Insurance Leader AIG Drives Business Transformation and Service Performance Through Center of Excellence Model

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with AIG and HP on the challenges and solutions involved in managing a global center of excellence for IT performance.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Dana Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving performance of their services to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end-users alike.

We're now joined by our co-host and moderator, Chief Software Evangelist at HP, Paul Muller. Welcome, Paul, how are you?

Paul Muller: I'm great Dana. How are you doing?

Gardner: I'm excellent. Where are you coming from today?

Muller: I'm coming from sunny San Francisco. It’s unseasonably warm, and I'm really looking forward to today’s discussions. It should be fun. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Gardner: We have a fascinating show. We're going to be learning about global insurance leader American International Group, or AIG, and how their Global Performance Architecture Group has leveraged a performance center of excellence (COE) to help drive business transformation.

So let me introduce our guest from AIG. We're here with Abe Naguib, Senior Director of AIG’s Global Performance Architecture Group. Welcome back, Abe.

Naguib: Hi, Dana. Hi, Paul. How are you?

Gardner: We're excellent. We've talked before, Abe, and I'm really delighted to have you back. I want to start at a high level. Many organizations are now focusing more on the user experience and the business benefits and less on pure technology, and for many, it's a challenge. From a very high level, how do you perceive the best way to go about a cultural shift, or an organizational shift, from a technology focus more towards this end-user experience focus?

The CIO has to keep his eye forward to periodically change tracks, ensuring that the customers are getting the best value for their money.

Naguib: Well, Paul and Dana, there are several paradigms involved from the COO and CFO’s push on innovation and efficiency. A lot of the tooling that we use, a lot of the products we use help to fully diversify and resolve some of the challenges we have. That’s to keep change running.

Abe Naguib

The CIO has to keep his eye forward to periodically change tracks, ensuring that the customers are getting the best value for their money. That’s a tall order and, he has to predict benefit, gauge value, maintain integrity, socialize, and evolve the strategy of business ideas on how technology should run.

We have to manage quite a few challenges from the demand of operating a global franchise. Our COE looks at various levels of optimization and one key target is customer service, and factors that drive the value chain.

That’s aligning DevOps to business, reducing data-center sprawl, validating and making sense of vendors, products, and services, increasing the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) of emerging technologies, economy of scale, improving services and hybrid cloud systems, as we isolate and identify the cascading impacts on systems. These efforts help to derive value across the chain and eventually help improve customer value.

Gardner: Paul Muller, does this jibe with what you're seeing in the field? Do you see an emphasis that’s more on this sort of process level, when it comes to IT with of course more input from folks like the COO and the chief financial officer?

Level of initiatives

Muller: As I was listening to Abe's description I was thinking that you really can tell the culture of an organization by the level of initiatives and thinking that it has. In fact, you can't change one without changing the other. What I've just described is a very high level of cultural maturity.

Paul Muller

We do see it, but we see it in maybe 10 to 15 percent of organization that have gone through the early stages of understanding the performance and quality of applications, optimizing it for cost and performance, but then moving through to the next stage, reevaluating the entire chain, and looking to take a broader perspective with lots of user experience. So it's not unique, but it's certainly used among the more mature in terms of observational thinking.

Gardner: For the benefit of our audience, Abe, tell us a little bit about AIG, its breadth, and particularly the business requirements that your Global Performance Architecture Group is tasked with meeting?

Naguib: Sure, Dana. AIG is a leading international insurance organization, across 130 countries. AIG’s companies serving commercial, institutional, individual customers, through one of the world’s most extensive property/casualty networks, are leading providers of life insurance and retirement services in the US.

Among the brand pillars that we focused on are integrity, innovation, and market agility across the variety of products that we offer, as well as customer service.

Bringing together our business-critical and strategic drivers across IT’s various segments fosters alignment, agility, and eventually unity.

Gardner: And how about the Global Performance Architecture Group? How do you fit into that?

Naguib: With AIG’s mantra of "better, faster, cheaper," my organization’s people, strategy, and comprehensive tools help us to bridge these gaps that a global firm faces today. There are many technology objectives across different organizations that we align, and we utilize various HP solutions to drive our objectives, which is getting the various IT delivery pistons firing in the same direction and at the right time.

These include performance, application lifecycle management (ALM), and business service management (BSM), as well as project and portfolio management (PPM). Over time our Global Performance organization has evolved, and our senior manager realized our strategic benefit and capability to reduce cost, risk, and mitigate production and risk.

Our role eventually moved out of quality assurance's QA’s functional testing area to focus on emphasizing application performance, architecture design patterns, emerging technologies, infrastructure and consolidation strategies, and risk mitigation, as well increasing ROI and economy of scale. With the right people, process, and tools, our organization enabled IT transparency and application tuning, reduced infrastructure consumption, and accelerated resolution of any system performances in dev and production.

The key is bringing together our business-critical and strategic drivers across IT’s various segments fosters alignment, agility, and eventually unity. Now, our leaders seek our guidance to help tune IT at some degree of financial performance to unlock optimal business value.

Culture of IT

Gardner: What's interesting to me, Paul, about what Abe just said is the evolution of this from test and dev in QA to a broader set of first IT, then operations, and then ultimately even through that culture of IT generally. Is that a pattern you're seeing that the people in QA are in the sense breaking out of just an application performance level and moving more into what we could call IT performance level?

Muller: As I was listening to Abe talk through that, there were a couple of keywords that jumped out that are indicators of maturity. One of them is the recognition that, rather than being a group-sized task, things like application, quality performance, and user experience actually are a discipline that can be leveraged consistently across multiple organizational units and, whether you centralize it or make it uniform across the organization is an important part of what you just described.

Maturity of operational and strategic alignment is something that requires a significant investment on business’s and IT’s behalf to prove early returns by doing a good job on some of the smaller projects. This shows a proven return on investment before the organization is typically going to be willing to invest in creating a centralized and an uniform architecture group.

Gardner: Abe, do you have some response to that?

Naguib: Yes, more-and-more, in the last six or seven years, there's less focus on just basic performance optimization. The focus is now on business strategy impact on infrastructure CAPEX, and OPEX. Correlating business use cases to impact on infrastructure is the golden grail.

I always say that software drives the hardware.

Once you start communicating to CIOs the impact of a system and the cost of hosting, licensing, headcount, service sprawl, branding, and services that depend on each other, we're more aligning DevOps with business.

Muller: You can compare the discussion that I just had with a conversation I had not three weeks ago with a financial institution in another part of the world. I asked who is responsible for your end-to-end business process -- in this case I think it was mortgage origination -- and the entire room looked at each other, laughed, and said "We don't know."

So you've really got this massive gap in terms of not just IT process maturity, but you also have business-process maturity, and it's very challenging, in my experience, to have one without having the other.

Gardner: I think we have to recognize too that most businesses now realize that software is such an integral part of their business success. Being adept at software, whether it's writing it, customizing it, implementation and integration, or just overall lifecycle has become kind of the lifeblood of business, not just an element of IT. Do you sense that, Abe, that software is given more clout in your organization?

Naguib: Absolutely Dana. I truly believe that. I've been kind of an internal evangelist on this, but I always say that software drives the hardware. Whether I communicate with the enterprise architects, the dev teams, the infrastructure teams, software frankly does drive the hardware.

That's really the key point here. If you start managing your root cost and performance from a software perspective and then work your way out, you’ve got the key to unlocking everything from efficiencies to optimizing your ROI and to addressing TCO over time. It's all business driven. Know your use cases. Know how it impacts your software, which impacts your infrastructure.

Converged infrastructure

Gardner: Of course, these days we’re hearing more about software-defined networking, software-defined data centers, and converged infrastructure. It really does start to come together, so that you can control, manage, and have a data-driven approach to IT, and that fits into ITIL and some of the other methodologies. It really does seem to be kind of a golden age for how IT can improve as performance, as productivity, and of course as a key element to the overall business. Is that what you’re finding too, Abe?

Naguib: Absolutely. It's targeting software performance, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that depend on each other.

More and more, it's a domino effect. If you don't identify the root cause, isolate it, and resolve it, the impact does have a cascading effect, on optimization, delivery, and even cost, as we’ve seen repeatedly in the last couple of years. That’s how we communicate to our C-level community.

Gardner: Of course we have to recognize it. Just being performant, optimized, and productive for its own sake isn’t good enough in this economy. We have to show real benefits, and you have to measure those benefits. Maybe you have some way to translate how this actually does benefit your customers. Any metrics of success you can share with us, Abe?

Naguib: Yes, during our initial requirements-gathering phase with our business leaders, we start defining appropriate test-modeling strategy, including volumetrics, and managing and understanding the deployment pattern with subscriber demographics and user roles. We start aligning DevOps organizations with business targets which improves delivery expectations, ROI, TCO, and capacity models.

The big transformation taking place right now is that our organization is connecting different silos of IT delivery, in particular development, quality, and operations.

Then, before production, our Application Performance Engineering (APE) team identifies weak spots to provide the production team with a reusable script setting thresholds on exact hotspots in a system, so that eventually in production, they can take appropriate productive measures. Now, this is value add.

Gardner: Paul, do you have any thoughts in terms of how that relates to the larger software field, the larger enterprise performance field?

Muller: As we’re seeing across the planet at the moment, there's a recognition that to bring great software and information is really a function of getting Layers 1 through 7 in the technology stack working, but it's also about getting Layer 8 working. Layer 8, in this case, is the people. Unfortunately, being technologists, we often forget about the people in this process.

What Abe just described is a great representation of the importance of getting not just a functional part of IT, in this case quality and performance working well, but it's about recognizing the software will one day be delivered to operational staff to internally monitor and manage it in a production setting.

The big transformation taking place right now is that our organization is connecting different silos of IT delivery, in particular development, quality, and operations, to help them accelerate the release of quality applications, and to automate things like threshold setting, and optimize monitoring of metrics ahead of time. Rather than discovering that an application might fail to perform in a production setting, where you've got users screaming at you, you get all of that work done ahead of time.

Sharing and trust

You create a culture of sharing and trust between development, quality, and operations that frankly doesn’t exist in a lot of process where the relationship between development and operations is pretty strained.

Gardner: Abe, how do you measure this? We recognized the importance of the metrics, but is there a new coin of the realm in terms of measurement? How do you put this into a standardized format that you’re going to take to your CFO and your COO and say here’s what's really happening?

Naguib: That's a good question. Tying into what Paul was saying, nobody cared about whether we improved performance by three seconds or two seconds. You care at the front end, when you hear users grumbling. The bottom line is how the application behaves, translating that into business impact as well as IT impact.

Business impact is what are the dollar values to make key use cases and transactions that don't scale. Again, software drives the hardware. If an application consumes more hardware, the hardware is cheap now-a-days, but licenses aren’t. You have database and you have middleware products running in that environment, whether it's on-premise or in the cloud.

The point is that impact should be measured, and that's how we started communicating results through our organization. That's when we started seeing C-level officers tuning in and realizing the impact of performance of both to the bottom line, even to the top line.

We were able to leverage consistent dashboards across different IT solutions internally, then target weak spots and help drive optimization.

Gardner: It strikes me, Abe, that this is going to set you up to be in a better position to move to cloud models, consume more SaaS services, as you mentioned earlier, and to become more of a hybrid services delivery shop or have that capability. Does that make sense? Do you feel more prepared for what this next level of compute architecture you seem to be heading toward as a result of the investments you've made?

Naguib: Absolutely Dana. Our role is to provide more insight earlier and quicker to the right people at the right time.

Leveraging HP’s partnership and solutions helped us to address technologies, whether Web 2.0, client-server, legacy systems, Web, cloud-based, or hybrid models. We were able to leverage consistent dashboards across different IT solutions internally, then target weak spots and help drive optimization, whether on premise or cloud.

Gardner: Paul Muller, thoughts about how this is working more generally in the market, how people who get a grasp on global performance architecture issues like AIG are then in a better position to leverage and exploit the newer and far more productive types of computing models?

Muller: In the enterprise today, it's all about getting your ideas out of your head and making them a reality. As Abe just described, most of the best ideas today that are on their way into business processes you can ultimately turn into software. So success is really all about having the best applications and information possible.

Understand maturity

The challenge is understanding how the technology, the business process and the benefits come together and then orchestrating that the delivery of that benefit to your organization. It's not something that can be done without a deliberate focus on process. Again, the challenge is always understanding your organization's maturity, not just from an IT standpoint, but importantly from a broader standpoint.

Naguib: What's the common driver for all? Money talks. Translating things into a dollar value started to bring groups together to understand what we can do better to improve our process.

Gardner: Abe, it strikes me that you guys are really fulfilling this value epicenter role there and expanding the value of that role outside the four walls of IT into the larger organization. Tell me how HP is joining you in a partnership to do that? What is it that you're bringing to the table to improve that value for the epicenter of value benefit?

Naguib: Dana, what we're seeing more is that it's not just internal dev and ops that we're aligning with, or even our business service level expectations. It's also partnerships with key vendors that have opened up the roadmap to align our technologies, requirements, and our challenges into those solutions.

The gains we make are simple. They can be boiled down into three key benefits: savings, performance, and business agility. Leveraging HP's ALM solutions helps us drive IT and business transformation and unlock resources and efficiencies. That helps streamline delivery and an increased reliability of our mission critical systems.

After we've dealt with tuning, we can help activate post-production monitoring using the same script, understanding where the weak spots are.

My favorite has always been HP's LoadRunner Performance Center. It’s basically our Swiss Army Knife to support diverse platform technologies and align business use cases to the impact on IT and infrastructure via SiteScope, HP SiteScope.

We're able to deep dive into the diagnostics, if needed. And the best part is, after we've dealt with tuning, we can help activate post-production monitoring using the same script, understanding where the weak spots are.

So the tools are there. The best part is integrated, and actually work together very well.

Gardner: It really sounds like you've grabbed onto this system-of-record concept for IT, almost enterprise resource planning (ERP) for IT. Is that fair?

Naguib: That's a good way to put it.

Muller: One of the questions I get a lot from organizations is how we measure and reflect the benefit. What hard data have you managed to get?

Three-month study

Naguib: IDC came in and did an extensive three-month study, and it was interesting what they have found. We've realized a saving of more than $11 million annually for the past five years by increasing our economy of scale. Scale on a system allows more applications on the same host.

It's an efficiency from both hardware and software. They also found that our using solutions from HP increased staff productivity by over $300,000 a year. Instead of fighting fires, we're actually now focusing on innovation, and improving business reliability by over $600,000 a year.

So all that together shows a recoup, a five-year ROI, about 577 percent. I was very excited about that study. They also showed that we resolved mean time resolution over 70 percent through production debugging, root cause, and resolution efforts.

So what we found, and technologists would agree with me, is that today, with hardware being cheaper than software, there is a hidden cost associated with hosting an application. The bottom line, if we don’t test and tune our applications holistically, either the architecture, code, infrastructure, and shared services, these performance issues can quickly degrade quality of service, uptime, and eventually IT value.

I have a saying, which is that quality costs money but bad quality costs more.

Muller: I have a saying, which is that quality costs money but bad quality costs more. There you go.

Gardner: Abe, any recommendations that you might have for other organizations that are thinking of moving in this direction and that want to get more mature, as Paul would say. What are some good things to keep in mind as you start down this path?

Naguib: Besides software drives the hardware -- and I can't stress that enough -- are all the ways to understand business impact and translate whatever you're testing into the business model.

What happens to the scenarios such as outages? What happens when things are delayed? What is the impact on business operability, productivity, liability, customer branding. There are so many details that stem from performance. We used to be dealing with the "Google factor" of two-second response time, but now, we're getting more like millisecond response, because there are so many interdependencies between our systems and services.

Another fact is that a lot of products come into our doors on a daily basis. Modern technologies come in with a lot of promises and a lot of commitments.

Identify what works

So it's being able to weed through the chaff, identify what works, how the interdependencies work, and then, being able to partner with vendors of those solutions and services. Having tools that add transparency into their products and align with our environment helps bring things together more. Treating IT like a business by translating the impact into dollar value, helps to get lined up and responsive.

Gardner: Very good. Last word to you, Paul. Any thoughts about getting started? Are there principles that you are seeing in common, threads or themes for organizations, as they begin to get the maturity model in place and extend quality and process performance assurance improvements even more generally into their business?

Muller: It might be a little controversial here, but the first step is look in the mirror and understand your organization and its level of maturity. You really need to assess that very self-critically before you start. Otherwise, you're going to burn a lot of capital, a lot of time, and a lot of credibility trying to make a change to an organization from state A to state B. If you don’t understand the level of maturity of your present state before you start working on the desired state, you can waste a lot of time and money. It's best to look in the mirror.

The second step is to make sure that, before you even begin that process, you create that alignment and that desired state in the construct of the business. Make sure that your maturity aligns to the business's maturity and their goal. I just described the ability to measure the business impact in terms of revenue of IT services. Many companies can’t even do something as fundamental as that. It can be really hard to drive alignment, unless you’ve got business-IT alignment ahead of time.

I have said this so many times. The technology is a manageable problem, Layers 1 through 7, including management software to a certain degree, have solved problems the most time. Solving the problem of Layer 8 is tough. You can reboot the server, but you can’t reboot a person.

Solving the problem of Layer 8 is tough. You can reboot the server, but you can’t reboot a person.

I always recommend bringing along some sort of management of organizational change function. In our case, we actually have a number of trained organizational psychologists working for us who understand what it takes to get several hundred, sometimes several thousand, people to change the way they behave, and that’s really important. You’ve got to bring the people along with it.

Gardner: Well we have to take a hint from you, Paul. Maybe our next topic will be The Psychology of IT, but we won’t be able to get to that today. I am afraid we'll have to leave it there and I have to thank our co-host Paul Muller, the Chief Software Evangelist at HP. Thanks so much for joining us.

Muller: Always a pleasure.

Gardner: And like to thank our supporter for this series, HP Software, and remind our audience to carry on the dialogue with Paul and other experts there at HP through the Discover Performance Group on LinkedIn.

You can gain more insights and information on the best of IT performance management at www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance. And you can always access this in other episodes of our HP Discover Performance podcast series at hp.com and on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.

Of course, we also extend a big thank you to our guest. Abe Naguib, Senior Director of AIG’s Global Performance Architecture Group. Thanks so much, Abe.

Naguib: Thank you, Dana, thank you, Paul. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Gardner: Again, a last thank you to our audience for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance podcast discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your co-host for this ongoing series of HP-sponsored business success story. Thanks again for joining and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with AIG and HP on the challenges and solutions involved in managing a global center of excellence for IT performance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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New Strategies Needed to Ensure Simpler, More Efficient Data Protection for Complex Enterprise Environments

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on new solutions to solve the growing need for more reliable and less cumbersome data backups, despite increasingly data-intensive environments.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Quest Software.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Dana Gardner

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on enterprise backup, why it’s broken, and how to fix it. We'll examine some major areas where the backup of enterprise information and data protection are fragmented, complex, and inefficient. And then, we'll delve into some new approaches that help simplify the data-protection process, keep costs in check, and improve recovery confidence.

Here to share insights on how data protection became such a mess and how new techniques are being adopted to gain comprehensive and standard control over the data lifecycle is John Maxwell, Vice President of Product Management for Data Protection at Quest Software, now part of Dell. [Disclosure: Quest Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Welcome back to the show, John.

John Maxwell: Hey, Dana. It’s great to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with George Crump, Founder and Lead Analyst at Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm focused on the storage market. Welcome, George.

George Crump: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: John, let’s start with you. How did we get here? Why has something seemingly as straightforward as backup become so fragmented and disorganized?

Maxwell: Dana, I think it’s a perfect storm, to use an overused cliché. If you look back 20 years ago, we had heterogeneous environments, but they were much simpler. There were NetWare and UNIX, and there was this new thing called Windows. Virtualization didn’t even really exist. We backed up data to tape, and a lot of data was in terabytes, not petabytes.

Flash forward to 2012, and there’s more heterogeneity than ever. You have stalwart databases like Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, but then you have new apps being built on MySQL. You now have virtualization, and, in fact, we're at the point this year where we're surpassing the 50 percent mark on the number of servers worldwide that are virtualized.

John Maxwell

Now we're even starting to see people running multiple hypervisors, so it’s not even just one virtualization platform anymore, either. So the environment has gotten bigger, much bigger than we ever thought it could or would. We have numerous customers today that have data measured in petabytes, and we have a lot more applications to deal with.

And last, but not least, we now have more data that’s deemed mission critical, and by mission critical, I mean data that has to be recovered in less than an hour. Surveys 10 years ago showed that in a typical IT environment, 10 percent of the data was mission critical. Today, surveys show that it’s 50 percent and more.

Gardner: George, did John leave anything out? From your perspective, why is it different now?

Crump: A couple of things. I would dovetail into what he just mentioned about mission criticality. There are definitely more platforms, and that’s a challenge, but the expectation of the user is just higher. The term I use for it is IT is getting "Facebooked."

High expectations

I've had many IT guys say to me, "One of the common responses I get from my users is, 'My Facebook account is never down.'" So there is this really high expectation on availability, returning data, and things of that nature that probably isn’t really fair, but it’s reality.

One of the reasons that more data is getting classified as mission critical is just that the expectation that everything will be around forever is much higher.

George Crump

The other thing that we forget sometimes is that the backup process, especially a network backup, probably unlike any other, stresses every single component in the infrastructure. You're pulling data off of a local storage device on a server, it’s going through that server CPU and memory, it’s going down a network card, down a network cable, to a switch, to another card, into some sort of storage device, be it disk or tape.

So there are 15 things that happen in a backup and all 15 things have to go flawlessly. If one thing is broken, the backup fails, and, of course, it’s the IT guy’s fault. It’s just a complex environment, and I don’t know of another process that pushes on all aspects of the environment in one fell swoop like backup does.

Gardner: So the stakes are higher, the expectations are higher, the scale and volume and heterogeneity are all increased. What does this mean, John, for those that are tasked with managing this, or trying to get a handle on it as a process, rather than a technology-by-technology approach, really looking at this at that life cycle? Has this now gone from being a technical problem to a management or process problem?

Maxwell: It's both, because there are two issues here. One, you expect today's storage administrator, or sysadmin, to be a database administrator (DBA), a VMware administrator, a UNIX sysadmin, and a Windows admin. That’s a lot of responsibility, but that’s the fact.

A lot of people think that they are going to have as deep level of knowledge on how to recover a Windows server as they would an Oracle database. That’s just not the case, and it's the same thing from a product perspective, from a technology perspective.

Is there really such thing as a backup product, the Swiss Army knife, that does the best of everything? Probably not.

Is there really such thing as a backup product, the Swiss Army knife, that does the best of everything? Probably not, because being the best of everything means different things to different accounts. It means one thing for the small to medium-size business (SMB), and it could mean something altogether different for the enterprise.

We've now gotten into a situation where we have the typical IT environment using multiple backup products that, in most cases, have nothing in common. They have a lot of hands in the pot trying to manage data protection and restore data, and it has become a tangled mess.

Gardner: Before we dive a little bit deeper into some of these major areas, I'd like to just visit another issue that’s very top of mind for many organizations, and that’s security, compliance, and business continuity types of issues, risk mitigation issues. George Crump, how important is that to consider, when you look at taking more of a comprehensive or a holistic view of this backup and data-protection issue?

Disclosure laws

Crump: It's a really critical issue, and there are two ramifications. Probably the one that strikes fear in the heart of every CEO on the planet is all the disclosure laws that exist now that say that, when you lose a customer’s data, you have to let him know. Unfortunately, probably the only effective way to do that is to let everybody know.

I'm sure everybody listening to this podcast has gotten more than one letter already this year saying their Social Security number has been exposed, things like that. I can think of three or four I've already gotten this year.

So there is the downside of legally having to admit you made a mistake, and then there is the legal requirements of retaining information in case of a lawsuit. The traditional thing was that if I got a discovery motion filed against me, I needed to be able to pull this information back, and that was one motivator. But the bigger motivator is having to disclose that we did lose data.

And there's a new one coming in. We're hearing about big data, analytics, and things like that. All of that is based on being able to access old information in some form, pull it back from something, and be able to analyze it.

That is leading many, many organizations to not delete anything. If you don't delete anything, how do you store it? A disk-only type of solution forever, as an example, is a pretty expensive solution. I know disk has gotten a lot cheaper, but forever, that’s a really long time to keep the lights on, so to speak.

We need to step back, take inventory of what we've got, and choose the right solution to solve the problem at hand, whether you're an SMB or an enterprise.

Gardner: Let's look at this a bit more from the problem-solution perspective. John, you've gotten a little bit into this notion that we have multiple platforms, we have operating systems, hypervisors, application types, even appliances. What's the problem here and how do we start to develop a solution approach to it?

Maxwell: The problem is we need to step back, take inventory of what we've got, and choose the right solution to solve the problem at hand, whether you're an SMB or an enterprise.

But the biggest thing we have to address is, with the amount and complexity of the data, how can we make sysadmins, storage administrators, and DBAs productive, and how can we get them all on the same page? Why do each one of these roles in IT have to use different products?

