Archive for April 2017

Journeys into Cloud

Have you been wondering what the journey to cloud will be for your team or department or enterprise? it is not an easy path to migrate all the data across the enterprise into the cloud, but the journey can be a connected system of different paths and tracks which needs to be planned, aligned and executed. The pitfalls of a cloud journey is who will you trust as your partner, the bottom line for all companies is the cost of hosting their data and systems in the cloud with all the security. In here lies the fact that if you choose one partner who can be your core competitor your issue is will there be a data leak within the ecosystem to create intense competition or would the partner turn into a hostile competitor if they know how your pricing models work. The other side has more issues where you have a partner but their ecosystem cannot support all the tools you use. how do you make choices and decision? do you migrate all data, if so does that ecosystem support all compliance needs? do you have audibility and traceability? and the biggest question is if you plan to go hybrid cloud can you do that easily?. We are having this discussion to prod your thoughts around Digital Data Transformation and Cybersecurity areas, which have bigger roadmaps and future state. As we progress into the next weeks you will see this topic emerge more in the blogs and keep the conversation going.

Cybersecurity – Sniffing

A goal that cybersecurity tools and algorithms needs to satisfy is the ability to sniff and detect intrusions. This process can be completed in different ways by different vendors and solution providers. What it does at the minimum is to sniff every data piece that comes into the organization and identify patterns that might sound irregular. For example think of emails, an APT attack might come as mail segments from known email addresses. how can you sniff that and stop it? this is where you need to discuss with internal and external resources on techniques and processes. In the military world the situation is handled different and in commercial world we need to brace it very differently. Interesting, no this is just foundational and at the very basic process expected from all tools. CISO’s and their teams expect more depth and visibility in these processes along with API interfaces to customize. We will discuss more on this series in the next few blogs.

Friday – Time for a Weekend.

All of us across the world like Friday as it is the last working day for a week to complete. But this is one day a cybersecurity plot can take place, are you ready and alert? do you have the perimeters and fences setup to barricade and protect? As we move forward to the next iterations of data, we have to keep our alerts like everyday and be ready as a hawk to prey. We will continue our banter next week on Cybersecurity. Have a great weekend.

Cybersecurity Pitfall – Why

In the recent Gartner Summit in Texas, we heard from analysts a key piece of prediction –

“By 2020, 30% Of Web Browsing Sessions Will Be Done Without A Screen – In Star Trek, interactions with the computer happened most often via sound interface. The rise of voice assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa means that more people will become used to human-voice interaction with computers. It’s a short leap from that to websites that don’t show, but speak information to the user. If you’re in web development, this is going to mean learning a whole new set of media operations and an entirely new way of working with content developers.”

This means we are looking at security from a whole different angle. This is where why cybersecurity fails needs to be understood, the pitfalls exist in different areas from intrusion, threats, attacks, persistent silent actors and more in the spectrum. Here is where technologies cannot help us, the best machine learning and neural network algorithms can work only if the process is developed and optimized for its utilization. If we are moving to web search by voice, there are so many linguistic dependencies, variations, support and a complete change to the world of search and social media. Lot of opportunities laden with risk and unknown factors in terms of security, this needs to be clearly defined and understood.

For Ampcus team this is one of our areas of focus where we are applying our expertise to create solutions that can be leveraged and deployed, our innovation labs are going on this as one spectrum of activities from a cybersecurity perspective. Stay tuned as we discuss this more in the following blog.

Cybersecurity – Perimeters & Fencing

We live in a world of data and information, constantly flowing around us, generated by us and peers. Some of the data that floats is sensitive to us and we realize the same after the fact, oops too late is what we hear consistently in the past in these situations. With the advent of Social Media and Webpages becoming life for many enterprises, we evolved the idea of cybersecurity. One of the key areas of cybersecurity that we focus on (or need to focus) is the perimeters and fencing of systems and information. We are not talking about gardening here with fences or perimeters, we need to add firewalls, DMZ, routers and switches, networks and sub-networks. These perimeters will be managed with software and infrastructure layers which will provide the first layers of security. Adding the fences to the information layers will provide the security layers to the data, which will prevent the leaks of information and isolate cybersecurity threats. We are working on a whitepaper that will be published on the subject.