bold. They want to make sure that everything has been in the market for a long time. They are a little hesitant.

But being an early adopter sounds like you have made yourselves ready to adopt more AI and machine learning capabilities. Again, I think that’s very forward-looking of you.

But tell us, in real terms, what has being an early adopter gotten for you? We’ve had some pretty scary incidents just in the recent past, with WannaCry, for example. What has being an early adopter done for you in terms of these contemporary threats?

Kater: The new threats, including the EternalBlue exploit that happened here recently, are very advanced in nature. Oftentimes when these breaches occur, it takes several months before they have even become apparent. And oftentimes they move laterally within our network without us knowing, no matter what you do.

Some of the more advanced and persistent threats don’t even have to infect the local host with any type of software. They work in the virtual memory space. It’s much different than the older threats, where you could simply reboot or clear your browser cache to resolve them and get back to your normal operations.

Earlier, when KDFA still made use of non-persistent desktops, if the user got any type of corruption on their virtual desktop, they were able to reboot, and get back to a master image and move on. However, with these advanced threats, when they get into your network, and they move laterally -- even if you reboot your non-persistent desktop, the threat will come back up and it still infects your network. So with the growing ransomware techniques out there, we can no longer rely on those definition-based approaches. We have to look at the newer techniques.

As far as why we are early adopters, and why I have chosen some of the principles that I have, I feel strongly that you are really only as strong as your weakest link. I strive to provide my users with the most advanced, nimble, and agnostic solutions possible.

We are able to grow and compute on any device anywhere, anytime, securely, with minimal limitations.  

We are able to grow and compute on any device anywhere, anytime, securely, with minimal limitations. It allows us to have discussions about increasing productivity at that point, and to maximize the potential of our smaller number of users -- versus having to worry about the latest news of security breaches that are happening all around us.

Gardner: You’re able to have a more proactive posture, rather than doing the fire drill when things go amiss and you’re always reacting to things.

Kater: Absolutely.

Gardner: Going back to making sure that you’re getting a fresh image and versions of your tools …  We have heard some recent issues around the web browser not always being safe. What is it about being able to get a clean version of that browser that can be very important when you are dealing with cloud services and extensive virtualization?

Virtual awareness, secure browsing

Kater: Virtualization in and of itself has allowed us to remove the physical element of our workstations when desirable and operate truly in that virtual or memory space. And so when you are talking about browsers, you can have a very isolated, a very clean browser. But that browser is still going to hit a website that can exploit your system. It can run in that memory space for exploitation. And, again, it doesn't rely on plug-ins to be downloaded or anything like that anymore, so we really have to look at the techniques that these browsers are using.

What we are able to do with the secure browsing technique is publish, in our case, via XenApp, any browser flavor with isolation out there on the server. We make it available to the users that have access for that particular browser and for that particular need. We are then able to secure it via Bitdefender HVI, making sure that no matter where that browser goes, no matter what interface it’s trying to align with, it’s secure across the board.

Gardner: In addition to secure browsing, what do you look for in terms of being able to keep all of your endpoints the way you want them? Is there a management approach of being able to verify what works and what doesn’t work? How do you try to guarantee 100 percent security on those many and varied endpoints?

Kater: I am a realist, and I realize that nothing will ever be 100 percent secure, but I really strive for that 99.9 percent security and availability for my users. In doing so -- being that we are so small in staff, and being that I am the one that should manage all of the security, architecture, layers, networking and so forth -- I really look for that centralized model. I want one pane of glass to look at for managing, for reporting.

I want that management interface and that central console to really tell me when and if an exploit happens, what happened with that exploit, where did it go,  what did it do to me and how was I protected.

I want that management interface and that central console to really tell me when and if an exploit happens, what happened with that exploit, where did it go, and what did it do to me and how was I protected. I need that so that I can report to my management staff and say, “Hey, honestly, this is what happened, this is what was happening behind the scenes. This is how we remediated and we are okay. We are protected. We are safe.”

And so I really look for that centralized management. Automation is key. I want something that will automatically update, with the latest virus and malware definitions, but also download the latest techniques that are seen out there via those innovative labs from our security vendors to fully patch our systems behind the scenes. So it takes that piece of management away from me and automates it to make my job more efficient and more effective.