George and I were talking earlier. One of the things that he brought up was that in a lot of companies, data is getting backed up over and over by the DBA, the VMware administrator, and the storage administrator, which is really inefficient. We have to look at a holistic approach, and that may not be one-size-fits-all. It may be choosing the right solutions, yet providing a centered means for administration, reporting, monitoring, etc.

Gardner: George, you've been around for a while in this business, as have I, and there is a little bit of a déjà vu here, where we're bringing a system-of-record approach to a set of disparate technologies that were, at one time, best of breed and necessary, but are increasingly part of a more solution or process benefit.

So we understand the maturation process, but is there anything different and specific about backup that makes this even harder to move from that point solution, best of breed mentality, into more of a comprehensive process standardization approach?

Demands and requirements

Crump: It really ties into what John said. Every line of business is going to have its own demands and requirements. To expect not even a backup administrator, but an Oracle administrator that’s managing an Oracle database for a line of business, to understand the nuances of that business and how they want to keep things is a lot to ask.

To tie into what John said, when backup is broken, the default survival mechanism is to throw everything out, buy the latest enterprise solution, put the stake in the ground, and force everybody to centralize on that one item. That works to a degree, but in every project we've been involved with, there are always three or four exceptions. That means it really didn’t work. You didn't really centralize.

Then there are covert operations of backups happening, where people are backing up data and not telling anybody, because they still don't trust the enterprise application. Eventually, something new comes out. The most immediate example is virtualization, which spawned the birth of several different virtualized specific applications. So bringing all that back in again becomes very difficult.

I agree with John. What you need to do is give the users the tools they want. Users are too sophisticated now for you to say, "This is where we are going to back it up and you've got to live with it." They're just not going to put up with that anymore. It won't work.

So give them the tools that they want. Centralize the process, but not the actual software. I think that's really the way to go.

Gardner: So we recognize that one size fits all probably isn’t going to apply here. We're going to have multiple point solutions. That means integration at some level or multiple levels. That brings us to our next major topic. How do we integrate well without compounding the complexity and the problems set? John?

We’re keenly interested in leveraging those technologies for the DBAs and sysadmins in ways that make their lives easier and make sure they are more productive.

Maxwell: We've been working on this now for almost two years here at Quest, and now at Dell, and we are launching in November, something called NetVault XA. “XA” stands for Extended Architecture. We have a portfolio of very rich products that span the SMBs and the enterprise, with focus on virtual backup, heterogeneous backup, instantaneous snapshots and deep application recovery, and we’re keenly interested in leveraging those technologies for the DBAs and sysadmins in ways that make their lives easier and make sure they are more productive.

NetVault XA solves some really big issues. First of all, it unifies the user experience across products, and by user, I mean the sysadmin, the DBA, and the storage administrator, across products. The initial release of NetVault XA will support both our vRanger and NetVault Backup, as well as our NetVault SmartDisk product, and next year, we'll be adding even more of our products under NetVault XA as well.

So now we've provided a common means of administration. We have one UI. You don’t have to learn something different. Everyone can work on the same product, yet based on your login ID, you will have access to different things, whether it's data or capabilities, such as restoring an Oracle or SQL Server database, or restoring a virtual machine (VM).

That's a common UI. A lot of vendors right now have a lot of solutions, but they look like they're from three, four, or five different companies. We want to provide a singular user experience, but that's just really the icing on the cake with NetVault XA.

If we go down a little deeper into NetVault XA, once it’s is installed, learning alongside vRanger, NetVault, or both, it's going to self identify that vRanger or NetVault environment, and it's going to allow you to manage it the way that you have already set about from that ability.

New approach

We're really delivering a new approach here, one we think is going to be unique in the industry. That's the ability to logically group data and applications within lines of business.

You gave an example earlier of Oracle. Oracle is not an application. Oracle is a platform for applications, and sometimes applications span databases, file systems, and multiple servers. You need to be looking at that from a holistic level, meaning what makes up application A, what makes up application B, C, D, etc.?

Then, what are the service levels for those applications? How mission critical are they? Are they in that 50 percent of data that we've seen from surveys, or are they data that we restored from a week ago? It wouldn’t matter, but then, again, it's having one tool that everyone can use. So you now have a whole different user experience and you're taking up a whole different approach to data protection.

Gardner: This is really interesting. I've seen a demo of this and I was very impressed. One of the things that jumped out at me was the fact that you're not just throwing a GUI overlay on a variety of products and calling it integration.

There really seems to be a drilling down into these technologies and surfacing information to such a degree that it strikes me as similar to what IT service management (ITSM) did for managing IT systems at a higher level. We're now bringing that to a discrete portion backup and recovery. Does that sound about right, George, or did I overstate it?

We're really delivering a new approach here, one we think is going to be unique in the industry. That's the ability to logically group data and applications within lines of business.

Crump: No, that's dead-on. The benefits of that type of architecture are going to be substantial. Imagine if you are the vRanger programmer, when all this started. Instead of having to write half of the backend, you could just plug into a framework that already existed and then focus most of your attention on the particular application or environment that you are going to protect.

You can be releasing the equivalent of vRanger 6 on vRanger 1, because you wouldn’t have to go write this backend that already existed. Also, if you think about it, you end up with a much more reliable software product, because now you're building on a library class that will have been well tested and proven.

Say you want to implement deduplication in a new version of the product or a new product. Instead of having to rewrite your own deduplication engine, just leverage the engine that's already there.

Gardner: John, it sounds a little bit like we're getting the best of both worlds, that is to say the ability to support a lot of point solutions, allowing the tools that the particular overseer of that technology wants to use, but bringing this now into the realm of policy.

It's something you can apply rules to, that you can bring into concert with other IT management approaches or tasks, and then gain better visibility into what is actually going on and then tweak. So amplify for me why this is standardization, but not at the cost of losing that Swiss Army knife approach to the right tool for the right problem?

One common means

Maxwell: First of all, by having one common means, whether you're a DBA, a sysadmin, a VMware administrator, or a storage administrator, this way you are all on the same page. You can have people all buying into one way of doing things, so we don't have this data being backed up two or three times.

But the other thing that you get, and this is a big issue now, is protecting multiple sites. When we talk about multiple sites, people sometimes say, "You mean multiple data centers. What about all those remote office branch offices?" That right now is a big issue that we see customers running into.

The beauty of NetVault XA is I can now have various solutions implemented, whether it's vRanger running remotely or NetVault in a branch office, and I can be managing it. I can manage all aspects of it to make sure that those backups are running properly, or make sure replication is working properly. It could be halfway around the country or halfway around the world, and this way we have consistency.

Speaking of reporting, as you said earlier, what about a dashboard for management? One of our early users of NetVault XA is a large multinational company with 18 data centers and 250,000 servers. They have had to dedicate people to write service-level reports for their backups. Now, with NetVault XA, they can literally give their IT management, meaning their CIO and their CTOs, login IDs to NetVault XA, and they can see a dashboard that’s been color coded.

It can say, "Well, everything is green, so everything is protected," whether it's the Linux servers, Oracle databases, Exchange email, whatever the case. So by being able to reduce that level of complexity into a single pane of glass -- I know it's a cliché, but it really is -- it's really very powerful for large organizations and small.

I can manage all aspects of it to make sure that those backups are running properly, or make sure replication is working properly.

Even if you have two or three locations and you're only 500 employees, wouldn’t it be nice to have the ability to look at your backups, your replicas, and your snapshots, whether they're in the data center or in branch offices, and whether you're a sysadmin, DBA, storage administrator, to be using one common interface and one common set of rules to all basically all get on the same plane?

Gardner: Let's revisit the issue that George was talking about, eDiscovery, making sure that nothing falls through the cracks, because with Murphy’s Law rampant, that's going to be the thing that somebody is going to do eDiscovery on. It seems to me you're gaining some confidence, some sense of guarantees, that whatever service-level agreements (SLAs) and compliance regulatory issues are there, you can start to check these off and gain some automated assurance.

Help me better understand John why the NetVault XA has, for lack of a better word, some sort of a confidence benefit to it?

Maxwell: Well, the thing is that not only have we built things into NetVault XA, where it's going to do auto discovery of how you have vRanger and NetVault set up and other products down the road, but it's going to give you some visibility into your environment, like how many VMs are out there? Are all those VMs getting protected?

I was just at VMworld Barcelona a couple of weeks ago, and VMware has made it incredibly simple now to provision VMs and the associated storage. You've got people powering up and powering down VMs at will. How do you know that you're protecting them?

Dispersed operations

Also at an event this week in Europe, I ran into a user in an emerging country in Eastern Europe, and they have over 1,000 servers, most of which are not being protected. It's a very dispersed operation, and people can implement servers here and there, and they don't know what half the stuff is.

