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SECURITYUPDATE A CONSUMER-GRADE SECURITY EXPERIENCE FIONA BOYD, HEAD OF ENTERPRISE AND CYBER SECURITY AT FUJITSU, EXPLAINS WHY IT’S TIME TO REIMAGINE SECURITY AND STOP HOLDING BACK EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY Cyber threats are continually changing, and new threats are emerging. One striking example is the impact brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many employees have had to leave the safe confines of corporate networks and use potentially insecure home devices and networks to access corporate systems and data. Cyber hackers have been able to exploit this trend in many ways: by sending phishing emails which promise exclusive information about COVID- 19, using bogus websites to trick users into typing in usernames, passwords and banking details for donations and fake relief efforts or temporary government loans and grants. Organisations develop policies that prevent staff from being phished, but the side effect can sometimes hamper employee productivity. Moreover, people have to work and that almost inevitably leads to 'exceptions' in the policy in the way of shadow IT, including personal devices without updated anti-virus software, or unchecked USB sticks with the potential to infect entire corporate infrastructures. But when it comes to things like data protection and privacy and tasks like data replication and backup, not applying the corporate rules can lead to a host of complications - some of them very severe indeed. A BETTER WAY? There has to be a better way. We need to create a consumer-grade experience with a corporate security wrapper around it. These are almost diametrically opposite needs, with a tension that's complicated to resolve. It is a challenge to create a better user experience while deploying security measures for organisations working across various countries and partner organisations. And simple economics dictates that any new system will be in place for quite some time - meaning that it will become outdated against the latest consumer tech quicker than it can be kept up-to-date. Where we are today is no longer fit for purpose. IT departments create long policy documents and force employees to review them annually, but the dos and don'ts must translate into something more dynamic. What this points to is that the people aspect of security is often more complicated than the technical. And ironically, new technologies could make things even more frustrating for users. What's needed is a change in security culture that treats users more like consumers, so we move away from the once-a-year security training event to something more interesting, enticing and lasting. Getting there will require business and security teams working together, understanding and agreeing what risks are unavoidable (and planning appropriate security measures) and those where the risk outweighs any likely potential reward. Security has to speak the language of business. THE SECURITY CONTEXT As a starting point, cyber security needs to have a better handle on users. Today, access rights are generated service by service or system by system. This approach is too crude and too complicated. There are fewer face-to-face meetings now, but the need for executives to access corporate systems remotely remains. Blanket bans are unworkable and unnecessary. Security is now moving towards personabased rules, mapping reasonable behaviour for that person, and applying it dynamically. This is already in place in many organisations - at least in a rudimentary way. What's likely to be missing is context-sensitive role profiles, dynamically created for different types of users accessing data outside core working hours. New 'digital experience' roles assist the shift in enterprise IT, modelled on the consumer environment, where services and products have experience 'champions' to ensure what is delivered is actually what the user wants and needs. For the enterprise user, this isn't just about making it look good: the task is to protect value streams delivered by how people work and to add value by mapping end-to-end workflows. The way forward is for cyber security and the enterprise experience owners to build in the right security as part of the design. TOWARDS A NEW SECURITY CULTURE The new way: emulate the launch of a consumer product. Look at the total experience for the 'customer' and design-in security as part of the overall value workflow. If we have the digital experience owner, we have a starting point to add value to the people who generate value. But users have a role too. Security teams can work as hard as possible to make everything 'secure by design'. Still, unless users take responsibility for doing their part, no amount of smart technology will keep an organisation entirely safe. When reimaging how every employee can contribute to an organisations' security posture and building a culture that fully integrates intuitive security, everyone plays a crucial role. NC 12 NETWORKcomputing JANUARY/FEBRUARY <strong>2021</strong> @NCMagAndAwards WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK
PRODUCTREVIEW SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer PRODUCT REVIEW PRODUCT REVIEWPRODUCT RE Databases are so critical to business operations that it's essential their health, availability and performance are assured. Problems with databases and their host systems are notoriously difficult to identify and diagnose and can easily manifest themselves when it's too late to stop them impacting on customer services. To ensure smooth database operations, businesses need a proactive monitoring solution and the SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) provides a wealth of features. Supporting all main cloud, on-premises and virtualised database platforms, DPA offers deep insights into performance and resource usage, identifies anomalies and their root causes and provides sage advice on remedial actions. We found DPA easy to deploy and had it running on a Windows Server 2019 host in under 30 minutes. It provides a handy web browser wizard that helps create a performance data repository, and offers facilities to register individual database instances or multiple ones at the same time. A key feature of DPA is its agentless monitoring while larger organisations will approve of its support for SQL Server availability groups (AGs) plus Oracle's multitenant container databases (CDBs). At its foundation, DPA uses the proven Response Time Analysis method to measure the wait time between query requests and responses. DPA gets right down to business as its home page presents an informative top-level dashboard with a graph identifying instances with the highest wait times and another that can show wait times trending upwards or downwards. A summary below uses colourcoded blocks to denote partially healthy or unhealthy AGs, instances with excessive wait times and host system hardware metrics that are in warning or critical states. Selecting a database instance from the list below transports you to a dedicated web page with coloured bar graphs showing wait time trends for individual SQL statements over custom time periods. You can drill down deeper into the day's activities to see detected anomalies and DPA provides full search facilities for quickly locating any SQL statement. DPA's advisors use proprietary algorithms to analyse database performance and identify issues and anomalies. All queries that have raised an alert are listed where you can view details such as the execution time, recent variations in performance and historical patterns of activity. SQL blocking prevents resource conflicts but can cause major performance problems when lock durations are too long. DPA remedies these issues as its graphs reveal the root blocking transactions, their impact on other transactions waiting for the resource to be released and even poorly written SQL statements that may be causing these issues. Query performance analysis assists in identifying the root cause of performance issues where you simply click on a hash value at the side of the wait graph and it'll load a detailed view of the query's activity. DPA's machine learning and intelligent analysis correlates all relevant information in one page with the top waits and statistics plus query and table tuning advisors that provide valuable assistance in narrowing down the culprit. DPA snaps in seamlessly with the SolarWinds Orion platform, allowing multiple products to be used to monitor overall app health and capture database performance metrics. The optional SAM module can keep an eye on database apps and host health while Orion's smart PerfStack feature uses correlation projects to compare metrics from multiple systems and apps to identify the root cause of complex network problems. SolarWinds DPA is the perfect partner for businesses that can't afford to have poorly performing databases impacting their customer services. It presents a wealth of information about database issues, helps find their root cause in as few as four clicks and provides invaluable database tuning assistance. NC Product: Database Performance Analyzer Supplier: SolarWinds Web site: www.solarwinds.com Price: Perpetual from £1,597 per instance excluding VAT WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK @NCMagAndAwards JANUARY/FEBRUARY <strong>2021</strong> NETWORKcomputing 13
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Jan-Feb-Mar 2021

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