Tag Archives: Smart Device

Hybrid Computing, Mobile Computing, Security

Closing the gap on technology evolution

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I recently saw a blog post by one of the Federal CIO’s. I can’t argue with their observations, though I think we may disagree on how to tackle the problem. That CIO is going to post their direction in future posts. I’m going to take a shot at my own direction in this post.

The following graph demonstrates that the US Government IT is falling behind Fortune 500 firms and way behind internet startups.
IT Curve acceptance
Federal CIO study graph

I remember having this debate with an IBM General Manager years ago when he was considering outsourcing some operating system components thinking that all programmers are created equal. There is a huge difference in maintaining a legacy of millions of lines of code vs. starting from scratch with something new. As important, starting over AND maintaining all the rules and regulations of the legacy, is also a very difficult proposition. It takes pre-existing knowledge for success.

This CIO faces a problem that is similar to many other businesses. It’s true for mainframes as it will be for Microsoft Windows and Linux systems in the future. There are millions of lines of “legacy code” in languages that are less popular today than they will be in the future. The inference is to move away from the legacy code toward a modern language where there are more skills available. As a factoid, there are more ARM chips in the market today than Intel chips. There are more applications being developed for iOS and Android than for Microsoft Windows and that’s way more than being developed for mainframes. So that might lead someone to believe that’s the programming model of this generation.  And as I’ve said in an earlier post, if your IT career began in the 1990’s and you hated mainframes, you were right….at that time….

But like everything, time changes things. IBM and vendor partners have dramatically changed what the mainframe was into a more modern computing environment. IBM spends over $1B in R&D for each generation of the mainframe that comes out about every two years now. I’m going to park that, for a moment, to go to another topic, that is more relevant to the skills discussion.

Patterns

Programming is about patterns. Patterns occur at a process level, in languages and in behaviors. There are three broader patterns at work here. Systems of Record, Engagement and Insight. I’ve written about that before, but Record deals with transaction processing, Engagement deals with the end user interface and Insight is about analytics. Most programming being done today is around systems of engagement – taking advantage of enhancements in smart phone, wearable tech (e.g. watches and fitness) and other devices that are the Internet of Things. GPS, accelerometer, touch, voice and biometrics are just a few of the advances that improve the human computer interface. The mainframe has avoided this programming area completely as a native interface. That makes complete sense. Ignored by many, though, is the fact that the mainframe has fully embraced leveraging those capabilities through interoperability and standard formats and protocols. They enable hybrid programming to reach out to those interfaces to simplify the deployment of systems of Record. In addition, they’ve integrated with Systems of Insight to enable real time analytics to be applied to traditional systems of Record to reduce risk.

This link will take you to a tremendous video about the z13 server and its ability to satisfy these new capabilities. Warning – it’s 30+ minutes long.

Where will the skills come from?

Another fear raised is that schools no longer teach “mainframe”. Perish the thought. While there are fewer “mainframe” schools than teach commodity system programming, there are a wealth of schools across the world that are part of IBM’s System z Academic Initiative. Checking their website, there are three in Maryland, close to the Federal government and very close to the agency head writing the blog. But you know, “you can’t trust the marketing” materials put out by a vendor. So I went to the Loyola College of Maryland, University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) and Prince George County Community College web sites to see what they said about the IBM Academic Initiative. Honestly, the info I found was from 2011-13, other than Prince George which was up to date. So I reached out to the schools. UMES responded quickly.
“First and foremost, I would like to inform you that we are actively involved in the IBM Academic Initiative. Dr. Robert Johnson is the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science is the lead person in the initiative. Further, they are currently in the process in moving into our new $100 million Engineering and Aviation Science Building which will significantly enhance our capabilities to support the initiative.”
Here’s a brochure for their program.

Most importantly, success is not a two-way street between IBM and the schools. It’s four way, including businesses/agencies and the students. The best schools will work with businesses to provide internships with students PRIOR to graduation. There is generally a very high (close to 50%) success rate in those students choosing full-time employment at the business they did an internship. I strongly encourage any business or agency concerned about future skills deployment to reach out to these schools and work directly with them. Experience shows that you’ll be very pleased with the results. UMES gave me their cell numbers if you’d like to reach out to me for a direct introduction.

Adopt New Technologies and dump the old?

The collective wisdom of the Federal CIO’s seems to point to new technologies as the “future” of programming. The referenced blog points to Uber, Siri and Facebook as examples of such applications and suggests they may be irrelevant in five years. (See Myspace as an example). New technologies grow up in a vacuum. There is no maintenance legacy. It doesn’t mean the legacy can’t work with them, though. A prior blog entry looks at 22 emerging technologies and their relationship to the mainframe and how hybrid computing can solve new business problems.

Let’s consider one of the new, cool tech referenced: Uber. I happen to have a chauffeur’s license (a story for another time) and am very familiar and active with Livery legislation. The Uber mobile application is actually very simple and easy to recreate. What makes them successful is their business model and practices. They hire drivers as contractors, therefore no tax consequences for Uber. They avoid the bureaucracy of Livery laws.

There is a state law that enables the New York City Taxi and Livery Commission (T&LC) to regulate who and what can be operated within the boroughs. This is for the “safety and comfort of passengers”. However, it’s big money. Medallions, per cab, have cost up to $750,000 just to put a car on the street and the T&LC limits the number of medallions. Cars from outside the T&LC are not allowed to make more than one stop in the city. They cannot pick up a passenger at an airport if they dropped them off more than 24 hours ago. The T&LC have 250+ officers in unmarked vehicles that follow and intimidate non-T&LC livery vehicles in the city. I witnessed a stretch limo being impounded by the T&LC when an upstate Livery firm dropped off the passengers returning from a NYC funeral at a NYC restaurant before traveling north. The second stop was illegal. In any event, other states (CT and NJ) got upset with this bureaucracy. They lobbied and a Federal law resulted to allow reciprocal rights to other states to operate without joining the T&LC. But upstate Livery can’t participate. The NY Assembly and Senate have had to modify laws to create T&LC’s in neighboring jurisdictions to allow reciprocal rights in NYC locations. Rockland, Nassau and Westchester counties have T&LC’s now. This is the third year that Dutchess and Ulster have legislation to enable reciprocal rights up for a vote. The NY Assembly has passed their legislation, but the NY Senate hasn’t. Last year, they decided to wait on Dutchess and Ulster until they figured out how to allow Uber  and Lyft to operate in NYC exempt from the T&LC bureaucracy. That legislation has now been created and will be voted on soon.

T&LC makes revenue on selling taxi medallions and collecting tax on fares. Uber & Lyft disrupt those economics. The livery vehicles pay $3000 per year for insurance. Uber/Lyft cut deals with insurance companies to lower that to $600/year to make them more competitive. The drivers must also have personal insurance on the cars when a fare isn’t present.  Laws are now being enacted to allow “Transportation Network Companies”  (TNC as they generically refer to Uber and Lyft) to get “fair access” to markets in NY without this bureaucracy. I’ve developed an app which will qualify the “local” livery company to operate as a TNC to reduce their costs and in turn, reduce the cost to consumers…will the government allow that? Will the Dutchess and Ulster laws pass? This is more about big money, venture capital and paid lobbyist getting to the legislative leaders, than the small livery companies trying to stay in business. We’ll see if the legislation and the bureaucracy will enable the small livery services to morph into a mini-Uber. The legislation enables the Commissioners of Insurance and Motor Vehicles to regulate the “TNC” businesses. The legislation doesn’t prescribe how that will be managed nor how much it will cost. By the way, did you notice that the legislation for Uber includes a lighted icon in the front and rear of the car to identify it? That’s as much for passenger safety as it is to make it easier for the T&LC police to pull over the cars if the legislation doesn’t pass. Not much likelihood of that, though, given the amount of money changing hands in Albany.

Long story short – Uber is more about business processes than it is about new applications.

Past Technology Evolution Examples

Going back to the graph, there is much to learn from prior experiences of the Fortune 500 and government agencies introducing new technology.

Learn from the Fortune 500 – the good:

Benefits processing: Hewitt Assoc and Fidelity continuously advance their capabilities. They provide integration with employer payroll systems. They have up to the minute accuracy of consumer records. They provide immediate access to Accruals and eligibility. They’ve adopted web and mobile technologies as Systems of Engagement, including biometric security authentication.

Claims processing: Travelers Insurance has historically reduced IT and people expense 10% annually while improving response times. Claims agents leverage mobile technology for accidents and disasters as input to “legacy” systems.

Learn from the government – the good:

The FBI and VA leverage mainframe virtualization to avoid IT costs of millions of dollars over commodity systems, while improving security, resilience and service level agreements. They run the same code in a different container with a superior operations model and lower costs.

All of the above use Hybrid technology which includes the mainframe.

Learn from the government – the bad:

Marine Corps – hosted by an IT supplier that gouges them on mainframe costs – three times the amount if they hosted it themselves. The IT supplier takes floor space, energy and cooling costs for an entire data center and only bills to the mainframe users. The IT group claims: Commodity systems wouldn’t be affordable if they were “taxed” with those costs. That’s why understanding the Total Cost of Ownership is a critical success factor when considering mainframe vs. commodity system costs. Unfortunately, regulations are in place that mandate that the Marine Corps use that particular IT Supplier. Other groups have bucked that policy to save money.

US Postal Service was not competitive with package tracking vs UPS and FedEx. They realized they needed to add new applications and wanted modern programming to do it. It included new engagement systems at the delivery vehicles via mobile technology. ….that’s the good. The bad – they spent $100’s of millions on redundant “commodity” IT infrastructure and copied key data and applications from the mainframe in order to host the new applications, while leaving the mainframe running. Testing and benchmarking have demonstrated that adding the new applications to the existing mainframes would have avoided millions in costs and operations complexity, while simplifying the architecture and improving SLA’s. With package shipping volumes increasing annually, they’ve continued to upgrade the mainframe each year. They are just spending too much overall. While they collaborate between the systems by moving data, they could save more if they shared the data in real-time.

Prescription for change

While a prescription for change is forth coming in the CIO’s future blogs, let’s hypothesize some changes for their benefit.

Modernization of the development environment

Rational tools – They move the mainframe application development to commodity systems. This moves 80% of the development off the mainframe to reduce IT costs. They provide tools to modernize and document the “legacy” applications and simplify their maintenance. They provide seamless test to the mainframe and other platforms of deployment choice. One large business has 1000 Java developers for commodity systems, 400 Cobol programmers for the mainframe and 50 developers familiar with Java and Cobol to enable hybrid programming and integration. All use the same Rational development front end. From a skills perspective, the mainframe development can now look and feel exactly the same as development on commodity systems. This eases the skills and knowledge requirements to start.

Language modernization:

Cobol Copybooks – the means to define data structures – are now sharable with web services and those services  can launch from Cobol. More on that in a moment.

Chip Speed

The System z13 server runs dual core 5GHz processors. Benchmarks show that Java runs faster here than any other platform. The video referenced earlier provides specifics. With direct access to databases and files, business applications can have better performance than other architectures. With fault tolerance and an improved hardware and software security architecture, the result is a very price competitive hosting environment for new workloads.

Risk and Fraud analytics

Financial services businesses are doing real-time analytics in the middle of their System of Record transaction programs to assess risk and avoid fraud. Leveraging the Copybook capability, they can call out to leverage the 1000+ processors in the IBM Data Analytics Accelerator (IDAA – formerly Netezza) that have been tied into the mainframe to speed time to resolve.

Callsign – a biometric authentication and fraud prevention technology, can leverage a modern smart phone to identify the owner/user of the device before they actually answer a challenge – which could be a finger print, facial recognition or voice. Using the accelerometer in the phone, the GPS and pressure points on the touch pad, along with historic behavior patterns, Callsign can tell by the way a person is holding a phone if it’s the original user or someone else before offering them the authentication challenge. This type of technology can be used at kiosks in regional/branch offices to enroll users and make sure they are the real person requesting later service. No need for a card. A unique user id is sufficient to provide authentication. True, many low-income users/beneficiaries may not have smart phone capability. Alternative mechanisms can be deployed for challenge/response authentication. But, maybe providing a low-cost device to beneficiaries for this purpose, a more modern version of the “RSA token devices”,  might reduce overall costs for low-income users. Watch this space. One of the Callsign customers, a large credit card processing bank, is calling out to Callsign from a “legacy” mainframe transaction program to authenticate that the real customer is at the point of sale or ATM device requesting service. Compare that to an experience I had recently. Visiting 500 miles from home, I went to a big box department store and paid with a valid credit card. Everything was good, but the transaction was denied. I then used a debit card, same bank, same credit card service, but used my pin code. The transaction was approved. As I walked out of the store, I got a call from the credit card provider asking me if I just attempted to use the card. They restored my card to service immediately. Use of the Callsign capability eliminates the human intervention, lowers my embarrassment and speeds transaction processing.

Going a step further, Callsign runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or a private cloud today. This is a distributed connection to the transaction systems calling out to it. There are about 15 “risk tests” that can be done, but typically just three can be done and the results fed back to make a risk decision in the time allowed for a transaction to complete. We’ve hypothesized that if Callsign was running on a mainframe, with a memory connection to the transaction programs, that 10 risk tests could be done on the mainframe and maintain the service level agreement of the “legacy” transaction programs. Stay tuned for future updates in this pace.

The NSA has proven that leveraging a Google like search capability can help stop attacks. Why not use web crawling software to look for fraud and overpayments? Leveraging online obituary information, an insurance company or benefits providers could determine if a person has died and no longer eligible for services. In addition, it can predict the services that may be available to the survivors of that person. This can speed up time to deploy payments to their survivors. These web crawlers can feed a data warehouse searching for fraud but also feed real-time systems to avoid fraud for new transactions.

Collaboration is necessary to move forward:

Education: partnerships between vendors, businesses/agencies and schools is necessary to create the next generation of IT professionals (programmers and operations) as well as to update the skills of existing personnel.

Operations: Today, fiefdoms around individual architectures or administrative domains exist that create/foster conflict and drive up IT costs. Not everyone is going to get along. Organizational politics and budgets have as much to do with fiefdoms as anything. Leveraging the Rational developer example, where a small group of people have some hybrid responsibility, can lead to breakthroughs in processing schemes.

Legislation: Where necessary, this can be valuable to enable a leap toward something new that will provide value and reduce costs.

Summary

There is no right or perfect answer to any IT decision. As the saying goes and leading to an unintended consequence: “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater” isn’t necessarily a good approach. Leveraging a hybrid computing, operational and development environment can make a large shift toward leveraging “modern” application models. Happy programming!

Hybrid Computing, Security

What happens after a breach? The vultures descend

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There have been so many breaches. In every case, the business or agency affected realizes that they must spend money to fix the breach. That’s when the vendor sales teams come out of the woodwork. Everyone has something to sell. New analytics, new detection mechanisms and new management offerings are just some of the products. However, in almost every case, a quick decision on a new product would be like putting lipstick on a pig. At the heart of a breach is a fundamental problem with people, process and technology associated with security. While a witch hunt for the base problem may be happening, it’s important to take a step back, take stock of what’s good and bad about what is already in place. Re-look at processes and find the gaps that need to be considered. But most important, what is the scope of the processes?

Too many systems to manage securely

Too often, a business will have multiple domains that are independently managed. For example, there may be separate domains for management of desktops, web servers, application servers, data warehouses, transaction servers and database servers. My experience has shown that when a breach is found in one area, the other areas breathe a sigh of relief as it is not their problem. That’s a bad attitude. Business problems are end to end solutions that cross several of these domains. As such, a business should be looking to collaborate their security and harden processes across domains rather than manage them individually.

Create an Enterprise Security Hub

The IBM mainframe is an ideal hub for centralization of security focus. For the same reasons that IBM calls the mainframe the System z, z being for zero down time, it could have been  System s for fail safe security. IBM has spent years in hardware and software R&D to harden the mainframe for business resilience and security and include that level of functionality in the basic hardware and software systems. The bulk of the built-in security services meet industry standards for interoperability and programming interfaces. As a result, these services can be executed on behalf of any other system or server that is interconnected with them. This includes usage as an authentication server, managing logs, providing real-time analytics to prevent loss and a central site for audit management. Unfortunately, no sales person is going to run to a business to brag about these capabilities. The unintended consequence by IBM and for its customers is that with all this capability “inside the box” they don’t have a commissioned sales force pushing these functions. IBM has a wide variety of software solutions that they are selling for distributed domains. They have software to manage the mainframe better. However, there is no end to end play that focuses on the mainframe as the central hub for enterprise security.

Wealth of Documentation

All is not lost, however. IBM and their Business Partners have a wealth of documentation and capabilities to demonstrate the strength of the mainframe for enterprise security. European customers can attend an excellent security conference in Montpellier, France from September 29 to October 2. The IBM Design Centers provide briefing centers and proof of concept capability tailored to an organization’s needs. There are IBM Redbooks describing the security functionality, including cryptography, analytics and Digital Certificate management for global authentication.

Shared Credentials to sign on via Biometrics and Multi-Factor authentication

There are also a wealth of up and coming vendors that can contribute to end to end security. Two that I’ve been working with are Callsign and Cyberfy that can leverage a mobile device for multi-factor biometric authentication in a consistent way across platforms. Throw away your userids and passwords that could be key logged and stolen and move to something that is truly unique to an individual. With these tools, a common authentication is used and managed across a wide range of servers and applications. Common authentication is the center of cross domain security management. Without a consistent authentication mechanisms, it becomes extremely difficult to correlate security activities across domains.

Operational Collaboration

I started this about breaches. A mainframe can provide and collect a wealth of forensic information across systems. As the host server for a tremendous amount of financial and personnel transaction processing, this information is used in real-time to prevent fraud because of the mainframe’s ability to run multiple transactions and database servers simultaneously, with integrity, while satisfying a service level agreement. This combination of functionality can work well with network attached applications and user devices.

These are the tenants that provide the foundation for hardening an environment. If a business or agency looks at what they have already and they find a mainframe, they’ll find a wealth of capabilities to lock down their end to end systems. The most important element is collaboration across organizations. Through collaboration, organizations can find weakness and inconsistency.  Once these efforts are undertaken, then the gaps can be identified and the acquisition of new products can be done intelligently.

Start Locking down systems before it’s too late

If anyone needs assistance getting started in locking down their systems, give me a call. Don’t wait until you’ve been breached, it will only cost more to solve the problem. As has been said, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

Hybrid Computing

Webinar April 15th: Mainframe Security – How good is it? Unfortunately – only as good as the End User device accessing it

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Vicom

hosts a Lunch ‘n’ Learn Webinar presented by

Raytheon_logo

April 15, 2015 12-1PM EDT

Call in: 888-245-8770 passcode 206580

Presentation Slides will be posted here prior to the call

Presentation Abstract:

For years, the IBM mainframe has been the benchmark for secure transaction and data base processing. It’s considered hacker resistant, via a hardware and software architecture that inhibits buffer overflows, which are the bane of Trojan Horses, viruses and worms.

The modern PC, smart phones and tablets are rife with malware and identity spoofing. As long as an end user is the systems programmer for these devices, there will continue to be problems. If a userid can be spoofed on the end user device, there isn’t much to prevent them from accessing back end servers of all types that these devices may be connected. Businesses spend enormous sums looking to detect problems and attempt to better manage these devices.

Raytheon Cyber products takes a different approach. They compartmentalize infrastructure to create a more secure computing environment. E.g., separating Internet traffic from internal business systems. They’ve simplified operations so that the end user behaviors and server access barely change. The result is an environment that prevents malware intrusions and data theft. Detection products are nice, but how much will a business spend on unplanned forensic efforts and brand loss marketing should a theft occur? Raytheon’s approach simplifies the hybrid deployment model and reduces the risk at back end servers, such as the mainframe, and can help to lower overall security deployment costs.

This session will introduce the “battle tested” Raytheon Cyber products to commercial customers. It will demonstrate how compartmentalization of networks, data and applications can simplify end-to-end operations while preventing attacks. It will show how their technology is complimentary to existing Hybrid infrastructure. They’ll also introduce some of the future deployment models they are considering to further prevent attacks on electronic business.

Presenters’ Bios:

Jim Porell is a retired IBM Distinguished Engineer. His IBM roles included: Chief Architect of Mainframe Software (10 years), led Business Development for the mainframe (3 years), Security and Application Development marketing lead (3 years), Chief Business Architect for IBM Federal Sales (2 years). He’s presently a partner at Empennage, developing its marketing and investment possibilities. Jim is also on the Advisory Board of startups: Callsign and Malcovery. He’s a sales consultant to Vicom Infinity. In each of these roles, Jim is focused on the secure and resilient deployment of Hybrid Computing solutions across server architectures and end user devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets, PC’s).

Jeremy A. Wilson, is a member of Raytheon’s CTO Council & the Director of Customer Advocacy. Mr. Wilson works closely with Raytheon’s Executive Leadership Team focused on solving information sharing challenges for their extensive portfolio of customers including the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, as well as Civilian and Commercial agencies. Mr. Wilson has over 15 years’ experience in Multi-Level Security and Cross-Domain Solutions. Prior to joining Raytheon in 2005, he served as the Chief Technology Advisor and Architect for both SAIC and General Dynamics. In these roles, Mr. Wilson held a vast number of responsibilities such as System Design, Technical Assessments, Security & Policy Auditing, Strategic Planning, Proposal Generation, & Certification & Accreditation. Mr. Wilson has spoken at number of technical events and sessions and is a member of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP), and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA).

Hybrid Computing

Mainframe Security – How good is it?

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Two things about security that have been true for a long time:

  1. The Mainframe is the most secure platform in the industry
  2. Security is about People, Process and Technology

These are not mutually exclusive concepts. What’s important to realize, though, is the mainframe shouldn’t get a “Pass” on security processes because of its reputation. Unfortunately, I have encountered some really poor security management practices associated with mainframes at a wide variety of customers. These poor practices have put those businesses at risk. Mainframe technology and architecture can inhibit a number of security issues that other platforms regularly encounter, such as buffer overflows that enable viruses and Trojan Horses. However, poor management of data access, protection and audit can lead to data loss, theft and network attacks.

The Mainframe is NOT Hacker proof

There, I’ve said it and I’ve said it before. Mainframe systems have been hacked. There is one obscure case where some very old open source code was running on a mainframe. That open source code had been successfully hacked on other platforms. The attackers used a similar technique to get “inside” a business. Network attacks that drive a denial of service have also been successfully initiated. Both of these types of attacks were clearly avoidable. The worst attacks have come from insiders. Sometimes by accident, but unfortunately, sometimes on purpose. Not unlike Edward Snowden and Wikileaks, insiders have released confidential information stored on mainframes. In each of these cases, better security practices and the use of additional products and monitoring could have inhibited these data thefts.

Who is responsible for Mainframe Security?

Another problem that I’ve seen is lack of diligence by a business over the people managing the mainframe. The worst case scenario dealt with an outsourcer. The outsourcer mistakenly assumed that the mainframe was “hacker proof”. The owning business assumed the outsourcer knew what they were doing and didn’t audit the security of the systems nor the outsourcers running the systems. It turns out, the outsourcer wasn’t auditing the security either. In this instance, network ports were left open that enabled attackers a way into the system. Data sent over the network wasn’t encrypted, allowing attackers to sniff for critical data. Perhaps worst of all, many of the systems programmers had operational access to modify all system datasets without going through change management.

It doesn’t mean that anything negative happened at this customer. But it certainly could have happened. And even within that particular outsourcer’s business, they had other customers that were properly protected. This seemed to be a local anomaly. The lesson learned, however, is that the owning business should own audit responsibilities and the analytics associated with their security operations and data protection. Simple tools could be deployed and routinely run to “health check” their operation. Either the outsourcer or the business can run those tools, but the business should check the results as a normal part of grading their outsourcer.

“Knowledgeable” People may be your worst enemy and largest risk

Social engineering is a terrific mechanism to get access to restricted data. I’m not going to give examples, other than to say that asking the right questions of the right people can result in acquiring data or privileges that someone isn’t supposed to have. Again, the human element at work in circumventing security. One of my favorite “social engineering” episodes was visiting the security director at a large bank. Physical security was tight. The team there asked if I could break into the building. My normal response is never on the first time, but usually on a second pass, it is possible. As I left the cold building in December, I realized I left my jacket in the Director’s office. The security guard told me to go back up to the third floor unescorted. I was in the Director’s desk chair when he returned from the rest room. Isolated incident? Unfortunately not. That’s just my favorite example, without the details.

