TECHNOLOGY

Why cyber resilience remains an underrated element of the security strategy

Published

1 year ago

March 29, 2023

A curious article from February 1’s issue of the Borneo Post shone a light on the gap between expectation and reality when it comes to cyber recovery.

Professional services provider KPMG surveyed Asia-Pacific organisations and found almost three quarters (73%) of CISOs did not have the influence to protect their companies fully. Moreover, while progress has been made on prevention and response programmes, businesses are still underestimating impacts on operations and recovery times.

“Too many organisations wrongly assume that recovery will require several weeks to return to business as usual, when the reality is that it may take several months or more,” commented Ubaid Mustafa Qadiri, head of technology risk and cyber security at KPMG Malaysia.

There are, per the definition from SANS, six phases of a cyber incident response plan: preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned. For affected companies however, it can often be panic stations as laptops are locked and files encrypted.

Enter the KPMG cyber incident response and recovery services. Runita Virdee is director of KPMG’s technology advisory practice. Alongside helping clients with the technology and digital transformations, Virdee leads KPMG’s UK cyber recovery practice. With certain infrastructure projects, such as disaster recovery and business continuity, it makes sense that the two areas are linked.

If an attack occurs, the incident response team begins by looking at the forensic analysis of the event. This ranges from understanding where their threat originated from, to assessing and recovering the technology that has been infected.

“We are seeing increasingly complex cyber-attacks launched by malicious threat actors who are constantly evolving and looking to outpace our tools and techniques to deliver maximum damage. We’re fortunate enough to have the size and scale and a broad range of organisational capabilities to respond appropriately – from networking specialists, identity experts and crisis management personnel to support the arduous recovery process.”

Organisations today are, of course, critically reliant on complex interconnected and interdependent systems. Regulations are increasingly strict, and public expectation of transparency is high. Depending on circumstances, organisations may have to notify regulators within 72 hours of becoming aware. Co-operating, as appropriate, with the Information Commissioner as you recover is key.

“With that in mind, two questions that need very coherent answers are: what is the core infrastructure that needs to be brought back online, and in which order of priority?” explains Virdee. “Organisations will often have to balance the need to continue the most business-critical operations – despite the absence of IT – and recovering and rebuilding impacted networks. Regular contact with the client is imperative; several times a day at peak times.”

“We mobilise teams of specialists at different sites, working alongside the client teams on the ground to start recovering,” notes Virdee. “Activities could range from rebuilding 1000s of laptops and physical devices, or as complex as re-architecting and rebuilding the core network and infrastructure from the ground up, embedding security and tight controls to minimise the risk of re-entry.”

Containment of ransomware across large corporate can be incredibly challenging, as is understanding how to restrict and control access to only authorised personnel.

“Recovery times naturally depend on the size of the organisation. For a small company with limited infrastructure and hardware, and a proactive approach to backups, some recoveries can happen within five days. At the other end of the scale however – think a global-sized firm with multi-million revenues and sites in remote parts of the world” notes Virdee. “The longest recovery at 18 months which included recovery and improving their technology estate.”

Education has always been an important part of the cybersecurity puzzle. Employees are frequently a primary access point. KPMG regularly sends out phishing test emails to keep folk on their toes. In some cases, it starts with the IT department. “A lot of organisations really don’t have IT teams that are scaled,” notes Virdee. “And that’s a challenge that we often see. The most successful recoveries have been a whole company effort, aided by invaluable support and input from a wide range of partners and vendors.”

Ultimately, the need for cyber response is one that will not go away. Prevention is important – but equally important is a robust cyber recovery plan with clear set of response activities and identified owners. The European Central Bank is one recent example of a high-profile organisation looking to test resilience after a sharp rise in cyberattacks.

“No organisation can ever be 100% secure but focusing on standards, a robust resilience strategy, accountability at the right levels and fostering a security-focused culture will, in the long term, prove to be a powerful net benefit for any organisation,” says Virdee.

Note: A previous draft of this article was published in error.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud