IT@Intel Blog : 2008 : August : 20

For the past year I have been working with several client technologies that revolve around the area of Client Virtualization. As I looked into these technologies and benchmarked them, I began to realize several key things.

These technologies are finally mature enough to start using mainstream. True they may not all fit your current IT model, security rules or management framework, but that is another discussion. The pure fact is with hardware virtualization now enabled in chipsets, we can expect virtualized environments that perform faster than yesterday's systems and almost as fast as the host OS. Moving forward, technologies will be released that will support side by side OS or multiple instance virtual machines. Imagine a world where IT can manage something as simple as a virtual environment and get out of the platform support and enterprise OS business. There are tools there today that allow this to happen and we have done some work in this area and released a white paper recently with our results, it is called Client Computing with a VUE and can be found at (IT@Intel Client Computing with VUE (Virtual User Environment)). The key is to make sure you start planning around these technologies now, versus scrambling to support them later.

Some of these technologies are flexible enough, they can be used to enable our users in ways we never could before - Imagine going home at night and not having to carry a laptop. Simply carrying a USB stick that has your IT build on it and being able to plug it into your home system to check email, review documents etc. Imagine users having a choice in the platforms they use. No longer is getting a system in IT like picking the first Model T, do you want black or black? We could enable our users today to be able to simply go to any computer access a website, log in and authenticate, and a few moments later, they can have corporate apps streamed to the system they are on and access their data from cloud storage.

IT can sometimes be more than a cost center - After reviewing some of these technologies, I realized we as IT could use some of these to provide more than standard services to the corporate environments we support. Imagine a corporate environment with thousands of desktops that users use day to day but don't fully utilize. Using some of these technologies, we can take processor and memory slices off these machines and add them to a grid computing environment. Allowing our corporation several thousand more process cycles without having to expand their server or data center space.

Again, not all of these can drop right into your environment today. Some things may need to change on the technology or your IT side. But the key is this area is changing fast. Let's stop thinking about how we have always done it and instead ask how we should do this tomorrow.

Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts!

0 Comments Permalink Tags: client, virtualization, streaming, operating_sytems, application, saas, innovation

Can an organizations greatest security asset also be its most serious threat? Yes it can.

The Greatest Asset

I manage information security for Intel’s mergers and acquisitions. Recently, I was evaluating an acquired company and delivering information security training to our newest employees on their collective hire date. As I was presenting the fundamentals of how to keep the company, their work, and our industry safe from cyber threats, an important security maxim was exemplified.

In interacting with the audience, I understood how they were accustomed to conduct business, the scope of information they handle on a daily basis, and their views on the value of security. I began to emphasize how the employee base was the greatest asset to information security and the combined force of a well informed, properly trained, and security savvy workforce dwarfs the efforts of the dedicated security staff. My recruitment speech sunk in and their faces glowed with pride. I saw a bit of excitement from the audience, that of empowerment and newfound responsibility. I was setting them up. Although absolutely true, a few slides later in my presentation I unveiled the stark reality.

The Greatest Threat

I asked to my newly recruited security champions what the greatest threat to the company was. Amid different answers, I revealed that THEY were the greatest threat. Not just them, but the entire workforce. The glow in their faces dimmed a bit. How can this be? How can our employees be both the greatest asset and the worst enemy in the cyber warfare trenches? They were shocked. They were dumbfounded. They were intrigued. I gave a dramatic pause. It is not often people are captivated by the boring and bothersome topic of information security. I savored the moment.

The real battlefield is in hearts and minds of employees. These new employees, more than any, represent the greatest challenge. They are accustomed to their previous ways, inundated with new-hire information, and are not familiar with the security expectations of their new corporate parent. Security policy is a distant concern on their first day. Every subsequent day, the separated cluster of workers will not benefit from the social reinforcement of good security practices as they are distanced from the collective body of experienced employees who exhibit secure behaviors.

We discussed how apathy, laziness, and circumventing policy for a quick gain, can cause significant weaknesses in security. Every employee has a responsibility to be secure and reinforce those fundamentals with their peers. A single employee through malice or carelessness can cause more damage than a legion of hackers. They must decide, through their actions, if they are the security marshals or the villains of the story. The battle is with the mindset of the employees. The finest security policy is worthless in the hands of an apathetic workforce.

In the end, the discussion was a success. It was not just training; it was an interactive dialogue talking to what is important and how every employee, now including them, work as a team to be Intel’s greatest security asset.

So, who do you market to?

1 Comments Permalink Tags: security, value, policy, threat, security_threat, information_security, optimal_security, model, risk, matthew_rosenquist, rosenquist

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Can Client Virtualization lead to a simpler IT environment?

A Company’s Greatest Security Threat and Asset

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