Qualys annual user conference live blogging

Qualys’ annual security conference returned to a live-only event this week at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, and the keynote addresses started things off on a very practical note… about selling coconuts, toasters, and carbon monoxide detectors. The first two keynotes featured speeches from both Shark Tank celebrity businessman and CEO of Cyderes, Robert Herjavec, and Qualys’ President and CEO, Sumedh Thakar. Both spoke around the similar theme of qualifying and quantifying digital cyber risks.

I am doing near-time blogging of their show, and this was the first of a series of posts.

The second post was a recap of the first day’s events, and included highlights from some of their customers and product team as they took a deeper dive into TotalCloud.

The third post profiled the special launch of the Qualys Threat Research Unit, showing some of its research and how it compiles threat intel and works with various industry bodies to share this data.

The next post highlights some of Qualys’ customers who came to the event to tell some of their stories about how their companies have benefitted from their products.

My final post recaps the second day of the conference sessions and some of the more interesting aspects of various Qualys products.

New AMD website: Performance intensive computing

AMD and Supermicro have asked me to help them build this new website that focuses on higher-end computing services. Topics include building computing clusters, taking advantage of GPUs to increase capacity and performance, and highlighting various case studies where this equipment plays a key role, such as with scientific computing and for academic research.

Blogger in residence for SaltStack conference

I wrote a series of blog posts at the SaltConf18 in September 2018. SaltStack is a devops automation, remote control and orchestration tool that has a great deal of power and is used in some very large enterprise networks managing hundreds of thousands of servers.I also wrote white papers about their technology and its applications.

Here are links to the various pieces (the actual posts have since been removed from their site):

— I wrote this white paper which talks about typical use cases of the SaltStack Enterprise product and Salt’s key features.

Understanding security automation in the context of the stages of grief

The relationship of the digital and physical worlds has never been closer, a post about Cyndi Tetro’s session.

— Examining how IBM Cloud and Cloudflare use Salt to manage their global networks

SaltStack: Using automation to deal with infosec grief

Like many of you in college, I read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ Death and Dying about the various stages of grief. I think IT security managers go through similar stages when their networks have been breached by hackers and malware. There is the shock of the breach, then denial that their equipment was at fault, then anger at the hackers for having targeted their company. Eventually, everyone gets down to work trying to fix the problem, and finally accepts that it happened.

 

We have all seen what happens when IT staffs never make it past the denial stage: their networks remain in ruins for weeks or months. They overspend on consultants, they have to scrap and replace their servers, and they suffer tremendous business losses. Sony Entertainment, the City of Atlanta, Maersk shipping, the list is far too long.

 

I was thinking about these stages this week when I was at SaltConf18 listening to how users of SaltStack are deploying this tool to help them make their enterprises more secure. Some users have developed their own home-grown solutions, cobbling together various routines that provide for widespread patching across all of their systems. Others were eagerly learning about the news on how to deploy SecOps for SaltStack, which was announced this week and will be delivered next year. When the product was introduced, Mehul Revankar, a senior product manager for the SecOps product, spoke about how it took care of the various different stages of identification, remediation, creation of actionable content and being able to scale up well to protect the largest collections of servers and endpoints.

 

Just like in coping with the loss of a loved one, we have to figure out how to move through these stages constructively and productively. Getting unstuck is key. When it comes to people, we have psychoanalysis and supportive friends to help us through these dark times. But when it comes to protecting our computing infrastructure, we have to turn to better automation to help us through the response and remediation of our equipment. (Maybe there is a role for therapy, but I’ll put that aside for this blog post.)

 

Certainly, SecOps isn’t the first security tool to use automation, and it won’t be the last. Many vendors are moving into this territory, frankly because they don’t have a choice. When you have to patch ten thousand Linux or Windows servers because of a vulnerability, you can’t do the job manually. Oftentimes, the window of opportunity for such massive patching is a matter of hours or days before the first exploits start showing up in the wild. By now we all know what happened at Equifax last year when they delayed patching their Apache Struts servers. They were still stuck at the denial stage.

