Showing posts with label data management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data management. Show all posts

Thursday, March 04, 2021

How to Gain Advanced Cyber Resilience and Recovery Across Digital Business Workflows

A transcript of a discussion on how comprehensive cloud security solutions need to go beyond on-premises threat detection and remediation to significantly strengthen extended digital business workflows.

 Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Unisys and ServiceNow.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Cyber attacks are on the rise, harming brands and supply chains while fomenting consumer and employee distrust -- as well as leading to costly interruptions and service blackouts.

At the same time, more remote workers and extended-enterprise processes due to the pandemic demand higher levels of security across all kinds of business workflows.

Stay with us now as we explore why comprehensive cloud security solutions need to go beyond on-premises threat detection and remediation to significantly strengthen extended digital business workflows.

To learn more about ways to shrink the attack surface and dynamically isolate process security breaches, please join me now in welcoming Karl Klaessig, Director of Product Marketing for Security Operations, at ServiceNow. Welcome, Karl.

Karl Klaessig: Thank you so much.

Gardner: We’re also here with E.G. Pearson, Security Architect at Unisys. Welcome, E.G.

E.G. Pearson: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Gardner: Karl, why are digital workflows so essential now for modern enterprises, and why are better security solutions needed to strengthen digital businesses?

Klaessig: Dana, you touched on cyber attacks being on the rise. It’s a really scary time if you think about MGM Resorts and some of the really big attacks in 2020 that took us all by surprise. And 23 percent of consumers have had their email or social media accounts hacked, taken over, or used. These are all huge threats to our everyday life as businesses and consumers.

Klaessig
And when we look at so many of us now working from home, this huge new attack surface space is going to continue. In a recent Gartner chief financial officer (CFO) survey, 74 percent of companies have the intent to shift employees to work from home (WFH) permanently.

These are huge numbers indicating a mad dash to build and scale remote worker infrastructures. At the end of the day, the teams that E.G. and I represent, as vendors, we strive hard to support these businesses as they seek to scale and address an explosive impact for cyber resilience and cyber operations in their enterprises.

Gardner: E.G., we have these new, rapidly evolving adoption patterns around extended digital businesses and workflows. Do the IT and security personnel, who perhaps cut their teeth in legacy security requirements, need to think differently? Do they have different security requirements now?

IT security requirements rise

Pearson: As someone who did cut their teeth in the legacy parts, I say, “Yes,” because things are new. Things are different.

Pearson
The legacy IT world was all about protecting what they know about, and it’s hard to change. The new world is all about automation, right? It impacts everything we want to do and everything that we can do. Why wouldn’t we try to make our jobs as simple and easy as possible?

When I first got into IT, one of my friends told me that the easiest thing you can do is script everything that you possibly can, just to make your life simpler. Nowadays, with the way digital workflows are going, it’s not just automating the simple things -- now we’re able to easily to automate the complex ones, too. We’re making it so anybody can jump in and get this automation going as quickly as possible.

Gardner: Karl, now that we’re dealing with extended digital workflows and expanded workplaces, how has the security challenge changed? What are we up against?

Klaessig: The security challenge has changed dramatically. What’s the impact of Internet of things (IoT) and edge computing? We’ve essentially created a much larger attack surface area, right?

What’s changed in a very positive way is that this expanded surface has driven automation and the capability to not only secure workflows but to collaborate on those workflows.

We have to have the capability to quickly detect, respond, and remediate. Let’s be honest, we need automated security for all of the remote solutions now being utilized – virtually overnight – by hundreds of thousands of people. Automation is going to be the driver. It’s what’s really rises to the top to help in this.

Gardner: E.G., one of the good things with the modern IT landscape is that we can do remote access for security in ways that we couldn’t before. So, for IoT, as Karl mentioned, we’re talking about branch offices -- not just sensors or machines.

We increasingly have a very distributed environment, and we can get in there with our security teams in a virtual sense. We have automation, but we also have the virtual capability to reach just about everywhere.