Gardner: And how has Bitdefender HVI, in association with Bitdefender GravityZone, accomplished that? How big of a role does it play in your overall solution?

Kater: It has been a very easy deployment and management, to be honest. Again, entities large and small, we are all facing the same threats. When we looked at ways to attain the best solution for us, we wanted to make sure that all of the main vendors that we make use of here at KDFA were on board.

And it just so happened this was a perfect partnership, again, between Citrix, Bitdefender, Intel, and the Linux community. That close partnership, it really developed into HVI, and it is not an evolutionary product. It did not grow from anything else. It really is a revolutionary approach. It’s a different way of looking at security models. It’s a different way of protecting.

HVI allows for security to be seen outside of the endpoint, and outside of the guest agent. It’s kind of an inside-looking-outward approach. It really provides high levels of visibility, detection and, again, it prevents the attacks of today, with those advanced persistent threats or APTs.

With that said, since the partnership between GravityZone and HVI is so easy to deploy, so easy to manage, it really allows our systems to grow and scale when the need is there. And we just know that with those systems in place, when I populate my network with new VMs, they are automatically protected via the policies from HVI.

Given that the security has to be protected from the ground all the way up, we rest assured that the security moves with the workload. As the workload moves across my network, it’s spawned off and onto new VMs. The same set of security policies follows the workloads. It really takes out any human missteps, if you will, along the process because it’s all automated and it all works hand-in-hand together.

Behind the screens

Gardner: It sounds like you have gained increased peace of mind. That’s always a good thing in IT; certainly a good thing for security-oriented IT folks. What about your end-users? Has the ability to have these defenses in place allowed you to give people a bit more latitude with what they can do? Is there a productivity, end-user or user experience benefit to this?

Kater: When it comes to security agents and endpoint security as a whole, I think a lot of people would agree with me that the biggest drawback when implementing those into your work environment is loss of productivity. It’s really not the end-user’s fault. It’s not a limitation of what they can and can't do, but it’s what happens when security puts an extra load on your CPU, it puts extra load on your RAM; therefore, it bogs down your systems. Your systems don’t operate as efficiently or effectively and that decreases your productivity.

With Bitdefender, and the approaches that we adopted, we have seen very, very limited, almost uncomputable limitations as far as impacts on our network, impacts on our endpoints. So user adoption has been greater than it ever has, as far as a security solution.

I’m also able to manipulate our policies within that Central Command Center or Central Command Console within Bitdefender GravityZone to allow my users, at will, if they would like, to see what they are being blocked against, and which websites they are trying to run in the background. I am able to pass that through to the endpoint for them to see firsthand. That has been a really eye-opening experience.

We used to compute daily, thinking we were protected, and that nothing was running in the background. We were visiting the pages, and those pages were acting as though we thought that they should. What we have quickly found out is that any given page can launch several hundred, if not thousands, of links in the background, which can then become an exploit mechanism, if not properly secured.

Gardner: I would like to address some of the qualitative metrics of success when you have experienced the transition to more automated security. Let’s begin with your time. You said you went from five or 10 percent of time spent on security to 50 or 60 percent. Have you been able to ratchet that back? What would you estimate is the amount of time you spend on security issues now, given that you are one and a half years in?

Kater: Dating back 5 to 10 years ago with the inception of VDI, my security footprint as far as my daily workload was probably around that 10 percent. And then, with the growing threats in the last two to three years, that ratcheted it up to about 50 percent, at minimum, maybe even 60 percent. By adopting GravityZone and HVI, I have been able to pull that back down to only consume about 10 percent of my workload, as most of it is automated for me behind the scenes.

Gardner: How about ransomware infections? Have you had any of those? Or lost documents, any other sort of qualitative metrics of how to measure efficiency and efficacy here?

We have had zero ransomware infections in more than a year now. We have had zero exploits and we have had zero network impact.

Kater: I am happy to report that since the adoption of GravityZone, and now with HVI as an extra security layer on top of Bitdefender GravityZone, that we have had zero ransomware infections in more than a year now. We have had zero exploits and we have had zero network impact.

Gardner: Well, that speaks for itself. Let’s look to the future, now that you have obtained this. You mentioned earlier your interest in AI, machine learning, automating, of being proactive. Tell us about what you expect to do in the future in terms of an even better security posture.

Safety layers everywhere, all the time

Kater: In my opinion, again, security layers are vital. They are key to any successful deployment, whether you are large or small. It’s important to have all of your traditional security hardware and software in place working alongside this new interwoven fabric, if you will, of software -- and now at the hypervisor level. This is a new threshold. This is a new undiscovered territory that we are moving into with virtual technologies.

As that technology advances, and more complex deployments are made, it’s important to protect that computing ability every step of the way; again, from that base and core, all the way into the future.

More and more of my users are computing remotely, and they need to have the same security measures in place for all of their computing sessions. What HVI has been able to do for me here in the current time, and in moving to the future, is I am now able to provide secure working environments anywhere -- whether that’s their desktop, whether that’s their secure browser. I am able to leverage that HVI technology once they are logged into our network to make their computing from remote areas safe and effective.

Gardner: For those listening who may not have yet moved toward a hypervisor-level security – or who have maybe even just more recently become involved with pervasive virtualization and VDI -- what advice could you give them, Jeff, on how to get started? What would you suggest others do that would even improve on the way you have done it? And, of course, you have had some pretty good results.

Kater: It’s important to understand that everybody’s situation is very different, so identifying the best solutions for everybody is very much on an individual corporation basis. Each company has its own requirements, its own compliance to follow, of course.

Pick two or three vendors and run very stringent POCs; make sure that they are able to identify your security restraints, try to break them, run them through the phases, see how they affect your network.

The best advice that I can give is pick two or three vendors, at the least, and run very stringent POCs; no matter what they may be, make sure that they are able to identify your security restraints, try to break them, run them through the phases, see how they affect your network. Then, when you have two or three that come out of that and that you feel strongly about, continue to break them down.

I cannot stress the importance of POCs enough. It’s very important to identify that one or two that you really feel strongly about. Once you identify those, then talk to the industry experts that support those technologies, talk to the engineers, really get the insight from the inside out on how they are innovating and what their plan is for the future of their products to make sure that you are on a solid footprint.

Most success stories involve a leap of faith. With machine learning and AI, we are now taking a leap that is backed by factual knowledge and analyzing techniques to stay ahead of threats. No longer are we relying on those virus definitions and those virus updates that can be lagging sometimes.

Gardner: Before we sign off, where do you go to get your information? Where would you recommend other people go to find out more?

Kater: Honestly, I was very fortunate that HVI at its inception fell into my lap. When I was looking around at different products, we just hit the market at the right time. But to be honest with you, I cannot stress enough, again, run those POCs.

If you are interested in finding out more about Bitdefender and its product line up, Bitdefender has an excellent set of engineers on staff; they are very knowledgeable, they are very well-rounded in all of their individual disciplines. The Bitdefender website is very comprehensive. It contains many outside resources, along with inside labs reporting, showcasing just what their capabilities are, with a lot of unbiased opinions.

They have several video demos and technical white papers listed out there, you can find them all across the web and you can request the full product demo when you are ready for it and run that POC of Bitdefender products in-house with your network. Also, they have presales support that will help you all along the way.

Bitdefender HVI will revolutionize your data center security capacity.

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

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Globalization risks and data complexity demand new breed of hybrid IT management, says Wikibon’s Burris

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst interview explores how globalization and distributed business ecosystems factor into hybrid cloud challenges and solutions.

Mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity are forcing companies to seek new breeds of solutions so they can grow and thrive as digital enterprises. 

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

Here to report on how international companies must factor localization, data sovereignty and other regional cloud requirements into any transition to sustainable hybrid IT is Peter Burris, Head of Research at Wikibon. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Peter, companies doing business or software development just in North America can have an American-centric view of things. They may lack an appreciation for the global aspects of cloud computing models. We want to explore that today. How much more complex is doing cloud -- especially hybrid cloud -- when you’re straddling global regions?

Burris: There are advantages and disadvantages to thinking cloud-first when you are thinking globalization first. The biggest advantage is that you are able to work in locations that don’t currently have the broad-based infrastructure that’s typically associated with a lot of traditional computing modes and models.

Burris

The downside of it is, at the end of the day, that the value in any computing system is not so much in the hardware per se; it’s in the data that’s the basis of how the system works. And because of the realities of working with data in a distributed way, globalization that is intended to more fully enfranchise data wherever it might be introduces a range of architectural implementation and legal complexities that can’t be discounted.

So, cloud and globalization can go together -- but it dramatically increases the need for smart and forward-thinking approaches to imagining, and then ultimately realizing, how those two go together, and what hybrid architecture is going to be required to make it work.

Gardner: If you need to then focus more on the data issues -- such as compliance, regulation, and data sovereignty -- how is that different from taking an applications-centric view of things?

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Burris: Most companies have historically taken an infrastructure-centric approach to things. They start by saying, “Where do I have infrastructure, where do I have servers and storage, do I have the capacity for this group of resources, and can I bring the applications up here?” And if the answer is yes, then you try to ultimately economize on those assets and build the application there.

That runs into problems when we start thinking about privacy, and in ensuring that local markets and local approaches to intellectual property management can be accommodated.

But the issue is more than just things like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, which is a series of regulations in the European Union (EU) that are intended to protect consumers from what the EU would regard as inappropriate leveraging and derivative use of their data.

It can be extremely expensive and sometimes impossible to even conceive of a global cloud strategy where the service is being consumed a few thousand miles away from where the data resides, if there is any dependency on time and how that works.

Ultimately, the globe is a big place. It’s 12,000 miles or so from point A to the farthest point B, and physics still matters. So, the first thing we have to worry about when we think about globalization is the cost of latency and the cost of bandwidth of moving data -- either small or very large -- across different regions. It can be extremely expensive and sometimes impossible to even conceive of a global cloud strategy where the service is being consumed a few thousand miles away from where the data resides, if there is any dependency on time and how that works.

So, the issues of privacy, the issues of local control of data are also very important, but the first and most important consideration for every business needs to be: Can I actually run the application where I want to, given the realities of latency? And number two: Can I run the application where I want to given the realities of bandwidth? This issue can completely overwhelm all other costs for data-rich, data-intensive applications over distance.

Gardner: As you are factoring your architecture, you need to take these local considerations into account, particularly when you are factoring costs. If you have to do some heavy lifting and make your bandwidth capable, it might be better to have a local closet-sized data center, because they are small and efficient these days, and you can stick with a private cloud or on-premises approach. At the least, you should factor the economic basis for comparison, with all these other variables you brought up.

Edge centers

Burris: That’s correct. In fact, we call them “edge centers.” For example, if the application features any familiarity with Internet of Things (IoT), then there will likely be some degree of latency considerations obtained, and the cost of doing a round trip message over a few thousand miles can be pretty significant when we consider the total cost of how fast computing can be done these days.

The first consideration is what are the impacts of latency for an application workload like IoT and is that intending to drive more automation into the system? Imagine, if you will, the businessperson who says, “I would like to enter into a new market expand my presence in the market in a cost-effective way. And to do that, I want to have the system be more fully automated as it serves that particular market or that particular group of customers. And perhaps it’s something that looks more process manufacturing-oriented or something along those lines that has IoT capabilities.”

The goal is to bring in the technology in a way that does not explode the administration, management, and labor cost associated with the implementation.

The goal, therefore, is to bring in the technology in a way that does not explode the administration, managements, and labor cost associated with the implementation.

The other way you are going to do that is if you do introduce a fair amount of automation and if, in fact, that automation is capable of operating within the time constraints required by those automated moments, as we call them.

If the round-trip cost of moving the data from a remote global location back to somewhere in North America -- independent of whether it’s legal or not – comes at a cost that exceeds the automation moment, then you just flat out can’t do it. Now, that is the most obvious and stringent consideration.