 

As First Data’s VP Amaya Souarez said in her keynote session at SaltConf18, “You can’t hire yourself out of this problem, we have to automate.”

 

A recent study of several dozen IT executives supports this need for better security automation. One was quoted in the study saying, “The future of security is [being] as autonomous as possible — where a combination of real-time, intelligent analytics, and integrated automation and remediation cover an ever-increasing part of manual investigative and response runbooks.”

 

That was the design goal of SecOps for SaltStack. The trick is being able to break down the process — going from recognition to remediation — in such a way that an automated tool can sequentially apply a series of security policies and rules to make the automation work under a wide variety of conditions. To be effective, automation has to deal with circumstances when a rule fails as well as when it succeeds. At this week’s conference, Justin McMillion and David Kleiner of Sunayu showed how they built their automated auditing tool. Their firm does a lot of work for the Department of Defense to help them keep their Linux servers up to date and within compliance of various DoD standards. They created some clever dashboards and routines using SaltCheck to do this, and mentioned during their session how they were envious of what they could have done if SecOps was available.

Saltstack: How IBM and Cloudflare use Salt to manage their global networks

When I look at smaller-sized tech companies, I tend to judge them by the company that they keep. By that I mean who they partner with, who are their customers, and where are their products being used. By any of those metrics, SaltStack is in very good quarters indeed.

 

At the SaltConf18, we heard from several large customers using Salt to run some very sophisticated and complex networks, such as Cloudflare and IBM Cloud. Both companies run their infrastructure with just a few staffers, which is another testimonial to how powerful Salt can be in its automation and orchestration features.

 

Tom LeFebvre is a network engineer and was the presenter for Cloudflare. Cloudflare runs about a tenth of the total global Internet traffic across its infrastructure, and is used by some of the largest web properties to accelerate the delivery of their content. They manage more than seven thousand servers with Salt, located in more than 150 different data centers running more than 250 Salt Master copies.

 

They are deep users of Salt, and are constantly trying to improve their deployment to make it operate faster and more reliably. When you are connecting servers between China and the US, you have to keep network latencies and traffic to a minimum, especially as it has to traverse the Great Chinese Firewall.

 

Some of the things they have learned is to try to use packages rather than scripts to update server operating systems, and use highstate calls whenever possible to reduce the loads being placed on the Minions. They also developed a series of graphical dashboards that keeps track of the highstates and set up special alerts for help troubleshoot failed conditions or when Minions were consuming too much time to complete their tasks. They tied these conditions to notifications that were sent out to the staff via Google chat messages, which shows how easy it is to extend Salt with other services. They also rewrote some of their Pillars into pure Python, again to help increase performance. Finally, they are increasing the number of Masters deployed in each data center to handle their canary deployments, which means providing an early warning when something goes wrong with one of their massive system rollouts or upgrades.

 

Also presenting at the conference were an unlikely couple: Nathan Newton from IBM Cloud and Mike Wiebe from Cisco. The two have been active in working with SaltStack to modify its minions and other code to work with the giant network gear that IBM Cloud uses to run its global network. Newton spoke on how he has just 12 team members that runs their network and a large part of that efficiency is due to Salt. IBM Cloud has tens of thousands of Cisco NX-OS and Arista EOS network switches that are spread across 80 data centers around the world.

 

Again, what impressed me was how both men were working with SaltStack to extend the original premise of the product to handle the completely different context of network management, by having the Minions run directly on the Cisco gear. Newton said during one of his presentations, “IBM is good at building data centers, but once they are built the next day we need automation to take care of them.” That’s where they need help. They reached a tipping point last year where they were maintaining 60,000 different devices and “we couldn’t do it manually. We needed to be more proactive and have better automated tools.” That’s where Salt came into play. One of the reasons why they duo went with Salt was because of its event-driven automation, and the ability to cause particular actions and not just notify the team when something went wrong.