Pearson: Nowadays, IoT is huge. Operational technology (OT) is huge. Data is huge. Take your pick, it’s all massive in scope nowadays. Branch offices? Nowadays, all of us are our own branch office sitting at our homes.

Now, everybody is a field employee. The world changed overnight. And the biggest concern is how do we protect every branch office and every individual who’s out there? It used to be simpler, you used to create a site-to-site virtual private network (VPN) or you had communications that could be easily taken care of.

Everybody is now a field employee. The world changed overnight. And the biggest concern is how do we protect every branch office and every individual who's out there? The world is different.

Now the communication is open to everybody because your kids want to watch Disney in the living room while you’re trying to work in your office while your wife is doing work for her job three rooms down. The world is different.

The networks that we have to work through are different. Now, instead of trying to protect an all-encompassing environment, it’s about moving to more individual or granular levels of security, of protecting individual endpoints or systems.

I now have smart thermostats and a smart doorbell. I don’t want anybody attaching to those. I don’t need somebody talking to my kids through those things. In the same vein, I don’t need somebody attaching to my company’s OT environment and doing something silly inside of there. So, in my opinion, it’s less about the overarching IT environment, and more about how to protect the individuals.

Gardner: To protect all of those vulnerable individuals then, what are the new solutions? How are the Unisys Stealth and ServiceNow Platform coming together to help solve these issues?

Collaborate to protect individuals

Klaessig: Well, there are a couple of areas I’ll touch on. One is that Unisys has an uncanny capability to do isolation and initially contain a breach or threat. That is absolutely paramount for our customers. We need to get a very quick handle on how to investigate and respond. Our teams are all struggling to scale faster and faster with higher volume. So, every minute bought is a huge minute gained. Right out of the gate, between Unisys and ServiceNow, that buys us time -- and every second counts. It’s invaluable.

Another thing that's driving our solutions are the better ties between IT and security; there’s much more collaboration. For a long time they tended to be in separate towers, so to speak. But the codependences and collaborative drivers between Unisys and ServiceNow mean that those groups are so much more effective. The IT and security teams collaborate thanks to the things we do in the workloads and the automation between both of our solutions. It becomes extremely efficient and effective.

Gardner: E.G., why is your technology, Unisys Stealth for Dynamic Isolation a good fit with ServiceNow? Why is that a powerful part of this automation drive?

Pearson: The nice part about dynamic isolation is it’s just a piece of what we can do as a whole with Unisys Stealth. Our Stealth core product is doing identity-based microsegmentation. And, by nature, it flows into software-defined networking, and it's based on a zero trust model.

The reason that's important is, in software-defined networking, we're gathering tons of information about what's happening across your network. So, in addition to what’s happening at the perimeter with firewalls, you are able to get really good, granular information about what's happening inside of your environment, too.

We're able to gather that and send all of that fantastic information over the ServiceNow Platform to your source, whatever it may be. ServiceNow is a fantastic jumping point for us to be able to get all that information into what would have been separate systems. Now they can all talk together through the ServiceNow Platform.

Klaessig: To add to that, this partnership solves the issues around security data volume so you can prioritize accurately because you’re not inundated. E.G. just described the perfect scenario, which is that the right data gets into the right solution to enable effective assessment and understanding to make prioritizations on threat responses and threat actions based on business impact.

That huge but managed amount of data that comes in is invaluable. It’s what drives everything to get to prioritizing the right incidents.

Gardner: The way you're describing how the solutions work together, it sounds like the IT people can get better awareness about security priorities. And the security people can perhaps get insights into making sure that the business-wide processes remain safe.

Critical care for large communities

Klaessig: You’re absolutely right because the continuous threat prioritization and breach protection means that the protective measures have to go through both IT and security. That collaboration and automation enables not just the operational resilience that IT is driving for, but also the cyber resilience that the security teams want. It is a handshake.

