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Things To Do Right Now About Your Cybersecurity Workforce Crisis

Intel Security has released Hacking the Skills Shortage, a report revealing the current cybersecurity workforce crisis. The report is full of interesting observations. For example, 71% of respondents admitted that this lack of talent has had a direct and negative effect on their organization.

The shortage in cybersecurity skills has done measurable damage to companies. It is harder for firms to leverage new technology to compete in the market, harder to comply with government directives for protecting data, and harder to ensure the trust of partners, suppliers and customers. This shortage is causing real trouble.

The trouble only gets worse when hackers succeed. According to the Intel survey, one in three respondents admit the shortage has made their firm a more desirable hacking target (we think it is hitting far more, but that is what the survey said).

Additional key findings of the survey include:

  • 82% of respondents reported a shortage of cybersecurity skills
  • 9 out of 10 respondents say that cybersecurity technology could help compensate for skill shortages
  • 76% of respondents said their government is not investing enough in building cybersecurity talent

We have direct and personal experience in this domain and see the impact of this shortage across multiple industries. Our recommendations are that firms seek to mitigate this challenge by a comprehensive approach that includes actions like:

  • Understand that mitigating cyber risks is not just the job of the cybersecurity workforce or even the IT team. Security and IT teams play important roles, but business leaders from across the organization must be involved to mitigate digital risk.
  • Educate your entire workforce on the nature of the threat, as well as what they need to do to help keep your organization secure.
  • Review all your plans and policies to focus on ways to optimize your cybersecurity spend and optimize your need for trained cybersecurity professionals.
  • Consider the right ways to optimize your outsourcing strategy, including the smart use of cloud capabilities for your IT and also the smart use of outsourced cybersecurity vendors.
  • Consider leveraging the talents of a firm that provides CISO as a service solutions.

If your organization is suffering from the impact of the cybersecurity skills shortage we would love to hear from you and would be glad to provide more insights relevant to your planning to address this gap.

The Cybersecurity Framework in Action: An Intel Use Case

On 3 March 2015 I participated in a deep dive into some key policies and processes used by Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) to continue to reduce the business risk of cyber threats. This review was presented by Malcolm Harkins, Intel’s Chief Security and Privacy Officer. Malcolm was briefing how Intel corporation leveraged the NIST-coordinated Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity to create a more mission-focused cyber security effort across their corporation. Their approach is also helping establish a common language with suppliers to Intel, significantly extending the approach.

Intel’s use of the framework clearly got results. You can review them yourself online at http://intel.com/federal But here are some of the things that jumped out at me during the presentation:

• The framework was used as a living risk management tool, not at static compliance checklist. This is key.
• The pilot resulted in reusable tools and best practices for the company
• The pilot also produced feedback for NIST which will impact and continuously improve the overall framework.
• Benefits of the framework include an ability to more quickly focus in on areas of the enterprise security posture that need focus.
• This also supports collaboration, inside the organization and also to other organizations external to the corporation.
• Intel expects to continue to harmonize their internal risk management methodologies, technologies and language across their corporation through use of the framework.
• They also are using the framework to better inform internal risk tolerance discussions.
• Intel executives see the framework as a way to ensure cyber security activities are focused more on risk reduction vice just compliance. This has always been leadership’s intent, but the framework makes it easier.

We have written about the NIST framework here before and have long seen the value (it has helped us help many of our clients out). Intel corporation publishing a use case like this will help convince many other companies to take a look at the framework and that will help more firms adopt a common language in the security related elements of people, process, technology and the overall ecosystem.

For firms like our, we will continue to leverage this framework to inform our own security and as one of the key tools leveraged in our interactions with clients. We thank Intel for publishing their case study, it is a fantastic and very helpful contribution to the community.

Examining New Mission-Focused Capabilities Coming From The Cloudera And Intel Engineering Partnership

The video at this link and embedded below captures the content and dialog of a webinar which examined new capabilities of Cloudera and Intel, with a focus on capabilities that provide a full stack solution to many key enterprise mission needs. The webinar included insights by Cloudera’s Senior Director of Technology Webster Mudge and Intel’s Enterprise Technology Specialist Ed Herold, plus questions from an informed audience. Results of the recent CTOlabs.com white paper on this topic were also presented.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KgxCb2X_Bo

This information can inform your design trades and is relevant to enterprise architects, engineers and line of business leaders.

We would love to get you feedback on the webinar video and/or white paper. Please contact us with your thoughts.

