hs2 accelerates...
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to graph databases
CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
Downtime
coMputerweekly.coM
HS2
/GRI
MSH
AW
HS2 accelerates innovationThe high-speed rail project aims to connect industry,
skills and the technology of the future
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Home
News
Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to graph databases
CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
DowntimeBritish Library puts Shakespeare on phoneThe British Library is enabling people to download digital facsimiles of first edi-tion Shakespeare plays to their devices using “digital wallpaper”.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
NEWS IN BRIEF
VO
DA
FON
EGRO
UPDDoS attacks hit three-quarters
of global brands in 2015More than seven in 10 global brands were hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2015. Few organisations were spared DDoS attacks, according to a survey by communications and analysis organisation Neustar. The survey of 1,000 IT professionals revealed that 73% reported DDoS attacks in 2015, with 82% suffering repeated attacks and 57% suffering subsequent theft.
Lloyds Bank offshores IT roles to India in cost-cutting planLloyds Banking group is reducing its UK IT workforce by 80 people, with half moving to India as part of a cull of more than 600 jobs at the bank. John Morgan-Evans, regional officer at union Unite, said the move to offshore IT jobs to cut costs was alarming. The cuts are part of a three-year plan announced in 2014, when the bank said it would cut 9,000 jobs and close 150 branches.
HMRC weighs up desktop services and cloud collaborationHM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has issued two prior information notices worth a total of £215m. HMRC is looking for management and support for user devices worth £200m, and an integrated cloud-based collaboration system worth £15m. The larger of the two con-tracts includes the build, deploy-ment, maintenance and support of user devices such as Blackberrys and managed desktop services.
Barnet Council audit finds Capita services lackingBarnet Council’s audit reports show failings in IT disaster recovery and IT change management, run by Capita. The internal audit is the first review of the services Capita provides to the council since it signed the contract in 2013. The 10-year contract, worth £32m a year, transferred IT and back-office functions such as human resources (HR) and payroll to Capita.
computerweekly.com 3-9 May 2016 3
Home
News
Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to graph databases
CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
Downtime
NEWS IN BRIEF
Apple CEO looks to services as device revenues fallApple chief executive Tim Cook is look-ing to the company’s services division as revenue from device sales fell for the first time in 13 years. Despite warnings from Apple in January 2016, shares fell 8% in after-hours trading in reaction to quarterly revenue of $50.6bn, down 13% compared with the three months ending 26 March the year before. Apple had forecast a decline of between 9% and 14%.
❯ Mobilised workforces drive performance and productivity
❯ UFO broadband network sees promising pilot results
❯ Government accepts data ethics council proposal
❯ Apple Pay signs up a million users a week
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
Banks’ mainstream adoption of Blockchain 10 years awayFinancial services firms should treat blockchain as a lab project and pre-pare for another decade before the technology hits the mainstream, according to Forrester Research. It predicted a three-phase evolution of blockchain deployments.
IPv6 alone will not secure IoT Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) alone will not make internet of things (IoT) communications secure, warned Hanns Proenen, chief information security officer (CISO) at GE Europe. Although IPv6 is essential to IoT he said IPv6 is not more secure than IPv4.
Volvo tests self-driving carsVolvo will trial autonomous driv-ing in 2017, with 100 self-driving Volvo vehicles taking to the streets of London. Participants in the Drive Me London programme will be real families using their cars in their usual day-to-day situations.
OpenStack Foundation calls for enterprise open source inputThe OpenStack Foundation is call-ing on enterprises to step up their involvement with the open source community to ensure its work keeps pace with the rate of inno-vation occurring in the internet of things and big data era.
Business fail to learn the lessons of past cyber attacksOrganisations are failing to learn the lessons of past cyber attacks, the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report reveals. The analysis shows they are not addressing basic issues and well-known attack methods.
Spike in outsourcing in 2016Restructured deals fuelled a sharp increase in IT and business process outsourcing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa during the first three months of 2016. ISG said the value of deals was €2.25bn, 19% higher than Q1 2015. n
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Home
News
Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to graph databases
CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
Downtime
Accelerating government’s digital transformation with passion and driveThe government’s minister for digital reform, Matt Hancock, talks to Lis Evenstad about creating a Digital Leadership Academy, learning valuable lessons in how to run digital services and his love for open data
With a larger budget than ever before, the Government Digital Service (GDS) is on a mission to transform government services and departments from analogue
to digital, something Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock is “incredibly excited about”.
Speaking to Computer Weekly at GDS’s annual event, Sprint 16, Hancock says he wants to break down the silos and change the way government operates, not just focusing on “a few transac-tions, but using digital, technology and data to improve all of the services we provide”.
“We’re on a journey,” he says, from a government that was behind the times to one increasingly using digital services. He hopes that by the end of this parliament, we will have a government where “digital delivery of public services is standard practice”.
“The job of GDS is to provide thought leadership, but also to chal-lenge and support all parts of government, so that people know about the best technology, the best standards and techniques, and also so the questions are asked of where we can do better.”
