Uniplus Consultants

Changing the Landscape - IBM's $1.5 Billion Security Initiative

On November 1^st, the world’s largest IT company  set forth a major security initiative - developed over the past 18 months, IBM announced strategies to help its customers achieve  “an enterprise free of fear” (their term). Big Blue is allocating $1.5 Billion and 200 security researchers to turn that vision into reality.

What does this mean to all of us?

Because IBM views compliance with regulations as one of the main drivers behind this initiative, their proposed new approach is based on a comprehensive and automated security risk management process. The goal is to provide CIOs and CISOs with tools and methodologies to automate the measurement and assessment of business processes and risks, as well as the costs of managing their information more effectively.

IBM's risk management framework is fleshed out with a family of security products that help address external threats - these include ISS, Watchfire, Fidelis Security Systems, PGP and Verdasys.

In future blogs we will take a closer look at what we already know about the IBM Security Framework , what we see on the horizon, and the Web Application Security and Network Vulnerability Assessment products that make it all work.

I, for one, welcome IBM's commitment to this space, and look forward to monitoring their progress with you!

Key Benefits of Build and Release Delivery Automation

When building an effective enterprise architecture framework, the following five primary architectural components need to be defined and addressed:

1. Enterprise Services: Shared enterprise  services business architecture
2. Information Systems Services: use of a service oriented approach to deliver application integration and information services
3. Infrastructure: - description of the approach for establishing and operating data centers, networks and platform hardware and or software
4. Security Services: processes, governance and associated technologies required to achieve and maintain information security for enterprise services
5. Service Management: Support and Delivery processes to enable effective management of Enterprise Services

The Service Management component, which is becoming increasingly important to executives and IT architects, comprises Incident Management, Services Level Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Release Management, as well as other related processes.

In this blog, we will focus on the Release Management process and evaluate the benefits to organizations of automating their Build and Release Delivery Process and consequently achieve business improvements.

Build and Release Delivery Automation delivers value to organizations by reducing the cost of software delivery. This increased development efficiency is achieved by reducing manual steps and leveraging quality processes across multiple projects.

Decreasing overall time to market is another benefit of Build and Release Delivery Automation. Accelerated development cycles by enabling server pools, parallel processing and performance queues enables of a given project into independent tasks, which can execute in parallel on one or several servers.

This process automation could translate into increased quality of products delivered by accommodating more frequent code builds, providing developers with immediate feedback on the success or failure of their coding efforts to keep them on the right track and providing QA teams key information about builds so they know what changed and what tests should be run.

To better understand the benefits associated with Build and Release Delivery Automation, we need to look at reduction of the cost and the overall time to market of software delivery and gains in quality of products delivered.

Last but not least, having a complete history and audit trails for every build, test and deploy activity helps with compliance and improve collaboration of distributed teams.