 

What impressed me most about both IBM and Cloudflare’s implementations was how willing they were to keep pushing Salt to do more and do it better. Both of them obviously believe in the product to trust it to be such a critical part of their network infrastructure.

SaltStack: The physical world is what is driving the coming digital transformation

We’ve all heard about how everything is going digital, using on-demand cloud-based services and mobile technology. But at a session at SaltConf18, we heard a very different perspective from Cyndi Tetro, the head of the non-profit Utah Women’s Technology Council and the CEO for ForgeDX.  She spoke at one of the conference sessions and painted a very exciting picture of how the physical world is really driving change and innovation in the digital universe.

 

Tetro spends time looking at this intersection and tracks products that have made inroads into improved business and customer experiences. For example, we all like to talk about the Internet of Things, but now some of us have dozens of connected devices that we use regularly. What about connected lawnmowers and sprinklers that can, Roomba-style, maintain your yard without your intervention? Or a coffee mug that can keep itself at a constant temperature and detect when it is filled with liquids? Analysts predict that by 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices, and increasing exponentially from there.

 

Most of us when we visit one of the theme parks in Orlando or Southern California don’t really think about all the connected devices there, but Disney and other park operators are constantly thinking about how to improve the visitor experience. I got a chance many years ago to tour Disneyland with one of its network engineers: back then they could barely scratch the surface in terms of synchronizing the music with the Main Street Parade and putting in enough fiber to carry all their digital traffic. Since then, Disney engineers created their “World of Color” light show that depends on a variety of digital technologies to coordinate more than 18,000 elements such as lighting, water fountains and music.

 

World of Color was created more than a decade ago, and since then the entertainment company hasn’t stopped innovating. Disneyworld today offers its Magic Band that can be used to open your hotel room door, charge purchases at the park’s various gift shops, skipping lines for the rides, and personalizing your family’s experience at the park. These are all examples of what Tetro says are “finding the compelling real-world experiences and then using digital technology to make them possible.”

 

What about the 2016 Super Bowl, when Carolina Panthers All-Pro linebacker Thomas Davis ended up wearing a 3D-printed brace that was custom-made in a few hours? Again, the digital tech — the 3D printed object — literally made this player’s day, said Tetro. She also mentioned fitness clubs and gyms that are using connected technology so that groups of people can do their spin classes in separate cities or even in their own homes, connecting online and being led by a superstar instructor. Equinox is one of the pioneers in this technology.

 

Tesla is often used as an example of a connected car, but many other automakers are using technology in more mundane ways, for just-in-time assembly line methods. Wireless networks send specifications directly to the manufacturing machinery seconds before it is placed inside the vehicle. Tetro calls these “dynamic manufacturers.”

 

Finally, there is the smart or connected city. Tetro mentioned the NYC-based Hudson Yards development, which is being constructed literally over the railroad tracks just west of Pennsylvania Station. The sales center provides a complete digital experience so that buyers can look at video walls and see 360-degree views of what their apartment will provide.

 

Tetro says that “our job in technology is to make it disappear, even though it is a big part of whatever we are doing. Everything that you can touch is heading towards being infused with technology in some fashion, but the interesting points are how the digital and physical worlds interact with each other. We are just on the cusp of many advancements.” It was a fascinating and very fast-paced look at what our world is evolving into.

In-house blogging at RSA Archer Summit in Nashville

In August 2018 I was in Nashville, covering the RSA Archer Summit customer annual conference. Here are my posts about the show:

Blogger in residence at Citrix Synergy conference

This is my second time at the major Citrix annual conference, and I will be posting regularly during and after the show. My first piece can be found here and covers what I heard from a new management team at Citrix. They introduced their vision for the future of Citrix, and the future of work. “Work is no longer a place you go, it is an activity and digital natives expect their workplace to be virtual and follow them wherever they go. They are pushing the boundaries of how they work,” said Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov.

