EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

EMA research has determined that network managers will need to upgrade, expand, and adapt their network monitoring and management tools and practices if they are going to support the Internet of Things (IoT).

“It feels like magic but it is technology,” and “we will help transform every company into a software company,” were the two quotes by Michael Dell that best summed up the spirit of  Dell EMC World 2017. These statements show the genuine excitement of a seasoned tech executive to attack the next challenge of his career: merging the Dell EMC brands -Pivotal, VMware, RSA, SecureWorks, and Virtustream- into one highly differentiated IT powerhouse.

"Today, a dev team leveraging Kubernetes containers can get a cloud app up in minutes." This statement by Arvind Krishna, IBM’s GM for Hybrid Cloud, at the beginning of his InterConnect 2017 keynote should have received a lot more recognition than it did. This one sentence shows the fundamental shift in IBM’s strategy, away from the old Tivoli-centric IT ops company and toward a modern DevOps-focused organization that is looking for differentiation up the stack. Today’s IBM encourages developers to deploy entire application environments without IT administrators even being aware.

ForeScout recently released an IoT Enterprise Risk Report based on research from ethical hacker Samy Kamkar. Based on Kamkar’s findings, the report on IoT security issues could readily be renamed something like, “IoT: the bane of the enterprise environment,” or “IoT brings new meaning to the term ‘Enterprise Risk’.”

In my last IoT blog, I talked about the history of IoT and the evolution of issues surrounding IoT devices. In this part of the series, we will expand on the issues around IoT and the data it collects.

The Internet can be a pretty scary place. Places like the dark web exist in the form of trading houses with stolen personal information from credit cards and social security numbers, to health records and full identities being obtained for a price. Malware development and deployment and other attack services such as DDoS and botnets can be rented by the hour. Recent reports indicate that DDoS attacks are increasing in both frequency and size, and the problem of botnets being used as attack networks or launch points in DDoS and other malicious activities is significant. Indications are that it will only continue to get worse.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a not-for-profit think tank of volunteers that spend their time trying to better the internet. These people are the antithesis of cybercriminals; they spend their energy trying to figure out ways to make our data safer. They create best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, or in this case, they determine how a cloud environment can be used to enhance and scale authentication for a service that can be cloud-based or private data center-based.