Making IT system highly secured and resilient

Recent news – Oracle systems hacked, Delta system down, Amazon system outage are becoming very common news. We have all the technology and solution to avoid these situations.

IT security and business continuity has always been a concern for IT professionals. Worldwide political events, privacy concern, regulatory demands, external attacks, corporate financial crises, and identity theft have contributed to making security management and systems resiliency a boardroom level priority. Enterprises want to make their IT Infrastructure resilient and they also understand the need to maintain service levels to satisfy today’s dynamic business. Maintaining a secured and highly resilient system needs innovative thinking.

We will notice Business continuity of most enterprises focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three building blocks – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – these are widely recognized as vital ingredient for successful business continuity plans. A defensive posture is useful in protecting the organization and its revenue streams but it does not directly help the bottom line.

An offensive resilience posture also consists of three building blocks, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In practice these building blocks can be used all together or in various combinations depending upon need. For example diversifying operations might allow hardening to be limited other than at sites where critical applications and data reside. The resiliency building blocks are illustrated diagrammatically bellow.

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I consider business resilience encompasses business as well as IT and it can be thought of as spanning six discrete layers: Strategy, Organization, Process, data/application, technology and facilities/security.

Strategy includes:

1.     Governance Strategy

2.     Financial strategy

3.     Continuity strategy

4.     Communications strategy

5.     New product/services strategy

6.     Risk management.

Organization includes:

1.     Roles

2.     Responsibilities

3.     Structures

4.     Skills

5.     Cross-organizational cooperation

Process Includes:

1.     IT Process

§  Change management

§  Problem management

§  Incident management

§  Availability management

2.     Business Process

§  Sales Order

§  Financial

§  CRM

§  Claims processing

§  Business controls and System Management Process (IT  Infrastructure Library)

3.     Cross-Functional Process

§  Business Continuity

§  Quality Management

§  R&D

§  ERP

Applications and Data include:

1.     Data security

2.     Data storage

3.     Application architecture and design

4.     Backup and recovery

Technology Includes:

1.     Hardware architectures

2.     System software

3.     Middleware

4.     Networks

5.     Delivery channel

6.     Disruptive technology

Facilities and Security include:

1.     Physical and logical security

2.     Safeguard access

3.     Power protection

4.     Environmental considerations

5.     Security Architecture of the Systems / IT Infrastructure

This model itself is scalable and can be applied to an enterprise, to an individual location, a key business process or IT system. Clearly, a number of lower level considerations embedded in each layer. For example, the Facility/Security layer should consider various aspects of physical and logical security, power protection and environmental consideration.  Business Resilience achieve by implementing continuity, availability, security, recovery and scalability spanning and supporting six discrete layers outlined above combine to deliver Business resilience.

Developing technology strategy to support today's dynamic business environment

Developing technology strategy for an enterprise become more and more complex. Today’s dynamic nature of the business, rapid change of technology, frequently evolving new technology solution making strategy development an on-going effort. Enterprises are monitoring and revisiting strategy and technology road map periodically and modifying accordingly. Even strategy development for next couple of years is a big challenge for enterprises. Architecture thinking and decisions are playing a pivotal role. As always business drivers are the fundamental driving force behind all Architectural Principles, Policies, and Decisions. Innovative thinking is essential for all architecture decision, well thought-out principal and policy can help the enterprise to protect their IT investment. Architect needs to take a holistic look while validating the motivation and implication of all decisions.

If we take a simplistic approach in developing strategy for today’s environment, we will find Market trend, Global Technology Outlook, Customer centric design, and innovative ideas – use cases are major influence factors when we establish a business vision. Similarly we see business needs to consider business innovation, new product, new business model, and business processes to augment current or adapt a new business line. Following self-explanatory picture depicts a strategy development approach in today’s environment.

Infrastructure architecture is the paramount issue for all business leaders to accommodate disruptive technology such as Mobile, Cloud, Internet, and Analytics.  These technologies need robust infrastructure and well thought out underpinning hardware, software, and right technology solution. Digital business imperatives are pushing enterprises to modernize their infrastructure and new architecture for applications. New generation mobile application, Internet of things (IoT), network-speed computing, and high performance enterprise will require maximum efficiency, agility, and speed.  Innovation across the entire stack can only help to capture the business growth opportunities created by the new technologies. Therefore business will be transformed by these system improvements, like transition from reactive to predictive analytics, from static to streaming data, from real to virtual prototypes, from batch to interactive computing. Aggregation of compute intensive, application-specific appliances and storage sub-systems, optimized network, along with middleware and system software will provide compelling differentiation in the new paradigm. 

Anticipating those changes strategy development process need to go beyond traditional development process. Enterprise can be in advantage position by utilizing wealth of information, capturing opportunities created by moving from fragmented global footprints towards true global integration. Enterprises need to think, how they should adapt to the expectations of its new clients and the ever faster pace of change that it brings? 

NOTE:  For detail method and technical paper please contact me.

