Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Intel’s purchase yesterday of security software maker McAfee, detailed in this News.com story, signals a shift in the tech industry’s view of how to better secure computers, networks, and software programs: Security has to be built in, rather than added on later. It’s the concept of “secure by design.”
At IBM, the secure-by-design concept extends to encompass our Smarter Planet agenda. These days, its not enough to secure the traditional computing infrastructure. You’ve got to protect all of the devices and networks that are now being used to monitor, manage, and analyze everything from smart electrical grids to health care systems. “All of the physical assets of the world are becoming digitized, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent,” says Kristin Lovejoy, head of IBM security strategy. “But the sad reality is that as people develop and design these new technologies they’re not thinking enough about the issue of security. These devices are so critical that if they’re unavailable or if they’re tampered with, it could have a significant negative impact on an individual or a large population.”
When security is an afterthought, it tends to be expensive and not that effective. Plus, organizations typically find out about a vulnerability after it has already been exploited by malicious software programs.
We believe that only by designing products to be secure can organizations gain the protection they need at a reasonable price. With that principle in mind, IBM has established what we call a secure engineering framework. It’s a set of specifications that we are beginning to use in all of our design processes, for hardware and software alike.
Now that the world’s critical infrastructure is being wired and networked, security is becoming more important than ever before. Business-as-usual in the tech industry isn’t good enough any more.
Big Iron never dies. Forty-six years after the first IBM mainframe models were introduced, our company is launching a new generation of the machines today in New York City. The zEnterprise series offers the kinds of performance you’d expect: The top-of-the line machine is equipped with 96 powerful processors running at a blazing-fast 5.2Ghz, together capable of executing more than 50 billion instructions per second. In an era when PC servers run tens of applications simultaneously in virtualization mode, this model can run run more than 100,000. It’s like a computing cloud in a box.
While the sheer perform
ance numbers for zEnterprise are impressive, it also represents a major step forward in our efforts to make corporate computing smarter.
A key element of the launch is IBM Unified Resource Manager, a software innovation built into the systems that integrates a mainframe with Unix and PC blade servers as if they’re a single machine, with all of the security and reliably of the mainframe. We believe that in the not-too-distant future, the modern data center will no longer be a vast array of different types of devices and chunks of software but, instead, will be best understood as a single computing system, encompassing processing, memory, storage, networking, and all of the software and services that go with it. Conceptually and operationally, it will be one large machine. Unified Resource Manager is an important step in that direction.
This isn’t just some fancy technology trick that we’re doing because we can. The world of business computing is in the midst of a profound shift, driven by a convergence of forces. Digital intelligence is being injected into the world’s physical systems through pervasive instrumentation and global interconnectivity. That’s generating an exponential increase in the volume, quality, and speed of data. At the same time, doing business is growing in complexity and the pace of business has quickened. Companies are under intense pressure to respond to the expectations of a new generation of young people raised on the Internet, the rapid emergence of new markets, and intensifying competition.
To deal with all of these developments, enterprises need to become smarter–gathering more and better information, making sense of it, and acting wisely and immediately on what they learn. Continue Reading »
Editor’s Note: The following post by Stephen L. Sams, vice president of site and facilities services for IBM, underscores the need for CIOs to more effectively manage growth in their data centers. If data centers are allowed to grow organically, CIOs can find themselves adding unnecessary resources, increasing the power demands and carbon footprints of their data centers beyond the needs of their business workloads. This post helps CIOs understand the importance of building a modular and flexible data center for more energy efficiency now and in the future.
How do you build a data center to last 20 years when information technology is changing every 2 years
In the new economic environment, uncertainty, volatility and complexity seem to be at an all time high – and they are still rising. Business processes are becoming more interconnected and global. Standout CEO’s are focused on how to manage in a more complex environment by creating value through new perspectives, deeper insights and more information. For CEO’s and their organizations, avoiding complexity is not an option — the choice comes in how they respond to it.
CIOs can play an important role in the enterprise by developing a vision of innovation enabled by IT. How well you manage your data centers to raise the return on investment of IT infrastructure, to expand the business impact of data center operations and to make innovation real determines the level of your success. Since data centers are long-term and somewhat static investments – needing to last 20 years while the technology inside changes every 2 to 3 years – it becomes an imperative that you plan strategies to be able to react to dynamic changes.
IBM’s data center family features innovation around a modular approach which helps solve three key ways to design a smarter data center.
Posted by
jamesmathewson in
Editor’s Note: Following is an essay co-authored by Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux for IBM, and Jean Staten Healy, director of cross-IBM Linux strategy for IBM. It describes the central place Linux plays in building a smarter planet, and builds on a presentation about the role of Linux in Smarter Systems, which the two IBM executives gave at the recent Red Hat Summit.
What do you think about when you read or hear the word “smart” when it is applied to computers? How about a supercomputer? If any machine is smart, a supercomputer is, right?. According to a study released by the University of California at Berkeley in May, 2010, 470 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux, the open source operating system. That’s 91%. Evidently the people who decided to use Linux for these computers were pretty smart too.