Replicated data doesn’t mean that security control is replicated

It doesn’t matter what platform or server you are using for a database. Far too many businesses make a copy of production data so that the Quality Assurance team can do system modifications and stress test before making updates to a production system. Application developers might also have access to this production data to test the next iteration of a business application. QA and development may be outsourced to another business. That business could be in another country. Without audit or security management of the test and development copies of the data, there is the very large possibility of data theft or leakage.

The weakest link is the End user interface – PC’s, Smartphones, Tablets

Plenty is known about the security problems associated with end-user devices.  Management of those devices falls on the owner of the device. Where Bring Your Own Device or BYOD is allowed, then the management practices for the devices will differ by the number of devices. Unfortunately, users save the userid and passwords of back-end servers on these devices. As a result, any server that these devices access is at risk of mismanagement or spoofing of credentials of the end-user if that device is stolen or hacked.

There is hope. Collaborative security should be the norm.

Earlier posts of mine discuss collaborative and hybrid computing. This is as important with security as it is for business resilience, storage management and application development. By looking across the IT infrastructure, a business can identify risk more clearly than a business that has fiefdoms protecting their smaller domains. Analytics, audits, identity management and data protection done across the IT infrastructure will help a business reduce risk and save on overall costs.

Don’t let security by obscurity result in the unintended consequence of data loss. Stay vigil. Keep an eye on your systems, your system administrators and your users.

Hybrid Computing

Emerging Technology and the role of the mainframe

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I recently was given a list of emerging technologies and asked how the mainframe, and in particular, z/OS, is relevant to those technologies. It’s a great question. Unfortunately, it’s important to understand the source and motivation of the question. Sometimes, the  questioner is looking for an excuse to bury the mainframe. They’d have the unintended consequence of not finding or looking for synergy with the mainframe. In other cases, there is genuine curiosity. I’m going to go with curiosity in this case and give my best effort to respond.

Systems of Record are where data resides. Systems of Engagement are where information is accessible to end users. In many cases, PC systems are both a System of Record and a System of Engagement, so there is a thought that these “commodity” systems are “good enough” to handle all workloads. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Complexity, scale, security and business resilience are some of the problems that occur when commodity devices become the sole “solution” to problems. However, there is another major problem – operational silos. This occurs when one organization solves “one problem” while another organization solves and manages another business problem. Complexity and risk occurs when multiple organizations depend on each other to replicate data or share data for different purposes. This is where system security and resilience are at risk. It also requires duplication of data and duplication of effort to manage that data. Any duplication adds to costs.

I like a different approach. It’s based on leveraging the best of all technologies: commodity front end devices, such as PC’s, Smart Devices and the Internet of Things (definition later); Commodity servers for data transformation and hosting applications; large-scale servers for hosting and managing access to data, including a large amount of data manipulation and processing. In this hybrid environment, the goal is to bring the applications to the data. There will never be a single copy of data (e.g. backups, disaster recovery, cloning), nor will there ever be a single server to process that data. However, by sharing data and reducing copies, a simpler deployment model is possible. In addition, cross-platform security and resilience should be a part of the solution so that data is processed on a “need to know” basis and applications are highly available, end to end. It doesn’t make sense to have a back-end server (System of Record) that is 99.999% available if the front end infrastructure (System of Engagement) is full of availability and security issues. Our goal is to provide an end to end deployment infrastructure that provides efficient integration across the components and technologies necessary to meet a business’ workload needs. In the process, the business or government agency should dramatically reduce operational cost and complexity, while improving security and business resilience. This infrastructure can meet or exceed service level agreements and provide investment protection for the future.

Given the above context, here are a couple of emerging technologies and my view of where a hybrid approach can help them or not. I say my view, but the reality is, my good friend, George Thompson of IBM, provided the first pass at this list. We’ve been collaborating for many years. In my role as a consultant to Vicom Infinity, George is the principal IBMer I’ve been working with toward challenging customers to save $2 million dollars on IT expenses. So here we go:

1.     Digital Security

There are many ways to look at this. But most importantly, collaboration is king. There will never be a “Single Sign On”.  However, there are multiple sign ons with shared credentials. A good example of that is Apple has the same sign on credentials for it’s Apple Store, iMessage and iCloud, among other applications. But taking it a step further, they’ve introduced biometrics through finger print readers on their smart devices. Other forms of multi factor authentication can be deployed. There needs to be a source for “the truth”. There are several large banks and governments that have leveraged z/OS RACF for hosting digital certificates as the basis for authentication across applications and devices. One bank has stated that they avoid $16 million in annual license fees from third parties by hosting and managing their own digital certificate infrastructure on their existing mainframes.

Beyond authentication are digital footprints necessary for forensics utilized for Cyber security fraud, theft and rogue insider activities tracing. There are so many products that can collect logs and monitor those footprints. z/OS and Linux on z have been leveraged as collectors of these logs to allow for processing across workloads and to look for anomalies that might not be detected otherwise, if each different organizational unit was processing the request. The New York Police Department (NYPD) deployed a product from Intellinx that captured end-user activities across their agency. Up until that deployment, each of their 30+ applications had a unique home-grown audit capability. Intellinx enabled them to eliminate the “silo’ed” audits and combine them into a single commercial off the shelf (COTS) product. It also allowed them to find anomalies across the entire application suite that may not have been easily detected, manually, by their silo’ed offerings.

2.       Virtual Personal Assistant

Cognitive computing is evolving rapidly. Speak into your phone or tablet.  Ask a question or request a task be executed and your “wish” becomes their “command”.  Simple requests are executed on the device itself (e.g. call a person).  But many requests go to a central “cloud based” service.  The request gets parsed for context, a knowledge base is queried and the result is provided to the requestor.

I don’t see the mainframe “operating” the Virtual Personal Assistant, at this time. However, I do see the mainframe as a source for the knowledge base for a wide variety of applications. If you ask to query your account balance, does the bank make a copy of that “up to date” business record and send it to the VPA server? No. The VPA is the System of Engagement. It translates the request into a query. The query is sent to the relevant server which processes the request and sends the results bank. The VPA then translates that into spoken word or some form of viewer by launching a device app to display the results. These are not mutually exclusive processes.
Going back to Digital Security, the back end server that processes the query could use the Digital Security provided by the previous authentication of that device. It could also send a challenge request directly to the device, as a form of multi factor authentication, to ensure it wasn’t a fraudulent request, such as a phishing attempt. Collaboration is critical.

3.       Smart Workspace

I found an interesting definition at a Johnson Controls website.  What was most interesting to me is that I know of Johnson Controls from their utility infrastructure monitoring devices, also known as SCADA or system control and data acquisition devices (e.g. thermostats, system monitors). And that leads me to think of the security of those devices. But I digress. Their vision is around Social Computing, Mobile and Collaboration so that the workplace of the future is a virtual office where you feel a sense of community with your peers rather than feel isolated. This includes document collaboration, video and screen sharing, smart walls/boards/screens that are touch sensitive. These can all be considered the System of Engagement. What’s the mainframe and z/OS role? The source of the files/documents. The authentication server that coordinates the integration of each of the pieces of this “virtual community”. The fault tolerant backup of the critical data elements. The workflow scheduler that “turns on” and coordinates the myriad of parts of a very large virtual community.

4.       Software-Defined Anything (SDx)

The idea here is that instead of physical servers and physical devices or appliances, the IT world evolves to virtual appliances and virtual application images. The mainframe can be viewed for three major virtualization capabilities.

1. Logical partitioning – PR/SM LPAR – that enables the mainframe to be carved up into separate entities. This really is a physical partitioning, though and probably doesn’t apply.
2. z/OS – originally known as MVS for Multiple Virtual Storage – for it’s ability to run multiple applications and data types within the same operating system image.
3. z/VM – with its ability to run multiple operating systems and therefore, multiple application servers simultaneously and on demand.

Within z/OS and z/VM, there is software defined networks, memory and storage that enable direct sharing between workloads. In some cases, with new hardware definitions, only pointers to data are shared between applications to dramatically improve performance latency, reduce virtual and real memory and improve security, resilience and scale of the end to end workload.
That’s not to say that z/OS and z/VM are the answer to Software Defined Anything. The Anything is workload and solution dependent. These systems can participate effectively as part of a bigger solution to reduce costs and improve the solution qualities.

5.       Affective Computing

This is an area that probably doesn’t have direct ties to a mainframe.  As defined in wikipedia:  it’s about computer science, psychology and cognitive computing. Think about robots that attempt to mimic human activity.

I don’t see arms and legs protruding from an IBM mainframe nor a mainframe chip within a robot, yet. I still see mainframe connections. One is through security. These robots need to be smart. They need to get their “smarts” from some source. That source needs to be secure. Authentication must occur. The robot will then “do things”. Are they transactional? These are things that can be done with a mainframe.

6.       Neurobusiness

The Gartner Group definition is “capability of applying neuroscience insights to improve outcomes in customer and other business decision situations.”  To me, insights equals analytics.  Analytics on the mainframe and z/OS is fantastic. Why? It’s got the data.  There are many businesses that look at trends, anomalies and other analytic insight to improve sales, identify fraud detection, forecast future trends and leverage existing data and analytic capabilities on the mainframes. There are also businesses that are running analytics on commodity servers against commodity hosted data and joining those results with analytics run on mainframes against mainframe data.

The definition, looking at other sources, is applied to training and decision making.I don’t necessarily see the mainframe participating in that aspect.

7.       Prescriptive Analytics

Described by wikipedia as the third and final phase of business analytics (BA) which includes descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Vendors such as SAS and IBM’s SPSS have been on z/OS for many years. SAS has described the lack of value of “looking in the rear view mirror” rather than looking ahead to how you can get value for many years. The mainframe has plenty of the business data. These vendors have brought the applications to the data in order to gain the insight and provide the business value.

8.       Data Science

A pseudonym for analytics.  There are multiple parts of analytics:

  • The data.
  • The application that analyzes the data.
  • The application that presents the results.

The mainframe has long been excellent at hosting and processing the data. The System of Record.  Data visualization is the role of the System of Engagement and commodity hosted devices. If a business wants to “copy the data” in batch, host it on a commodity server and then process it and display it on a commodity device, that’s their prerogative. But what does that cost them?

  • Time – necessary to make the copies.
  • Network – bandwidth to make the copies.
  • Storage – to host temporary and production copies of the data.
  • Compute Capacity/Scale – that’s used to move the data, instead of processing it.
  • Environmental – energy, floor space and cooling for the copies of data.
  • Money – for all this “excess” capacity.
  • And lest we forget – Security – to make sure that the “need to know” aspects of the particular data copied is handled the same, regardless of where it resides and
  • Resilience – back up capabilities for all the extra servers and data.

Needless to say, many businesses are leveraging near real-time analytics against the System of Record hosted on a mainframe and leveraging the best capabilities available on mobile devices and PC’s for the visualization of the results.

9.       Smart Advisors

This is a System of Engagement. It could be a human or it could be the dissemination of data to a human. This is not the role of the mainframe. That Advisor needs to get its “smarts” someplace. As demonstrated earlier, the mainframe, z/OS, their data and their analytic processing can contribute to those “smarts”.

10.   Speech-to-Speech Translation

This is a System of Engagement. Not necessarily the role of a mainframe. Once it’s translated to actions, the mainframe is happy to oblige and process the request. It can also work to ensure the authentication of the user/device requesting the translation, when necessary.

11.   Internet of Things (IoT)

This typically refers to the myriad of new devices that are being made accessible via the Internet, e.g. Home appliances, Light bulbs, cars, cameras, etc. For this reason, the Internet naming convention was running out of addresses (IPv4), so a new addressing convention, IPv6 was created to handle the demand. Most of these devices are Systems of Engagement. They need to securely access Systems of Record.

The mainframe and z/OS have introduced IPv6 to enable direct connection to those devices. As defined earlier, the security of those devices and the monitoring of them can be handled on a mainframe. These devices are not islands, nor is the mainframe. They can easily collaborate to bring the best of all worlds into new solutions and other emerging technologies. IBM recently launched a foundation for the Internet of Things.

12.   Natural-Language Question Answering

At the front end, this is a System of Engagement. To get the answers, Systems of Engagement and knowledge bases are required. I don’t envision the mainframe doing the natural language parsing, but I certainly envision their role in preparing the answer and securing the connection from end to end.

13.   Complex Event Processing (CEP)

I love math. Patterns, Fractals, Recursion. Macro and Micro views. Computers are outstanding at repeating patterns. Many of the problems that I see in contemporary society are because we are too close to a problem. If you step back a little, a look at “the bigger picture”, you can see patterns repeated.
Event processing is like a Dispatcher. Every operating system has a dispatcher at a kernel level. Many operating systems cannot dispatch disparate work simultaneously because those systems don’t know how to balance the needs of the many and prioritize them against the needs of a few. Deadlocks, overcommitment and race conditions occur for unsuccessful systems. z/OS and the mainframe have demonstrated excellent capabilities for avoiding these issues and provide granularity, at a business level, for balancing the processing needs. More importantly, many years ago, they created workflow processing that deals with the success or failure of prior tasks to determine the next task. At a micro level, z/OS has been executing Complex Event Processing for decades.
Now, the term applies to end to end business solutions that include multiple Systems of Engagement and multiple Systems of Record. There are several middleware solutions that enable the mainframe and z/OS to participate and to manage CEP and be managed by CEP across a disparate group of systems and devices.

14.   Big Data

This is primarily dealing with the System of Record and the analysis and processing of the data within Systems of Record. z/OS and the mainframe have demonstrated the ability to process their own data, the data of other systems and to have their data processed by other systems.
Security, storage management and resilience of the data on both z/OS and other servers can be managed from z/OS as well.

15.   In-Memory Database Management Systems

As a database, this is a System of Record. For many years, middleware, such as CICS for z/OS, has provided an in-memory database management system. New applications are looking for SQL and other industry standard interfaces to these in memory databases. z/OS and the mainframe are capable of meeting these needs and working in collaboration with other systems that provide these capabilities. In addition, z/OS and the mainframe can provide authentication and resilience services for these databases.

16.   Content Analytics

Content analytics is the act of applying business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA) practices to digital content. Companies use content analytics software to provide visibility into the amount of content that is being created, the nature of that content and how it is used.
This is another area of System of Record. z/OS and the mainframe have a variety of middleware associated with content management, including archive functions for media streams, documents, and other non-relational data types. In turn, there are analytic solutions available on the mainframe and off it to process that data.

17.    Hybrid Cloud Computing

By definition, this includes internally managed clouds in concert with externally accessed clouds by a business or agency. zEnterprise is the premier Hybrid Cloud platform supporting Public, Private and Community clouds across heterogeneous architecture and supporting many cloud infrastructures including OpenStack. Enough said.

18.   Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communication Services

This is related to the communication between the devices associated with the Internet of Things and the success of IPv6. As stated earlier, the mainframe and z/OS are already enabled for this form of communication.

19.    Cloud Computing

Somewhat redundant with the Hybrid cloud computing item above, both z/OS and the mainframe provide cloud hosting capabilities. Allen Systems Group’s Cloudfactory/Mainframe has enabled much of the functionality of z/OS to be accessed and provisioned via an interface that is similar to Amazon Web Services.

20.   Gesture Control

By definition, this is a human computer interface and therefore a part of the System of Engagement. This is not a role that I envision the mainframe to undertake. The gestures will be interpreted and  actions are taken, as a result.  Some of these actions may be directed toward transactions or applications hosted on the mainframe and z/OS.

21.   In-Memory Analytics

There are several approaches to solve this problem. Architecturally, there are some valuable differences.

