Page 12 - FCW, June 30, 2016

CYBERSECURITY THE ROLE OF THE CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE
Government IT Buying: Technology Solutions
Plan to buy over the next 12 months (personal involvement)
Planned spending (mean per respondent)
$884,666 $877,541 $810,261 $607,598 $963,691 $746,161 $929,654
$1,646,008
Cybersecurity
Cloud Computing
Infrastructure / Data Center
Mobile / Communications
Big Data Mgmt. & Analytics
Public Safety
Virtualization
Health IT
66% 65%
64% 63%
59% 57%
54%
38%
14-21. Which technology solutions or services will you personally be involved in purchasing over the next 12 months? (Please select all that apply.) (N=623) and 29. How much do you plan to spend on each of these IT solutions? (N=involved in purchasing solution for category)
and software. Integrating these disparate technologies into a coherent agency-wide infrastructure has proven difficult, to say the least.
While Oracle is renowned for
its database solutions that are ubiquitous in government and industry, over the past few years,
the company has been successfully extending that influence into the hardware space through its version of converged infrastructure. Oracle believes that its solution—comprised of co-engineered hardware and soft- ware with a single source of support—can help agencies address their cybersecurity operational needs.
“Security doesn’t stop at the network,” says Rubal. “From our view, security needs to be considered everywhere data resides—from the network, storage and compute levels to the operating system, middleware and applications. This is consistent on-premises, or in a public or
private cloud.”
Oracle’s approach facilitates that extension, he says. The benefits to
Government spending on cybersecurity continues to rank highly, indicating this is clearly a top priority.
Defense in Depth under NIST
The intersection of converged infrastructure with cybersecurity fits well with
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, which the Obama Administration first proposed in 2013 as a way to reduce cyber risks on US critical infrastructure. That framework recommends a defense-in-depth strategy to protect data through five core security functions: identify, protect, detect, respond and recover.
“We believe that this framework is the best approach for agencies to take to be able to provide data protection at all levels,” says Oracle’s David Rubal. “While it specifically addresses risk, we feel that Oracle’s focus on data protection at the infrastructure level supports the objectives of the framework.”
When an agency implements the NIST framework throughout all stages of the data lifecycle and aligns that with a converged infrastructure, he says, it will be able to inspect and analyze data as it’s processing that data and check for unnecessary risk. The framework calls for a range of near real-time, interactive services from an agency’s IT infrastructure to implement its core functions. And the converged infrastructure is well-positioned to provide those services.
Naturally, says Rubal, agencies could accomplish that with Oracle. They would waste no time in having to build the infrastructure themselves.
government agencies come from wrapping a cloud services approach around the company’s converged infrastructure. “In that type of infra- structure, Oracle offers important security features for data processing, compute, and data storage; support- ing the security of data at all levels.”
Oracle operating as a hardware and infrastructure company may come as a surprise, but it’s no accident—the company has invested some $10 billion in R&D over the past five years, following its purchase
of Sun Microsystems in 2010. The goal has been to build a converged infrastructure framework designed to help derive the maximum possible value from any organization’s use of Oracle’s database software.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure includes hardware-based “Silicon- Secured Memory,” which is intended to protect against such things as malware and other cyberthreats.
It also provides onboard and accelerated encryption at the chip level. The available end-to-end securi- ty features that Oracle offers is what the company calls the “table stakes,” which everyone should now expect from a true converged infrastructure solution. And this is essential for any agency looking to protect its data.
OPTIMIZED INFRASTRUCTURE
The company argues “nothing runs Oracle software better than Oracle infrastructure.” Oracle can go into an
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