How Modern Storage Provides Hints On Optimizing and Best Managing Hybrid IT and Multi-Cloud Resources

Transcript of a discussion on the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Join us as we learn from leading IT industry analysts how to make the best of a hybrid IT journey to successful digital business transformation.

Our next interview examines the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. Managing hybrid IT necessitates not only a choice between public cloud and private cloud, but a more granular approach to picking and choosing which assets go where based on performance, costs, compliance, and business agility.

Peters

Here to report on how to begin to better assess what IT variables should be managed and thoughtfully applied to any cloud model is Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Welcome, Mark. 

Mark Peters: Thank you, Dana. Good to be with you. 

Gardner: Now that cloud adoption is gaining steam, it may be time to step back and assess what works and what doesn’t. In past IT adoption patterns, we’ve seen a rapid embrace that sometimes ends with at least a temporary hangover. Sometimes, it’s complexity or runaway or unmanaged costs, or even usage patterns that can’t be controlled. Mark, is it too soon to begin assessing best practices in identifying ways to hedge against any ill effects from runaway adoption of cloud? 

Peters: The short answer, Dana, is no. It’s not that the IT world is that different. It’s just that we have more and different tools. And that is really what hybrid comes down to -- available tools.

It’s not that those tools themselves demand a new way of doing things. They offer the opportunity to continue to think about what you want. But if I have one repeated statement as we go through this, it will be that it’s not about focusing on the tools, it’s about focusing on what you’re trying to get done. You just happen to have more and different tools now.
  
 Gardner: We hear sometimes that at as high as board of director levels, they are telling people to go cloud-first, or just dump IT all together. That strikes me as an overreaction. If we’re looking at tools and to what they do best, is cloud so good that we can actually just go cloud-first or cloud-only?

Cloudy cloud adoption

Peters: Assuming you’re speaking about management by objectives (MBO), doing cloud or cloud-only because that’s what someone with a C-level title saw on a Microsoft cloud ad on TV and decided that is right, well -- that clouds everything.

You do see increasingly different people outside of IT becoming involved in the decision. When I say outside of IT, I mean outside of the operational side of IT.

You get other functions involved in making demands. And because the cloud can be so easy to consume, you see people just running off and deploying some software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model because it looked easy to do, and they didn’t want to wait for the internal IT to make the change.

All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see.

Running away from internal IT and on-premises IT is not going to be a good idea for most organizations -- at least for a considerable chunk of their workloads. All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see. 

Gardner: I certainly agree with that. If it’s all then about a mix of things, how do I determine the correct mix? And if it’s a correct mix between just a public cloud and private cloud, how do I then properly adjust to considerations about applications as opposed to data, as opposed to bringing in microservices and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when they’re the best fit?

How do we begin to rationalize all of this better? Because I think we’ve gotten to the point where we need to gain some maturity in terms of the consumption of hybrid IT.

 

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Peters: I often talk about what I call the assumption gap. And the assumption gap is just that moment where we move from one side where it’s okay to have lots of questions about something, in this case, in IT. And then on the other side of this gap or chasm, to use a well-worn phrase, is where it’s not okay to ask anything because you’ll see you don’t know what you’re talking about. And that assumption gap seems to happen imperceptibly and very fast at some moment.

So, what is hybrid IT? I think we fall into the trap of allowing ourselves to believe that having some on-premises workloads and applications and some off-premises workloads and applications is hybrid IT. I do not think it is. It’s using a couple of tools for different things.

It’s like having a Prius and a big diesel and/or gas F-150 pickup truck in your garage and saying, “I have two hybrid vehicles.” No, you have one of each, or some of each. Just because someone has put an application or a backup off into the cloud, “Oh, yeah. Well, I’m hybrid.” No, you’re not really.

The cloud approach

The cloud is an approach. It’s not a thing per se. It’s another way. As I said earlier, it’s another tool that you have in the IT arsenal. So how do you start figuring what goes where?

I don’t think there are simple answers, because it would be just as sensible a question to say, “Well, what should go on flash or what should go on disk, or what should go on tape, or what should go on paper?” My point being, such decisions are situational to individual companies, to the stage of that company’s life, and to the budgets they have. And they’re not only situational -- they’re also dynamic.

I want to give a couple of examples because I think they will stick with people. Number one is you take something like email, a pretty popular application; everyone runs email. In some organizations, that is the crucial application. They cannot run without it. Probably, what you and I do would fall into that category. But there are other businesses where it’s far less important than the factory running or the delivery vans getting out on time. So, they could have different applications that are way more important than email.

When instant messaging (IM) first came out, Yahoo IM text came out, to be precise. They used to do the maintenance between 9 am and 5 pm because it was just a tool to chat to your friends with at night. And now you have businesses that rely on that. So, clearly, the ability to instant message and text between us is now crucial. The stock exchange in Chicago runs on it. IM is a very important tool.

The answer is not that you or I have the ability to tell any given company, “Well, x application should go onsite and Y application should go offsite or into a cloud,” because it will vary between businesses and vary across time.

If something is or becomes mission-critical or high-risk, it is more likely that you’ll want the feeling of security, I’m picking my words very carefully, of having it … onsite.

You have to figure out what you're trying to get done before you figure out what you're going to do with it.

But the extent to which full-production apps are being moved to the cloud is growing every day. That’s what our research shows us. The quick answer is you have to figure out what you’re trying to get done before you figure out what you’re going to do it with. 

Gardner: Before we go into learning more about how organizations can better know themselves and therefore understand the right mix, let’s learn more about you, Mark. 

Tell us about yourself, your organization at ESG. How long have you been an IT industry analyst? 

Peters: I grew up in my working life in the UK and then in Europe, working on the vendor side of IT. I grew up in storage, and I haven’t really escaped it. These days I run ESG’s infrastructure practice. The integration and the interoperability between the various elements of infrastructure have become more important than the individual components. I stayed on the vendor side for many years working in the UK, then in Europe, and now in Colorado. I joined ESG 10 years ago.

Lessons learned from storage

Gardner: It’s interesting that you mentioned storage, and the example of whether it should be flash or spinning media, or tape. It seems to me that maybe we can learn from what we’ve seen happen in a hybrid environment within storage and extrapolate to how that pertains to a larger IT hybrid undertaking.

Is there something about the way we’ve had to adjust to different types of storage -- and do that intelligently with the goals of performance, cost, and the business objectives in mind? I’ll give you a chance to perhaps go along with my analogy or shoot it down. Can we learn from what’s happened in storage and apply that to a larger hybrid IT model?

 

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Peters: The quick answer to your question is, absolutely, we can. Again, the cloud is a different approach. It is a very beguiling and useful business model, but it’s not a panacea. I really don’t believe it ever will become a panacea.

Now, that doesn’t mean to say it won’t grow. It is growing. It’s huge. It’s significant. You look at the recent announcements from the big cloud providers. They are at tens of billions of dollars in run rates.

But to your point, it should be viewed as part of a hierarchy, or a tiering, of IT. I don’t want to suggest that cloud sits at the bottom of some hierarchy or tiering. That’s not my intent. But it is another choice of another tool.

Let’s be very, very clear about this. There isn’t “a” cloud out there. People talk about the cloud as if it exists as one thing. It does not. Part of the reason hybrid IT is so challenging is you’re not just choosing between on-prem and the cloud, you’re choosing between on-prem and many clouds -- and you might want to have a multi-cloud approach as well. We see that increasingly.

What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes.

Those various clouds have various attributes; some are better than others in different things. It is exactly parallel to what you were talking about in terms of which server you use, what storage you use, what speed you use for your networking. It’s exactly parallel to the decisions you should make about which cloud and to what extent you deploy to which cloud. In other words, all the things you said at the beginning: cost, risk, requirements, and performance.

People get so distracted by bright, shiny objects. Like they are the answer to everything. What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes. That’s all we should be looking for.

Focus on the outcome that you want, and then you figure out how to get it. You should not be sitting down IT managers and saying, “How do I get to 50 percent of my data in the cloud?” I don’t think that’s a sensible approach to business. 

Gardner: Lessons learned in how to best utilize a hybrid storage environment, rationalizing that, bringing in more intelligence, software-defined, making the network through hyper-convergence more of a consideration than an afterthought -- all these illustrate where we’re going on a larger scale, or at a higher abstraction.

Going back to the idea that each organization is particular -- their specific business goals, their specific legacy and history of IT use, their specific way of using applications and pursuing business processes and fulfilling their obligations. How do you know in your organization enough to then begin rationalizing the choices? How do you make business choices and IT choices in conjunction? Have we lost sufficient visibility, given that there are so many different tools for doing IT?

Get down to specifics

Peters: The answer is yes. If you can’t see it, you don’t know about it. So to some degree, we are assuming that we don’t know everything that’s going on. But I think anecdotally what you propose is absolutely true.

I’ve beaten home the point about starting with the outcomes, not the tools that you use to achieve those outcomes. But how do you know what you’ve even got -- because it’s become so easy to consume in different ways? A lot of people talk about shadow IT. You have this sprawl of a different way of doing things. And so, this leads to two requirements.

Number one is gaining visibility. It’s a challenge with shadow IT because you have to know what’s in the shadows. You can’t, by definition, see into that, so that’s a tough thing to do. Even once you find out what’s going on, the second step is how do you gain control? Control -- not for control’s sake -- only by knowing all the things you were trying to do and how you’re trying to do them across an organization. And only then can you hope to optimize them.

You can't manage what you can't measure. You also can't improve things that can't be managed or measured.

Again, it’s an old, old adage. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. You also can’t improve things that can’t be managed or measured. And so, number one, you have to find out what’s in the shadows, what it is you’re trying to do. And this is assuming that you know what you are aiming toward.

This is the next battleground for sophisticated IT use and for vendors. It’s not a battleground for the users. It’s a choice for users -- but a battleground for vendors. They must find a way to help their customers manage everything, to control everything, and then to optimize everything. Because just doing the first and finding out what you have -- and finding out that you’re in a mess -- doesn’t help you.

