Bill McCluggage

I had a great time at the Barbican on Monday last week, speaking at the RSA Security Summit. Art Coviello and Eddie Schwartz led off the day with their usual flair, giving very interesting and cogent talks on the main theme of the summit: “how big data transforms security”. There were great break-out sessions, like the one by RSA’s Matthew Gardiner on security analytics. And there was time for great conversations during breaks and lunch — like one I had with Phillip Hoyer (of Actividentity, now part of HIDGlobal) about mobile security and PKCS #11.

My own session, in the last segment of the day, was on “Breaking the Kill Chain”. We’ve been thinking a lot at RSA about the attack models that enterprises are confronted with these days, especially targeted, stealthy attacks. The “kill chain” described in a paper published by Lockheed-Martin is a very useful tool for modeling APTs and for understanding how to put in place intelligence-driven defenses.

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Government ICT 2013 – Part 2

(For part 1 click here)

The Government ICT 2013 Conference was completed with equal gusto by Mike Bracken, who admitted hot footing it up Whitehall to be at the QEII centre in time to give a dynamic and challenging insight into the Government’s drive to deliver digital by default.  His four key objectives as leader of the Government Digital Service are:  the creation of the Government Digital Service (now complete), fixing Government’s online publication of information by building a Continue Reading

The Government ICT Conference 2013 in the QEII Conference Centre kicked off the event season with traditional gusto and the key themes were focused on delivering change, supporting the Government’s reform agenda and enabling the delivery of more efficient public services.  All worthy themes but the core challenge still seems Continue Reading

Probably obvious I know but one of the most important aspects of the Olympics has been money. Or more specifically, the ability of consumers, retailers, banks, restaurants, hotels and transport companies to handle transactions without interruption.  Although there have been some signs that systems have been put under strain, key systems have proved to be robust.

London banks had already tested their systems against cyber attack towards the end of last year and the aim was to see how quickly the financial sector could restore services to ‘business as usual’ after major disruption.

The ‘proof of the pudding’ as they say, will be in the delivery of a successful ‘economic games’ and we will be able to claim that all the planning and investment Continue Reading

There is  a lot of truth in the adage of what I was taught in the RAF and what has stayed with me in the form of the ‘5 Ps’ – previous planning prevents poor performance, and the work over the past 7 years that has gone into delivering and securing the Digital Olympics is a great example.

The core digital infrastructure, much of which was locked down months ago, has been relentlessly tested to ensure it can cope with the huge demand placed on it during the 17 days of the Summer Olympics and 12 days of the Paralympics.  Organisers of the London 2012 games are confident that the investment in testing the vast array of IT infrastructure and equipment deployed across London and the Olympic venues, and recovery processes in the case of a major cyber attack, will pay dividends.

With all this data flashing around the networks it is hard to visualise Continue Reading

The atmosphere in London is euphoric, at times electric and totally surreal as the city has completely embraced the spirit of the Olympics.  Key landmarks such as Horse Guards, Hyde Park, Wimbledon, Wembley, the ExCel and Greenwich have been transformed.  But the key site is the Olympic Park and for me the highlights have been the opening ceremony, the way in which spectators have enjoyed and supported such a fantastic international spectacle and of course the athletes themselves, who are proving that world records can be broken. Continue Reading

So what do the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN and the announcement that scientists may have found the Higgs boson  particle have to do with the challenges faced by the UK Government and their drive to achieve savings?  The answer is ‘Big Data’ and the drive to develop new data analytic methods based on the manipulation of huge amounts of data.

The availability of affordable compute power and new platforms such as Hadoop and Greenplum HD designed specifically for big data analytics across unstructured datasets has changed the landscape of scientific research and will ultimately have a similar effect on public sector capabilities.  But the question is – how long will it take before Government leaders recognise the opportunity and act?

It is also worth noting that I believe that many people in Government find it hard to differentiate between the fundamental concept of ‘Big Data’ and the largely politically driven objective of ‘Open Data’.  But in the context of this blog post it may be worth holding this thought for a later article.

So how large is the big data challenge faced by CERN?  Well, apparently this year the LHC experiments will generate 22 Petabytes of data and that’s after 99% of the data from the experiments has been tossed.   That’s a big number with 15 noughts (a million gigabytes) and a big data challenge.

However, although it seems a big number, it is also comparable in size to data held by a number of UK public sector organisations.

But in many instances, the data held by Government is not considered a raw resource in the same way as CERN treats the data from the LHC.  CERN have focused on exploiting this data to complete humanity’s understanding of the standard model of physics and the latest development in our knowledge of the fabric of the universe.  The UK public sector probably doesn’t have such a profound rationale for exploiting big data but it still has a choice – it can either develop a strategy to exploit the value of the data it currently holds and make a real difference to public administration, services and outcomes or continue to cocoon the data it holds in costly retention practices missing the opportunity to achieve big savings.

So how big are the potential savings?  In a report released by Policy Exchange on ‘The Big Data Opportunity’ they estimate that ‘achieving cutting-edge performance could in time save the public sector up to £16 billion to £33 billion a year – equivalent to £250 to £500 per head of the population ‘.

So pretty substantial and an opportunity not to be missed!