That shared data and workloads are part of security but they reflect actual IT processes, and vice versa. It makes both more effective.  

Gardner: E.G., anything more to offer on this idea of roles, automation, and how your products come together?

Pearson: I wholeheartedly agree with Karl. IT and security can’t be siloed anymore. They can't be separate organizations.

IT relies on what security operations puts in play, and security operations can't do anything unless IT mitigates what security finds. So they can't act individually any more. Otherwise, it's like telling a football player to lace up their ice skates and go score a couple of goals.

IT relies on what security operations puts in play, and security operations can't do anything unless IT mitigates what security finds. So they can’t act individually any more. Otherwise, it’s like telling a football player to lace up their ice skates and go score a couple of goals.

Gardner: As we use microsegmentation and zero trust to attend to individual devices and users, can we provide a safer environment for sets of users or applications?

Pearson: Yes, we have to do this in smaller and smaller groups. It’s about being able to understand what those communities need and how to dynamically protect them. 

As we adjust to the pandemic and the humungous security breaches like we found at the end of 2020, protecting large communities can't be done as easily. It’s so much easier to break those down into smaller chunks that can be best protected.

Klaessig: It’s also around protecting best based on the applications. I think that has a big impact because you can say, “Hey, these are the applications critical for our customers and our organization.”  Therefore, anyone who has access to those, we monitor that much more closely, or they are automatically prioritized at the top of the queue if there's an incident.

We can group things out based on use and the impact to the business. And again, this all contributes to the prioritization and the response when we coordinate between the two solutions, Unisys and ServiceNow.

Gardner: So it’s an identity-driven model but on steroids. It's not just individual people. It's critical groups.

Klaessig: Well said.

Pearson: Yes.

Gardner: How can people consume this, whether you’re in IT, security personnel, or even an end user? If you're trying to protect yourself, how do you avail yourself of what ServiceNow and Unisys have put together?

Speed for bad-to-worse scenarios

Klaessig: The key is we target enterprises. That's where we work together and that's where ServiceNow workflows go. But to your point, nowadays I'm essentially a lone, solo office person, right? With that in mind, we need to remember those new best practices.

The appropriate workflows and processes within our collective solutions must reflect the actual individual users and processes. It goes back to our comments a couple of minutes ago, which is what do you use most? How often do you use it? When do you use it, and how critical is it? Also, who else is involved?

That’s something we haven’t touched on up until now -- who else will be impacted? At the end of the day, what is the impact? In other words, if someone just had a credential stolen, I need the quick isolation from Unisys based on the areas of IT impacted. I can do that in ServiceNow, and then the appropriate response puts a workflow out and it’s automated into IT and security. That’s critical. And that’s the starting point for the other processes and workflows.

Gardner: We now need to consider what happens when you inevitably face some security issues. How does the ServiceNow Security Incident Response Platform and Unisys Stealth come together to help isolate, reduce, and stifle a threat rapidly?

Pearson: The reason such speed is important is that many of you all have already been impacted by ransomware. How many of you all have actually seen what ransomware will do if left unchecked for even just 30 minutes inside of a network? It’s horrible. That to me, that is your biggest need.

Whether it is just a regular end-user or if it’s a full-scale, enterprise-level-type workflow, speed is a huge reason that we need a solution to work and to work well. You have to be fast to keep bad things from going really, really wrong.

One of the biggest reasons we have come together with Stealth doing microsegmentation and building small communities and protecting them is to watch the flow of what happens with whom across ports and protocols because it is identity based. Who’s trying to access certain systems? We’re able to watch those things.

As we’re seeing that information, we’re able to say if something bad is happening on a specific system. We’re able to show that weird or bad traffic flow is occurring, send that to ServiceNow and allow the automated operations to protect an end point or a server.

Because the process is automated, it brings the response down to less than 10 seconds, using automated workflows within ServiceNow. With dynamic isolation, we’re able to isolate that specific system and cut if off from doing anything else bad within a larger network.