 

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Visibility is not the same as solving. The point is not just finding out what you have – but of actually being able to do something about it. The level of complexity, the range of applications that most people are running these days, the extremely high levels of expectations both in the speed and flexibility and performance, and so on, mean that you cannot, even with visibility, fix things by hand.

You and I grew up in the era where a lot of things were done on whiteboards and Excel spreadsheets. That doesn’t cut it anymore. We have to find a way to manage what is automated. Manual management just will not cut it -- even if you know everything that you’re doing wrong. 

Gardner: Yes, I agree 100 percent that the automation -- in order to deal with the scale of complexity, the requirements for speed, the fact that you’re going to be dealing with workloads and IT assets that are off of your premises -- means you’re going to be doing this programmatically. Therefore, you’re in a better position to use automation.

I’d like to go back again to storage. When I first took a briefing with Nimble Storage, which is now a part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), I was really impressed with the degree to which they used intelligence to solve the economic and performance problems of hybrid storage.

Given the fact that we can apply more intelligence nowadays -- that the cost of gathering and harnessing data, the speed at which it can be analyzed, the degree to which that analysis can be shared -- it’s all very fortuitous that just as we need greater visibility and that we have bigger problems to solve across hybrid IT, we also have some very powerful analysis tools.

Mark, is what worked for hybrid storage intelligence able to work for a hybrid IT intelligence? To what degree should we expect more and more, dare I say, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to be brought to bear on this hybrid IT management problem?

Intelligent automation a must

Peters: I think it is a very straightforward and good parallel. Storage has become increasingly sophisticated. I’ve been in and around the storage business now for more than three decades. The joke has always been, I remember when a megabyte was a lot, let alone a gigabyte, a terabyte, and an exabyte.

And I’d go for a whole day class, when I was on the sales side of the business, just to learn something like dual parsing or about cache. It was so exciting 30 years ago. And yet, these days, it’s a bit like cars. I mean, you and I used to use a choke, or we’d have to really go and check everything on the car before we went on 100-mile journey. Now, we press the button and it better work in any temperature and at any speed. Now, we just demand so much from cars.

To stretch that analogy, I’m mixing cars and storage -- and we’ll make it all come together with hybrid IT in that it’s better to do things in an automated fashion. There’s always one person in every crowd I talk to who still believes that a stick shift is more economic and faster than an automatic transmission. It might be true for one in 1,000 people, and they probably drive cars for a living. But for most people, 99 percent of the people, 99.9 percent of the time, an automatic transmission will both get you there faster and be more efficient in doing so. The same became true of storage.

We used to talk about how much storage someone could capacity-plan or manage. That’s just become old hat now because you don’t talk about it in those terms. Storage has moved to be -- how do we serve applications? How do we serve up the right place in the right time, get the data to the right person at the right time at the right price, and so on?

We don’t just choose what goes where or who gets what, we set the parameters -- and we then allow the machine to operate in an automated fashion. These days, increasingly, if you talk to 10 storage companies, 10 of them will talk to you about machine learning and AI because they know they’ve got to be in that in order to make that execution of change ever more efficient and ever faster. They’re just dealing with tremendous scale, and you could not do it even with simple automation that still involves humans.

It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. It will not be a “recommending tool,” it will be an “executing tool.”

We have used cars as a social analogy. We used storage as an IT analogy, and absolutely, that’s where hybrid IT is going. It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. Just to make it crystal clear, it will not be a “recommending tool,” it will be an “executing tool.” There is no time to wait for you and me to finish our coffee, think about it, and realize we have to do something, because then it’s too late. So, it’s not just about the knowledge and the visibility. It’s about the execution and the automated change. But, yes, I think your analogy is a very good one for how the IT world will change.
 

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Gardner: How you execute, optimize and exploit intelligence capabilities can be how you better compete, even if other things are equal. If everyone is using AWS, and everyone is using the same services for storage, servers, and development, then how do you differentiate?

How you optimize the way in which you gain the visibility, know your own business, and apply the lessons of optimization, will become a deciding factor in your success, no matter what business you’re in. The tools that you pick for such visibility, execution, optimization and intelligence will be the new real differentiators among major businesses.

So, Mark, where do we look to find those tools? Are they yet in development? Do we know the ones we should expect? How will organizations know where to look for the next differentiating tier of technology when it comes to optimizing hybrid IT?

What’s in the mix?

Peters: We’re talking years ahead for us to be in the nirvana that you’re discussing.

I just want to push back slightly on what you said. This would only apply if everyone were using exactly the same tools and services from AWS, to use your example. The expectation, assuming we have a hybrid world, is they will have kept some applications on-premises, or they might be using some specialist, regional or vertical industry cloud. So, I think that’s another way for differentiation. It’s how to get the balance. So, that’s one important thing.

And then, back to what you were talking about, where are those tools? How do you make the right move?

We have to get from here to there. It’s all very well talking about the future. It doesn’t sound great and perfect, but you have to get there. We do quite a lot of research in ESG. I will throw just a couple of numbers, which I think help to explain how you might do this.

We already find that the multi-cloud deployment or option is a significant element within a hybrid IT world. So, asking people about this in the last few months, we found that about 75 percent of the respondents already have more than one cloud provider, and about 40 percent have three or more.

You’re getting diversity -- whether by default or design. It really doesn’t matter at this point. We hope it’s by design. But nonetheless, you’re certainly getting people using different cloud providers to take advantage of the specific capabilities of each.

This is a real mix. You can’t just plunk down some new magic piece of software, and everything is okay, because it might not work with what you already have -- the legacy systems, and the applications you already have. One of the other questions we need to ask is how does improved management embrace legacy systems?

Some 75 percent of our respondents want hybrid management to be from the infrastructure up, which means that it’s got to be based on managing their existing infrastructure, and then extending that management up or out into the cloud. That’s opposed to starting with some cloud management approach and then extending it back down to their infrastructure.

People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It’s enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change.

People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It's enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change. Rather than just deploying something and hoping that all of your current infrastructure -- not just your physical infrastructure but your applications, too -- can use that, we see a lot of people going to a multi-cloud, hybrid deployment model. That entirely makes sense. You're not just going to pick one cloud model and hope that it  will come backward and make everything else work. You start with what you have and you gradually embrace these alternative tools. 

Gardner: We’re creating quite a list of requirements for what we’d like to see develop in terms of this management, optimization, and automation capability that’s maybe two or three years out. Vendors like Microsoft are just now coming out with the ability to manage between their own hybrid infrastructures, their own cloud offerings like Azure Stack and their public cloud Azure.

 

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Where will we look for that breed of fully inclusive, fully intelligent tools that will allow us to get to where we want to be in a couple of years? I’ve heard of one from HPE, it’s called Project New Hybrid IT Stack. I’m thinking that HPE can’t be the only company. We can’t be the only analysts that are seeing what to me is a market opportunity that you could drive a truck through. This should be a big problem to solve.

Who’s driving?

Peters: There are many organizations, frankly, for which this would not be a good commercial decision, because they don’t play in multiple IT areas or they are not systems providers. That’s why HPE is interested, capable, and focused on doing this. 

Many vendor organizations are either focused on the cloud side of the business -- and there are some very big names -- or on the on-premises side of the business. Embracing both is something that is not as difficult for them to do, but really not top of their want-to-do list before they’re absolutely forced to.

From that perspective, the ones that we see doing this fall into two categories. There are the trendy new startups, and there are some of those around. The problem is, it’s really tough imagining that particularly large enterprises are going to risk [standardizing on them]. They probably even will start to try and write it themselves, which is possible – unlikely, but possible.

Where I think we will get the list for the other side is some of the other big organizations --- Oracle and IBM spring to mind in terms of being able to embrace both on-premises and off-premises.  But, at the end of the day, the commonality among those that we’ve mentioned is that they are systems companies. At the end of the day, they win by delivering the best overall solution and package to their clients, not individual components within it.

If you’re going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment took, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor.

And by individual components, I include cloud, on-premises, and applications. If you’re going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment tool, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor. That last part I think is self-descriptive. 

Gardner: Clearly, not a big group. We’re not going to be seeking suppliers for hybrid IT management from request for proposals (RFPs) from 50 or 60 different companies to find some solutions. 

Peters: Well, you won’t need to. Looking not that many years ahead, there will not be that many choices when it comes to full IT provisioning. 

Gardner: Mark, any thoughts about what IT organizations should be thinking about in terms of how to become proactive rather than reactive to the hybrid IT environment and the complexity, and to me the obvious need for better management going forward?

Management ends, not means

Peters: Gaining visibility into not just hybrid IT but the on-premise and the off-premise and how you manage these things. Those are all parts of the solution, or the answer. The real thing, and it’s absolutely crucial, is that you don’t start with those bright shiny objects. You don’t start with, “How can I deploy more cloud? How can I do hybrid IT?” Those are not good questions to ask. Good questions to ask are, “What do I need to do as an organization? How do I make my business more successful? How does anything in IT become a part of answering those questions?”

In other words, drum roll, it’s the thinking about ends, not means. 

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave there. We’ve been exploring growing need for proper rationalization of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. And we’ve learned how managing hybrid IT necessitates making better choices between cloud -- but also thinking about the ends rather than the means as we get to more granular tools and have even more options for how to accomplish things.

So, please join me in thanking our guest, Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Thanks so much, Mark. 

Peters: My pleasure. Thank you. 

Gardner:  If our listeners and readers want to follow you and gain more of your excellent insight, how should they do that? 

Peters: The best way is to go to our website, www.esg-global.com. You can find not just me and all my contact details and materials but those of all my colleagues and the many areas we cover and study in this wonderful world of IT. 

