Securing the smarter planet

Al Zollar, General Manager IBM Tivoli Software, discusses building security into the fabric of the IT infrastructure.

Q. What does IBM see as the next challenge for technology leaders?

Al Zollar: The rate at which business, politics and technology continues to accelerate. We are not talking about mild, episodic change. We are talking about 'turbulent change.' Economic disruptions, cyber attacks, political upheaval, technology leapfrogs and natural disasters can occur almost without warning. Even anticipated change, driven by new partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, or management initiatives, requires leaders to make decisions in the face of uncertainty in order to ensure continuing economic growth and expanded stakeholder value. In the face of this uncertainty, how do we anticipate and prepare for everything that might happen? 

Organizations have to learn to embrace change, and thrive on it. Every person knows all too well the complexities and challenges that technology is creating in a world that is becoming more aware, more interconnected and smarter every day. Our planet is growing smarter because of the sheer magnitude of the data that we can collect about the events and activities in our everyday lives, our ability to interconnect, collect, and share that data in a world where billions of devices have built-in intelligence, and because of our ability to use this data to understand and control what is happening in the environments around us. 

Q. How is IBM helping clients build security into business practices to keep financial services infrastructures secure from the start?

AZ.  To realize the promise of future innovation we will depend upon the safe and dependable operation of the systems that will gather, transmit, and analyze data, communicate and act upon the results.  This type of security must be considered from the early stages of development through deployment. The reliability of these solutions must be secure by design.

This concept means that cost-effective security begins with the creation of secure systems from the start. Time-to-market, maintenance, and the devastating costs of publicized breaches are reduced through the benefits of integrating secure practices early in the development lifecycle. It is a long-standing axiom that functional defects identified during system development are orders of magnitude less costly to repair than those found in production systems, and these benefits and savings are even higher when it comes to security. Current models show us that the average data breach costs an organization roughly $6.6M, and that the average cost per lost customer data record is over $200. These numbers are staggering.   

Q. What progress has IBM seen within enterprises in the financial services industry adopting a secure by design strategy? 

AZ: Recently we worked with a worldwide financial services conglomerate, whose IT operations team was drowning in a constant stream of change requests across services designed by 25 different application teams. Their operations staff resource budget was frozen and they could not keep up with all of the issues reported about performance issues, deployment errors and manual workarounds and had a current backlog of 2,500 priority one requests. We helped them implement a service lifecycle process that's discovers the interdependency of assets in their live topology so they could create a reference architecture. They also automated their workflow so that it could be re-used time and again for a repeatable and 100% accurate deployment. The result was a vastly reduced backlog of issues, cost savings through consistent deployment, compliance and traceability of work activity and the ability to capture, document and formalize best practices.

Biography

Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli Software, is responsible for the strategic direction and ongoing operations for the Tivoli brand, which manages today's dynamic infrastructures, giving customers the ability to manage resources and risks, optimize human capital and manage service levels and business processes.