On top of that, these moments of automation necessitate significant amounts of data being generated and captured. We have done model studies where, for example, the cost of moving data out of a small wind farm can be 10 times as expensive. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do relatively simple and straightforward types of data analysis on the performance of that wind farm.

Process locally, act globally

It’s a lot better to have a local presence that can handle local processing requirements against models that are operating against locally derived data or locally generated data, and let that work be automated with only periodic visibility into how the overall system is working closely. And that’s where a lot of this kind of on-premise hybrid cloud thinking is starting.

It gets more complex than in a relatively simple environment like a wind farm, but nonetheless, the amount of processing power that’s necessary to run some of those kinds of models can get pretty significant. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of analytic work be pushed directly down to the devices themselves. So, the Sense, Infer, and Act loop will occur very, very closely in some of those devices. We will try to keep as much of that data as we can local.

But there are always going to be circumstances when we have to generate visibility across devices, we have to do local training of the data, we have to test the data or the models that we are developing locally, and all those things start to argue for sometimes much larger classes of systems.

Gardner: It’s a fascinating subject as to what to push down the edge given that the storage cost and processing costs are down and footprint is down and what to then use the public cloud environment or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment for.

But before we go into any further, Peter, tell us about yourself, and your organization, Wikibon.

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Burris: Wikibon is a research firm that’s affiliated with something known as TheCUBE. TheCUBE conducts about 5,000 interviews per year with thought leaders at various locations, often on-site at large conferences.

I came to Wikibon from Forrester Research, and before that I had been a part of META Group, which was purchased by Gartner. I have a longstanding history in this business. I have also worked with IT organizations, and also worked inside technology marketing in a couple of different places. So, I have been around.

Wikibon's objective is to help mid-sized to large enterprises traverse the challenges of digital transformation. Our opinion is that digital transformation actually does mean something. It's not just a set of bromides about multichannel or omnichannel or being “uberized,” or anything along those lines.

The difference between a business and a digital business is the degree to which data is used as an asset. 

The difference between a business and a digital business is the degree to which data is used as an asset. In a digital business, data absolutely is used as a differentiating asset for creating and keeping customers.

We look at the challenges of what does it mean to use data differently, how to capture it differently, which is a lot of what IoT is about. We look at how to turn it into business value, which is a lot of what big data and these advanced analytics like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning are all about. And then finally, how to create the next generation of applications that actually act on behalf of the brand with a fair degree of autonomy, which is what we call “systems of agency” are all about. And then ultimately how cloud and historical infrastructure are going to come together and be optimized to support all those requirements.

We are looking at digital business transformation as a relatively holistic thing that includes IT leadership, business leadership, and, crucially, new classes of partnerships to ensure that the services that are required are appropriately contracted for and can be sustained as it becomes an increasing feature of any company’s value proposition. That's what we do.

Global risk and reward

Gardner: We have talked about the tension between public and private cloud in a global environment through speeds and feeds, and technology. I would like to elevate it to the issues of culture, politics and perception. Because in recent years, with offshoring and looking at intellectual property concerns in other countries, the fact is that all the major hyperscale cloud providers are US-based corporations. There is a wide ecosystem of other second tier providers, but certainly in the top tier.

Is that something that should concern people when it comes to risk to companies that are based outside of the US? What’s the level of risk when it comes to putting all your eggs in the basket of a company that's US-based?

Burris: There are two perspectives on that, but let me add one more just check on this. Alibaba clearly is one of the top-tier, and they are not based in the US and that may be one of the advantages that they have. So, I think we are starting to see some new hyperscalers emerge, and we will see whether or not one will emerge in Europe.

I had gotten into a significant argument with a group of people not too long ago on this, and I tend to think that the political environment almost guarantees that we will get some kind of scale in Europe for a major cloud provider.

If you are a US company, are you concerned about how intellectual property is treated elsewhere? Similarly, if you are a non-US company, are you concerned that the US companies are typically operating under US law, which increasingly is demanding that some of these hyperscale firms be relatively liberal, shall we say, in how they share their data with the government? This is going to be one of the key issues that influence choices of technology over the course of the next few years.

Cross-border compute concerns

We think there are three fundamental concerns that every firm is going to have to worry about.

I mentioned one, the physics of cloud computing. That includes latency and bandwidth. One computer science professor told me years ago, “Latency is the domain of God, and bandwidth is the domain of man.” We may see bandwidth costs come down over the next few years, but let's just lump those two things together because they are physical realities.

The second one, as we talked about, is the idea of privacy and the legal implications.

The third one is intellectual property control and concerns, and this is going to be an area that faces enormous change over the course of the next few years. It’s in conjunction with legal questions on contracting and business practices.

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From our perspective, a US firm that wants to operate in a location that features a more relaxed regime for intellectual property absolutely needs to be concerned. And the reason why they need to be concerned is data is unlike any other asset that businesses work with. Virtually every asset follows the laws of scarcity. 

Money, you can put it here or you can put it there. Time, people, you can put here or you can put there. That machine can be dedicated to this kind of wire or that kind of wire.

Data is weird, because data can be copied, data can be shared. The value of data appreciates as we us it more successfully, as we integrate it and share it across multiple applications.

Scarcity is a dominant feature of how we think about generating returns on assets. Data is weird, though, because data can be copied, data can be shared. Indeed, the value of data appreciates as we use it more successfully, as we use it more completely, as we integrate it and share it across multiple applications.

And that is where the concern is, because if I have data in one location, two things could possibly happen. One is if it gets copied and stolen, and there are a lot of implications to that. And two, if there are rules and regulations in place that restrict how I can combine that data with other sources of data. That means if, for example, my customer data in Germany may not appreciate, or may not be able to generate the same types of returns as my customer data in the US.

Now, that sets aside any moral question of whether or not Germany or the US has better privacy laws and protects the consumers better. But if you are basing investments on how you can use data in the US, and presuming a similar type of approach in most other places, you are absolutely right. On the one hand, you probably aren’t going to be able to generate the total value of your data because of restrictions on its use; and number two, you have to be very careful about concerns related to data leakage and the appropriation of your data by unintended third parties.

Gardner: There is the concern about the appropriation of the data by governments, including the United States with the PATRIOT Act. And there are ways in which governments can access hyperscalers’ infrastructure, assets, and data under certain circumstances. I suppose there’s a whole other topic there, but at least we should recognize that there's some added risk when it comes to governments and their access to this data.

Burris: It’s a double-edged sword that US companies may be worried about hyperscalers elsewhere, but companies that aren't necessarily located in the US may be concerned about using those hyperscalers because of the relationship between those hyperscalers and the US government.

These concerns have been suppressed in the grand regime of decision-making in a lot of businesses, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a low-intensity concern that could bubble up, and perhaps, it’s one of the reasons why Alibaba is growing so fast right now.

All hyperscalers are going to have to be able to demonstrate that they can protect their clients, their customers’ data, utilizing the regime that is in place wherever the business is being operated.  

All hyperscalers are going to have to be able to demonstrate that they can, in fact, protect their clients, their customers’ data, utilizing the regime that is in place wherever the business is being operated. [The rationale] for basing your business in these types of services is really immature. We have made enormous progress, but there’s a long way yet to go here, and that’s something that businesses must factor as they make decisions about how they want to incorporate a cloud strategy.

Gardner: It’s difficult enough given the variables and complexity of deciding a hybrid cloud strategy when you’re only factoring the technical issues. But, of course, now there are legal issues around data sovereignty, privacy, and intellectual property concerns. It’s complex, and it’s something that an IT organization, on its own, cannot juggle. This is something that cuts across all the different parts of a global enterprise -- their legal, marketing, security, risk avoidance and governance units -- right up to the board of directors. It’s not just a willy-nilly decision to get out a credit card and start doing cloud computing on any sustainable basis.

Burris: Well, you’re right, and too frequently it is a willy-nilly decision where a developer or a business person says, “Oh, no sweat, I am just going to grab some resources and start building something in the cloud.”