We track Cloudera in our list of Big Data disrupters.

We track Intel as a Tech Titan

Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, McAfee and Symantec Found the Cyber Threat Alliance

In what could be a very virtuous trend, four of the cyber security industry’s leading tech vendors (Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, McAfee and Symantec) have established a consortium focused on the furtherance of the art and science of cyber threat intelligence. This alliance, started in May and expanded in September, aims to help industry entities coordinate and collaborate in new ways against the high end adversaries attacking the corporate world.

The consortium is focused on sharing of threat intelligence, including indicators of compromise, according to a release.

We believe this will be a significant new source of information that contributes to the overall cyber threat intelligence capability of industry.

The mission of the Cyber Threat Alliance is to drive a coordinated industry effort against cyber adversaries through deep collaboration on threat intelligence and sharing indicators of compromise.

While past industry efforts have often been limited to the exchange of malware samples, this new alliance will provide more actionable threat intelligence from contributing members, including information on zero-day vulnerabilities, botnet command and control (C&C) server information, mobile threats, and indicators of compromise (IoCs) related to advanced persistent threats (APTs), as well as the commonly-shared malware samples. By raising the industry’s collective actionable intelligence, alliance participants will be able to deliver greater security for individual customers and organizations.

“We must match our adversaries’ aggressive drive to innovate with our own deeper commitment to collaborate. It’s no longer enough to share and compare yesterday’s malware samples. As an industry, we need to understand and be poised to react to the latest complex and multidimensional attacks of today and tomorrow. This cyber alliance provides a critical framework for educating each other on the infrastructure and evolving tactics behind these attacks.”
– Vincent Weafer, senior vice president for McAfee Labs, part of Intel Security

For more information on the cyber alliance and its members, visit:
cyberthreatalliance.org

This is a continuation of and very supportive of the trend we have been reporting on towards automation. This type of alliance will eventually be able to produce indicators that can be acted on in automated ways, giving a leg up to enterprise defenders.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Cloudera CSO Mike Olson on Intel and Cloudera’s Technology Collaboration

Two of my favorite technology companies, the great American firms Intel Corporation and Cloudera, are now working very strategically together in a way that will have a positive impact on the future of enterprise IT.

For context, see the video at this link and embedded below:

In the video, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich talks about the equity investment and importance of the technology collaboration between Intel and Cloudera. The bottom line here: The leader in data center hardware and high performance computing (Intel) is now strategically teamed with the leader in the big data software platform (Cloudera) to produce a great innovation for developers, users and solution providers across every realm. This is bringing solutions to the mainstream in a way that leverages a standard platform.

What do I look for next? As a CTO I would like to see new documentation, including use cases, reference architectures and repeatable guidance that enterprises and developers can use for this new platform. Both Cloudera and Intel have many reference architectures and use cases available now, but new ones that combine the power of both these firms will be an awesome read. I really can’t wait.

Mike Olson of Cloudera provided some context on what this means strategically in a blog post at Cloudera. He summarized the essence of the news as:

  • Intel will replace its own Apache Hadoop-based software distribution with CDH. We’ll transition current customers and partners over a reasonable time period.
  • Intel and Cloudera will cooperate to enhance the open source projects that make up CDH so that they take advantage of the power and features of Intel’s chipset. Intel silicon powers 94% of the world’s servers today, so we expect to make life better for an enormous number of users.
  • We’ll work together to promote and distribute the software worldwide, directly and through the channels and partnerships we each bring to the relationship.
  • Intel Capital has acquired a stake in Cloudera, adding to the funds we announced last week. It’s the largest data center investment in Intel Capital’s history, and the investment makes Intel our largest strategic shareholder.

Mike concludes his post with some important relevance on this news, saying:

Our collaboration means that customers will be able to rationalize their IT spending. They’ll be able to do existing work better, faster and cheaper. More importantly, they’ll be able to attack new workloads, analyzing more data than ever before in ways previously impossible. They’ll get value from data they couldn’t capture before.