Gardner: Also thank you to our audience for joining us for this Briefings Direct Voice of the Analyst discussion on how to better manage the hybrid IT journey to digital business transformation.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principle Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Follow me on Twitter @Dana_Gardner and find more hybrid IT-focused podcasts at www.briefingsdirect.com. Please pass this content on to your IT community, if you found it valuable, and please come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

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Kansas Development Finance Authority Gains Peace of Mind, End-Points Virtual Shield Using Hypervisor-Level Security

Transcript of a discussion on how a Kansas economic development organization gains peace of mind by relying on increased automation and intelligence in how it secures its systems, data, and people.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of BriefingsDirect. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator.

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and government agencies, implementing and managing IT security has leaped in complexity. Once-safe products used to thwart invasions now have been exploited. E-mail phishing campaigns are far more sophisticated, leading to damaging ransomware attacks.

What’s more, the jack-of-all-trades IT leaders of these mid-market concerns are striving to protect more data types on and off premises, their workload servers and expanded networks, as well as the many essential devices of the mobile workforce.

Security demands have gone up, yet there is a continual need for reduced manual labor and costs -- while protecting assets sooner and better. We will now learn how a Kansas economic development organization has been able to gain peace of mind by relying on increased automation and intelligence in how it secures its systems and people.

Kater

To explore how an all-encompassing approach to security has enabled improved results with fewer hours at a smaller enterprise, please join me in welcoming our guest, Jeff Kater, Director of Information Technology and Systems Architect at Kansas Development Finance Authority (KDFA) in Topeka.

Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Kater: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: As a director of all of IT at KDFA, security must be a big concern, but it can’t devour all of your time. How have you been able to balance security demands with all of your other IT demands?

Kater: That’s a very interesting question, and it has a multi-segmented answer. In years past, leading up to the development of what KDFA is now, we faced the trends that demanded very basic anti-spam solutions and the very basic virus threats that came via the web and e-mail.

What we’ve seen more recently is the growing trend of enhanced security attacks coming through malware and different exploits -- that were once thought impossible -- are now are the reality.

Therefore in recent times, my percentage of time dedicated to security had grown from probably five to 10 percent all the way up to 50 to 60 percent of my workload during each given week.

Gardner: Before we get to how you’ve been able to react to that, tell us about KDFA.

Enterprise-ready 24/7

Kater: KDFA promotes economic development and prosperity for the State of Kansas by providing efficient access to capital markets through various tax-exempt and taxable debt obligations.

KDFA works with public and private entities across the board to identify financial options and solutions for those entities. We are a public corporate entity operating in the municipal finance market, and therefore we are a conduit finance authority.

KDFA is a very small organization -- but a very important one. Therefore we run enterprise-ready systems around the clock, enabling our staff to be as nimble and as efficient as possible.

There are about nine or 10 of us that operate here on any given day at KDFA. We run on a completely virtual environment platform via Citrix XenServer. So we run XenApp, XenDesktop, and NetScaler -- almost the full gamut of Citrix products.

We have a few physical endpoints, such as laptops and iPads, and we also have the mobile workforce on iPhones as well. They are all interconnected using the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) approach.

Gardner: You’ve had this swing, where your demands from just security issues have blossomed. What have you been doing to wrench that back? How do you get your day back, to innovate and put in place real productivity improvements?

We wanted to be able to be nimble, to be adaptive, and to grow our business workload while maintaining our current staff size.

Kater: We went with virtualization via Citrix. It became our solution of choice due to not being willing to pay the extra tax, if you will, for other solutions that are on the market. We wanted to be able to be nimble, to be adaptive, and to grow our business workload while maintaining our current staff size.

When we embraced virtualization, the security approaches were very traditional in nature. The old way of doing things worked fantastically for a physical endpoint.

The traditional approaches to security had been on our physical PCs for years. But when that security came over to the virtual realm, they bogged down our systems. They still required updates be done manually. They just weren’t innovating at the same speed as the virtualization, which was allowing us to create new endpoints.

And so, the maintenance, the updating, the growing threats were no longer being seen by the traditional approaches of security. We had endpoint security in place on our physical stations, but when we went virtual we no longer had endpoint security. We then had to focus on antivirus and anti-spam at the server level.

What we found out very quickly was that this was not going to solve our security issues. We then faced a lot of growing threats again via e-mail, via web, that were coming in through malware, spyware, other activities that were embedding themselves on our file servers – and then trickling down and moving laterally across our network to our endpoints.

Gardner: Just as your organization went virtual and adjusted to those benefits, the malware and the bad guys, so to speak, adjusted as well -- and started taking advantage of what they saw as perhaps vulnerabilities as organizations transitioned to higher virtualization.

Security for all, by all

Kater: They did. One thing that a lot of security analysts, experts, and end-users forget in the grand scheme of things is that this virtual world we live in has grown so rapidly -- and innovated so quickly -- that the same stuff we use to grow our businesses is also being used by the bad actors. So while we are learning what it can do, they are learning how to exploit it at the same speed -- if not a little faster.

Gardner: You recognized that you had to change; you had to think more about your virtualization environment. What prompted you to increase the capability to focus on the hypervisor for security and prevent issues from trickling across your systems and down to your endpoints?