So it's having a means to take an inventory and ensure that the servers are being maintained, that everything is being protected, because next to your employees, your data is the most important asset that you have.

Data is everywhere now. It’s in mobile devices. It certainly could be in cloud-based apps. That's one of the things that we didn’t talk about. At Quest we use seven software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based applications, meaning they're big parts, whether it's Salesforce.com or our helpdesk systems, or even Office 365. This is mission-critical corporate data that doesn’t run in our own data center. How am I protecting that? Am I even cognizant of it?

The cloud has made things even more interesting, just as virtualization has made it more interesting over the past couple of years. With NetVault XA, we give you that one single pane of glass with which you can report, analyze, and manage all of your data.

Gardner: Do we have any instances where we have had users, beta customers perhaps, putting this to use, and do we have any metrics of success? What are they getting from it? It's great to have confidence, it's great to have a single view, but are they reducing expenses? Do they have a real measurement of how their complexity has been reduced? What are the tangibles, John?

Now, this person can focus on ensuring that operating systems are maintained, working with end users.

Maxwell: Well, one of the tangibles is the example of the customer that has 18 data centers, because they have a finite-sized group that manage the backups. That team is not going to grow. So if they have to have two or three people in that team just working on writing reports, going out and looking manually at data, and creating their own custom reports, that's not a good use of their time.

Now, those people can do things that they should be doing, which is going out and making sure that data is being protected, going out and testing disaster recovery (DR) plans, and so forth. Some people were tasked with jobs that aren’t very much fun, and that’s now all been automated.

Now they can get down to brass tacks, which is ensuring that, for an enterprise with a quarter million servers, everything is protected and it's protected the way that people think they are going to be protected, meaning the service levels they have in place can be met.

We also have to remember that NetVault XA brings many benefits to our Ranger customer base as well. We have accounts with maybe one home office and maybe two or three remote labs or remote sales offices. We've talked to a couple of vRanger customers who now implement vRanger remotely. In these shops, there is no storage administrator. It's the sysadmin, the VMware administrator, or the Windows administrator. So they didn’t have the luxury like the big accounts to have people do that.

Now, this person can focus on ensuring that operating systems are maintained, working with end users. A lot of the tasks they were previously forced to do took up a lot of their time. Now, with NetVault XA, they can very quickly look at everything, give that health check that everything is okay, and control multiple locations of vRanger from one central console.

Mobile devices

Gardner: Just to be clear John, this console is something you can view as a web interface, and I'm assuming therefore also through mobile devices. I'm going to guess that at some point, there will perhaps be even a more native application for some of the prominent mobile platforms.

Maxwell: It’s funny that you mentioned that. This is an HTML5-based application. So it's very new, very fresh, and very graphical. If you look at the UI, it was designed with tablets and laptops in mind. It's gotten to where you can do controls with your thumbs, assuming you're running this on a tablet.

In-house, and with early support customers, you can log into this remotely via laptops, or tablet computing. We even have some people using them on mobile phones, even though we're not quite there yet. I'm talking about the form factor of how the screens light up, but we will definitely be going that way. So a sysadmin or storage administrator can have at their fingertips the status of what’s going on in the data-protection environment.

What's nice is because this is a thin client, a web UI, you can define user IDs not only for the sysadmins and DBAs and storage administrators, but like I said earlier, IT management.

So if your boss, or your boss’ boss, wants to dial in and see the health of things, how much data you’re protecting, how much data is being replicated, what data is being protected up in the cloud, which is on-prem, all of that sort of stuff, they can now have a dashboard approach to seeing it all. That’s going to make everyone more productive, and it's going to give them a better sense that this data is being protected, and they can sleep at night.

If you don’t have a way to manage and see all of your data protection assets, it's really just a lot of talk.

Gardner: George, we spoke earlier about these natural waves of maturation that have occurred throughout the history of IT. As you look at the landscape for data protection, backup, or storage, how impactful is this in that general maturation process? Is Quest, with its NetVault XA, taking a baby step here, or is this something that gets us a bit more into a fuller, mature outcome, when it comes to the process of data lifecycle?

Crump: Actually, it does two things. Number one, from the process perspective, it allows there to actually be a process. It's nice to talk about backup process and have a process for protection and a process to recover, but if you don’t have a way to manage and see all of your data protection assets, it's really just a lot of talk.

You can't run a process like we are talking about in today’s data center with virtualization and things like that off of an Excel spreadsheet. It's just not going to work. It's nowhere near dynamic enough. So number one, it enables the fact of having a conversation about process.

Number two, it brings flexibility. Because the only other way you could have had that conversation about process, as I said before, would be to throw everything out, pick one application, and suffer the consequences, which would be not ideal support for every single platform.

To sum it up, it's really an enabler to creating a real data-protection process or workflow.

Gardner: Okay. We're going to have to wrap it up pretty soon, but we've mentioned mobile access, and cloud. I wonder if there's anything else coming down the trend pike, if you will, that will make this even more important.

The economy

I come back to our economy. We're still not growing as fast as many people would like, and therefore companies are not just able to grow their top line. They have to look to increase their bottom line through efficiency and deduplication, finding redundancy, cutting down on storage, cutting down energy cost, simplifying, or centralizing data centers into a larger but more efficient and therefore fewer facilities, etc.

Is there anything here, and I will open this up to both John and George, that we can look to in the future that strikes some of these issues around efficiency and productivity, or perhaps there are other trends that will make having a process approach to a data lifecycle and backup and recovery even more important?

Maxwell: Dana, you hit on something that's really near and dear to my heart, which is data deduplication. We have a very broad strategy. We offer our own software-based dedupe. We support every major hardware based dedupe appliance out there, and we're now adding support for Dell’s DR Series, DR4000 dedupe appliances. But we're still very much committed to tape, and we're building initiatives based on storing data in the cloud and backing up, replicating, failover, and so forth.

One of the things that we built into NetVault XA that's separate from the policy management and online monitoring is that we now have historical data. This is going to give you the ability to do some capacity management and capacity planning and see what the utilization is.

How much storage are your backups taking? What's the most optimum number of generations? Where are you keeping that data? Is some data being kept too long? Is some data not being kept long enough?

For every ounce of flexibility, it feels like we have added two ounces of complexity, and it's something we just can't afford to deal with.

By offering a broad strategy that says we support a plethora of backup targets, whether it's tape, special-purpose backup appliances, software-based dedupe, or even the cloud, we're giving customers flexibility, because they have unique needs and they have different needs, based on service levels or budgets. We want to make them flexible, because, going back to our original discussion, one size doesn’t fit all.

Gardner: I think we can sum that up as just being more intelligent, being more empowered, and having the visibility into your data. Anything else, George, that we should consider as we think about the future, when it comes to these issues on backup and recovery and data integrity?

Crump: Just to tie in with what John said, we need flexibility that doesn’t add complexity. Almost everything we've done so far in the environment up to now, has added flexibility, but also, for every ounce of flexibility, it feels like we have added two ounces of complexity, and it's something we just can't afford to deal with. So that's really the key thing.

Looking forward, at least on the horizon, I don't see a big shift, something like virtualization that we need to be overly concerned with. What I do see is the virtual environment becoming more and more challenging, as we stack more and more VMs on it. The amount of I/O and the amount of data protection process that will surround every host is going to continue to increase. So the time is now to really get the bull by the horns and institute a process that will scale with the business long-term.

Gardner: Well, great. We've been enjoying a conversation, and you have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on new approaches that help simplify the data-protection process and help keep cost in check, while also improving recovery confidence. We've seen how solving data protection complexity and availability can greatly help enterprises gain a comprehensive and standardized control approach to their data and that data’s lifecycle.

So I would like to thank our guests, John Maxwell, Vice President of Product Management for Data Protection at Quest. Thanks, John.

Maxwell: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also George Crump, Lead Analyst at Storage Switzerland. Thank you, George.

Crump: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to you, our audience, for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Quest Software.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on new solutions to solve the growing need for more reliable and less cumbersome data backups, despite increasingly data-intensive environments. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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Right-Sizing Security and Information Assurance, a Core-versus-Context Journey at Lake Health

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how healthcare provider Lake Health ensures that its internal systems continue to serve patient care, while protecting against outside threats.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Dana Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving performance of their services to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end-users alike. We're now joined by our co-host for this sponsored podcast series, Chief Software Evangelist at HP, Paul Muller. Hello, Paul, welcome back.

Paul Muller: Dana, it's good to be back. How are you?

Gardner: I'm well. Are you still in San Francisco?

