June 27, 2009

Now We All Have Skin In The Game

It used to be that cybersecurity was something we talked about, but took for granted. Now, we’re seeing so many articles and warnings these days about cybersecurity. I think this is more than just hype. We are at a precipice, where cyberspace is essential to each and every one of us.

Here are some recent examples of major reviews in this area:

  • The White House released its 60-days Cyberspace Policy Review on May 29, conducted under the auspices of Melissa Hathaway, the Cybersecurity Chief at the National Security Council; and the reports states: “Cybersecurity risks pose some of the most serious economic and national security challenges of the 21st century…the nation’s approach to cybersecurity over the past 15 years has failed to keep pace with the threat."
  • The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th President wrote in a December 2008 report: “America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration…It is a battle we are losing.”

Cyberspace is becoming a more dangerous place as the attacks against it are growing. Federal Computer Week, June 2009, summarized the threat this way:

“Nation states are stealing terabytes of sensitive military data, including some of the most advanced technology. Cybercrime groups are taking hundreds of millions of dollars from bank accounts and using some of that money to buy weapons that target U.S. soldiers. The attacks are gaining in sophistication and the U.S. defenses are not keeping up.

Reviewing the possibilities as to why this is happening: Have we dropped our guard or diverted resources or knowhow away from cybersecurity in a tight budgetary environment and now have to course correct? Or, have our adversaries become more threatening and more dangerous to us?

I believe that the answer is neither. While our enemies continue to gain in sophistication, they have always been tenacious against us and our determination has never wavered to overcome those who would threaten our freedoms and nation. So what has happened?

In my view the shift has to do with our realization that technology and cyberspace have become more and more vital to us and underpins everything we do--so that we would be devastated by any serious disruption. As the Cyberspace Policy Review states definitively: “The globally-interconnected digital information and communications infrastructure known as “cyberspace” underpins almost every facet of modern society and provides critical support for the U.S economy, civil infrastructure, public safety, and national security.”

We rely on cyberspace in every facet of our lives, and quite honestly, most would be lost without the connectivity, communications, commerce, productivity, and pleasure we derive from it each and every day.

The result is that we now have some serious “skin in the game”. We have something to lose--things that we deeply care about. Thus, we fear for our safety and survival should something bad happen. We think consciously or subconsciously how would we survive without the technology, Internet, and global communications that we have come to depend upon.

Let’s think for a second:

What if cyberspace was taken down or otherwise manipulated or controlled by hostile nation states, terrorists, or criminals?

Would there be a breakdown in our ability to communicate, share information, and learn? Would there be interruptions to daily life activities, disruptions to commerce, finance, medicine and so forth, concerns about physical safety or “accidents”, risks to critical infrastructure, and jeopardy to our ability to effectively protect ourselves and country?

The point here is not to scare, but to awaken to the new realities of cyberspace and technology dependence.

Safeguarding cyberspace isn’t a virtual reality game. Cyberspace has physical reality and implications for all of us if we don’t protect it. Cyberspace if a critical national asset, and we had better start treating it as such if we don’t want our fear to materialize.