That’s huge. That gives us the capability to take on something fast that could bring down an entire system. I have seen ransomware go 30 minutes unchecked, and it will completely ravage an entire file server, which brings down an entire company for three days until everything can be brought back up from the backups. Nobody has time for that. Nobody has time for the 30 minutes it took to do something silly to cost you three days of extra work, not to mention what else may come from that.

With our combined capabilities, Unisys Stealth provides the information we’re able send to the ServiceNow platform to have protection put in place to isolate and start to remediate within 10 seconds. That’s best for everybody because 10 seconds worth of damage is a whole lot easier to mitigate than 30 minutes’ worth.

Klaessig: Really well-said, E.G.

Gardner: I can see why 2+2=6 when it comes to putting your solutions together. ServiceNow gets the information from Stealth that something is wrong, but then you could put the best of what you do together to work.

Resolve to scale with automation

Klaessig: We do. And this leads us to do even more automation. How can you get to that discovery point faster, and what does that mean to resolve the problem?

And there’s another angle to this. Our listeners and readers are probably saying, “I know we need to respond quickly, and, yes, you’re enabling me to do so. And, yes, you’re enabling me to isolate and do some orchestration that ties things up to buy me time. But how do I scale the teams that are already buried beyond belief today to go ahead and address that?”

That’s a bit overwhelming. And here’s another added wrinkle. E.G. mentioned ransomware, and the scary part is in 2020 ransomware was paid 50 percent of the time versus one-third of the time in 2019. Even putting aside the pandemic and natural disasters, this is what our teams our facing.

It again goes back to what you heard E.G. and I touch on, which is automation of security and IT is what’s critical here. Not only can you respond consistently quicker, but you’ll be able to scale your teams and skills -- and that’s where the automation further kicks in.

Businesses can't take on this type of volume around security management with the teams they have in place today. That's why automation is so critical. As attacks escalate, they can't just go and add more people in time, right?

In other words, businesses can't take on this type of volume around security management with the teams they have in place today. That’s why automation is so critical. Comprehensive tooling increases detection on the Unisys side, and that gives them not only more time to respond but allows them to be more effective as well. As attacks escalate, they can’t just go ahead and add more people in time, right? This is where they need that automation to be able to scale with what they have.

It really pays off. We’ve seen customers benefit from a dollars and cents prospective, where they saw a 74 percent improvement in time-to-identify. And now 46 percent of their incidents are handled by automation, saving more than 8,700 hours annually for their teams. Just wrap your head around that. I mean, that’s just a huge advantage from putting these pieces together and automating and orchestration like E.G. has been talking about.

Gardner: Is it too soon, Karl, to talk about bots and more automation where the automation is a bit more proactive? What’s going to happen when the data and the speed get even more useful, but more compressed when it comes to the response time? How smart are these systems going to get?

Get people to do the right thing

Klaessig: The reality is, we’re already going there. When you think of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), we’re already doing a certain amount of that in the products.

As we leverage more of the great data from Unisys, it drives who can resolve those vulnerabilities because they have a predetermined history of dealing with those types of vulnerabilities. That’s just an example of being able to use ML to align the right people to the right resolution. Because, at the end of the day, it still comes down to certain people doing certain things and it always will. But we can use that ML and AI to put those together very quickly, very accurately, and very efficiently. So, again, it takes that time to respond down to seconds, as E.G. mentioned.

Gardner: Are we going to get to a point where we simply say, “J.A.R.V.I.S., clean up the network”?

Pearson: I hope so! Going back to my old days of being an admin, I was an extremely lazy admin. If I could have just said, “J.A.R.V.I.S., remediate my servers,” I would have been all over it.

I don’t think there’s any way we can’t move toward more automation and ML. I don’t necessarily want us to get to the point where Skynet is not going to delete the virus, saying, “I am the virus.” We don’t need that.