Muller: Still in San Francisco, and it’s another lovely day.

Gardner: Very good. We're also here with Raf Los. He is the Chief Security Evangelist at HP. Welcome back, Raf, how are you? [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Raf Los: I'm well. Thank you.

Gardner: And where are you joining us from today?

Los: I'm in Houston, Texas, today.

Gardner: We have a fascinating show today, because we're going to learn how regional healthcare services provider Lake Health in Ohio has matured from deploying security technologies to becoming more of a comprehensive risk-reduction practice provider internally for its own consumers.

We're going to learn how Lake Health's Information Security Officer has been expanding the breadth and depth of risk management there to a more holistic level, and we're even going to discuss how they've gone about deciding for which risk and compliance services to seek outside providers and which to retain and keep inside, or on premises.

With that, please join me in welcoming our special guest, Keith Duemling. He is the Information Security Officer at Lake Health. Welcome, Keith.

Keith Duemling: Hi. How are you guys doing today?

Gardner: We're doing very well.

Keith, let me begin our discussion with a high level, almost a philosophical, question for you. Many people are practicing IT security and they're employing products and technologies. They're putting in best practices and methods, of course, but it seems to me that you have a different take.

You've almost abstracted this up to information assurance -- even quality assurance -- for knowledge, information, and privacy. Tell me how that higher abstraction works, and why you think it's more important or more successful than just IT security?

Duemling: If you look at the history of information security at Lake Health, we started like most other organizations. We were very technology focused, implementing one or two point solutions to address specific issues. As our program evolved, we started to change how we looked at it and considered it less of a pure privacy issue and more of a privacy and quality issue.

Go back to the old tenets of security, with confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We started thinking that, of those three, we really focused on the confidentiality, but as an industry, we haven't focused that much on the integrity, and the integrity is closely tied to the quality.

Information assurance

So we wanted to transform our program into an information-assurance program, so that we could allow our clinicians and other caregivers to have the highest level of assurance that the information they're making decisions based on is accurate and is available, when it needs to be, so that they feel comfortable in what they are doing.

So it's not just protecting information from being disclosed, but it's protecting information so that it's the right information, at the right time, for the right patient, for the right plan of care. From a high level, the program has evolved from simple origins to more of a holistic type of analysis, where we look at the program and how it will impact patient care and the quality of that patient care.

Gardner: It sounds like what I used to hear -- and it shows how long I have been around -- in the manufacturing sector. I covered that 20 years ago. They talked about a move towards quality, and rather than just looking at minute or specific parts of a process, they had to look at it in total. It was a maturity move on behalf of the manufacturers, at that time.

Raf Los, do you see this as sort of a catching up for IT and for security practices that are maybe 20 years behind where manufacturing was?

Los: More or less, Dana. Where Keith’s group is going, and where many organizations are evolving to, is a practice that focuses less on “doing security” and more on enabling the enterprise and keeping quality high. After all, security is simply a function, one of the three pillars of quality. We look at does it perform, does it function, and is it secure?

Raf Los

So it's a natural expansion of this, sort of a Six Sigma-esque approach to the business, where IT is catching up, as you’ve aptly put it. So I tend to agree with it.

Gardner: Of course, compliance is really important in the healthcare field. Keith, tell us how your approach may also be benefiting you, not just in the quality of the information, but helping you with your regulatory and compliance requirements too?

Duemling: In the approach that we’ve taken, we haven’t tried to change the dynamics that significantly. We've just tried to look at the other side of the coin, when it comes to security. We find that a lot of the controls that we put in place for security benefit from an assurance standpoint, and the same controls for assurance also benefit from a security standpoint.

As long as we align what we're doing to industry-accepted frameworks, whether it’d be NIST or ISO, and then add the healthcare-specific elements on top of that, we find that that gives us a good architecture to continue our program and be mindful of the assurance aspect as well as the security side.

In doing so, we're able to implement controls that span multiple compliance elements, so that we are not duplicating our efforts, missing something, or trying to reinvent the wheel. Obviously, we're not the first healthcare provider, and we certainly won't be the last one, to go through the challenges of compliance in the United States -- and how it's ever changing.

Add-on benefits

Gardner: Are there some other ancillary or add-on benefits from your approach? I am thinking of being able to be proactive, rather than reactive, on certain elements of your requirements. Or do you have an ability to compress the amount of time that you can react, so that you can be more real time in how you adjust. What are the other benefits to your approach?

Duemling: One of the other benefits of the approach is that we look at the data itself or the business function and try to understand the risks associated with it and the importance of those functions and the availability of the data. When we put the controls and the protective measures around that, we typically find that if we're looking specifically at what the target is when we implement the control, our controls will last better and they will defend from multiple threats.

So we're not putting in a point solution to protect against the buzzword of the day. We're trying to put in technologies and practices that will improve the process and make it more resilient from both what the threats are today and what they are in the future.

Gardner: Paul Muller, any thoughts about what you're hearing and how this might relate to the larger marketplace that you're familiar with from some of the other clients and enterprises that you're talking to?

Muller: A couple of observations. The first is that we need to be really careful when we think about compliance. It's something of a security blanket, not so much for security executives. I think InfoSec security executives understand the role of compliance, but it can give business leaders a false sense of security to say, "Hey, we passed our audit, so we're compliant."

Paul Muller

There was a famous case of a very large financial-services institution that had been through five separate audits, all of which gave them a very clear bill of health. But it was very clear from some of the honey pots they put in place in terms of certain data that they were leaking data through to a market-based adversary. In other words, somebody was selling their data, and it wasn’t until the sixth audit that it uncovered the source of the problem.

So we need to be really careful. Compliance is actually the low bar. We're dealing with a market-based adversary. That is, someone will make money from your data. It's not the nation-state that we need to worry about so much as the people who are looking to exploit the value of your information.

Of course, once money and profit enter the equation, there are a lot of people very interested in automating and mechanizing their attack against your defense, and that attack surface is obviously constantly increasing.

The challenge, particularly in examples such as the one that Keith is talking about, comes in the mid-sized organizations. They've got all of the compliance requirements, the complexity, and the fascinating, or interesting, data from the point of view from a market-based adversary. They have all of that great data, but don't necessarily have the scale and the people to be able to protect that.

Balancing needs

It's a question of how you balance the needs of a large enterprise with the resources of a mid-sized organization. I don't know, Keith, whether you've had any experience of that problem.

Duemling: I have all too many times experienced that problem that you’re defining right there. We find that technology that helps us to automate our situational awareness is something that's key for us. We can take the very small staff that we have and make it so that we can respond to the threats and have the visibility that we need to answer those tough questions with confidence, when we stand in front of the board or senior management. We're able to go home and sleep at night and not be working 24×7.

Los: Keith, let me throw a question at you, if you don't mind. We mentioned automation, and everybody that I have with this conversation with tends to -- I don't want to say oversimplify -- but can have an over-reliance on automation technology.

In an organization of your size, you’re right smack in the middle of that, too big not to be a target, too small to have all the resources you've ever wanted to defend yourself. How do you keep from being overrun by automation -- too many dashboards, too many red lights blinking at you, so you can actually make sense of any of this?

Duemling: That's actually one of the reasons we selected ArcSight. We had too many dashboards for our very small staff to manage, and we didn’t want Monday to be the dashboard for Product A, Tuesday for Product B, and things of that nature.

So we figured we would aggregate them and create the master dashboard, which we could use to have a very high-level, high-altitude view, drill down into the specific events, and then start referring them to subject-matter experts. We wanted to have just those really sensitive events bubble up to the surface, so that we could respond to them and they wouldn’t get lost in the maze of dashboards.

We wanted to have just those really sensitive events bubble up to the surface, so that we could respond to them and they wouldn’t get lost in the maze of dashboards.

Gardner: Keith, before we go any further, for the benefit of our listeners, please tell us a bit about Lake Health, the size of your organization, the types of services you provide, and even the nature of your organization. Are you non-profit, publicly-traded, that sort of thing?

Duemling: Sure. Lake Health is a not-for-profit healthcare system. We’re about 45 minutes outside of Cleveland, Ohio. We have two freestanding hospitals and approximately 16 satellite sites of different sizes that provide healthcare to the citizens of the county that we’re in and three adjacent counties.

We have three freestanding 24×7 emergency rooms (ERs), which treat all kinds of injuries, from the simple broken fingers to severe car accidents, heart-attacks, things of that nature.

We also have partnerships with a number of very large healthcare systems in the region, and organizations of that size. We send some of our more critically injured patients to those providers, and they will send some of their patients to us for more localized, smaller care closer to their place of residence.