My second post is on Windows Continuum. This puts the Windows 10 functionality on a lot of different and non-traditional IT devices, such as the Surface Hub gigantic TV, Xbox consoles, and Windows Phones. If you review the information provided from Microsoft, you might get the wrong idea of how useful this could be for the enterprise, and in my post I discuss what Citrix is doing to embrace and extend this interface.

My next piece is looking at several infosec products that were shown at the show, including solutions from Bitdefender, Kaspersky, IGEL and Veridium. Security has been a big focus at the show and I am glad to see these vendors here supporting Citrix products.

Speaking of security, one of the more important product announcements this week at Synergy was that the Secure Browser Essentials will be available later this year on the Azure Marketplace. This is actually the second secure browsing product that Citrix has announced, and you can read my analysis of how they differ and what are some things to consider if you are looking for such a product.

And here is a story about the Okada Manila Resort that was featured as a semi-finalist for the innovation award at the show. It was built on a huge site and is similar to the resort-style properties that can be found in Las Vegas and Macau. It will house 2,300 guest rooms when it is fully built and have 10,000 employees. Scott’s IT department has at least 100 of them full-time — plus contractors — to support 2,000 endpoints and numerous physical and virtual servers placed in two separate datacenters on the property. I spoke to the IT manager about how he built his infrastructure and some of the hard decisions he had to make. 

At his Synergy keynote, Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov mentioned that IT “needs a software defined perimeter (SDP) that helps us manage our mission critical assets and enable people to work the way they want to.” The concept is not a new one, having been around for several years. An SDP replaces the traditional network perimeter — usually thought of as a firewall. I talk about what an SDP is and what Citrix is doing here. 

Finally, this piece is about the Red Bull Racing team and how they are using various Citrix tech to power their infrastructure. Few businesses create a completely different product every couple of weeks, not to mention take their product team on the road and set up a completely new IT system on the fly. Yet, this is what the team at Red Bull Racing do each and every day.

Blogger in residence at SailPoint’s Navigate user conference

One of the more fun gigs I have is being the blogger on the ground during an event, and posting commentary and analysis in near-real-time on the sponsoring company’s blog. Today I am in Austin, along with a few hundred other identity geeks from the world’s largest companies at the SailPoint Navigate13 user conference. You can read my posts here on SailPoint’s blog:

And this article:

  • How do you future-proof your business?

At the Navigate opening session today, SailPoint CEO Mark McClain spoke to how to future proof your IAM. He mentioned several tenets that the company keeps in mind while rolling out new products and Web services. First, it has to have a user interface that is consumer-grade dirt simple with friendly UIs and nothing to learn. Second, it should build in governance from the start. It should make use of the existing access roles and policies that are already created elsewhere in the enterprise. This is indeed how SailPoint has built its business over the years. “Anything we build should have a range of built-in analytics too.” Next, it should function across the entire applications domain, spanning public and private clouds and handle all on-premises servers, too.

In addition to this work, I also have written this about what I saw at the conference:

How Liberty Mutual built their first mobile app with Mendix

One of the largest insurers in the US was looking to roll out a new mobile app for its group insurance customers. Chris Woodman, an IT manager at the firm, described at Mendix World the process they went through and how Mendix was a key element to their success.

“In 2011, we wanted to develop a mobile app, but we didn’t know what we were getting into, and we had no previous mobile development experience,” he said. “Two months later we had our app deployed.” Mendix awarded the project as the outstanding effort of the year at the conference.

You can read more of my report on Liberty Mutual’s efforts from the Mendix blog here.

There are other entries that I authored during the show, and here are their links. Mendix definitely has an interesting story to tell. Here are the original stories that I filed and since then taken off their blog.

  • How fast can you deploy your apps?
  • John Rymer from Forrester describes his favorite mobile apps
  • Wrap of the first day at the confrence
  • Ron Tolido of Cap Gemini Europe spoke about whether your company has a business prevention department
  • The student programming competition
  • Wrap of the second day of the conference