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 26, 2009

The Cloud is a Natural Evolution of IT


Cloud computing is bringing us closer than ever to providing IT as utility, where users no longer need to know or care about how the IT services are provided, and only want to know that they are reliably there—just like turning on the light.
This rent-an-IT model of cloud computing can apply to any portion of an organization’s IT architecture, as follows:
  • Service architecture—for application systems, there is “software as a service” (SaaS) such as Google Apps suite for office-productivity or Salesforce.com for customer relationship management. And for developing those systems, there is “platform as a service” (PaaS) such as Google Apps Engine (GAE) or the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE).
  • Information architecture—for storing the data used in systems, there is “storage as a service” such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
  • Technology architecture—for hosting systems, there is “infrastructure as a service” such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
The big advantage to using hosted IT or cloud computing is that it provides on-demand information technology—again like your electricity usage; the juice is there when you need it. Additionally, by outsourcing to specialist IT providers, you can generally get more efficiency, economy, and agility in providing IT your organization.
Of course, there are challenges that include ownership, security, privacy, and a cultural shift from a vertical (stovepiped) to horizontal (enterprise and common services) mindset.
From my perspective, cloud computing is a natural evolution in our IT service provision:
  1. At first, we did everything in-house, ourselves—with our own employees, equipment, and facilities. This was generally very expensive in terms of finding and maintaining employees with the right skill sets, and developing and maintaining all our own systems and technology infrastructure, securing it, patching it, upgrading it, and so on.
  2. So then came, the hiring of contractors to support our in-house staff; this helped alleviate some of the hiring and training issues on the organization. But it wasn’t enough to make us cost-efficient, especially since we were still managing all our own systems and technologies for our organization as a stovepipe.
  3. Next, we moved to a managed services model, where we out-sourced vast chunks of our IT—from our helpdesk to desktop support, from data centers to applications development, and even to security and more. But apparently that didn’t go far enough, because we were still buying, building, and maintaining our own IT instances for our organization, but now employing call centers and data centers in far-flung places.
  4. And finally, the realization has emerged that we do not need to provide IT services either with our own or contracted staff, but rather we can rely on IT cloud providers who will manage our information technology and that of tens, hundreds, and thousands of others and provide it seamlessly over the Internet, so that we all benefit from a more scalable and unified service provision model.
The cloud computing model takes the CIO/CTO and their staffs out of the fire-fighting mode of IT management and into the drivers seat for managing IT strategically, innovatively, and with a focus on the specific mission needs of their organization.

Share/Save/Bookmark

June 21, 2009

Making More Out of Less

One thing we all really like to hear about is how we can do more with less. This is especially the case when we have valuable assets that are underutilized or potentially even idle. This is “low hanging fruit” for executives to repurpose and achieve efficiencies for the organization.

In this regard, there was a nifty little article in Federal Computer Week, 15 Jun 2009, called “Double-duty COOP” about how we can take continuity of operations (COOP) failover facilities and use them for much more than just backup and business recovery purposes in the case of emergencies. 

“The time-tested approach is to support an active production facility with a back-up failover site dedicated to COOP and activated only during an emergency. Now organizations can vary that theme”—here are some examples:

Load balancing—“distribute everyday workloads between the two sites.”

Reduced downtime—“avoid scheduled outages” for maintenance, upgrades, patches and so forth.

Cost effective systems development—“one facility runs the main production environment while the other acts as the primary development and testing resource.”

Reduced risk data migration—when moving facilities, rather than physically transporting data and risk some sort of data loss, you can instead mirror the data to the COOP facility and upload the data from there once “the new site is 100 percent operational.”

It’s not that any of these ideas are so innovatively earth shattering, but rather it is their sheer simplicity and intuitiveness that I really like.

COOP is almost the perfect example of resources that can be dual purposed, since they are there “just in case.” While the COOP site must ready for the looming contingency, it can also be used prudently for assisting day-to-day operational needs.

As IT leaders, we must always look for improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of what we do. There is no resting on our laurels. Whether we can do more with less, or more with more, either way we are going to advance the organization and keep driving it to the next level of optimization. 


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 20, 2009

Who Says Car Companies Can't See?


Check out the concept for the new "Local Motors" car company:

  • "Vote for the designs you want. If you are a designer, you can upload your own. Either way, you help choose which designs are developed and built by the Local Motors community. Vote for competition designs, Checkup critiques, or portfolio designs.
  • Open Development, sort of like open source. Once there is enough support for any single design, Local Motors will develop it openly. That means that you not only choose which designs you want to drive, you get to help develop them - every step of the way.
  • Choose the Locale During the development process, help choose where the design should be made available. Local Motors is not a big car company, we are Local. The community chooses car designs with local regions in mind; where will this design fit best? You tell us. We make it happen.
  • Build your Local Motors vehicle Then, once the design and engineering is fully developed you can go to the Local Motors Micro-Factory and build your own - with our help, of course. See the "Buy" page for purchase and Build Experience details.
  • Drive your Local Motors car, the one you helped design and build, home."