But being able to automate helps overcome the mundane, such as resetting somebody’s password and being able to pull a system offline that’s experiencing some sort of weird whatever it may be. Automating those types of things helps everybody go faster through their day because if you’re working a helpdesk, you’ve already gotten 19 people with their hair on fire begging for your attention.

If you could cut off five of those people by automating and very easily allowing some AI to do the work for you, why wouldn’t you? I think their time is more valuable than the few dollars it’s going to cost to automate those processes.

Klaessig: That's going to be the secret to success in 2021 and going forward. You can scale, and the way you're going to scale is to take out those mundane tasks and automate all of those different things that can be automated.

As I mentioned, 46 percent of the security incidents became automated for our customer. That's a huge advantage. And at the end of the day, putting J.A.R.V.I.S. aside, the more ML we can get into it, the better and more repeatable the processes and the workflows will be -- and that much faster. That's ultimately what we're driving toward as well.

Gardner: Now that we understand the context of the problem, the challenges organizations face, and how these solutions come together, I'm curious at how this actually gets embedded into organizations? Is this something that security people do, that the IT people do, that the helpdesk people do? Is it all of the above?

Everybody has role to reap benefits

Pearson: The way we usually get this going is there needs to be buy-in from everybody because it's going to touch a lot of folks. I'm willing to bet Karl's going to say similar things. It's nice to have everybody involved and to have everybody's buy-in on this.

It usually starts for us at Unisys with what we're doing with microsegmentation and with a networking and security group. They need to talk to be able to get this rolled out. We also need the general IT folks because they're going to have to install and get this rolled out to endpoints. And we need the server admins involved as well. 

When it comes down to it, everybody's going to have to be involved a little bit. But it generally starts with the security folks and the networking folks, saying, “How can I protect my environment just a little bit more than I was before?” And then it rolls from there.

Klaessig: I agree. At the end of the day, this goes back being a collaborative opportunity. In other words, when we look at this, this is the opportunity for IT and security to join together. These solutions really benefit both teams. And oftentimes, it actually can piggyback on investments they've already made elsewhere.

At the end of the day, this goes back to being a collaborative opportunity ... for IT and security to join together. These solutions benefit both teams and can piggyback on investments they have already made elsewhere.

And that's a big advantage as well. Going forward, I strongly believe in -- and I've seen the results of this -- being a driver toward greater collaboration. It is that type of deployment and should be done in that manner. And then quite frankly, both organizations reap the benefits.

Pearson: Wholeheartedly.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how comprehensive cloud security solutions need to go beyond on-premises threat detection to significantly strengthen critical digital business services.

And we've learned how a joint-solution between Unisys and ServiceNow shrinks the attack surface, dynamically and rapidly isolating today's extended enterprise security threats.

Please join me in thanking our guests, Karl Klaessig, Director of Product Marketing for Security Operations, at ServiceNow. Thanks so much, Karl.

Klaessig: Thank you, it was a pleasure.

Gardner: And we've also been here with E.G. Pearson, Security Architect at Unisys. Thanks so much, E.G.

Pearson: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect cybersecurity innovation discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Unisys- and ServiceNow-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. 

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Unisys and ServiceNow.

A transcript of a discussion on how comprehensive cloud security solutions need to go beyond on-premises threat detection and remediation to significantly strengthen extended digital business workflows. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, February 16, 2021

How Global Data Availability Accelerates Collaboration and Delivers Business Insights


A transcript of a discussion that explores how comprehensive and global data storage access delivers the rapid insights businesses need for digital business transformation.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: IBM Storage.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Our next data strategy insights discussion explores the payoffs when enterprises overcome the hurdles of disjointed storage to obtain global data access.

By leveraging the latest in container and storage server technologies, the holy grail of inclusive, comprehensive, and actionable storage can be obtained. And such access extends across all deployment models – from hybrid cloud, to software-as-a-service (SaaS), to distributed data centers, and edge.