  1. For the x86 and Power architectures, IBM has delivered:
    IBM’s DB2 10.5 with BLU Acceleration, typical queries in an analytics workload have been shown to be more than 1,000 times faster than other leading databases. Innovations in BLU Acceleration include:
    ·        ‘Dynamic in-memory” columnar processing providing not only dramatic analytics performance – up to 25 times faster -– but also the ability to scale for expanding Big Data needs without the limitations imposed by traditional in-memory systems.
    ·        “Load and go” simplicity which allows clients access to blazing-fast analytics transparently to their applications, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling.
    ·        “Parallel vector processing” for high-performance data analysis in parallel across different processors.
    ·        “Actionable compression,” providing as much as 10 times storage space savings where data no longer has to be decompressed to be analyzed.
    This DB2 is typically called LUW – Linux, Unix and Windows version. In this case, the BLU acceleration is not available on Linux for System z implementation of DB2. However, through database connection middleware, the z/OS data can be accessed by this product.
  2. Hadoop is an open source implementation of a large scale analytic server that has been deployed on the mainframe by IBM and by Veristorm’s zDoop offering. This can leverage most of the z/OS System of Record databases and make them accessible to the Hadoop File System running on the mainframe or other Hadoop servers.
  3. Another hybrid implementation is the IBM Database Analytics Accelerator (IDAA). This is a co-processor that works with flash (memory) copies of data on z/OS and can process a query 1000x faster that z/OS might on it’s own. There are several operational benefits to this approach:
  • Security – the authentication, access control and logging are all done in the context of the z/OS user that initiated the query request. This simplifies audit and analysis of user behaviors.
  • Latency from OLTP to Analytics – It provides near real-time access provided to transactional data where other systems might be using a copy of time that takes a lengthy time to unload, transfer and reload prior to its availability for analytic processing.
  • Cost – it provides commodity analytic server costs without the need for extra management as an independent server instance and the costs of security and resilience associated with that.

22.   Activity Streams

This are generated at a System of Engagement. Activity streams are generally associated with Social Media applications. There are a number of products that will take these feeds and coordinate them across Social Media platforms. I am not aware of any of them running natively on z/OS, though I do believe the IBM Connections can run on the mainframe. Some of the z/OS management activities can be processed as activity streams and posted to social media. This is valuable where an internal wiki might be used to manage or display mainframe system status.

23.   Speech Recognition

Speech recognition research and development has been going strong at IBM for almost 50 years. Throughout that time, more than 200 IBMers have contributed to the significant advancements in this field. That being said, it is a System of Engagement.
Middleware is available, as part of multi factor authentication, to leverage speech recognition and patterns as a login method that can be passed to the mainframe. Speech recognition middleware can also be leveraged to begin applications or start tasks on z/OS and the mainframe. Customers have used these techniques to simplify the human interface to z/OS.

That’s the end of the list I received, but not the end of my thoughts on Emerging Technologies.

The Evolution of the Mainframe.

Database Processing.

By nature, database processing deals with the System of Record. IBM’s DB2 platform was originally deployed in the early 1980’s after a successful research product. Later, on a separate code base, the DB2 for Linux Unix and Windows was created with a similar programming interface to the mainframe version. Mainframe customers demand consistency and a legacy that they can count on. Once implemented by IBM or other vendors and then successfully used in production by a customer, the customer expects that code to run “forever”. I can tell you that I’m working with a customer now whose original code was written in 1969 and they are many generations of hardware and software old and out of service, but they are still working with integrators to keep it running.
With those requirements in mind, IBM has developed a philosophy that many of the new technologies will be deployed on the DB2 LUW version first. If successful, that functionality will be later integrated into the DB2 for z/OS version. If it is unsuccessful, there is no harm in not adding it to the mainframe version as it might be just a niche offering.

Evolution of new technology

Many of the System of Record emerging technologies listed in this blog will share a similar fate. Where they have not been implemented on the mainframe yet, they will be considered for the future based on their customer exploitation merits. You’ll notice I used a phrase: “not on the mainframe, yet”, a couple of times above. That’s because I believe it. Some of these emerging technologies will become ubiquitous and demand their place on the mainframe in much the same way as the DB2 technologies have evolved. Think about TCP/IP, Linux, Java, and XML that were once emerging technologies and are ubiquitously deployed on the Mainframe and within z/OS. Even Linux inside z/OS…at least some of it.

Same code. Different Container. Different Operations Model

With the adoption of open source and open programming interfaces, there are few programs that can’t be deployed on z/OS or the mainframe. But just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done. For example, z/OS is branded as a Unix system because of the Unix System Services component. By that brand, it means it can support a VT100 character based terminal as an input device. So, using the vi editor, if you type a character, it would immediately get sent to the mainframe for processing. Type the next character and the same response. Move the mouse and you burn mainframe mips chasing it. Yes, that works, but it is a complete waste of mainframe processing. Capture the edit on a PC or smart device, using local processing. When done or the user hits enter, send the bulk of the input to the server to be saved and processed. Data processing is what the mainframe is about. The punch card and the 3270 terminal are “old school” systems of engagement. The mainframe has adapted to those interfaces as well. The z/OS Management Facility is a new web services based implementation that can augment or replace the “old school” 3270 command line functionality. New products, such as IBM zSecure and IBM Wave put a graphic front end on the mainframe. It is collaborative and hybrid deployments such as these vs. replacement of a legacy.

What’s your cluster look like?

The mainframe Parallel Sysplex solved clustered computing in a dramatically different fashion than commodity servers. Rather than separate data into smaller consumable chunks that are then spread across database servers that are then attached to clusters of application servers that need to have round robin workload balancing for some semblance of security, the mainframe did it different. They decided to share all data across their “cluster”. Each system has direct access to the data much like a SAN. This access is now Fiber Channel based, via the FICON protocol. It runs on the same fiber optics wiring as the FCP protocol, but it has better latency, security, error correction and redundancy. Shared by these clustered servers is the Coupling Facility. This is a separate mainframe server or logical partition with three functions:

  1. High speed communications (peer-to-peer) between the “cluster members”.
  2. Lock manager for read/write access to the shared data across the cluster.
  3. Data cache for the most recently used data (in memory) to avoid disk access for high volume transaction processing.

Commodity database server developers are beginning to make their own “coupling facilities” with a fraction of the functionality, performance, scale and reliability built into the mainframe Parallel Sysplex capabilities.

System Integrity

In 1973, IBM issued an integrity guarantee that any problems found in their code on the mainframe that could, and I’m paraphrasing, give an unauthorized person an undeserved authority, promote a program from user space to kernel space without authority or could manipulate or destroy data without authority would provide a fix at no charge, as quickly as possible. Recently, the guarantee was updated. But there is a reason for the guarantee and that’s baked into the hardware and software architecture of the mainframe. The hardware creates a boundary and set of instructions to manage the transition between user and kernel (system) processing. It also enforces boundaries on memory within the operating systems. As a result, a “buffer overflow” between user space and kernel space will be detected by the hardware. So in case there was poor programming on behalf of the operating system or middleware, the hardware is smart enough to detect the error and abnormally terminate the offending user program. It’s not to say the mainframe is hacker proof. Better stated, it is hacker resistant. The hardware architecture will detect and inhibit the majority of problems found from poor programming on commodity systems. In fact, execution of “portable” code on the mainframe has found a number of integrity problems that might have gone unnoticed on commodity software.

Multi-tenancy

Baked into the mainframe hardware and software is the goal that multiple applications, databases, and for that matter, operating systems, can run simultaneously without negatively impacting each other. The impact being integrity and performance based. The mainframe workload management capabilities for managing service levels and scale are legendary. Many more eggs can be put in a single basket. Far few servers need to be deployed. As PC servers became rampant in data centers, VMWARE came along and began to offer up to 80:1 reduction in the number of physical servers required to deploy workloads. Simultaneously, z/VM and Linux might offer an 800:1 reduction of the same workloads. Operational fiefdoms being what they are, an organization might be satisfied with the savings of an 80:1 reduction. Working collaboratively, there might be a 400:1 reduction in servers, with some on virtual blades and some of the mainframe.

Summary

This is not an either-or proposition, though organizationally, it might feel that way.  Collaboration and sharing is at the foundation of the mainframe architecture. Now, through networks and multiple servers, that collaboration extends to Systems of Engagement.

A truly modern IT organization can realize the benefits of collaboration in application development, business resilience, time to deployment, operational risk and simply put, cost savings.

All of the above examples are to prove the point of the value of hybrid and collaborative computing. There are many offerings that provide similar value to those listed in this post.

Hybrid Computing

Modern Data Usage Patterns – a case for Data consolidation

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Last week, I wrote about organizational fiefdom’s and how they can inhibit efficiency in deployment models.

This week, I’ll describe a couple of data patterns that are common across several business models. Most important, they can take advantage of a hybrid deployment model and some unique System z characteristics that can result in a dramatic reduction in operational and security overhead and simplify compliance to a wide variety of government, industry and business regulations. It’s all based on a shared data model and collaboration across end to end technologies.

To me, there are three critical business oriented data operations: update a record, read a record and analyze a collection of records. There are also management operations: backup/archive, migration/recall and disaster recovery. I’m going to focus on the business oriented aspects for this post.

Let’s consider three different scenarios. A national intelligence operation that is processing satellite and other electronic information. A health care environment that processes medical records and data from medical devices. And a Criminal database containing wants, warrants and criminal records.

Each of these has a data ingest process that comes from individuals or individual devices. Satellite data is beamed to earth, typically to an x86 based server and then transmitted and loaded into a “System of Record” which might be considered the master database.

Medical records can be updated by a medical professional and patient via an end user device or portal and input can be received from medical devices e.g. EKG, MRI, XRay, etc. All of this information is then loaded into a master database.

BOLO’s (Be On the Look Out), Criminal Records, Wants and Warrants are input by various police agencies and transmitted to a master record database that can be accessed by other police departments to see if someone they’ve stopped or is in custody may be wanted by other jurisdictions.

Each of these scenarios has something special about them – a need to know. A doctor or nurse can’t “troll” a medical database looking for any data. That’s against HIPAA policy. They should only be looking at records associated with patients they are working with.

Intelligence analysts may only be able to see certain satellite or ELINT (electronic intelligence feeds) based on their security clearance.

Police in one jurisdiction cannot query or update records in other jurisdictions unless they are pre-approved for a particular case.

This Need to Know can also be called Compartmentalization or labeling of data. DB2 on z/OS has technology known as Multi-Level Security that allows data to be hidden from users and applications that don’t have a need to know. The best part of this technology is there doesn’t need to be any change to an application. The need to know criteria is established between security administrators and database administrators. As a result, when multiple users attempt to query an entire database, if they are in different compartments they’ll get completely different result sets without knowing the full breadth of the database.

So let’s look at a Medical System that has multiple hospitals scattered across a broad geography. Each hospital has specialty areas: Orthopedics, Oncologists, Pediatrics, etc. There is a Primary Care Physician (PCP) for each individual patient. There is the Patient. There are a bunch of different medical test devices: MRI, CTScan, EKG, etc.  At some point, a Patient Care Record is created. A PCP is identified to that Patient. They may order tests on behalf of the patient. Test data is captured, stored and linked to the patient’s record. A Cardiologist may see and annotate information associated with the EKG. Any other Cardiologist at the hospital may also see that EKG and annotate it. An Orthopedic surgeon may look at it, but not annotate it. A doctor at another hospital may not even know that the patient exists unless they are invited to look at it by a peer or via the patient requesting a second opinion.

The following diagram shows a Manufacturing business that gets a variety of “parts” from different suppliers. They allowed each of their suppliers to check the on hand inventory to allow for continuous manufacturing and improve the supply chain operations. The unintended consequence of this implementation was that each supplier could see another suppliers’ inventory and price per unit. As a result, devious suppliers could undercut the competition or worse, collude with their competitors to raise prices.

Commercial MLS

By turning on the labeled security capabilities of DB2, the suppliers can only see their records. Employees of the manufacturing company can see all the records in the database. No applications were changed. The manufacturing company had to collect some additional security information for each supplier in order for this to work properly. You’ll notice the inclusion of internet address (IP @) as a security context. The manufacturer can “force” supplier updates to come from the supplier’s site. It will not allow a supplier’s employees to logon from home, for example. This could help inhibit a rogue employee of the supplier from compromising the Manufacturer’s database.

There are other examples of production systems leveraging MLS capabilities. Lockheed Martin has been operating a secure environment for multiple agencies for many years. This has been for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and its mission partners.

But here’s another important distinction from other models. The data operations are somewhat like the Eagle’s song Hotel California: 

“We are programmed to receive, You can check out anytime you like… but you can never leave”.

That means if you are viewing the data, you are viewing the “System of Record”. Where you are viewing from is called the “System of Engagement“.  By definition, the System of Engagement can overlay and complement the System of Record by transforming it. This is can be a  stateless entity or read only. The XRay image, stored in a database, is just a collection of bytes. The end user may not have the proper viewer installed on their desktop. The System of Engagement will transform the image into something consumable and recognizable by the end user. The Hospital doesn’t make a copy of the data and transmit it to other service providers. If they did, they’d have to ensure that those new data owners of the copy adhered to the same stringent privacy laws for which they are accountable. This becomes a logistics nightmare. Instead, the “user” being a patient or medical professional accesses a program (The System of Engagement), which could be a virtual desktop or web service, which in turn accesses the database and remotely presents the requested data to the end user. This is more of an image as the end user device is considered stateless. No local copy is saved. Because this is solely a remote presentation of the information, that device can be exempt from Privacy audits because it is understood that no local copy is made. This doesn’t address an end user taking a picture or writing down information associated with the record being processed. There are other products that can be deployed to capture these breaches of privacy policy. I can cover that in a later post.

Compartments can be created that contain only a subset of the stored records, similar to a view. So analytic processing might be done across all database records, looking for patterns, fraud, opportunities, etc, but without including protected personally identifiable information. For example, disease outbreaks by region, trends, risks, etc, but again, this analysis may only be done by someone with a need to know.

Look here for a video associated with Intelligence Analysts dealing with Satellite transmissions and leveraging this workflow.

SatelliteDemo

It may be hard for some of you, but imagine the different satellites are actually medical devices. Imagine the different compartments are associated with various hierarchies of users at a Corporate level, Branch/Region, Department and individual basis. Imagine the spatial data results of this video as demonstrated using Google Earth, are instead rendering views of XRays, CTScan’s, etc. Hopefully, this is a compelling view of the realm of possibilities. One thing that might appear contrary to what I described earlier is the fact that in this video,  various users know that a satellite exists when they didn’t have a need to know. Some satellites may be Top Secret, so unauthorized users have no need to know that that particular satellite even exists. To correct that situation vs what the video depicts,  if the System of Engagement had requested sign on by the user first, they would not have seen the entire list of satellite’s as that may have been excluded by an additional database query of accessible satellites for that user. However, when comparing to medical devices, there is no secret that there are multiple imaging devices, but the results may not be visible to a user, based on the need to know. Many, many options exist. These are just examples to get the discussion started about new possibilities.

There’s another important aspect of this. Any business with DB2 on z/OS already has the System of Record capability. There is a change in operations management required, but no additional software license charges required to implement this. Other platforms are required to separate data (aka copy it) to facilitate the ease of compartmentalization available on DB2 for z/OS. Analytics can be provided against this system of record locally, by products such as the IBM Data Analytics Accelerator (IDAA) or Veristorm’s zDoop, which is a Hadoop solution running on the mainframe. The mainframe is capable of meeting the service level agreements of both the updates and queries of the database with very large scale.

The Systems of Engagement may be Linux or Windows systems running on Virtual Desktops or PC servers, as well as within Linux for System z or z/OS application and transaction processing environments. The end user access could be from kiosks (thin client terminals), Smart Devices, PC’s or business specific devices e.g. Point of Sale, ATM, police cruiser access points, etc. These systems could be hosted in a public or private cloud. They could be part of an existing system infrastructure. Authentication and access control should be centrally managed across the entire operational infrastructure.

The net of all this is a couple of examples of hybrid computing and collaboration across systems that can dramatically reduce the complexity and improve the efficiency of end to end business processes. If you are still compartmentalizing operations by server silos you may have the unintended consequence of missing some dramatic cost savings or better stated, cost avoidance. Compartmentalization on a need to know basis may initially lead a business toward separation of duties and separation/copying of data. But with the capabilities described, it’s actually a form of consolidation and collaboration that enables a greater degree of sharing the System of Record. You might not have to spend more in systems deployment to solve some very complex problems. Happy programming!