Mike’s full blog is here: The Next Ten Years

Also see more from the Intel press release below:

Cloudera, Intel Commit to Accelerate and Transform How Enterprises Use Big Data; Intel Makes Significant Equity Investment in Cloudera

PALO ALTO, Calif., and SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 27, 2014 – Intel Corporation and Cloudera today announced a broad strategic technology and business collaboration, as well as a significant equity investment from Intel making it Cloudera’s largest strategic shareholder and a member of its board of directors. This is Intel’s single largest data center technology investment in its history. The deal will join Cloudera’s leading enterprise analytic data management software powered byApache Hadoop™ with the leading data center architecture based on Intel® Xeon® technology. The goal is acceleration of customer adoption of big data solutions, making it easier for companies of all sizes to obtain increased business value from data by deploying open source Apache Hadoop solutions. Both the strategic collaboration and the equity investment are subject to standard closing conditions, including customary regulatory approvals.

Cloudera will develop and optimize Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) for Intel architecture as its preferred platform and support a range of next-generation technologies including Intel fabrics, flash memory and security. In turn, Intel will market and promote CDH and Cloudera Enterprise to its customers as its preferred Hadoop platform. Intel will focus its engineering and marketing resources on the joint roadmap. The optimizations from Intel’s Distribution for Apache Hadoop/Intel Data Platform (IDH/IDP) will be integrated into CDH and IDH/IDP and will be transitioned after v3.1 release at the end of March. To ensure a seamless customer transition to CDH, Intel and Cloudera will work together on a migration path from IDH/IDP. Cloudera will also ensure that all enhancements will be contributed to their respective open source projects and CDH.

The collaboration with Cloudera promises to enhance both Intel data center and Internet of Things (IoT) technology initiatives by enabling customers to manage and analyze machine-generated data from a variety of sources, spanning sensors to gateways and a range of devices.

“By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. “We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business. This collaboration spans our data center technology from compute to network, security and storage, and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things.”

Both companies remain committed to the open source community that has been the driving force behind Hadoop. The companies will also execute joint go-to-market strategies that include coordinated product, channel and sales programs.

“Hadoop has changed the entire conversation around data,” said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer, Cloudera. “Based on our ability to store, process and analyze all kinds of data, increasingly in new ways, the potential for advances in business, social and economic environments are vast. Teaming with Intel, the industry leader in data center technology innovation, presents an opportunity for us to layer Hadoop into a platform’s core framework. The result is rapid performance improvements on workloads such as those extracting intelligent insight. Intel’s vision for delivering open, performance optimized solutions for big data is synergistic to our vision to help companies accelerate time to achieving success.”

About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available at newsroom.intel.com andblogs.intel.com.

Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.

  • Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

About Cloudera
Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified Platform for Big Data: The Enterprise Data Hub. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, process and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data. Founded in 2008, Cloudera was the first and is still today the leading provider and supporter of Hadoop for the enterprise. Cloudera also offers software for business critical data challenges including storage, access, management, analysis, security and search. With over 20,000 individuals trained, Cloudera is a leading educator of data professionals, offering the industry’s broadest array of Hadoop training and certification programs. Cloudera works with over 900 hardware, software and services partners to meet customers’ big data goals. Leading organizations in every industry run Cloudera in production, including finance, telecommunications, retail, internet, utilities, oil and gas, healthcare, biopharmaceuticals, networking and media, plus top public sector organizations globally.http://www.cloudera.com/ www.cloudera.com

Connect with Cloudera
Read our blog: www.cloudera.com/blog/

Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/cloudera

Visit us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/cloudera

Cloudera, Cloudera’s Platform for Big Data, CLoudera Enterprise Basic Edition, Cloudera Enterprise Flex Edition, Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub Edition and CDH are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cloudera Inc. in the United States, and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

Hardware Really Matters for Computer Functionality and Security

It may be stating the obvious to say that the hardware you use has a direct impact on the functionality of your IT. That is so fundamental of a statement it really goes without saying. But for some reason decision-makers gloss over the importance of hardware to security design. Why? The hardware you pick has a direct impact on the security of your enterprise.

This matters at even layer of your enterprise. From devices to networks to servers and storage. The hardware you use has security ramifications.

Consider, for example, Intel Corporation’s vPro technology. This is a capability that comes with modern PC’s.  This component of hardware provides management features that enable systems administrators to exert control over devices to ensure computers are operating well and to ensure they are working securely.  This capability enables remote management, security monitoring and updating of PCs. vPro has several components (my favorites are Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT).  AMT is hardware that enables the secure remote management of enterprise PCs. TXT is the only technology I know of that verifies the launch environment and establishes a root of trust. TXT enables trust at a fundamental/foundational layer.  Without it, no PC can be secure. With it, more secure, resilient systems can be configured and operated and entire enterprises can be made more resilient.