Stay with us now as we examine the role that comprehensive data storage plays in delivering the rapid insights businesses need for digital business transformation. To learn how, we’re joined again by Denis Kennelly, General Manager, IBM Storage. Welcome back, Denis.

Kennelly: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner:  Denis, in our earlier discussions in this three-part series we learned about IBM’s vision for global consistent data, as well as the newest systems forming the foundation for these advances.

But let’s now explore the many value streams gained from obtaining global data access. We hear a lot about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption needed to support digital businesses. So what role does a modern storage capability -- particularly with a global access function and value -- play in that AI growth?

Kennelly: As enterprises become increasingly digitally transformed, the amount of data they are generating is enormous. IDC predicts that something like 42 billion Internet of things (IoT) devices will be sold by 2025, and so the role of storage is not only centralized to data centers. It needs to be distributed across this entire hybrid cloud environment.

Discover and share AI data

Kennelly

For actionable AI, you want to build models on all of the data that’s been generated across this environment. Being able to discover and understand that data is critical, and that’s why it’s a key part of our storage capabilities. You need to run that storage on all of these highly distributed environments in a seamless fashion. You could be running anywhere -- the data center, the public cloud, and at edge locations. But you want to have the same software and capabilities for all of these locations to allow for that essential seamless access.

That’s critical to enabling an AI journey because AI doesn’t just operate on the data sitting in a public cloud or data center. It needs to operate on all of the data if you want to get the best insights. You must get to the data from all of these locations and bring it together in a seamless manner.

Gardner: When we’re able to attain such global availability of data -- particularly in a consistent context – how does that accelerate AI adoption? Are there particular use cases, perhaps around DevOps? How do people change their behavior when it comes to AI adoption, thanks to what the storage and data consistency can do for them?

Kennelly:  First it’s about knowing where the data is and doing basic discovery. And that’s a non-trivial task because data is being generated across the enterprise. We are increasingly collaborating remotely and that generates a lot of extended data. Being able to access and share that data across environments is a critical requirement. It’s something that’s very important to us.

Then -- as you discover and share the data – you can also bring that data together into use by AI models. You can use it to actually generate better AI models across the various tiers of storage. But you don’t want to just end up saying, “Okay, I discovered all of the data. I’m going to move it to this certain location and then I’m going to run my analytics on it.”

Part 1 in the IBM Storage innovation series
Part 2 in the series
Instead, you want to do the analytics in real time and in a distributed fashion. And that’s what’s critical about the next level of storage.

Coming back to what’s hindering AI adoption, number one is that data discovery because enterprises spent a huge amount of time just discovering the data. And when you get access, you need to have seamless access. And then, of course, as you build your AI models you need to infuse those analytics into the applications and capabilities that you’re developing.

And that leads to your question around DevOps, to be able to integrate the processes of generating and building AI models into the application development process so that we make sure the application developers can leverage those insights for the applications they are building.

Gardner:  For many organizations, moving to hybrid cloud has been about application portability. But when it comes to the additional data mobility we gain from consistent global data access, there’s a potential greater value. Is there a second shoe to fall, if you will, Denis, when we can apply such data mobility in a hybrid cloud environment?

Access data across hybrid cloud

Kennelly:  Yes, and that second shoe is about to fall. The first part of our collective cloud journey was all about moving to the public cloud, moving everything to public clouds, and building applications with cloud-based data.

What we discovered in doing that is that life is not so simple, and we’re really now in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons. Because of that success, we now need the hybrid cloud approach.

The need for more cloud portability has led to technologies like containers to get portability across all of the environments -- from data centers to clouds. As we roll out containers into production, however, the whole question of data becomes even more critical.

That need for more cloud portability has led to technologies like containers to get portability across all of these environments – from data centers to clouds. As we roll out containers and these workloads into production, the whole data question is more critical.