INTERVIEW
Matt Hancock: “There are big lessons for how to run
digital services from the past 20 years”
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
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CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
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GDS’s £450m budget over the course of this parliament will have to deliver efficiency savings ahead of its funding.
Computer Weekly revealed last year that savings of £3.5bn are expected in return, with the money mainly being spent on common technology services (CTS), where it hopes for savings of £1.1bn; government-as-a-platform (GaaP), delivering £1.3bn in savings; and the Gov.uk Verify identity scheme, saving GDS another £1.1bn.
While the funding is welcome, Hancock understands that the task ahead is not an easy job. With GDS aiming to turn up the pace and the volume of digital services, there are many hurdles that need jumping.
Closing the skills gapOne of the biggest challenges, highlighted by a National Audit Office report late last year, is that there is a big digital skills gap in government.
The NAO survey found that funding, cultural issues, career paths and cross-government competition “are all perceived to have a negative impact on developing staff and improving capa-bility and capacity”.
The skills problem has been apparent in large government IT programmes, such as the rural payments digital service, where the the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) was expected to provide systems integration skills to bring the different elements of the programme together. However, it “did not have the necessary skills in-house, and did not know how to obtain them”.
Hancock says the government is “constantly learning lessons in how to do these things better”.
“There are big lessons for how to run digital services from the past 20 years,” he says. “One lesson is don’t let huge, long con-tracts and then forget about them; instead, let more smaller con-tracts and manage them actively. Another lesson is don’t put an unnatural deadline on a project; rather keep iterating it and improving it. Another is to design something in an agile way from the start so you can alter it when it interacts with reality in the delivery. Always focus on the user need.”
Hancock calls these his four key principles, and adds that there is no easy answer. “We try to keep a state of mind of constantly learning and improving,” he says.
Digital leaDershipIn fact, Hancock is working hard to tackle the skills gap. Last year, he launched lunchtime coding clubs for civil servants to develop opportunities for “civil servants to roll up their sleeves and get stuck into data”.
Now he is planning the launch of a Digital Leadership Academy: “To make sure that we train people in how to run digital projects, and crucially where we can take the lessons from both successful and unsuccessful projects.”
The academy will be for everyone running digital projects: “Both people with digital backgrounds and the people with the policy and business delivery backgrounds, and others from outside,” says Hancock. “You can learn a lot from how things are done from other governments and the private sector.”
INTERVIEW
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
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CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
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Ultimately, he says, “the best experience is to be part of a digital transformation”.
Hancock also recently announced a GDS Advisory Board which includes experts from retail, digital, data and technology sectors. The board will meet quarterly to advise and challenge the government to deliver better services for users and evalu-ate how emerging digital technology trends can be applied to public services. “Their job is to keep us on our toes and to show direction and leadership, and to challenge and support us as we challenge and support the rest of government,” says Hancock.
open DataAnother passion of Hancock’s is open data. “I love it,” he exclaims. The government has just announced a new piece of work on creating open data sources, or “canonical registers”, ensuring data is stored once, and kept up to date centrally.
The first register is on the different countries in the world. There are currently seven different lists of countries floating around government, but that will soon be cut down to one, held by the Foreign Office, which will be responsible for that list.
“Another example is the register of what companies exist in the UK. It’s reasonable to have one register of which companies exist, so that’s another example of the sorts of areas we can go,” he says. “Ultimately, it’s about creating a modern data infrastructure in government and holding it securely.”
How quickly these canonical registers will be deployed, Hancock is tight-lipped about. “In due course,” he says. “One of the things I’ve learnt about digital projects is that a way to ensure they get
completed successfully is not to put a date on them, because you want to drive the project to successful conclusion rather than force it to an unnatural death.”
Hancock is committed to open data and told the audience at Sprint 16: “We need to make sure that where we have datasets they are open where possible, but where we choose, for good rea-son, for them to be restricted, that is what happens.”
Explaining further to Computer Weekly, Hancock says that although the government has released more than 20,000 data-sets so far, quality is more important than quantity.
“The quality matters. Making sure they are mashable, machine readable and not published in PDFs is important,” he says. “So yes, we are expanding the numbers and that’s driving ahead, but at the same time we have to make sure they’re kept accurate and up to date and that they are held securely.”
Remarkably, he adds, there is very little resistance to publishing the data. “People have seen the impact of open data to improve services, so there’s a very strong agenda there,” he says. n
“A wAy to ensure digitAl projects get completed successfully is
not to put A dAte on them”Matt Hancock, GDS
INTERVIEW
❯ GDS will help government departments to help themselves
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
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CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
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DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software developmentContinuous software delivery experts tell Caroline Donnelly why organisations are missing out if they shun DevOps
Enterprises risk missing out on the business agility benefits of adopting DevOps because of concerns about the level of risk to operations. Despite the likes of Gartner hailing 2016
as the year DevOps hit mainstream levels of adoption, anecdotal evidence shared by day-to-day practitioners of the software deliv-ery method suggests not all enterprises are as keen as others.