I like this user-centric approach to car design and development. This is how we really put the user in the driver's seat.

The is the type of opportunity where we go from Henry Ford's one car for the masses approach to a more localized implementation.

While I don't know the specific economics of this approach for a car company, it seems like it has bottom-line potential since they will only proceed with car development once they have enough demand identified.

Why build cars that no one wants or likes and why pay for internal design and market research studies, when people will willingly participate for free in order to get what they really want?

Finally, this is a terrific example of open source development and crowdsourcing--getting the masses to contribute and making something better and better over time. More minds to the task, more productivity and quality as a result.


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 19, 2009

The Total CIO - Honored by CIO Magazine

FRI, JUN 19, 2009 10:42 EDT

What We’re Reading

Blogs and books selected by the staff of CIO magazine from the June 1 issue

POSTED BY: Christine Celli in Best Practices

TOPIC: Applications

BLOG: The Techie Reading List

CURRENT RATING:  COMMENTS: 0

The Total CIOBy Andy Blumenthal.

Andy Blumenthal, CTO at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, blogs on all things leadership, including the challenges of a being a change agent, bridging the business and IT divide and the importance of being customer-centric.


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 16, 2009

Rocky and The Total CIO



The Total CIO:
  1. Multitasks
  2. Always is training (and learning)
  3. Leads by example
  4. Inspires others
  5. Is determined and persistent
  6. Has inner strength
  7. Everything is a potential technology/tool
  8. Means business
  9. Gets results
  10. Above all, has a heart

Share/Save/Bookmark

June 14, 2009

Architecture of Freedom

In the United States, we have been blessed with tremendous freedom, and these freedoms are enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. However, in many countries around the world, people do not share these basic freedoms and human rights.

Now in many countries, the limitation and subjugation of people has extended from the physical to the virtual world of the Internet. People are prevented through filtering software from freely “surfing” the Internet for information, news, research and so forth. And they are prohibited from freely communicating their thoughts and feelings in email, instant messages, blogs, social networks and other communications media, and if are identified and caught, they are punished often through rehabilitation by hard prison labor or maybe just disappear altogether.

In fact, many countries are now insisting that technology companies build in filtering software so that the government can control or block their citizen’s ability to view information or ideas that are unwanted or undesirable.

Now however, new technology is helping defend human rights around the world—this is the architecture for anonymity and circumvention technologies.

MIT Technology Review (May/June 2009) has an article entitled “Dissent Made Safer—how anonymity technology could save free speech on the Internet.”

An open source non-profit project called TOR has developed a peer to peer technology that enables users to encrypt communications and route data through multiple hops on a network of proxies. “This combination of routing and encryption mask a computer’s actual location and circumvent government filters; to prying eyes, the Internet traffic seems to be coming from the proxies.”

This creates a safe environment for user to browse the Internet and communicate anonymously and safely—“without them, people in these [repressive] countries might be unable to speak or read freely online.”

The OpenNet Initiative in 2006 “discovered some form of filtering in 25 of 46 nations tested. A more current study by OpenNet found “more than 36 countries are filtering one or more kinds of speech to varying degrees…it is a practice growing in scope, scale, and sophistication.”

Generally, filtering is done with some combination of “blocking IP addresses, domain names… and even Web pages containing certain keywords.”

Violations of Internet usage can result in prison or death for treason.

Aside from TOR, there are other tools for “beating surveillance and censorship” such as Psiphon, UltraReach, Anonymizer, and Dynaweb Freegate.

While TOR and these other tools can be used to help free people from repression around the world, these tools can also be used, unfortunately, by criminals and terrorists to hide their online activities—and this is a challenge that law enforcement must now understand and contend with.

The architecture of TOR is fascinating and freeing, and as they say, “the genie is out of the bottle” and we cannot hide our heads in the sand. We must be able to help those around the world who need our help in achieving basic human rights and freedoms, and at the same time, we need to work with the providers of these tools to keep those who would do us harm from taking advantage of a good thing. 