Third Dimension - in Strategy and Roadmap

Incorporating Technology Outlook is an essential step in establishing IT Strategy for any organizations in today’s rapid changing business and technology landscape. Considering technology outlook in architecture development method can eliminate many risks and also can protect investment because of dynamic nature of today’s business. It is surprising to note that most methods do not incorporate Technology Outlook.

Enterprise has multiple line-of-businesses, therefore when we are thinking about strategy we need to know the business goals for each LoB along with their respective visions. Each LoB establishes their own goals based on market situation, market trend, and most of all they want to position themselves ahead of their competitors. These business goals are also need to align with the overall enterprise’s business goals. Establishing a strategy is a true art of employing stratagems towards the goal of the enterprise and can be accomplished by adopting a holistic approach. Therefore understanding enterprise’s goal, vision, and mission is an essential step in developing strategy that can fulfill overall enterprise’s goal. In today’s dynamic environment Technology Outlook plays a very critical role, I call it a third dimension. To establish a strategy, typically we consider where the enterprise is today and where they want to go by enabling capabilities that enterprise does not have. We align IT transformation to business requirements. This process primarily focuses on business, current architecture, technology, people, and processes to find the gaps. It is a two dimensional approach. Architectural thinking and architectural decisions should also be influenced by the Technology Outlook or the Third Dimension. We design blue print and the road map based on target architecture, but without considering the third dimension the strategy may not be effective for a future date. We must know how much today’s architecture decision will be able to sustain the future changes due to continuous innovation of new technology and customers’ demand.

The third dimension needs substantial research and trend analysis. If we look back we see the change in – 

1)    Foundation – Transformative Enterprise Computing

a.    New emerging applications require substantial improvements in system characteristics such as performance, power efficiency and cost/performance.

b.    Solution-optimized systems support aggregation of compute intensive, network optimized, application-specific, storage sub-systems, together with middleware and system software.

c.    Capturing the growth opportunities require fundamental innovation across the entire stack.

d.    Business has been transformed over time because of system improvements. Like transition from reactive to predictive analytics, from static to  streaming data,

2)    Foundation – Security,

a.    We see multitier containment security has emerged to complement perimeter based security architecture.

b.    The vulnerability and threat landscape is changing

c.    Rapid growth of information volume and fast adoption of new technologies making traditional perimeter defense obsolete.

d.    Far field fraud detection technologies providing early warnings about security breaches and fraudulent transactions before such incidents emerge to complement existing near field techniques. 

Similarly we find rapid change in Business Decision category

3)    Business decision – Digital Economy

a.    International and national government introduced new regulation and monitoring policy, therefore financial firms implement mechanism to comply transparency and reporting.

b.    Mobile Financial Services and expansion of mobile banking changing the concept of interactions of customers with the financial institute.

c.    Transparent Securitization

4)    Business decision – Data for smart decision

a.    Although analytics technology has a proven and growing ability to create value from data, new technology made the data usable for all decision makers, not just analysts.

b.    Huge amounts of heterogeneous data of variable quality require better tools to identify data that is relevant for smart decision making.

c.    Database technology has moved from traditional to new paradigm of data management using hardware and software integration techniques, fabric based computing model. Data access and storing techniques leveraging new technology that include operating systems, memory utilization, faster access path.

d.    The ability to pull value from massive amounts of data and respond to real-time information is becoming a crucial competitive differentiator.  Value is realized by making smart data-driven decisions.

We also see the revolution in quality of services and customer experiences.

Therefore, without considering technology outlook in defining strategy, deriving Road Map and Architecture Blue print from this process may not help an enterprise to move in the right direction. So our challenge is:

(1)    Integrating Technology outlook into Strategy development 

(2)    Strategy that will satisfy today’s need must accommodate tomorrow’s new technology.

(3)    How we synchronize and integrate Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Technology Architecture, future technology, and potential new computing model in this innovative dynamic new business world

(4)    How will you deliver strategy while protecting client’s investment and without reworking on any component of the framework.

(5)    How SOA implementation strategy can support future technology.

Value of Pattern in Fabric-based computing model

Almost two years back I wrote a small column about the value of pattern in Architecture Design, this is now more relevant in today’s fabric-based computing (FBC) model. IBM and Oracle have already adopted fabric-based computing, I am sure other vendors are also in the market or will adopt FBC model soon. Architect will now have to include pattern analysis in their architecture designing method. If we cannot establish the pattern correctly we will land up into old stove-pipe scenario. Pattern and non-functional requirements will be the standard for Architecture Design work for the new FBC model.

Pattern are not something new, it is around for a long time. Pattern landscape encompassing both structural architecture and behavioral architecture will help to determine the right configuration of FBC model. Please stay tune for detail on Pattern Landscape design.