We’ve grown from a single, small community hospital to the organization that we have now.

Career path

Gardner: And how about you? What's been your trajectory in terms of how long you've worked there and the career path that you followed?

Duemling: I've been with Lake Health for a little under eight years now. I started as a systems administrator, managing a set of Windows servers, and evolved to my current position over time.

Typically, when I started, an individual was assigned a set of projects to work on, and I was assigned a series of security projects. I had a security background that I came to the organization with. Over time, those projects congealed into the security program that we have now, and if I am not mistaken, it's in its third iteration right now. We seem to be on a three-year run for our security program, before it goes through a major retrofit.

Gardner: How did you unify all of these different elements under what you call a program for security? What were some of the steps you needed to take? We heard a little bit about the dashboard issue, but I'm trying to get a larger perspective on how you unified culture around this notion of information assurance?

Duemling: We started within the information and technology department where we had to really do an evaluation of what technologies we had in place? What are different individuals responsible for, and who do they report to? Once we found that there was this sprinkling of technology and responsibilities throughout the department, we had to put together a plan to unify that all into one program that has one set of objectives, is under one central leadership, and has its clear marching orders.

We have to improve our relationship with compliance and we have to improve our relationship with physical security.

Then once we accomplished that, we started to do the same thing across the entire organization. We improved our relationship within IT, not just with sub-departments within IT, but then we also started to look outside and said, "We have to improve our relationship with compliance and we have to improve our relationship with physical security."

So we’re unifying our security program under the mantra of risk, and that's bringing all the different departments that are related to risk into the same camp, where we can exchange notes and drive towards a bigger enterprise focused set of objectives.

Gardner: Raf, this sounds a bit like the resiliency concepts that you've been talking about in the past few months. Is what we're hearing from Keith enterprise resiliency or is there a difference that we should appreciate?

Los: No, he's dead-on. At the end of the day, what security is chartered with, along with most of the rest of IT, as I said earlier, is empowering the organization to do its work. Lake Health does not exist for the sole purpose of security, and clearly they get that.

That's step one on this journey of understanding what the purpose of an IT security organization is. Along the broader concept of resiliency, one of the things that we look at in terms of security and its contribution to the business is, can the organization take a hit and continue, get back up to speed, and continue working?

Not if, but when

Most organization technologists by now know it’s not a question of if you’re going to be hacked or attacked, but a question of when, and how you’re going to respond to that by allowing the intelligent use of automation, the aligning towards business goals, and understanding the organization, and what's critical in the organization.

They rely on critical systems, critical patient-care system. That goes straight to the enterprise resiliency angle. If you get hacked and your network goes down, IT security is going to be fighting that hack. At the same time, we need to realize how we separate the bad guys from the patient and the critical-care system, so that our doctors and nurses and support professionals can go back to saving lives, and making people’s lives better, while we contain the issue and eradicate it from our system.

So that's perfectly along those lines, and as you pointed out, I've been hearing a lot about that lately. It's more than just about security, and that's a fantastic revelation to wake up to every morning.

Gardner: Keith, before we go and learn more about how you examine all of the things that you need to do in this program and then perhaps start thinking about what's core, what's context, and how to best source those, I’d like to hear a little bit about the payoffs.

You've been doing this, as you pointed, out for several years. Are there some lessons that you can point to in terms of payback? Clearly, if you are operating well and you've got good data and privacy, that's a reward in its own. But, are there some other returns on investment (ROI), maybe it's a softer return like an innovation benefit or being able to devote more staff to innovation. Maybe you can line-up a few of the paybacks when this goes as it should?

As an organization, we were able to wage that war, for lack of a better term, while the business continued to function

Duemling: I'd probably put forward two paybacks. One is about some earlier comments I heard. We, as an organization, did suffer a specific event in our history, where we were fighting a threat, while it was expected that our facilities would continue operating. Because of the significant size of that threat, we had degraded services, but we were able to continue -- patients were able to continue coming in, being treated, things of that nature.

That happened earlier in our program, but it didn’t happen to the point where we didn’t have a program in place. So, as an organization, we were able to wage that war, for lack of a better term, while the business continued to function.

Although those were some challenging times for us, and luckily there was no patient data directly or indirectly involved with that, it was a good payoff that we were able to continue to fight the battle while the operations of the organization continued. We didn't have to shut down the facilities and inconvenience the patients or potentially jeopardize patient safety and/or care.

A second payoff is, if we fast forward to where we are now, lessons learned, technologies put in place, and things of that nature. We have a greater ability to answer those questions, when people put them to us, whether it's a middle manager, senior manager, or the board. What are some of the threats we're seeing? How are we defending ourselves? What is the volume of the challenge? We're able to answer those questions with actual answers as opposed to, "I don't know," or "I'll get back to you."

So we can demonstrate more of an ROI through an improvement in situational awareness and security intelligence that we didn't have three, four, or five years earlier in the program’s life. And tools like ArcSight and some of the other technologies that we have, that aggregate that for us, get rid of the noise, and just let us hone in on the crown jewels of the information are really helpful for us to answer those questions.

System of record

Gardner: How about looking at this through the lens of a system of record perspective, an architectural term perhaps, has that single view, that single pane of glass, allowed you to gain the sense that you have a system of record or systems of record. Has that been your goal, or has that been perhaps even an unintended consequence?

Duemling: It's actually kind of both. One, it retains information that sometimes you wish you didn't retain, but that's the fact of what the device and the technology are in the solution and it’s meeting its objective.

But it is nice to have that historical system of record, to use your term, where you can see the historical events as they unfold and explain to someone, via one dashboard or one image, as a situation evolves.

Then, you can use that for forensic analysis, documentation, presentation, or legal to show the change in the threat landscape related to a specific incident, or from a higher level, a specific technology that's providing its statistical information into ArcSight, but you can then do trending and analysis on.

It is also good to get towards a single unified dashboard where you can see all of the security events that are occurring in the environment or outside the environment that you are pulling in, like edit from a disaster recovery (DR) site. You have that single dashboard where if you think there's a problem, you can go to that, start drilling down, and answer that question in a relatively short period of time.

Let's not undervalue the value of confidence -- not having to second guess not just the integrity of your systems and your applications.

Muller: I'll go back to Keith’s opening comments as well. Let's not undervalue the value of confidence -- not having to second guess not just the integrity of your systems and your applications, but to second guess the value of information. It's one thing when we're talking about the integrity of the bank balance of a customer. Let's be clear that that's important, but it can also be corrected just as easily as it can be modified.

When you're talking about confidence in patient data, medical imaging, drug dispensations, and so forth, that’s the sort of information you can't afford to lack confidence in, because you need to make split-second decisions that will obviously have an impact on somebody’s life.

Duemling: I would add to that. Like you were saying, you can undo an incorrect or a fraudulent bank transfer, but you cannot undo something such as the integrity of your blood bank. If your blood bank has values that randomly change or if you put the wrong type of blood into a patient, you cannot undo those without there being a definitely negative patient outcome.

Los: Keith, along those lines, do you have separate critical systems that you have different levels of classifications for that are defended and held to a different standard of resilience, or do you have a network wide classification? I am just curious how you figure out what gets the most attention or what gets the highest concentration of security?

Duemling: The old model of security in healthcare environments was to have a very flat type of architecture, from both networking, support, and a security standpoint. As healthcare continues to modernize for multiple reasons, there's a need to build islands or castles. That’s the term we use internally, "castles," to describe it. You put additional controls, monitoring, and integrity checks in place around specific areas, where the data is the most valuable and the integrity is the most critical, because there are systems in a healthcare environment that are more critical than others.

Obviously, as we talked about earlier, the ones that are used for clinical decision making are technically more critical than the ones that are used for financial compensation as it results from treating patients. So although it's important to get paid, it's more important that patient safety is maintained at all times.

Limited tools

We can't necessarily defend all of our vast resources with the limited set of tools that we have. So we've tried to pick the ones that are the most critical to us and that's where we've tried to put all the hardening steps in place from the beginning, and we will continue to expand from there.

Gardner: Keith, let's take this now to that question about managing your resources. Obviously, because you are in that Goldilocks position, as Raf pointed out -- not too big, not too little -- you have to be choosy. You don't have unlimited resources, but you have a very serious and significant responsibility.

Have you been starting to look at what is core and what is context, what should be either outsourced or provided through some managed services of some sort and what you would really like to retain control over? How does that thought process about that problem pan out?

Duemling: Absolutely, we look at every security project with the mindset of how we can do this the most effectively and with the least amount of resources that are diverted from the clinical environment to the information security program.

That being said, security as a service, cloud-based technology, outsourcing, whatever term you would like use, is definitely something that we consider on a regular basis, when it comes to different types of controls or processes that we have to be responsible for. Or professional services in the events of things like forensics, where you don’t do it on a regular basis, so you may not consider yourself an expert.

Some initiatives have gone premise-based and some have gone security-as-a-service based. We are kind of a mix.

We tend to do an evaluation of the likelihood of the threat materializing or dependence on the technology, what offerings are out there, both as a service and premise-based, what it would take from an internal resource standpoint to adequately support and use a technology. Then, we try and articulate that into a high-level summary of the different options, with cost, pros and cons related to each.

Then, typically our senior management will discuss all of those, and we'll try and come to the decision that we think makes best for our organizations, not just for that point, but for the next three to five years. So some initiatives have gone premise-based and some have gone security-as-a-service based. We are kind of a mix.

Gardner: Paul Muller, as a cloud follower, a close follower, you've seen hybrid services delivery arise in many different forms. I guess we're talking here about hybrid security delivery. How do they come together in your mind?

Muller: Exactly the same way. It is about what Keith described as understanding particularly where, for example, there is a high degree of specialization or skill required that is in short supply, particularly in your geography.

It's particularly true of security professionals that the bigger targets -- the banking institutions, defense, to a certain extent telecoms -- are able to offer a price premium to some of these people and it can make it hard to find the best quality stuff, particularly in mid-sized organizations. Therefore, it sometimes makes more sense to procure those staff and the services alongside them from outside of the organization.

Core intellectual property

Having said that, there are times when there is core intellectual property (IP) of your organization, core capabilities, particularly around industry vertical processes, where that level of expertise is not widely understood.

It's too generic to be of value. Healthcare is a great example, where the compliance requirement, plus the particular or specific patient management systems, would be too specific for a general-purpose service provider to add much value. It's a question of blending that right to the capabilities.

I want to add that it's interesting that the security world tends to have a somewhat schizophrenic view of software as a service (SaaS). They will typically be okay with the idea of putting all of your sales pipeline and your customer data into a customer relationship management (CRM) system in the cloud, but will often have a negative reaction if you say let's use security SaaS.

So often you will find that it's actually more palatable for the organization culturally, when looked at maybe as a managed service, rather than treating it as a SaaS, knowing, in other words, that there's people behind it as well as software. I don't know. Raf, what are your thoughts?

Los: Well, Paul, eloquently put. There's still that stigma of cloud somehow magically meaning less secure, and I work with that trepidation almost daily, like you do.

The one aspect we need to make sure that we emphasize and understand is that there are  people behind all of this.

The one aspect we need to make sure that we emphasize and understand is that there are  people behind all of this. This isn’t just some automated scan, script, or thing. There are people behind a lot of this, and the broad sense of why security really matters is the human element of it.

So these hybrid types of services make sense, because there are a lot of things and -- going back to that comment about the size of the organization -- you can't do it all yourselves. If you can, you can't do it well, whether you're a massive company or a small one.

Knowing that fact, acknowledging that, and being able to consume security services intelligently can be the difference between getting lost in "dashboard hell" and having the right information at the right time to make the right decision, based on partnerships with the correct organizations.

I think you summed it up well, but I just felt like I would add a little bit of color to that, because that's a little bit of what I have been seeing.

Gardner: It's interesting that a common thread for successful organizations is knowing yourself well. It's also an indicator of maturity, of course. I know that Paul is talking about this, and Raf as well, that those organizations that know themselves well can better plot their future architecturally and across comprehensive services. But it also sounds as if this is really important, when it comes to deciding what services to retain total control over or retain the resources that deploy them and another set of choices.

Back to you, Keith. It sounds like you have a good level of maturity. You have had a good opportunity to know yourself and then to track your progress. Is that helping you make these decisions about what's core or context in the design of your risk-mitigation activities?

What you do well

Duemling: Yes, it is. You have to know what you do well and also you have to know the areas where you, as an organization, are not going to be able to invest the time or the resources to get to a specific comfort level that you would feel would be adequate for what you are trying to achieve. Those are some of the things where we look to use security as a service.

We don't want to necessarily become experts on spam filtering, so we know that there are companies that specialize in that. We will leverage their investment, their technology, and their IP to help defend us from email-borne threats and things of that nature.

We're not going to try and get into the business of having a program or to create an event-correlation engine. That's why we're going to go out and look for the best-of-breed technologies out there to do it for us.

We'll pick those different technologies, whether it's as a service or premise-based and we'll implement those. That will allow us to invest in the people that know our environment the best and intimately and who can make decisions based on what those tools and those managed services tell them.

They can be the boots on the ground, for lack of a better term, making the decisions that are effective at the time, with all the situational awareness that they need to resolve the problem right then and there.

Security is more than just technology. It really is the people, the process, and the technology.

Gardner: Keith, you've got a little bit of 20/20 hindsight, having done this. For those of our listeners who are perhaps at that level, where they are juggling quite a few security products or technologies and they would like to move into this notion of a program and would like to have a unified view, any thoughts about getting started, any lessons learned that you could share?

Duemling: I would say just a couple of bullet points. Security is more than just technology. It really is the people, the process, and the technology. You have to understand the business that you are trying to protect. You have to understand that security is there to support the business, not to be the business.

Probably most importantly, when you want to evolve your security and set up projects into an actual security program, you have to be able to talk the language of the business to the people who run the business, so that they understand that it’s a partnership and you are there to support them, not to be a drain on their valuable resources.

Gardner: Raf, any thoughts to amplify or extend that?

Los: I think he has put it brilliantly just now. IT security is a resource and also a potential drain on resources. So the less we can take away from anything else the organization is doing, while enabling them to basically be better, deliver better, deliver smarter, and save more lives and make people healthier, that is ultimately the goal.

If there's nothing else that anybody takes away from a conversation like this, IT security is just another enabler in the business and we should really continue to treat it that way and work towards that goal.

Lessons learned

Gardner: All right, last word to you today, Paul Muller. What sort of lessons learned or perhaps perceptions from the example of Lake Health would you amplify or extend?

Muller: I will just go back to some of my earlier comments, which is, let’s remember that our adversary is increasingly focused on the market opportunity of exploiting the data that we have inside our organizations -- data in all of its forms. Where there is profit, as I said, there will be a drive for automation and best practices. They are also competing to hire the best security people in the world.

But as a result of that, and mixed in with the fact that we have this ever-increasing attack surface, the vulnerabilities are increasing dramatically. The statistic I saw from just October is that the cost of cyber crime has risen by 40 percent and the attack frequency has doubled in the last 12 months. This is very real proof that this market forces are at work.

The challenge that we have is educating our executives that compliance is important, but it is the low bar. It is table stakes, when we think about information and security. And particularly in the case of mid-sized enterprises, as Raf pointed out, they have all of the attractiveness as a target of a large enterprise, but not necessarily the resources to be able to effectively detect and defend against those sorts of attacks.

You need to find the right mix of services, whether we call it hybrid, whether we call it cloud or managed services, combined with your own on-premises services to make sure that you're able to defend yourself responsibly.

Cyber crime has risen by 40 percent and the attack frequency has doubled in the last 12 months. This is very real proof that this market forces are at work.

Gardner: Very good. I am afraid we'll have to leave it there. I want to thank our co-hosts today. We have been joined by Paul Muller, the Chief Software Evangelist at HP. Thank you, Paul.

Muller: Great having been here again, Dana. Good to talk to you.

Gardner: And also Raf Los. He is the Chief Security Evangelist at HP. Thank you so much, Raf.

Los: Thanks for having me, Dana. And Keith, it has been a pleasure having the conversation.

Gardner: And I'd like to thank our supporter for this series, HP Software, and remind our audience to carry on the dialogue with Paul Muller through the Discover Performance Group on LinkedIn, and also to follow Raf on his popular blog, Following the White Rabbit.

You can also gain more insights and information on the best of IT performance management at http://www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance.

And you can always access this and other episodes in our HP Discover Performance Podcast Series at hp.com and on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.

And of course I want to thank our very special guest today, with a very impressive story, Keith Duemling; he is the Information Security Officer there at Lake Health. Thank you so much, Keith.

Duemling: Thank you for the opportunity to share the information.

Gardner: And lastly, I would like to thank our audience for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast discussion. I am Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored business success stories.

We appreciate your listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how healthcare provider Lake Health ensures that its internal systems continue to serve patient care, while protecting against outside threats. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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