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 12, 2009

Future Police Cruiser Architected for Law Enforcement

Carbon Motors E7 Police Car Photoshoot - Douglas Sonders Photography from Douglas Sonders on Vimeo.

Coming in 2012. This new law enforcement vehicle rocks!! 

The first police vehicle architected for the law enforcement end-user (User-centric EA in action). 

"Carbon Motors is a new Atlanta-based automaker that is developing the Carbon E7, the world's first purpose-built law enforcement vehicle that will provide enhanced performance and improved efficiency compared to the off-the-line cars used by today's officers. Automotive engineers from Carbon Motors are collaborating with law enforcement personnel across the country to design a vehicle that is equipped to meet the unique demands of day-to-day patrol operations." (Homeland Defense Journal)

Share/Save/Bookmark

June 7, 2009

Digital Object Architecture and Internet 2.0

There is an interesting interview in Government Executive, 18 May 2009, with Robert Kahn, one of the founders of the Internet.

In this interview Mr. Kahn introduces a vision for an Internet 2.0 (my term) based on Digital Object Architecture (DOA) where the architecture focus is not on the efficiency of moving information around on the network (or information packet transport i.e. TCP/IP), but rather on the broader notion of information management and on the architecture of the information itself.

The article states: Mr Kahn “still harbors a vision for how the Internet could be used to manage information, not just move packets of information” from place to place.

In DOA, “the key element of the architecture is the ‘digital element’ or structured information that incorporates a unique identifier and which can be parsed by any machine that knows how digital objects are structured. So I can take a digital object and store it on this machine, move it somewhere else, or preserve it for a long time.”

I liked the comparison to electronic files:

“A digital object doesn’t become a digital object any more than a file becomes a file if it doesn’t have the equivalent of a name and an ability to access it.”

Here are some of the key elements of DOA:

  • Handles—these are like file names; they are the digital object identifiers that are unique to each and enable each to be distinctly stored, found, transported, accessed and so forth. The handle record specifies things like where the object is stored, authentication information, terms and conditions for use, and/or “some sense of what you might do with the object.”
  • Resolution system —this is the ‘handle system’ that “gives your computer the handle record for that identifier almost immediately.”
  • Repository—“where digital objects may be deposited and from which they may be accessed later on.” Unlike traditional database systems, you don't need to know a lot of the details about it to get in or find what you're looking for.
  • Security at object layer—In DOA, the security “protection occurs at the object level rather than protecting the identifier or by providing only a password at the boundary.”

The overall distinguishing factor of DOA from the current Internet is that in the current Internet environment, you “have to know exactly where to look for certain information” and that’s why search engines are so critical to indexing the information out there and being able to find it. In contrast, in DOA, information is tagged when it is stored in the repository and given all the information up front about “how do you want to characterize it” and who can manage it, transport it, access it, and so on.

To me, in DOA (or Internet 2.0) the information itself provides for the intelligent use of it as opposed to in the regular Internet, the infrastructure (transport) and search features must provide for its usability.

As I am thinking about this, an analogy comes to mind. Some people with medical conditions wear special information bracelets that identify their unique medical conditions and this aids in the speed and possibly the accuracy of the medical treatment they receive—i.e. better medical management.  This is like the tagging of information in DOA where the information itself wears a metaphorical bracelet identifying it and what to do with it thereby yielding faster and better information management.

Currently, we sort of retrofit data about our information into tags called metadata, but instead here we have the notion of creating the information itself with the metadata almost as part of the genetic makeup of the information itself.

Information with “handles” built into as a part of the information creation and capture process would be superior information for sharing, collaboration, and ultimately more user-centric for people. 

In my humble opinion, DOA has some teeth and is certainly not "Dead On Arrival."


Share/Save/Bookmark

June 1, 2009

The Secret Service in Action


Once again, it's all about the mission. 

Focus, determination, absolute dedication to service. 

Principles every organization can adopt in their architectures.

And by the way, I am very proud to say my alma mater.


Share/Save/Bookmark