Kater: Security has always been a concern here at KDFA. And there has been more of a security focus recently, with the latest news and trends. We honestly struggled with CryptoLocker, and we struggled with ransomware.

While we never had to pay out any ransom or anything -- and they were stopped in place before data could be exfiltrated outside of KDFA’s network -- we still had two or three days of either data loss or data interruption. We had to pull back data from an archive; we had to restore some of our endpoints and some of our computers.

We needed to have a solution for our virtual environment -- one that would be easy to deploy, easy to manage, and it would be centrally managed.

As we battled these things over a very short period of time, they were progressively getting worse and worse. We decided that we needed to have a solution for our virtual environment – one that would be not only be easy to deploy, easy to manage, but it would be centrally managed as well, enabling me to have more time to focus back on my workload -- and not have to worry so much about the security thresholds that had to be updated and maintained via the traditional model.

So we went out to the market. We ran very extensive proof of concepts (POCs), and those POCs very quickly illustrated that the underlying architecture was only going to be enterprise-ready via two or three vendors. Once we started running those through the paces, Bitdefender emerged for us.

I had actually been watching the Hypervisor Introspection (HVI) product development for the past four years, since its inception came with a partnership between Citrix, Intel, the Linux community and, of course, Bitdefender. One thing that was continuous throughout all of that was that in order to deploy that solution you would need GravityZone in-house to be able to run the HVI workloads.

And so we became early adopters of Bitdefender GravityZone, and we are able to see what it could do for our endpoints, our servers, and our Microsoft Exchange Servers. Then, Hypervisor Introspection became another security layer that we are able to build upon the security solution that we had already adopted from Bitdefender.

Gardner: And how long have you had these solutions in place?

Kater: We are going on one and a half to two years for GravityZone. And when HVI went to general availability earlier this year, in 2017, and we were one of the first adopters to be able to deploy it across our production environment.

Gardner: If you had a “security is easy” button that you could pound on your desk, what are the sorts of things that you look for in a simpler security solution approach?

IT needs brains to battle breaches

Kater: The “security is easy” button would operate much like the human brain. It would need that level of intuitive instinct, that predictive insight ability. The button would generally be easily managed, automated; it would evolve and learn with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning what’s out there. It would dynamically operate with peaks and valleys depending on the current status of the environment, and provide the security that’s needed for that particular environment.

Gardner: Jeff, you really are an early adopter, and I commend you on that. A lot of organizations are not quite as bold. They want to make sure that everything has been in the market for a long time. They are a little hesitant.

But being an early adopter sounds like you have made yourselves ready to adopt more AI and machine learning capabilities. Again, I think that’s very forward-looking of you.

But tell us, in real terms, what has being an early adopter gotten for you? We’ve had some pretty scary incidents just in the recent past, with WannaCry, for example. What has being an early adopter done for you in terms of these contemporary threats?

Kater: The new threats, including the EternalBlue exploit that happened here recently, are very advanced in nature. Oftentimes when these breaches occur, it takes several months before they have even become apparent. And oftentimes they move laterally within our network without us knowing, no matter what you do.

Some of the more advanced and persistent threats don’t even have to infect the local host with any type of software. They work in the virtual memory space. It’s much different than the older threats, where you could simply reboot or clear your browser cache to resolve them and get back to your normal operations.

Earlier, when KDFA still made use of non-persistent desktops, if the user got any type of corruption on their virtual desktop, they were able to reboot, and get back to a master image and move on. However, with these advanced threats, when they get into your network, and they move laterally -- even if you reboot your non-persistent desktop, the threat will come back up and it still infects your network. So with the growing ransomware techniques out there, we can no longer rely on those definition-based approaches. We have to look at the newer techniques.

As far as why we are early adopters, and why I have chosen some of the principles that I have, I feel strongly that you are really only as strong as your weakest link. I strive to provide my users with the most advanced, nimble, and agnostic solutions possible.

We are able to grow and compute on any device anywhere, anytime, securely, with minimal limitations.  

We are able to grow and compute on any device anywhere, anytime, securely, with minimal limitations. It allows us to have discussions about increasing productivity at that point, and to maximize the potential of our smaller number of users -- versus having to worry about the latest news of security breaches that are happening all around us.

Gardner: You’re able to have a more proactive posture, rather than doing the fire drill when things go amiss and you’re always reacting to things.

Kater: Absolutely.

Gardner: Going back to making sure that you’re getting a fresh image and versions of your tools …  We have heard some recent issues around the web browser not always being safe. What is it about being able to get a clean version of that browser that can be very important when you are dealing with cloud services and extensive virtualization?

Virtual awareness, secure browsing

Kater: Virtualization in and of itself has allowed us to remove the physical element of our workstations when desirable and operate truly in that virtual or memory space. And so when you are talking about browsers, you can have a very isolated, a very clean browser. But that browser is still going to hit a website that can exploit your system. It can run in that memory space for exploitation. And, again, it doesn't rely on plug-ins to be downloaded or anything like that anymore, so we really have to look at the techniques that these browsers are using.

What we are able to do with the secure browsing technique is publish, in our case, via XenApp, any browser flavor with isolation out there on the server. We make it available to the users that have access for that particular browser and for that particular need. We are then able to secure it via Bitdefender HVI, making sure that no matter where that browser goes, no matter what interface it’s trying to align with, it’s secure across the board.

Gardner: In addition to secure browsing, what do you look for in terms of being able to keep all of your endpoints the way you want them? Is there a management approach of being able to verify what works and what doesn’t work? How do you try to guarantee 100 percent security on those many and varied endpoints?

Kater: I am a realist, and I realize that nothing will ever be 100 percent secure, but I really strive for that 99.9 percent security and availability for my users. In doing so -- being that we are so small in staff, and being that I am the one that should manage all of the security, architecture, layers, networking and so forth -- I really look for that centralized model. I want one pane of glass to look at for managing, for reporting.

I want that management interface and that central console to really tell me when and if an exploit happens, what happened with that exploit, where did it go,  what did it do to me and how was I protected.

I want that management interface and that central console to really tell me when and if an exploit happens, what happened with that exploit, where did it go, and what did it do to me and how was I protected. I need that so that I can report to my management staff and say, “Hey, honestly, this is what happened, this is what was happening behind the scenes. This is how we remediated and we are okay. We are protected. We are safe.”

And so I really look for that centralized management. Automation is key. I want something that will automatically update, with the latest virus and malware definitions, but also download the latest techniques that are seen out there via those innovative labs from our security vendors to fully patch our systems behind the scenes. So it takes that piece of management away from me and automates it to make my job more efficient and more effective.

Gardner: And how has Bitdefender HVI, in association with Bitdefender GravityZone, accomplished that? How big of a role does it play in your overall solution?

Kater: It has been a very easy deployment and management, to be honest. Again, entities large and small, we are all facing the same threats. When we looked at ways to attain the best solution for us, we wanted to make sure that all of the main vendors that we make use of here at KDFA were on board.

And it just so happened this was a perfect partnership, again, between Citrix, Bitdefender, Intel, and the Linux community. That close partnership, it really developed into HVI, and it is not an evolutionary product. It did not grow from anything else. It really is a revolutionary approach. It’s a different way of looking at security models. It’s a different way of protecting.

HVI allows for security to be seen outside of the endpoint, and outside of the guest agent. It’s kind of an inside-looking-outward approach. It really provides high levels of visibility, detection and, again, it prevents the attacks of today, with those advanced persistent threats or APTs.

With that said, since the partnership between GravityZone and HVI is so easy to deploy, so easy to manage, it really allows our systems to grow and scale when the need is there. And we just know that with those systems in place, when I populate my network with new VMs, they are automatically protected via the policies from HVI.

Given that the security has to be protected from the ground all the way up, we rest assured that the security moves with the workload. As the workload moves across my network, it’s spawned off and onto new VMs. The same set of security policies follows the workloads. It really takes out any human missteps, if you will, along the process because it’s all automated and it all works hand-in-hand together.

Behind the screens

Gardner: It sounds like you have gained increased peace of mind. That’s always a good thing in IT; certainly a good thing for security-oriented IT folks. What about your end-users? Has the ability to have these defenses in place allowed you to give people a bit more latitude with what they can do? Is there a productivity, end-user or user experience benefit to this?

Kater: When it comes to security agents and endpoint security as a whole, I think a lot of people would agree with me that the biggest drawback when implementing those into your work environment is loss of productivity. It’s really not the end-user’s fault. It’s not a limitation of what they can and can't do, but it’s what happens when security puts an extra load on your CPU, it puts extra load on your RAM; therefore, it bogs down your systems. Your systems don’t operate as efficiently or effectively and that decreases your productivity.

With Bitdefender, and the approaches that we adopted, we have seen very, very limited, almost uncomputable limitations as far as impacts on our network, impacts on our endpoints. So user adoption has been greater than it ever has, as far as a security solution.

I’m also able to manipulate our policies within that Central Command Center or Central Command Console within Bitdefender GravityZone to allow my users, at will, if they would like, to see what they are being blocked against, and which websites they are trying to run in the background. I am able to pass that through to the endpoint for them to see firsthand. That has been a really eye-opening experience.

We used to compute daily, thinking we were protected, and that nothing was running in the background. We were visiting the pages, and those pages were acting as though we thought that they should. What we have quickly found out is that any given page can launch several hundred, if not thousands, of links in the background, which can then become an exploit mechanism, if not properly secured.

Gardner: I would like to address some of the qualitative metrics of success when you have experienced the transition to more automated security. Let’s begin with your time. You said you went from five or 10 percent of time spent on security to 50 or 60 percent. Have you been able to ratchet that back? What would you estimate is the amount of time you spend on security issues now, given that you are one and a half years in?