As we think about all the ways where we can work together to create a Smarter Planet, Linux has a very natural role. First, Linux runs on more kinds of hardware than any other operating system. So if we are talking about tying together disparate systems to deliver better, more accurate, and more predictive health care, Linux can power the hardware and software to maintain the information repositories, do the data mining, and perform the analytics. That is, Linux can help provide the intelligence we will need and expect in our complex and sophisticated 21st century systems.
Linux runs on the smallest devices all the way up to the fastest supercomputers, as noted above. Linux today powers smart phones, Netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers in datacenters, but also home automation and many embedded systems. Linux will be at the heart of smart electrical grids that allow utilities to reduce waste, remotely manage and monitor use, and help reduce costs to consumers. Linux will increasingly be part of the instrumentation that provides the data we will use to tune and optimize not just our electrical grids, but also our water systems, supply chains, and factories, to name a few examples.
As the data is collected from the sensors, Linux can help ensure that it goes where it needs to go to do the most good. In order to reduce pollution, cars need to be inspected and kept off the roads until they are compliant with emission standards. Linux can power websites where citizens can pay fees and schedule inspection appointments in a low friction manner. Then once the inspections are complete, Linux systems can push the data to local and regional authorities, but also to repositories and software that measure not only compliance but perform data analysis. This will yield important information to further improve the system, and reduce pollution even more. Our systems need to be more interconnected, and Linux can help them be so.
Linux is global and supports many languages and locales. The tools needed to create a Smarter Planet must run in the heterogeneous environments that we have today. Linux is a big part of how we instrument, interconnect, and derive intelligence from the information around us. As we optimize the systems we have today and develop entirely new ones to solve problems in better ways, don’t be surprised to see Linux inside.
Dr. Robert S. Sutor: Vice President, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group
Jean Staten Healy: Director, Cross-IBM Linux Strategy, IBM Systems and Technology Group
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Guest in
Following is a special guest post from Former Lieutenant General John Fairfield of the U.S. Air Force:
With IT spending reaching nearly $80 billion in the new fiscal budget for 2011, agencies throughout the U.S. federal government are looking at ways to tighten their belts and increase efficiency. One emerging technology that holds great promise is cloud computing. In a cloud environment, IT resources such as applications, storage devices and servers are shared and delivered as services over the Internet.
But the big stumbling block to widespread adoption in federal agencies is the issue of security. How do you protect sensitive, classified data from the ever-growing threat of cyber attacks if the data is sitting in a public or private cloud somewhere?
The U.S. Air Force has decided to tackle this issue head-on and they’ve asked for IBM’s help. During the next 10 months, IBM researchers, software architects, cyber security experts and analytics specialists will work alongside military personnel and representatives from other federal agencies to hopefully overcome the hurdle.
Cyber security is a global issue, so the potential benefits of this project extend far beyond U.S. military services. The U.S. Air Force recognizes that new thinking, new technologies, and new levels of collaboration between government and industry will be required to find viable solutions. As a retired Air Force lieutenant general, I’m extremely proud that my service branch is taking the initiative to get ahead of one of the world’s greatest security challenges.
John S. Fairfield, a former Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force, is the director of strategic sales for IBM’s U.S. Federal Business.
[Editor's note: a press release with more details about this announcement can be found here at ibm.com.]
Posted by
Jack Mason in
More of a :60 second primer than an ad, this new video hits home on the new intelligence aspect of IBM’s new consulting service, business analytics. For more on this see the Smarter Enterprise channel on our Smarter Planet site on Tumblr. Continue Reading »
Business Decision Optimization. Evidence-Based Management. The Realtime, Predictive Enterprise.
On April 14, IBM launched Business Analytics & Optimization Services, a major expansion of its consulting organization that embraces all of these fronts. The move not only signals how the smarter planet vision is transforming into new value for IBM clients, but how that worldview will help individual organizations actually become more intelligent.
Business analytics may sound like an abstraction – (analytics simply means the science of analysis) – but it reflects a very tangible reality at the heart of Smarter Planet: because we can increasingly sense and gather information with unprecedented scale and precision, entire new spheres of knowledge and insight are within reach. We can measure and monitor just about anything, from the complex interactions in natural systems like Galway Bay to the ebb and flow of power over an intelligent electric grid.
As the new paper from IBM’s Institute of Business Value, Business Analytics & Optimization for the Intelligent Enterprise, notes:
The information explosion has permanently changed the way we experience the world: everything – and everyone – is leaving digital tracks. Intelligence is increasingly embedded in objects.
What company wouldn’t want to operate with the kind of highly instrumented, interconnected and realtime intelligence that business analytics promises? While that may seem like a rhetorical question, the study IBM conducted as part of the launch of the new analytics service found that nearly eight in ten business leaders were making decisions based on gut and instinct. Business analytics is meant to change that.