Over the course of the two-day DevOpsDays conference in London, advocates for the software delivery method spoke about some of the misconceptions that persist in enterprise circles around its use. One commonly held concern – cited by several speakers – was the belief among enterprises that pursing a con-tinuous delivery approach to IT code deployments increases the risk of something going wrong.
Speaking at the event, Kris Saxton, principal consultant of Automation Logic, said the reverse tends to be true. He said that, during his time as a systems engineer, he tended to become more anxious the longer a piece of IT kit he was responsible for remained up and running, before going on to experience “post-intervention relief” after the inevitable outage occurred.
“Moving to smaller, more frequent releases gives you that feel-ing of post-intervention relief more frequently because you’re not playing with massive bombs anymore,” he said.
Several other speakers at the event shared the sentiment, including DevOps enthusiast and Tripwire founder Gene Kim, who shared data showing firms that use DevOps tend to deploy code changes 200 times faster than those that do not.
“When something goes wrong, the mean time to restore ser-vices is usually 168 times faster,” he said.
Culture shoCkGetting to a point where an organisation can securely and effi-ciently roll out multiple code changes a day often requires enter-prises to undergo substantial re-organisation to create multi-disciplined and collaborative teams, populated by developers and IT operations staff.
This can prove offputting for senior management types who often have the final say on these projects, unless the department pushing DevOps can demonstrate value from adopting it.
ANALYSIS
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
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CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
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However, without buy-in from senior management, IT depart-ments may struggle to get their DevOps ambitions off the ground on a company-wide level.
“Interest in DevOps is widespread at a grass roots level, but there is arrested development for that to spread in a meaning-ful way without senior management sponsorship,” Saxton told Computer Weekly.
“Otherwise, you can innovate in a local sense in your silo or team, but you won’t be able to connect it up to other services to make it meaningful. Your development efforts around innovation will wither and die in the long run because of that lack of innova-tion and sponsorship.”
To get the ball rolling, Saxton said IT departments should embark on a small-scale DevOps trial to begin with, before sharing the results of this endeavour with senior management.
Metrics to back the point that DevOps can make a difference to the way the organisation is run are important to share at this point – but they must be presented in a business-savvy way.
“You’re persuading senior management this is something worth doing, so you have to use the language they understand,” he said. “For example, the main benefit from DevOps to a development team might be the ability to move quickly, but it might work better to pitch it as reducing operational expenditure. Both statements are true – but you need to tailor the message to your audience.”
no shortCuts to Devops Another stumbling block is the lack of product that can fast-track an enterprise into the world of DevOps, said Bridget Kromhout, principal technologist at platform-as-a-service provider Pivotal.
“DevOps is not that shiny thing you get in a box or you see on your balance sheet that you will definitely finish with in Q2,” she said. “It’s something you have to choose and do in your organisa-tion. It’s a cultural practice of co-operation and sharing, and it’s not something you achieve through tools alone.
“People think that, if they get the right tools, if they go to cloud and break down silos and add some containers, they will have achieved DevOps. Tools are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.”
For organisations that manage to negotiate these obstacles, the rewards can be varied and surprising. Kim claimed that improving the IT department’s performance can result in financial benefits for the wider business too.
He said the way a server administrator or a developer works can have an effect on profitability and share price: “When you look at how every organisation acquires customers and delivers services to customers, being 200 times faster than competitors makes a significant difference in the marketplace,” he said. n
ANALYSIS
“Being 200 times fAster thAn competitors mAkes A significAnt difference in the mArketplAce”
Gene kiM, tripwire founDer
❯Click here to learn how to develop a DevOps-friendly business culture
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
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Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
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CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
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HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning with the technology of tomorrowThe man behind the high-speed railway’s technology talks to Lis Evenstad about infrastructure, open data and SMEs
In HS2’s Canary Wharf offices, everything is high speed, says CIO James Findlay. One year from beginning construction on the controversial high-speed rail link between London and
north England, there remains a lot of work to be done.The £33bn project is one of the largest infrastructure projects
ever undertaken in the UK and HS2 is responsible for everything, from the construction of the railway to the passenger experience and stations – which, Findlay says, is “really exciting”.
“You have got to think about things like the passenger experi-ence coming through the stations – how we can get people off the platform as effectively as possible and how they are going to interact with other services that are not provided by HS2,” he says.
“We also need to look ahead to what will happen in the next 10 years and ensure all our technology systems – whether it’s the rail-way systems, passenger systems or construction systems – are open enough and can cope with the likely technology refreshes.
“We might see this emerging technology, that will suddenly come from left field, that might be game-changing. You have to create a platform that can actually cope with that.”
INTERVIEW
Findlay: “I’m passionate about the SME market. We’ve had quite a few
working with us and they are very innovative.”
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But there remains a while to go before the railway becomes operational. In the short term – over the next six to 12 months – HS2 will begin testing the market and begin looking for suppliers.
Findlay envisages a mix of larger suppliers and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that can bring innovation to the table. Mention “SME” to Findlay and his face lights up: “I’m passionate about the SME market,” he says. “We’ve had quite a few working with us in IT and they are very fleet of foot and innovative.”
HS2 needs to work with larger suppliers too, because “once we get into construction, an SME would not be able to support some of the big logistical things”, he says.
“It’s a blend of the two – but certainly more at the innovative side of the spectrum.”
supporting the teChnologies of the futureThe core technology will have to be well known because it needs to meet various international standards, especially concerning health and safety. But there is also a “huge push” to be as inno-vative as possible and make sure that what HS2 creates will be able to support the technologies of the future, says Findlay. By the time the HS2 rail link goes live, the technology landscape will have changed dramatically.
There remain some serious hurdles to clear. HS2 does not yet have the powers from Parliament to begin construction, but with the third reading of the bill due shortly, Findlay is optimistic.
“Subject to the various parliamentary processes, Royal Assent will be later this year or early next year, which is when we really start gearing up,” he says.
INTERVIEW
But it may not be so straightforward. The project is controver-sial, with several anti-HS2 campaign groups attempting to stop it. Campaigners have petitioned Parliament several times, calling for a stop to the programme, claiming the scheme will cost taxpay-ers money that could be spent elsewhere and that the project will damage the environment, among other objections.
visualising DataFindlay says he understands concerns about the project. HS2 is collecting all the design, environmental and other data and visu-alising it, so that the people affected can access it.
“This programme obviously has an impact,” he says. “It has an impact on individuals, on businesses and the environment, and it is incumbent on us to provide all the information that we gather as part of the development of the programme to our stakeholders, to Parliament and beyond, so they can fully interact with it as part of the democratic process.
“What we have been doing with the data is creating 3D models and YouTube videos. All of that data – geospatial data and envi-ronmental data – is on data.gov.uk as well.”
HS2 is constructing 5D models of the railway, factoring in not just location, but time and cost as well, so it can interact with the supply chain in a collaborative way. This is intended to realise a number of efficiencies in the construction of the programme and onwards during its operation, says Findlay.
The organisation has also joined the Open Data Institute to sup-port people’s interaction with the programme, “so we can have a much more informed debate”, he says.
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
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Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
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CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
Downtime
part of a maCroeConomiC strategy“HS2 is part of a much greater macroeconomic strategy,” says Findlay. “It’s not just about getting to Birmingham 15 minutes faster – it’s much broader than that.”
He explains that more than 95% of the UK’s trade imports come by sea, in large containers that need to be transported further. At the same time, the UK’s GDP continues to struggle for growth and, coupled with various infrastructure and capacity issues, something needs to change, he says.
To deal with the trade volumes, ports need to be dredged, motorways need to be extended and the exisitng rail network will be stretched to maximum capacity, says Findlay. So the network must increase its capacity to deal with that, and the way to do it is to get inter-city passengers onto something else – which is where HS2 comes in. “The project is controversial in some quarters, but in others less so,” he says.
Chancellor George Osborne announced in his 2015 autumn statement that the second phase of the HS2 project, the inter-change at Crewe, would be delivered six years early – a year after the Birmingham interchange is opened.
INTERVIEW
❯Click here to read an interview with Susan Cooklin, CIO of Network Rail
“it is A huge chAllenge – it is not just high speed By nAme,
But in its nAture”
HS2
The National College for High Speed Rail will open in September 2017 and teach students in the mainstream
education system
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to graph databases
CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
Downtime
Findlay’s enthusiasm for the project is obvious and infectious. “It is a huge challenge – it is not just high speed by name, but in its nature,” he says.
One of HS2’s biggest tasks is the infrastructure control platform. Based on the Government Digital Service’s government-as-a-platform strategy, the platform will be used right through the con-struction and operations. The platform will be a mix of in-house development and engagement with large and smaller suppliers. The main factor will be open application programming interfaces (APIs), open standards and open data, says Findlay.
“We know there are going to be so many technology refreshes that we cannot afford to be locked into any one supplier or tech-nology,” he says. “If we secure the data as open data in a non-proprietary format exposed to us through an open API, then job done. The technology itself sits in between and will come and go.”
Findlay says no one has created a platform like this in the infra-structure business before, which is “very exciting”.
HS2 already has a proof-of-concept in place, which is being developed in parallel with the business case “so we can actually show people this thing”, he says.
skills for the futureFindlay also supports the National College for High Speed Rail the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will set up as part of its national college programme. The college, which is due to open in September 2017, will teach a mix of people coming through the education system, as well as working as a “top-up place” for people already working in the industry.
HS2’s head of service transition in IT has been working on how the organisation can back the curriculum on the technology side, and support apprenticeships and graduates. Findlay says this demonstrates a widespread recognition of the shortage in skills and capabilities in the digital and technology sector.
“We are all fishing from the same pool and that is why it is a great opportunity to have some input into that,” he says. “It’s not often a CIO can influence that, it’s amazing.”
HS2 has taken on a number of apprentices, which Findlay says “feels like you’re giving back to the wider technology community”. He describes HS2 as a catalyst for growth, and hopes the skills and capabilities gained from the programme will contribute to the wider UK economy.
The project may be controversial and a substantial expense to the taxpayer, but Findlay believes it will end up saving the UK economy more than it costs. Working for the high-speed rail pro-ject means being ruthless about priorities and it attracts people who are “energised” by the pace and work hard to deliver some-thing they believe in: “Failure doesn’t even enter my head – it’s not an option,” Findlay says. n
“we Are All fishing from the sAme pool – And it is A greAt
opportunity to hAve some input”
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Making digital delivery of public services standard practice
DevOps advocates bust myths around enterprise agile software development
Interview: HS2 CIO James Findlay juggles today’s planning and the technology of tomorrow
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to graph databases
CW@50: British innovation in the fight against cyber threats
Downtime
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IT leaders’ crystal ball for tech investment
One of the questions most commonly asked of technology journalists is: “What’s the next big thing?” It’s easy enough to answer – at the moment, you would point to internet of things (IoT), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI),
service automation, and maybe a few others. The question that’s rarely asked – but which really matters – is: “Why are they the next big thing?” There is a common thread underly-
ing all these emerging technologies that helps to understand if and how they might be as transformative as previous “next big things” like the internet, mobility, cloud or big data. The real trend we’re experiencing – the fuel of the digital revolution – is the commoditisation of technologies that had previously been available only to corporations with deep pockets.
The internet commoditised communications. Mobility commoditised user computing. Cloud is the same for storage and processing power. And big data is commoditising high-volume information. It’s a predictable trend, repeated through history. The industrial revolu-tion started when steam engines were commoditised; the age of the car began when Henry Ford mass-produced vehicles.
But an underlying facet of successive waves of commoditisation is that each depended on the previous stage. You wouldn’t have com-modity mobile devices without commoditised communications. The move to cloud couldn’t happen until mobile devices were near-ubiquitous to access all that computer power. And without cloud, you would never have affordable capacity to process big data.
What does that tell us about the next big things? The emergence of blockchain, AI and service automation represents a new phase in this evolution. They don’t represent the commoditisation of technology – they are the first examples of commoditising processes.
Blockchain promises to make the process of financial transactions into a commodity. Transactions that were once only possible for huge organisations could, with blockchain, be open to startups and individuals. Service automation will make customer engagement processes a commodity – allowing companies to offer customer services previously only available to those with access to a contact centre, for example. AI will commoditise access to knowledge processes.
Forrester Research predicted last week that blockchain is about 10 years away from being mainstream. That feels about right. But for IT leaders looking to plot a course for how these next big things will benefit their business, understanding the underlying commoditisation of technologies, and then of processes, gives a valuable indicator of when and how to invest. n
Bryan Glick, editor in chief
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Whether you are setting about customer analytics, fraud detection, risk assessment or building com-plex social networking applications, you need connected data. Today’s enterprises are spending
more time looking to answer complex business questions. Linking a few data sources is often simple – but to do so with significant amounts of heterogeneous data requires a radical approach.
Without doubt, it is critical to re-envision your business not as a standalone entity but as part of an ecosystem where custom-ers assemble suppliers according to their needs, using businesses that collaborate and share data and services. And the need to support customer interactions across multiple touch points is forcing enterprises to analyse data more intelligently and in an integrated manner.
A graph database allows organisations to think differently and create intelligence-based business opportunities that weren’t possible before. Such a database constitutes a powerful, opti-mised technology that links billions of pieces of connected data to create sources of value for customers and increase operational agility for customer service.
Graph databases excel in navigating or processing large amounts of connected data, giving customers insights and intelligence that were next to impossible with traditional technologies. Enterprise architects who champion investment in graph databases will be ready to use data to create customer insights, respond quickly to changing market demands and competitive threats, and grow their organisations faster than their competitors by delivering innovative products and services.
How to tease out patterns in divergent data stacks
Graph databases – the technology that links relations between datasets – will revolutionise the insights of data analytics, writes Noel Yuhanna
BUYER’S GUIDE TO GRAPH DATABASES | PART 1 OF 3
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Many use cases use graph databases, including customer recommendation engines, big data ana-lytics, fraud detection, master data management, social networking, internet of things (IoT) analysis and real-time data analytics. The graph database market is expected to see significant success in the coming years as organisations combine people, processes and technology to close the gap between insights and action. The adoption for graph databases stands at 15% worldwide but is likely to double in the next three years.
tHe grapH database marketAlthough there are more than a dozen graph database suppliers, these are the leading ones: n Neo Technology first released Neo4j, an open source NoSQL property graph database in 2007, under an open source licence and then as a generally available commercial version in 2010. It supports transactional operations in the context of mission-critical systems running real-time queries. Customer feedback indicates that Neo Technology’s key strengths are its ability to sup-port native storage and process-ing of graph data models and its full Acid (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) compliance, flexible data models, and high performance for connected data. Customers often use it for real-time
recommendations, graph-based search, social networking, fraud detection, network and iden-tity management, and MDM. Neo Technology has many enterprise customers, including CenturyLink, Cisco Systems, eBay, HP, Lufthansa. Snap Interactive, a dating app company, uses Neo4j to support a social graph with one billion people and more than seven billion relationships.
n DataStax’s acquisition of Aurelius – the startup behind open graph database Titan – will enable it to add a graph compo-nent to its DataStax Enterprise data platform built on Apache Cassandra. The graph database functionality offers enterprises multimodel capabilities to store, process, and access various data sets to support broader use cases for transactional and operational applications. Organisations are likely to use the plat-form for recommendation and personalisation engines, fraud detection, risk assessment, mobile data management and IoT applications. Global connected data is becoming critical for all enterprises and DataStax’s scalable distributed platform along
with graph capabilities is likely to appeal to many.n Orient Technologies is the key contributor to and supporter of OrientDB, an open source NoSQL graph database written in Java released in 2010. OrientDB sup-ports schema-less and schema-based data modes and uses SQL
“key use cAses for orientdB include sociAl networking,
recommendAtion engines And frAud detection”
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❯Facebook’s Graph Search application puts the spotlight on graph database designs aimed
at capturing and organising data relationships.
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as its query language for both structured and unstructured data, on top of the traditional Gremlin and Sparol. Customers often men-tion its multimodel engine, ease of use, reliable performance, and small footprint as core strengths. OrientDB has a fully Acid-compliant graph database to support transac-tional and operational use cases. Key use cases for OrientDB include social networking, recommendation engines and fraud detection. Customers deploying OrientDB include CenturyLink, Ericsson, Pitney Bowes, Sky and Warner Music. n FlockDB is an open source distributed graph database that Twitter built to store relationships and later released to the
BUYER’S GUIDE
This is an extract of the Forrester Research report, “Market Overview: Graph Databases”
(May 2015), written by Noel Yuhanna, principal analyst at Forrester.
community. Currently, no com-mercial suppliers support it, so businesses are cautious about its support and roadmap. However, it’s suitable when a team of devel-opers is looking to get its hands dirty with code and customise it for specific graph applications where commercial systems fall
short. FlockDB is suitable for set operations requiring horizon-tal scalability with low-latency environments, such as social networking or fraud detection. n
“flockdB is suitABle for set operAtions requiring horizontAl
scAlABility with low lAtency, such As frAud detection”
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Britain has a proud tradition of innovation, but in the field of information security, much of this innovation has been performed under a cloak of secrecy. So, while some past innovations are only now coming to light,
others may remain hidden.Information security – once the concern of relatively few people
in political, military or diplomatic roles – is now part of the eve-ryday lives of the billions of people using computers, tablets and smartphones around the world.
However, back in September 1966 when Computer Weekly was born, few computer users would have had even the slightest concern about information security. They were more concerned about matters such as storage and retrieval of data, training for computer operators and analysts, and the potential export mar-ket for business-related UK computer technology.
Modern computing can trace some of its roots back to wartime innovation at Bletchley Park, which includes the development of mechanical computers known as bombes that helped decipher the Enigma code, and the Colossus computer that helped break the Lorenz code used to encrypt secret messages between Hitler and his generals.
It also turns out that information security, as we now know it, owes much to the efforts of those same pioneers because, at the end of the war, the Bletchley Park expertise in cryptography was
uk proves fertile breeding ground for information
security advancesWarwick Ashford looks at the evolution of information security threats and some of the British innovation to counter the risk
CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF BRITISH TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION
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Computer Weekly is marking its 50th anniversary
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50 years of British technology innovation
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rolled into the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
The invention of public-key cryptography is prob-ably the single most important development in the history of electronic information security, accord-ing to Fred Piper, emeritus professor and former head of the information security group at Royal Holloway, University of London, but for years that innovation was claimed by the US alone, thanks to the secrecy of the work done at GCHQ.
missed opportunityThe invention of public-key cryptography has long been attrib-uted to US cryptographers Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle, whose work was refined and implemented by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman (RSA), but it was revealed in December 1997 that GCHQ cryptographers James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson had beaten them to it. However, GCHQ had failed to patent and com-mercialise their discovery because the work was classified as top secret. For the same reason, other British innovations in the field of information security may still be unknown.
“After almost three decades of secrecy, Ellis, Cocks and Williamson received the acknowledgement they deserved,” writes Simon Singh in his book The Code Book, noting that Ellis sadly never lived to see the day, having died a month earlier.
Not bound by any secrecy classification, the RSA asymmet-ric cypher for public-key cryptography went public in 1977, four
years after the GCHQ cryptographers had made the same breakthrough, enabling non-government computer users to protect data from unauthorised access, which is the core of information security.
But almost from the beginning, the US govern-ment sought to exert influence over cryptogra-phy standards and how cryptography was used, with the NSA starting to lobby to get a law that
would regard all cryptographic information as classified at birth, recalls Diffie.
malware is bornAlthough information security has been a concern since ancient times, it only became an issue in the world of computing once formerly standalone computers were connected – about three years after Computer Weekly’s debut.
The first-ever connection between remote computers was established on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (Arpanet) on 29 October 1969, which was mainly enabled by the concept of packet switching developed by British computer scien-tist Donald Davies.