You can now build an application that runs in a certain environment, and containers allow you to move that application to other environments very quickly. But if the data doesn’t follow -- if the data access doesn’t follow that application seamlessly -- then you face some serious challenges and problems.

And that is the next shoe to drop, and it’s dropping right now. As we roll out these sophisticated applications into production, being able to copy data or get access to data across this hybrid cloud environment is the biggest challenge the industry is facing.

Gardner: When we envision such expansive data mobility, we often think about location, but it also impacts the type of data – be it file, block, and object storage, for example. Why must there be global access geographically -- but also in terms of the storage type and across the underlying technology platforms?

Kennelly: To the application developer, we really have to hide from them that layer of complexity of the storage type and platform. At the end of the day, the application developer is looking for a consistent API through which to access the data services, whether that’s file, block, or object. They shouldn’t have to care about that level of detail.

It’s important that there’s a focus on consistent access via APIs to the developer. And then the storage subsystem has to take care of the federated global access of the data. Also, as we generate data, the storage subsystem should scale horizontally.

These are the design principles we have put into the IBM Storage platform. Number one, you get seamless actions and consistent access – be it file, object, or block storage. And we can scale horizontally as you generate data across that hybrid cloud environment.

Gardner: The good news is that global data access enablement can now be done with greater ease. The bad news is the global access enablement can be done anywhere, anytime, and with ease.

And so we have to also worry about access, security, permissions, and regulatory compliance issues. How do you open the floodgates, in a sense, for common access to distributed data, but at the same time put in the guardrails that allow for the management of that access in a responsible way?

Global data access opens doors

Kennelly: That’s a great question. As we introduce simplicity and ease of data access, we can’t just open it up to everybody. We have to make sure we have good authentication as part of the design, using things like two-factor authentication on the data-access APIs.

But that’s only half of the problem. In the security world, the unfortunate acceptance is that you probably are going to get breached. It’s in how you respond that really differentiates you and determines how quickly you can get the business back on its feet.

And so, when something bad happens, the third critical role for the storage subsystem to play is in the access control to the persistence storage. At the end of the day, that is what people are after. Being able to understand the typical behavior of those storage systems, and how data is usually being stored, forms a baseline against which you can understand when something out of the ordinary is happening.

Part 1 in the IBM Storage innovation series
Part 2 in the series
Clearly, if you’re under a malware or CryptoLocker attack, you see a very different input/output (IO) pattern than you would normally see. We can detect that in real time, understand when it happens, and make sure you have protected copies of the data so you can quickly access that and get back to business and back online quickly.

Why is all of that important? Because we live in a world where it’s not a case of if it will happen, it’s really when it will happen. How we can respond is critical.

Gardner: Denis, throughout our three-part series we’ve been discussing what we can do, but we haven’t necessarily delved into specific use cases. I know you can’t always name businesses and reference customers, but how can we better understand the benefits of a global data access capability in the context of use cases?

In practice, when the rubber hits the road, how does global data storage access enable business transformation? Is there a key metric you look for to show how well your storage systems support business outcomes? 

Global data storage success

Kennelly: We’re at a point right now when customers are looking to drive new business models and to move much more quickly in their hybrid cloud environments.

There are enabling technologies right now facilitating that. There’s a lot of talk about edge with the advent of 5G networks, which enable a lot of this to happen. When you talk about seamless access and the capability to distribute data across these environments, you need the underlying network infrastructure to make that happen.

Customers are looking to drive new business models and to move much more quickly in their hybrid cloud deployments. There's a lot of talk about edge with the advent of 5G networks. When you talk about seamless access and the capability to distribute data across these environments, you need the underlying network infrastructure to make that happen.

As we do that, we’re looking at a number of key business measures and metrics. We have done some independent surveys and analysis looking at the business value that we drive for our clients with a hybrid cloud platform and things like portability, agility, and seamless data access.

