DemistifyIT

So much has been written about the US Government’s Health Insurance Exchange that I’m almost afraid to mention it.  For this posting, I’m going to stay out of the political fray and avoid rendering any opinion about whether we should, or should not have the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.  Instead, I would like to discuss the Challenge of the Health Insurance Exchange strictly from an IT perspective.

The US Government has spent approximately 400 million and counting on the current system.  So far, the system has been down more often than it’s been operational.  Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is on the defensive, and she’s been called before congress to testify about how she spent the money,  what went wrong?, and how she plans to fix it?.  On top of that, her boss, the President of the United States has been forced to acknowledge the problems with the American Public.  You get the idea – the site is a train wreck.  What we discovered is that the project was rushed, the supporting technology was dated, the systems are vastly more complex than originally thought and nothing works as advertised.

Hypothetically speaking, how would solve these technical problem if you were Sebelius?   Bear in mind, you have to change the proverbial tires on the bus while its driving down the road.  Well, I’ve actually given this some thought.  Throwing the whole thing out and starting from scratch isn’t an option – it would take too long, and you have the President of the United States, Congress and US Public breathing down your neck.  No, about the only thing you could do in the short-term is identify, isolate and repair the glitches.  The trouble is, a single transaction spans multiple systems and technologies.  What’s needed is the ability to trace a transaction end-to-end in order to ferret out and address the problems.   Stabilize and fix what you can, and replace what you must.  Once stabilized, you can test and upgrade fragile components.  All this sounds great, but without End-to-End visibility and a single pane of glass to identify problems you wouldn’t know where to start.

I’m quite proud of the fact that I work for a software company that has actually solved this problem.  In fact, my employer (Splunk) is the only machine data platform that I’m aware of that can provide this level of visibility and insight across heterogeneous environments in real-time.  If you simply Splunk it, find it, and fix it, you’ll quickly get a handle on what you need to fix and your priorities.

Are you able to quickly identify and isolate technology problems across all your environments?

Imagine this scenario – you just discovered that your IT systems have been hacked into.  Even worse, after pouring over logs and conducting exhaustive analysis you discover that the data breach had been going on for weeks.  Since that time, the perpetrator or perpetrators  have been systematically siphoning sensitive data from your network.   Now imagine that it’s your job to report this Data Breach to the CEO.   Would your heart just skip a beat? I know mine would.

This  awful scenario, while hypothetical has no doubt been played out both within businesses and government agencies throughout the world.      In addition to the lost trust, embarrassment, operational disruption, and the financial impact on your brand, data privacy laws and regulations  further raise the stakes through imposed fines.  Moreover, Wall Street definitely doesn’t take kindly to Data Breaches.

Here is a not so typical example of how a data breach can play out in the real world, but one you need to be aware of.  This is an account of happened to Heartland Payment System, a Payment Process Provider (NYSE: HPY).  In 2008, Heartland Payment Systems was alerted  to suspicious account  activity related to their customers from their partners Visa and MasterCard.   Heartland conducted an all out investigation and were horrified to discover that they were unaware that a packet sniffer had been surreptitiously installed on their network.

At the time of this discovery, Heartland’s stock was trading at $25. per share, with 36.83m outstanding shares.  As the full extent of the data breach came to light, Wall St. punished the stock.  Over the ensuing months, the stock hit a low of just under $5 per share.  That’s over and 80% drop in value or approximately $736 million. In addition to the massive drop in market cap, Heartland was forced to pay substantial fines, and spent vast sums on consultants and both software and hardware to harden their network.  Overall,according to news articles, the Data Breach cost Heartland $140 million in fines and other hard dollar costs.

What truly shocked everyone was the sheer magnitude of the breach – some 130 million credit card accounts were stolen.   This single data breach could have put Heartland out of business.  It’s taken years, but thanks to some shrewd crisis management, Heartland has regained customer trust, and thankfully, the stock is doing better than ever – trading at $44.47 per share as of this writing.

Heartland’s troubles could have been greatly minimized if they had an early warning system alerting them to network anomalies.   Much like a smoke alarm alerts us to fire, monitoring inbound requests and outbound responses with Splunk would have alerted and directed management to suspicious network activity which could quickly have been rooted out quickly.

To use an analogy – A tiny fire quickly extinguished causes little damage, but if you aren’t aware, that same small fire can become a raging inferno and take down your business.

Public service announcement – Remember to check the batteries in your smoke detectors on your birthday.

Like everything in life, knowing whom you are dealing with is essential.  I seriously doubt that I’m going out on a limb to say that no one likes dealing with a phony.  If you think about it, in the physical world, almost everything we do is based upon trust and relationships: friends, significant others and professional relationships.  Is your Doctor qualified?  Is your fiancée already married? Regardless of the relationship, it’s important for an individual to know whom they are dealing with.  The same is also true in business – does this company have the means to pay for the product we are shipping them?  Should we trust this importer?  Therefore, I believe that knowing the identity of whom you are interacting with in the digital world is just as important.  In fact, it may be even more important given the potential for rapid massive financial theft and sabotage.

To be clear, I’m defining a digital relationship as any electronic system that communicates information about you, your customers, your patients, your partners, including the ability to change, share or alter information on your behalf.  Nowadays, with the advent of social media these “digital relationships” are everywhere – Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter as well as other social applications.  The trend is to give these applications permission to share information amongst and between these new age applications, along with other more traditional applications such as e-mail accounts, contact lists, and more.  For example, grant Linked in access to your address book or e-mail account and they will search for new business contacts to link to.  The power of what I’ll refer to as “Cross Communication Applications” is unmistakable; they save time, and provide tremendous benefit to the end-user.

Even businesses are getting into the act, as they are now actively sharing enterprise information from cloud based applications such as Salesforce and Concur, with their on-premise back-office applications such as E-Business Suite, SAP, or other home-grown applications.  With all this sharing going on, it’s vitally important that everyone is certain of the identities exchanging information.  If a malevolent person or program were successful in impersonating your digital identity, the resulting damage from such a breach could be quite significant. Therefore, knowing that you are only sharing information with a trusted identity is critical.

Consumer-based cross communication likely poses less of a financial threat than do enterprise information or sharing – but ultimately, only you can be the judge of that.  Therefore, the more important the information to you, the more security measures you should take – defense in depth is truly your single best defense against malicious threats.

A Gateway is one of the most powerful tools available to stop would be posers from accessing your digital assets.  Since a Gateway reads and monitors all application traffic flowing into and out of Cross Communication Applications you can instruct the gateway to do a number of things, such as:

* Verifying that the incoming IP address matches the “white list” of trusted IP addresses
* Verifying that the IP traffic hasn’t been spoofed
* Insuring that incoming traffic does not contain Trojans or Known cyber attacks….and much more.

In summary, if securing your information matters, you should do a little research to determine whether or not a Gateway would be right for you.  Remember, we all really need to know who we are dealing with.