It could be argued that ever since the advent of Arpanet, infor-mation security in the modern sense has become increasingly important, particularly as Arpanet led to the connection of multi-ple networks and eventually the rise of the internet.
It was not long before the first piece of malicious software, or malware, made an appearance, with the detection in 1971 on the Arpanet of the Creeper worm, an experimental and relatively
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❯Check out all the articles in Computer Weekly’s anniversary-
inspired editorial programme celebrating 50 years of British
technology innovation.
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harmless self-replicating piece of software that used the Arpanet to infect the PDP-10 mainframes. Before that, there had been sev-eral pieces of malware, but they relied on the sharing of floppy disks for distribution. In 1982, the Elk Cloner virus written for Apple II systems is considered by some to have been responsible for the first large-scale computer virus outbreak in history, and was followed by the first virus for MS-DOS machines in 1986 – the Brain virus – but these and others still relied on floppy disks.
The power of the internet was still to be harnessed as an effi-cient mass distribution tool.
It was at that time that one of the oldest British cyber security firms, Sophos, was founded by Jan Hruska and Peter Lammer to produce antivirus and encryption tools. Today, the company proudly claims a 30-year history of innovation.
malware expands rapidlyAs the popularity of email and bulletin boards increased, the first internet-borne malware began to emerge, with the Morris worm that infected internet-connected machines running Unix becoming the first widespread worm in November 1988.
In 1991, the internet went public, with two million users of email and bulletin boards, and rapidly increased in size and popularity mainly because of the invention of the web browser by British sci-entist Tim Berners Lee while working for Cern in Switzerland.
Web traffic increased exponentially in 1993 as internet users moved from email and bulletin boards to web-based services, with businesses soon seeing the value and potential of linking local operations to international transactional and storage systems. PI
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As the popularity of the web increased, businesses
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But this revolutionary means of exchanging information came at a price, rapidly becoming a target for attackers typically in search of intellectual property data and personal data with the aim of making money through fraud and extortion, in addition to the activities of attackers pursuing the goals of state-supported cyber espionage.
By the mid-1990s, once-impreg-nable organisations were highly connected and highly vulnerable to attack, ushering in the first large-scale use of public-key encryption in the form of the secure sockets layer (SSL) computer protocol. This com-bines public-key and symmetric-key encryption to secure a connection between two machines, typically a web or mail server and a client machine, communicating over the internet or an internal network.
“Public-key cryptography was the technology that enabled e-commerce, e-government and all other online transactions,” says Royal Holloway’s Piper.
infosecurity industry expands witH tHreatsIn the 1990s, cryptographers recognised that the internet could only function if there were commercial private sector solutions and if security could evolve to meet the challenges, according to US cryptographer Bruce Schneier, former chief technical officer of BT Counterpane.
This essentially led to the rapid growth and expansion of the information security industry.
But not everyone immediately understood the need for informa-tion security or the future it would have, so when Royal Holloway introduced its first qualification in information security in 1992,
not everyone was convinced.“It is probably fair to say people
thought we were nuts,” says Piper. “It turned out to be quite a good move, but nobody at the time – including us – foresaw just how important it was going to become.”
Another area where the UK has led innovation, he says, is in cer-tification for penetration testing through the Crest not-for-profit
organisation led by its president, Ian Glover.“I am impressed by people who do things like Ian Glover,” says
Piper. “As a result of his efforts, we have UK-based world stand-ards for penetration testing, putting it way ahead of any other branch of cyber security.”
Although demand for information security products and ser-vices grew throughout the 1990s, it really accelerated through the first decade of the new millennium as cyber threats prolifer-ated. By 2003, the amount of information on the internet had sur-passed all other information in human history.
“IT security was being asked to defend more ground than any other interest in the history of our species,” says Schneier.
when royAl hollowAy introduced its first quAlificAtion in informAtion security in 1992,
not everyone wAs convinced
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The Melissa virus was perhaps the most notable piece of mal-ware in the 1990s, preceding a string of infamous worms in the early 2000s that included the LoveBug, Nimda, SQL Slammer, Blaster, Sobig, MyDoom, Netsky, Sasser, Koobface and Conficker.
However, the most famous worms were undoubtedly Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu, which introduced the concept of cyber weapons.
The decade also saw the rise of Trojans such as Zlob, Zeus, Torpic (Sinowal), SpyEye, GameOver Zeus and Regin, and remote access tools (Rats) such as Beast, Nuclear Rat and Bandook.
Since the 1990s, each information technology advance has created new vulnerabilities, in turn creating opportunities for information secu-rity innovation.
britisH innovation, gcHQ influence and legacyIn the UK, government in general and GCHQ in particular have been the natural breeding grounds for information security inno-vators, and since the Second World War, some of that expertise has gradually found its way into the private sector.
Many UK information security companies employ former gov-ernment experts, while some government departments have been privatised and some products and services developed for government have been made available to businesses through government commercial organisations.
One of the most recent and high-profile examples of govern-ment expertise moving into the private sector is Iain Lobban, who retired as director of GCHQ in October 2014, and within a year was reportedly advising oil and gas multinational Shell and corpo-rate intelligence firm Hakluyt & Company, itself set up by former members of secret intelligence service MI6.