Introduction

Server Fiefdoms Inhibit Optimized Business Solutions

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In the 1960’s, the IBM mainframe led a transition in business processing from a paper centric transaction processing environment to an IT centric processing environment. The combination of the Personal Computer and introduction of modems and later the Internet changed the IT community from being internally facing to customer centric computing. The introduction of the PC Server created “commodity centric” computing and, typically, folks running in that environment were against IT centric operations as the PC server could bring Department centric computing to individual business units.

The unintended consequence of all this was fiefdom’s were created to manage server silos. Over a decade of server deployments, individual IT organizations may have been created with business related names (e.g. Point of Sale org, Analytic org, Web hosting org, Claims administration org).  The reality is each of these organizations might be dependent on a specific server infrastructure.  As a result, the introduction of any other server infrastructure, for example mainframe to PC server or centralizing on a mainframe from UNIX or PC servers would be viewed as bad. The reality is no single server is capable of meeting all the IT needs of a business unless they are very, very small. And even then, multiple applications, which typically means, multiple server instances or operating system instances, will be required.

I am mainframe centric

I have no hesitation to say I am mainframe centric. That statement, alone and without context, will scare many people away from me as an IT consultant. One of the things I learned very early in my career is that Security of infrastructure is about People, Process and Technology. While the mainframe may be considered the most secure platform, technologically, my forensic experience at a variety of customers proves that poorly trained people and bad processes were the weakest links to security. But more important, much of that “poor security” happened at the end user device – formerly a PC, but now, including Smart devices, such as phones and tablets. If those devices aren’t secured with passwords and enterprise data residing on them isn’t encrypted, then they become the weakest link. And if the user of the device saves their userid and password in their browser so they can reconnect quickly, well so can the bad guy that steals their device and now, the bad guy has unfettered access to those “more secure” systems that execute transactions or provide data access on behalf of the end user that lost their device. I’ve spent over ten years looking at how back end systems can make the front end devices more secure. So I guess I am Security centric, as well. I’m also web, mobile and application development centric.

Most Application Developers are PC Centric.

If you started out as a mainframe programmer, you probably signed on to the mainframe with a 3270 emulator and used panel driven or command line driven tools to edit files and submit jobs to compile and execute the programs you created. The IT capacity that was used to do this type of development drove up the cost of operating the production mainframes.

The advent of the Personal Computer changed all that. Windows and Linux desktops provide graphic user interfaces. Fourth generation tools will help you graphically design the logic of an application and generate the source code in a variety of different programming languages that best suit the operations environment that you might run the program. With open system interfaces and  common programming languages, one development tool might create code to run on dozens of operating systems and hardware architectures. These are the type of tools used to build most middleware that is sold to run across “your favorite” operating system.

Well, that hybrid development environment didn’t end up as simple as that. Tiers of deployment platforms were created. If it was developed on a PC, then the first choice for a deployment platform was typically a PC server. Other platforms, like UNIX and the mainframe, were considered primarily as production platforms. They didn’t distinguish very well or price differently for developers. As a result, it became unaffordable to develop for a mainframe because the development group or a new Middleware vendor, couldn’t afford a mainframe or UNIX server to test their code, so again, by default, most new applications were targeted to PC servers.

Most Web Servers are PC Centric
Most Analytic Servers are PC Centric

Need I go on? A mantra for the client/server computing era was Move the Data to the Application. This led to copies of data everywhere, but also led to theft, loss, data breaches and server sprawl. Virtualization of server operating systems has helped to reduce server sprawl, but security remains complex. Business resilience, environmental needs (floor space, energy, cooling) and labor costs remain highly complex as well.

I said earlier that I am mainframe centric. But I can also say, unequivocally, that the mainframe can NEVER solve all of your business problems by itself. Why is that? Because it is blind and deaf. The 3270 terminal and punch card are long gone as input output devices. The modern mainframe requires a graphically enabled front end device, such as a Point of Sale device, ATM, PC or Smart Device. It still requires communications but now it leverages TCP/IP instead of SNA. So any business leveraging a mainframe is now a multi system business. Even the zEnterprise, with its introduction of the System z Bladecenter EXtension can’t solve all of a business’ problems because it doesn’t handle virtual desktop infrastructure nor manage the deployment of end user devices.

So let’s go back to solving business problems. We don’t need to discuss server types, but we can make some statements that should prove true, irrespective of server deployment model.

  1. Share data – the fewer copies of data, the easier to manage security and resilience. Sharing data for read/write access (transaction processing) along with read only access (Query and Analytics) will enable a combination of workflows that include real time analytics (fraud detection, co-selling) in a basic transaction.
  2. Move applications to data – copying applications is far easier and less time consuming, in addition to more secure and resilient, than moving data. Virtualization technologies enable a simple way to bring applications and data together in the same infrastructure and improve latency and simplify business resilience.
  3. Look for tortured data flows – there never will be a single copy of data, as there should be, at minimum, backup copies and disaster recovery copies. But if you can reduce the number of data moves, leveraging direct access to data, instead of file transfers or unload/reload workflows, a business can dramatically reduce operational complexity.
  4. The fewer parts (servers and data) the better – there will be less environmental costs, software license charges and reduction in complexity for security, capacity management and business resilience management.
  5. Use stateless devices/applications for end user connections – the end user wants direct access to data and transactions, but the less data stored on the end users’ device, the better. Cookies should be the limit of context stored on an end user device. That way, if the device is lost or stolen, no corporate data is lost. It will be stored centrally. This can be true of thin client computers as well as web access to a transaction processing environment.
  6. Never give developers direct access or copies of Production data – Development systems are generally not production systems. There is no logging, limited or no security and rarely an audit of critical data. This is the simplest target for a hacker or insider to attack in order to gain access to personally identifiable information or corporate jewels. Developers should have cleansed data through anonymization tools or other creations to ensure that the production environment remains protected.
  7. Measure availability end to end. I’ve seen server shops (of all types) claim four or five nines of availability for their infrastructure. That’s a nice internal measurement. If the end user, a consumer, is trying to access their data on a back end server and the security server, the web proxy server, a router or some other networking infrastructure is down then the business is down to them. Availability should be a business target not a server only target.
  8. Identify the security of users from end to end. When looking at transaction logs, a business should be able to see the identify of the individual that initiated a request. If the logs only identify the id of a down stream server, then additional logs and correlation is required from more expensive products to identify the end user. The more misdirection the greater the risk to security and data theft. Ensure that the originating user is easily identifiable at each step of the business workflow.
  9. Industry standard benchmarks are irrelevant to business workflows. They may help distinguish one component alternative from another. But since we’ve already determined that a hybrid environment will be required for production purposes, there are very few, if any, benchmarks that provide a true end to end workflow that mimics multiple business operations. Much like lawyers, benchmarks can offer guidance and may explain risks, but they are not the decision makers. The business application owner must weigh the total cost of operations and the incremental costs of maintenance for the entire business operations vs. just the component parts identified by a benchmark.

I first published “Porell’s Pointers” using Lotus Freelance for OS/2 circa 1990. The pointers covered then were server agnostic and remain true today. Sure, they were mainframe centric then and could be considered so today. But they make sense even if a UNIX system is the largest in your organization. They make sense if a PC server is the largest in your organization.

Published circa 1990 via Freelance Graphics for OS/2
Published circa 1990 via Freelance Graphics for OS/2

If you can follow these suggestions, but also think about the scale of operations needed for your business, consider the mainframe as a core component of your end to end workflow. Unlike most other servers, it excels at large scale, managing service level agreements (SLAs) for read/write and read only data, providing cross platform security infrastructure and managing availability and business resilience at an application level. The combination of z/OS, z/VM with Linux for System z, along with PC servers and desktop or Smart Devices will be a winning combination to satisfy the majority of your business problems. But once you look at a hybrid solution, then security, availability, disaster recovery, application development, analytics, capacity management and backup and archive should be cross platform or hybrid solutions as well. A wealth of middleware exists that can operate across platforms. This can be the beginning of a new operations model built on business problems rather than server specific domains. Damn the Server Fiefdoms! Full speed ahead with an organization that collaborates for shared business success.  Happy programming!