I can remember back in the mid-1990s when I would go into large media companies to meet with IT people to talk about the web, and what it would mean technically to build applications on the web. I would encounter 30 people, and five of them would be in IT and 25 of them would be in legal. They were very concerned about what it meant to put intellectual property in a digital format up on the web, because of how it could be misappropriated or how it could lose value. So, that class of concern -- or that type of concern -- is minuscule relative to the broader questions of cloud computing, of the grabbing of your data and holding it a hostage, for example.

There are a lot of considerations that are not within the traditional purview of IT, but CIOs need to start thinking about them on their own and in conjunction with their peers within the business.

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Gardner: We’ve certainly underlined a lot of the challenges. What about solutions? What can organizations do to prevent going too far down an alley that’s dark and misunderstood, and therefore have a difficult time adjusting?

How do we better rationalize for cloud computing decisions? Do we need better management? Do we need better visibility into what our organizations are doing or not doing? How do we architect with foresight into the larger picture, the strategic situation? What do we need to start thinking about in terms of the solutions side of some of these issues?

Cloud to business, not business to cloud

Burris: That’s a huge question, Dana. I can go on for the next six hours, but let’s start here. The first thing we tell senior executives is, don’t think about bringing your business to the cloud -- think about bringing the cloud to your business. That’s the most important thing. A lot of companies start by saying, “Oh, I want to get rid of IT, I want to move my business to the cloud.”

It’s like many of the mistakes that were made in the 1990s regarding outsourcing. When I would go back and do research on outsourcing, I discovered that a lot of the outsourcing was not driven by business needs, but driven by executive compensation schemes, literally. So, where executives were told that they would be paid on the basis of return in net assets, there was a high likelihood that the business was going to go to outsourcers to get rid of the assets, so the executives could pay themselves an enormous amount of money.

Think about how to bring the cloud to your business, and to better manage your data assets, and don't automatically default to the notion that you're going to take your business to the cloud.

The same type of thinking pertains here -- the goal is not to get rid of IT assets since those assets, generally speaking, are becoming less important features of the overall proposition of digital businesses.

Think instead about how to bring the cloud to your business, and to better manage your data assets, and don’t automatically default to the notion that you’re going to take your business to the cloud.

Every decision-maker needs to ask himself or herself, “How can I get the cloud experience wherever the data demands?” The goal of the cloud experience, which is a very, very powerful concept, ultimately needs to be able to get access to a very rich set of services associated with automation. We need visible pricing and metering, self-sufficiency, and self-service. These are all the experiences that we want out of cloud.

What we want, however, are those experiences wherever the data requires it, and that’s what’s driving hybrid cloud. We call it “true private cloud,” and the idea is of having a technology stack that provides a consistent cloud experience wherever the data has to run -- whether that’s because of IoT or because of privacy issues or because of intellectual property concerns. True private cloud is our concept for describing how the cloud experience is going to be enacted where the data requires, so that you don’t just have to move the data to get to the cloud experience.

Weaving IT all together

The third thing to note here is that ultimately this is going to lead to the most complex integration regime we’ve ever envisioned for IT. By that I mean, we are going to have applications that span Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), public cloud, IaaS services, true private cloud, legacy applications, and many other types of services that we haven’t even conceived of right now.

And understanding how to weave all of those different data sources, and all those different service sources, into coherent application framework that runs reliably and providers a continuous ongoing service to the business is essential. It must involve a degree of distribution that completely breaks most models. We’re thinking about infrastructure, architecture, but also, data management, system management, security management, and as I said earlier, all the way out to even contractual management, and vendor management.

The arrangement of resources for the classes of applications that we are going to be building in the future are going to require deep, deep, deep thinking.

That leads to the fourth thing, and that is defining the metric we’re going to use increasingly from a cost standpoint. And it is time. As the costs of computing and bandwidth continue to drop -- and they will continue to drop -- it means ultimately that the fundamental cost determinant will be, How long does it take an application to complete? How long does it take this transaction to complete? And that’s not so much a throughput question, as it is a question of, “I have all these multiple sources that each on their own are contributing some degree of time to how this piece of work finishes, and can I do that piece of work in less time if I bring some of the work, for example, in-house, and run it close to the event?”

This relationship between increasing distribution of work, increasing distribution of data, and the role that time is going to play when we think about the event that we need to manage is going to become a significant architectural concern.

The fifth issue, that really places an enormous strain on IT is how we think about backing up and restoring data. Backup/restore has been an afterthought for most of the history of the computing industry.

As we start to build these more complex applications that have more complex data sources and more complex services -- and as these applications increasingly are the basis for the business and the end-value that we’re creating -- we are not thinking about backing up devices or infrastructure or even subsystems.

We are thinking about what does it mean to backup, even more importantly, applications and even businesses. The issue becomes associated more with restoring. How do we restore applications in business across this incredibly complex arrangement of services and data locations and sources?

There's a new data regime that's emerging to support application development. How's that going to work -- the role the data scientists and analytics are going to play in working with application developers?

I listed five areas that are going to be very important. We haven’t even talked about the new regime that’s emerging to support application development and how that’s going to work. The role the data scientists and analytics are going to play in working with application developers – again, we could go on and on and on. There is a wide array of considerations, but I think all of them are going to come back to the five that I mentioned.

Gardner: That’s an excellent overview. One of the common themes that I keep hearing from you, Peter, is that there is a great unknown about the degree of complexity, the degree of risk, and a lack of maturity. We really are venturing into unknown territory in creating applications that draw on these resources, assets and data from these different clouds and deployment models.

When you have that degree of unknowns, that lack of maturity, there is a huge opportunity for a party to come in to bring in new types of management with maturity and with visibility. Who are some of the players that might fill that role? One that I am familiar with, and I think I have seen them on theCUBE is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) with what they call Project New Hybrid IT Stack. We still don’t know too much about it. I have also talked about Cloud28+, which is an ecosystem of global cloud environments that helps mitigate some of the concerns about a single hyperscaler or a handful of hyperscale providers. What’s the opportunity for a business to come in to this problem set and start to solve it? What do you think from what you’ve heard so far about Project New Hybrid IT Stack at HPE?

Key cloud players

Burris: That’s a great question, and I’m going to answer it in three parts. Part number one is, if we look back historically at the emergence of TCP/IP, TCP/IP killed the mini-computers. A lot of people like to claim it was microprocessors, and there is an element of truth to that, but many computer companies had their own proprietary networks. When companies wanted to put those networks together to build more distributed applications, the mini-computer companies said, “Yeah, just bridge our network.” That was an unsatisfyingly bad answer for the users. So along came Cisco, TCP/IP, and they flattened out all those mini-computer networks, and in the process flattened the mini-computer companies.

HPE was one of the few survivors because they embraced TCP/IP much earlier than anybody else.

We are going to need the infrastructure itself to use deep learning, machine learning, and advanced technology for determining how the infrastructure is managed, optimized, and economized.

The second thing is that to build the next generations of more complex applications -- and especially applications that involve capabilities like deep learning or machine learning with increased automation -- we are going to need the infrastructure itself to use deep learning, machine learning, and advanced technology for determining how the infrastructure is managed, optimized, and economized. That is an absolute requirement. We are not going to make progress by adding new levels of complexity and building increasingly rich applications if we don’t take full advantage of the technologies that we want to use in the applications -- inside how we run our infrastructures and run our subsystems, and do all the things we need to do from a hybrid cloud standpoint.

Ultimately, the companies are going to step up and start to flatten out some of these cloud options that are emerging. We will need companies that have significant experience with infrastructure, that really understand the problem. They need a lot of experience with a lot of different environments, not just one operating system or one cloud platform. They will need a lot of experience with these advanced applications, and have both the brainpower and the inclination to appropriately invest in those capabilities so they can build the type of platforms that we are talking about. There are not a lot of companies out there that can.

There are few out there, and certainly HPE with its New Stack initiative is one of them, and we at Wikibon are especially excited about it. It’s new, it’s immature, but HPE has a lot of piece parts that will be required to make a go of this technology. It’s going to be one of the most exciting areas of invention over the next few years. We really look forward to working with our user clients to introduce some of these technologies and innovate with them. It’s crucial to solve the next generation of problems that the world faces; we can’t move forward without some of these new classes of hybrid technologies that weave together fabrics that are capable of running any number of different application forms.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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