In terms of business value, we have four or five measures. For example, we can drive roughly 2.5 times more business value for our clients -- everything from top-line growth to operational savings. And that’s something that we have tested with many clients independently.

One example that’s very relevant in the world we live in today is we have a cloud provider that needed to have more federated access to their global data. But they also wanted to distribute that through edge nodes in a consistent manner. And that’s just an example of why this is happening in action.

Gardner: You know, some of the major consumers of analytics in businesses these days are data scientists, and they don’t always want to know what’s going on underneath the covers. On the other hand, what goes on underneath the covers can greatly impact how well they can do their jobs, which are often essential to digital business transformation.

For you to address a data scientist specifically about why global access for data and storage modernization is key, what would you tell them? How do you describe the value that you’re providing to someone like a data scientist who plays such a key role in analytics?

Kennelly: Well, data scientists talk a lot about data sets. They want access to data sets so they can test their hypothesis very quickly. In a nutshell, we surface data sets quicker and faster than anybody else at a price performance that leads the industry -- and that’s what we do every day to enable data scientists.

Gardner: Throughout our series of three storage strategy discussions, we’ve talked about how we got here and what we’re doing. But we haven’t yet talked about what comes next.

These enabling technologies not only satisfy business imperatives and requirements now but set up organizations to be even more intelligent over time. Let’s look to the future for the expanding values when you do data access globally and across hybrid clouds well. 

Insight-filled future drives growth

Kennelly: Yes, you get to critically look at current and new business models. At the end of the day, this is about driving business growth. As you start to look at these environments -- and we’ve talked a lot about analytics and data – it becomes about getting competitive advantage through real-time insights about what’s going on in your environments.

You become able to better understand your supply chain, what’s happening in certain products, and in certain manufacturing lines. You’re able to respond accordingly. There’s a big operational benefit in terms of savings. You don’t have to have excess capacity in the environment.

Part 1 in the IBM Storage innovation series
Part 2 in the series
Also, in seeking new business opportunities, you will detect the patterns needed to have insights you hadn’t had before by doing analytics and machine learning into what’s critical in your systems and markets. If you move your IT environment and centralize everything in one cloud, for example, then that really hinders that progress.

By being able to do that with all of the data as it’s generated in real time, you get very unique insights that provide competitive advantage.

Gardner: And lastly, why IBM? What sets you apart from the competition in the storage market for obtaining these larger goals of distributed analytics, intelligence, and competitiveness?

Kennelly: We have shown over the years that we have been at the forefront of many transformations of businesses and industries. Going back to the electronic typewriter, if we want to go back far enough, or now to our business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-employee (B2E) models in the hybrid cloud -- IBM has helped businesses make these transformations. That includes everything from storage to data and AI through to hybrid cloud platforms, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and right out to our business service consulting.

IBM has the end-to-end capabilities to make that all happen. It positions us as an ideal partner who can do so much.

I love to talk about storage and the value of storage, and I spend a lot of time talking with people in our business consulting group to understand the business transformations that clients are trying to drive and the role that storage has in that. Likewise, with our data science and data analytics teams that are enabling those technologies.

The combination of all of those capabilities as one idea is a unique differentiator for us in the industry. And it’s why we are developing the leading edge capabilities, products, and technology to enable the next digital transformations.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on the major payoffs when enterprises overcome the hurdles of disjointed storage to obtain global data access.

And we’ve learned about the role and impact of a comprehensive and global data storage model when delivering rapid insights for accomplishing digital business transformation.

So please join me impacting our guest, Denis Kennelly, General Manager, IBM Storage.  Thank you so much, Denis.

Kennelly: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks as well to our audience for joining these BriefingsDirect data strategies insights discussions. Please look for the other two discussions in this series on the IBM Storage vision, as well as the newest systems that form the foundation for these advances.

I’m Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout the series of IBM Storage sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: IBM Storage.

A transcript of a discussion that explores how comprehensive and global data storage access delivers the rapid insights businesses need for digital business transformation. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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