Page 11 - FCW, June 30, 2016

CYBERSECURITY THE ROLE OF THE CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE
The New Look of Cyberdefense: Converged Infrastructure
Data protection and cybersecurity intersect within converged infrastructure.
hese are interesting
times when it comes to technology. Outside of security, both industry and government have come to realize that traditional infrastruc-
tures can no longer cope with the data traffic, which rapidly continues to grow. Market analyst IDC believes worldwide that it could reach 180 zettabytes—or 180 billion terabytes— in 2025, up from just 4.4 zettabytes in 2013. How to cost-effectively upgrade and scale their IT infrastructures to handle this explosion of data is a pri- mary focus for government agencies.
This in turn increases the attack vectors for cybersecurity threats. As agencies look to improve their infrastructure to handle larger volumes of data, they are also looking to better safeguard that data—and more importantly, which technology partnerships to engage.
“Where that data resides, how it’s used, and what happens to it has become extremely important,” says David Rubal, Vice President of Oracle’s North America
internal, are not new to the govern- ment realm. They’ve been around for years. Traditionally, the security put in place to defend against those attacks focused on protecting the weakest links in those technology swim lanes. Current infrastructure and processes can be challenged to protect different varieties of data moving much faster throughout the entire technology stack.
Several highly public breaches at a number of large government
agencies have recently driven that lesson home.
This includes the breach at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) made public
in 2015. This breach compromised millions of government employ- ee records and helped focus the government’s attention on the intrin- sic value of all data. “It’s
obvious that data protection is now one of the top priorities,” says Rubal.
ARISE OF CONVERGENCE
The next generation architectures will be defined by converged infrastructure, a tight integration
of hardware and software end-to- end across the entire IT stack. This environment encompasses all infra- structure elements—compute, virtual machines, operating systems, data- base, applications, cloud, security, networking and storage. These have all traditionally been built component by component, using different pieces from different vendors.
While the concept of a converged infrastructure strategy has a long history, dating back to the minicom- puter days of the 1980s, its devel- opment has been hampered by that “swim lane” approach. In govern- ment, this has sometimes resulted in different IT silos within agencies going their own way with systems
Public Sector Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions Engineering organiza- tion. “It’s important that the infrastructure can help support processing data in a secure fashion, and to be able to support a defense-in-depth cyber- security strategy.”
The types of attacks and the people behind them, both external and
David Rubal, CISSP—
Vice President, Public Sector North America Cloud
and Infrastructure
Oracle Corporation
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