Kater: Dating back 5 to 10 years ago with the inception of VDI, my security footprint as far as my daily workload was probably around that 10 percent. And then, with the growing threats in the last two to three years, that ratcheted it up to about 50 percent, at minimum, maybe even 60 percent. By adopting GravityZone and HVI, I have been able to pull that back down to only consume about 10 percent of my workload, as most of it is automated for me behind the scenes.

Gardner: How about ransomware infections? Have you had any of those? Or lost documents, any other sort of qualitative metrics of how to measure efficiency and efficacy here?

We have had zero ransomware infections in more than a year now. We have had zero exploits and we have had zero network impact.

Kater: I am happy to report that since the adoption of GravityZone, and now with HVI as an extra security layer on top of Bitdefender GravityZone, that we have had zero ransomware infections in more than a year now. We have had zero exploits and we have had zero network impact.

Gardner: Well, that speaks for itself. Let’s look to the future, now that you have obtained this. You mentioned earlier your interest in AI, machine learning, automating, of being proactive. Tell us about what you expect to do in the future in terms of an even better security posture.

Safety layers everywhere, all the time

Kater: In my opinion, again, security layers are vital. They are key to any successful deployment, whether you are large or small. It’s important to have all of your traditional security hardware and software in place working alongside this new interwoven fabric, if you will, of software -- and now at the hypervisor level. This is a new threshold. This is a new undiscovered territory that we are moving into with virtual technologies.

As that technology advances, and more complex deployments are made, it’s important to protect that computing ability every step of the way; again, from that base and core, all the way into the future.

More and more of my users are computing remotely, and they need to have the same security measures in place for all of their computing sessions. What HVI has been able to do for me here in the current time, and in moving to the future, is I am now able to provide secure working environments anywhere -- whether that’s their desktop, whether that’s their secure browser. I am able to leverage that HVI technology once they are logged into our network to make their computing from remote areas safe and effective.

Gardner: For those listening who may not have yet moved toward a hypervisor-level security – or who have maybe even just more recently become involved with pervasive virtualization and VDI -- what advice could you give them, Jeff, on how to get started? What would you suggest others do that would even improve on the way you have done it? And, of course, you have had some pretty good results.

Kater: It’s important to understand that everybody’s situation is very different, so identifying the best solutions for everybody is very much on an individual corporation basis. Each company has its own requirements, its own compliance to follow, of course.

Pick two or three vendors and run very stringent POCs; make sure that they are able to identify your security restraints, try to break them, run them through the phases, see how they affect your network.

The best advice that I can give is pick two or three vendors, at the least, and run very stringent POCs; no matter what they may be, make sure that they are able to identify your security restraints, try to break them, run them through the phases, see how they affect your network. Then, when you have two or three that come out of that and that you feel strongly about, continue to break them down.

I cannot stress the importance of POCs enough. It’s very important to identify that one or two that you really feel strongly about. Once you identify those, then talk to the industry experts that support those technologies, talk to the engineers, really get the insight from the inside out on how they are innovating and what their plan is for the future of their products to make sure that you are on a solid footprint.

Most success stories involve a leap of faith. With machine learning and AI, we are now taking a leap that is backed by factual knowledge and analyzing techniques to stay ahead of threats. No longer are we relying on those virus definitions and those virus updates that can be lagging sometimes.

Gardner: Before we sign off, where do you go to get your information? Where would you recommend other people go to find out more?

Kater: Honestly, I was very fortunate that HVI at its inception fell into my lap. When I was looking around at different products, we just hit the market at the right time. But to be honest with you, I cannot stress enough, again, run those POCs.

If you are interested in finding out more about Bitdefender and its product line up, Bitdefender has an excellent set of engineers on staff; they are very knowledgeable, they are very well-rounded in all of their individual disciplines. The Bitdefender website is very comprehensive. It contains many outside resources, along with inside labs reporting, showcasing just what their capabilities are, with a lot of unbiased opinions.

They have several video demos and technical white papers listed out there, you can find them all across the web and you can request the full product demo when you are ready for it and run that POC of Bitdefender products in-house with your network. Also, they have presales support that will help you all along the way.

Bitdefender HVI will revolutionize your data center security capacity.

Gardner: That's a really good point that you need to do it yourself, because each site is different, and each organization is different. You really don't know until you put it into its paces what your particular results and security requirements are going to be, and how they come together. So I really appreciate your insights.

We have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how small to medium-sized businesses and government agencies are implementing and managing IT security better by relying on increased automation and intelligence.

And we have heard how Kansas Development Finance Authority in Topeka has benefited from a comprehensive and hypervisor-driven approach that cuts the time to produce better security and gain peace of mind.

So please join me in thanking our guest, Jeff Kater, Director of Information Technology and Systems Architect there at KDFA. Thank you so much, Jeff.

Kater: Thanks Dana!

Gardner: I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing series of BriefingsDirect security improvements discussions.

And a big thank you to our sponsor, Bitdefender, for supporting these use-case studies.

Lastly, a big thank you to our audience. Please pass along this information if you found it useful, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender.

Transcript of a discussion on how a Kansas economic development organization gains peace of mind by relying on increased automation and intelligence in how it secures its systems, data, and people. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

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