For more on AMT and TXT see: http://ipip.intel.com/go/fedgov/

And for more on hardware and security see: http://www.intel.com/technology/security/index.htm

 

Discussion with Justin Rattner of Intel

This post is a follow-on to my previous report on the 21 April 2009 Xeon 5500 kickoff event hosted by Intel corporation (see: Intel’s New Chip ).   My previous post talked about the new “Intelligent Processors” being fielded by Intel.  With this post I want to provide a bit more information on a key presenter there, Justin Rattner.

You can find background on Justin from two credible sources, his official bio at Intel and a Wikipedia entry on him.

It turns out  Justin works for a pretty cool company.  While talking with Justin and Nigel Ballard (Intel’s Federal Marketing Manager) I mentioned that I run a blog focused on technologists and they invited me to attend a small session with members of the press (this is another great reason to run a blog, you can elbow your way into all sorts of places!).

Some of what I learned from this session with Justin follow:

The new Nehalem chip may very likely change the security game.  We got hints of that at the presentation earlier in the day when he talked about the enhanced ability to support encryption on the chip.  When we were able to ask follow-on questions he underscored something that many of us in the profession have come to realize—encryption is just one of many capabilities that must be brought to bear against the threat.  The best approach is a defense in depth approach.

As part of a defense in depth approach, the new management capabilities of Nehalem provides an ability to watch what is going on in the processor.  Little chips on the processor watch the big chips on the processor.  That enables review of the code that is executing.

When fully taken advantage of, this capability will significantly mitigate the ability of bad guys or malicious code to install and run root kits, for example.  No anti-virus capability can detect a well masked rootkit.  None of the OS guys can do this.  It must be done on the chipset.  The management module on the new Nehalem chip can provide that ability.  It can scan memory and watch processes and compare against known valid code and take action.  In Justin’s words:  “It has become painfully obvious that none of the current defenses are adequate.”  A stand alone management system that can command other processor components is a fundamental solution that will change the game.

I asked Justin one of my favorite questions about Moore’s law.  We all know no mere mortal should ever try to predict its death, but it is time to predict its loss of relevance, I believe.   Afterall, the performance statistics provided by Justin in his opening session showed dramatic, exponential performance enhancements that are far greater than the Moore’s law driven increase in number of transistors on a chip over time.  So I asked Justin to comment.  I asked, if Intel is blowing past the performance predictions of Moore’s law, isn’t Moore’s law less relevant?  Shouldn’t some sort of “Core’s Law” be cited instead, where the number of cores double every two years?  Isn’t that a better predictor of performance?

Justin’s comment: Intel has now realized that Moore’s law is no longer about performance.  Moore’s law is remarkable in terms of predicting the number of transistors, but the number of transistors it takes to increase performance count has grown geometrically.  In general, a 2x increase in performance might require a 4x increase in transistors.  Smarter design is required.  Smarter design, like multi-core and multi-thread gives dramatic increase in performance and many other benefits as well, including an ability to manage thermal and power budget on the chip, or adding virtualization support on the chip.  Doing things like this requires transistors, but it also enhances overall performance.

I asked Justin about the internal tensions between people who are both consumers of tech and high tech workers. As consumers they are receiving more and more capabilities, from handhelds to desktops to cloud services.  Then they go to work and as enterprise workers they are served with sub standard IT.  He knows this tension well and knows it is occurring everywhere, but sees big gains being made in servers available to enterprises and believes now is the moment to upgrade to provide increase enterprise capability to workers.  He believes in establishing private clouds, but also realistically knows public clouds will be with us forever.

I asked Justin about the handheld market.  There are over 3.3 billion active cell phone subscriber accounts, for example, and only 1.2 billion PCs.   Justin was clear in this:  Intel recognizes this market and is coming.  Expect their continued pursuit of a wide range of consumer products, building on success of their Atom chip and netbooks.   Look for Intel moving faster into embedded computing.  Opportunities are expected to “explode” in digital signage, automobiles, healthcare, and personal ecommerce.

I asked about Twitter.  It is in use by many folks at Intel, and there are internal collaborative tools and social media inside the corporation.  It seemed clear that they are not designing chips by 140 character Twitter micro-blog bursts, but they are enhancing internal coordination and cooperation.  And that is good for all of us IT users.

Overall I found Justin to be a world class tech leader and I felt honored to be in the same room with a person who is changing the world in such a huge way.  Thanks Justin for the time.