Social Media - a pradigm shift

Social Media - a pradigm shift

Social Media has changed the Business Model for most enterprises. Business leaders are realizing that it is not possible to cut cost and grow the business at the same time by simply doing the same thing again and again. They are seeking new ideas and want to unlock new source of values within and outside their organization. They realized that they have to do new things that can produce different business results. Successful enterprises are making innovation their top priority. They understand that innovation is the only way to create sustainable competitive advantage in today’s changing world of new economy, and rising global competition. Enterprises are embracing new technology and new way of thinking. The Social Media Technology is now matured and has established itself as one of the incubators of innovation. In the past, businesses leaders felt they have to create everything themselves.  Today, social media technology has changed the way we used to think and do our businesses. It is helping enterprises to harvest innovation and uncover vast resources within the enterprise. The new technology showing us new forms of collaboration are possible—within a company, between companies, with online communities of experts and even with countless unknown individuals around the world. Employees can share ideas and work on projects with unprecedented ease. Experts of same or related subject area can team with those of another company. The open source software movement has delivered powerful operating system LINUX. This is just an example, it shows how widely distributed communities can come together virtually to create and improve products. Enterprise can engage with the entire networked world to learn, to capture feedback—or to turn their customers into co-creators, sharing thoughts and Ideas.  No matter which financial metric is used—revenue growth, operating margin growth or average profit over time will sharply increase by adopting social media and strong collaboration. Collaboration optimizes human side of the processes. It also shortens business processes cycle time. Most important of all it makes the human resources more productive and innovative.

Social Media is in the core of Social Business. It helps the enterprises become more innovative, helps to unlock untapped resources for better business outcome, revenue growth and increase in productivity. 

Successful colaboration strategy

How to increase employee productivity and grow business is the biggest challenge to the CEO, CFO and CIOs in today’s globally integrated business environment. Complex global economy, diverse types of users and usage are making these tasks more challenging. If we look closely, we will see collaboration technologies optimize human side of the processes. It also shortens processes cycle time. Most important of all it makes the human resources more productive and help to control cost. There are four types of users namely knowledge workers, task workers, power users, and data entry. Knowledge workers and task workers get maximum benefit out of collaboration. Enterprises are deploying collaboration tools to Partners, Customers, Knowledge workers, and task workers. Collaborative tools shorten processing cycle as well as unblock processes. It removes error through group activities, it also increase participation to an activities at global level. Overall it generates better business outcome. It drives overall growth of an enterprise, creates a culture of innovation, and helps to control cost. An open platform for collaboration should be built using flexible and open programmability technology. A successful collaboration must develop efficient means of working, it should create a culture of innovation, and helps innovate through collective talent. Collaboration also leverage and preserve tacit knowledge, establish strong relationship with business partners and customers. It should be an accelerator to business growth and control cost. Collaboration solutions can be categorized in to three areas: Collaborative environment, Collaboration enabled business processes, and role based portals. Successful integration of team collaborations, portals, messaging, communications, and social networking are the key to the successful implementation of collaboration. If we consider each collaboration capability component as a service and use service oriented architecture approach and select right products and delivery models to a business that best suited for them then it will add real value and will be considered as successful implementation of a collaboration strategy for any firm. Product agnostic thinking is the key. There are many products and tools available in the market place. It requires right approach and right viability study.

Third dimension in developing strategy

Strategy is the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal according to Merriam Webster dictionary. In any organizations there are multiple business areas and each business area will have multiple line of businesses, therefore when we are talking about strategy we need to know goals for each line of businesses (LoB) along with that of Information Technology.  Each LoB will establish their own goals based on the market situation, market trend, and most of all how to position themselves at competitive edge. These LoBs goals are also need to align with the overall enterprise’s business goals. The establishing a strategy is a true art of devising or employing plans or stratagems towards the goal of the enterprise and can be accomplished by using a holistic approach. Therefore understanding company’s goal, vision, and mission is an essential step in developing IT strategy that can fulfill overall enterprise’s goal. Most consulting companies have created practices /offerings and developed competency specifically to support their clients in developing a strategy. Each firm has their own techniques and method to establish strategy. Most of us consider relationship and alignment of Enterprise Strategy with Enterprise Architecture, but the most critical piece I see missing everywhere, which I call the third dimension, the Technology Outlook or the new technology. We consider where the enterprise is today and where they want to go. Based on target architecture we design a blue print and road map without considering the third dimension that is technology outlook, new technology that will affect the future business. How do you know how much your today’s architecture decision will affect due to continuous evolution of new technology? The biggest challenge I see:

(1)    Integrating Technology outlook into Strategy development 

(2)    Strategy that will satisfy today’s need and will accommodate tomorrow’s new technology.

(3)    How will you synchronize and integrate Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Technology Architecture,  future technology, and potential new computing model in this innovative dynamic new business world

(4)    How will you deliver strategy while protecting client’s investment and without reworking on any component of the framework that you develop using this strategy.

(5)    SOA implementation strategy that can support future technology.

We need a pattern based approach that can satisfy all these questions and factor-in all five challenges.

For technique paper and approach please contact me. I will be happy to discuss further and will provide you the intellectual capitals that I have created for strategy and road map development.