Intel’s Next Generation Chip Architecture

On 21 April 2009 Intel corporation held an “Intelligent Processors” event which highlighted Intel’s next generation chip architecture and the industry leading companies who are incorporating this technology into their products.   The event, pulled together by Nigel Ballard of Intel, included demos by companies like Endeca, Cisco, Cray, Dell, HP, Oracle, VMware, Microsoft and Sun.  Nineteen hardware partners showed off Xeon 5500-based server products at this event.  Clearly Nigel is a man with convening authority.  When he calls, the big guns of the IT community come.

There were two other big draws at this event.  One was the Intel CTO, Justin Rattner.  I’ll be running a separate article on my interview of Justin shortly.  For now I’ll just say it was great having the new Nehalem Microarchitecture placed in context by a CTO of his stature.  He provided a keynote that underscored not only the technology of this smart server processor, but hit on the importance of innovating in a downturn.  His message was very clear and it is one I believe.  Now is the time to transform computing.

Eric Doyle, Intel’s enterprise Marketing Manager, provided a deeper dive into the power of real offerings based on the new chip, especially the Intel Xeon 5500 (I meant to ask Eric if he can shed some light on why the codename for this project was called Nahelem, since he said he lives in Oregon I wonder if he named it?).

The following are a few notes that combine things Justin Rattner and Eric Doyle said:

The Xeon 5500 based on the Nehalem project is  really the next era for computer chips, providing the biggest jump in productivity and efficiency since the Pentium Pro.    The Nehalem is hitting the market right now (you can get one for your house if you buy a MacPro).  The server based on the Nehalem is Xeon 5500.

The design of Nahalem is based on quad core design with two executable threads per core.  The design also provides an added degree of intelligence to how things are done on the chip.  Little processors on the chip oversee and manage the big processors in the chip and that concept allows for some very significant improvements to computing.  For example, energy efficiency is far more adaptable/configurable.  When you don’t need full processing power, less power is drawn.  New virtualization capabilities are also enabled with this approach.

The result is that the Xeon 5500 provides the largest jump in computer performance in Intel’s history.  In fact, this jump is the greatest performance leap in computer history.  This jump is not just because of more transistors on the chip, it is because of a very smart design involving more cores.

This chip also provides features that will enhance trustworthy computing.  I found this especially interesting and the whole discussion left me feeling far more upbeat about the future of IT.   I have no doubt security will still be a constant battle well into the future, but with this new design the ability to run cryptographic algorithms is sped up significantly.  This design enables a 40% improvement in OpenSSL performance and a 50% improvement in RSA2048, for example.  New capabilities will soon be enabled that leverage the chip’s management capabilities to attest to true endpoint state.  This will enable enhanced defenses against rootkits.

A few other bullets on Nehalem, from the Intel website:
Intel® microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, offers the latest in processor innovation, including:

  • Dynamic scalability, managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces, and power for energy-efficient performance on-demand.
  • Design and performance scalability for servers, workstations, notebooks, and desktops with support for 2-8+ cores and up to 16+ threads with Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology), and scalable cache sizes, system interconnects, and integrated memory controllers.
  • Intelligent performance on-demand with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology taking advantage of the processor’s power and thermal headroom. This enables increased performance of both multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads.
  • Increased performance on highly-threaded applications with Intel HT Technology, bringing high-performance applications into mainstream computing with 1-16+ threads optimized for new generation multi-core processor architecture.
  • Scalable shared memory features memory distributed to each processor with integrated memory controllers and Intel QuickPath Technology high-speed point-to-point interconnects to unleash the performance of future versions of next-generation Intel® multi-core processors.
  • Multi-level shared cache improves performance and efficiency by reducing latency to frequently used data.

What is the “so what” of all the above?  Upgrade your old servers now.  It will save energy, it will save space, it will reduce operating cost, it will increase security, and it will enable more advanced applications.

As for the many demos seen at this event, my favorite was the one presented by my friends at Endeca.  Endeca is one of the first companies fielding capabilities that can take maximum advantage of Nehalem.   The speed, scale and scope of the data they can parse and enable interaction with is incredible.  If you are considering an Endeca deployment, consider Xeon 5500.  Ask Endeca for the demo and you will see why.  It just makes total sense.

Soon I’ll post a few more thoughts based on my interview of Justin Rattner.  Say tuned and happy computing!

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