As far as cyber security compa-nies are concerned, one of the best but perhaps most unlikely examples is BT, which after privatisation in 1991, became one of the UK’s lead-ing suppliers of information secu-rity services, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitiga-tion, managed firewalling and threat monitoring.
British multinational defence tech-nology company QinetiQ is another
example of a UK company that emerged out of a former govern-ment department, owing its existence to the privatisation of part of the government’s former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (Dera) in June 2001.
These and other British cyber security firms count former GCHQ and other intelligence agency members among their founders, leaders and advisers, but a fair amount of innovation has come out of the private sector too, although many of these firms have been founded by those with experience working with or for the UK government and military.
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since the 1990s, eAch informAtion technology
AdvAnce hAs creAted new vulnerABilities, in turn creAting
opportunities for innovAtion
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Innovative British cyber security companies that have arisen from the private sector include nCi-pher – acquired by Thales in 2008 – which was founded in Cambridge in 1996 to develop internet security products using advanced cryptography; Becrypt, formed in response to demand for mobile security in 1994; Digital Shadows, founded in 2011 to provide a cyber threat monitoring service; and, more recently, Glasswall Solutions, which innovates to tackle all document-based attacks with patented technology that breaks down every file to byte level, searching only for “known good” and matching the files against manufacturers’ standards to pass only clean, regenerated files on to users.
The military-grade cyber defence capability assessment tool (CDCAT) is an example of a tool originally developed for the military to help deal with the Conficker worm that is being made available to commercial business.
The CDCAT cyber security management and maturity assess-ment tool was developed for the Ministry of Defence (MOD) by the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), but accreditation organisation APMG has since been charged with taking the risk management tool to market by Ploughshare Innovations, which manages the commercial licensing of defence technology developed by the DSTL.
The UK government appears to be recognising the contribution that can be made, rather than continuing the former practice of using secrecy as the reason for ensuring British information secu-rity innovation never found its way into commercial applications.
The year 2013 was a watershed, not for inno-vation, but for the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the mass internet surveil-lance programmes being run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and allied countries, including the UK.
These revelations have since stirred much debate, particularly around the use and control of
encryption, harking back to similar debates in the 1970s, when public-key encryption was introduced. How this debate will influence innovation, particularly within Europe, in the years to come, is not yet clear. Another major influence on information security innovation and business models could be the final text of the UK’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill, which is inching its way to becoming law.
A short-term effect of the Snowden revelations, however, was to push the government into at least appearing to be more transpar-ent. In June 2014, GCHQ announced plans to help critical national infrastructure firms defend against cyber attack in a pilot for shar-ing threat intelligence and to share declassified intellectual prop-erty to support new business ventures.
Under the government’s National Cyber Security Plan, there has also been investment in UK cyber security startups, with more planned for the future.
In September 2014, the government announced £4m funding for a competition to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) develop ideas for countering cyber threats, and in January 2016, the government announced a £250,000 cyber security startup
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❯Cyber security 2016 and beyond: Studies reveal a
worrying disconnect between perception and reality in the
face of cyber threats.
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support programme that will offer help and advice to develop products and services and bring them to market.
britisH security startupsExisting UK cyber security startups with links to GCHQ and other intelligence agencies include the Falanx Group, which was founded by a former British Army officer and employs former mem-bers of the security and intelligence communities, and Darktrace, argu-ably one of the UK’s most success-ful cyber security startups
Although Darktrace’s founders include senior members of the UK government’s cyber community from MI5 and GCHQ, it also has close links to Cambridge University, pointing to UK universities as another important breeding ground for British innova-tion in information security.
Darktrace, founded in 2013, has developed an innovative cyber attack detection system that is modelled on the human immune system and based on cutting-edge machine learning and math-ematics developed at Cambridge. “Darktrace is designed to be self-learning, to understand the behaviour of the enterprise and every person and device in it, to adapt by calculating probability based on evidence, and to do all this in real time as things are hap-pening,” says John Dyer, account director at Darktrace.
Other notable British cyber security startups include real-time risk assessment firm CyberLytic; secure data transmission firm SQR Systems, which was the result of a research programme at the University of Bristol; password protection firm Silicon Safe; mobile security firm Wandera; data loss prevention company GeoLang; and high-end security services firm Corvid.
“A purely product-based approach to security is doomed to failure,” says Andrew Nanson, chief technol-ogy officer at Corvid. “Instead, you need a continually evolving platform of capability and to be as agile as the attackers.”
This is by no means an exhaustive list of innovative British informa-tion security companies, but illus-trates that there is an abundance of such innovation and that it is finally moving out of the shadows of gov-ernment and military secrecy into
commercial products and services.But the government continues to be pivotal and could play an
extremely positive role. While recent announcements around cyber security funding and support for cyber security companies are encouraging, it remains to be seen if the various government initiatives truly deliver the help that UK cyber security firms need.
According to some of those companies, there is still much work to be done. n
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“A purely product-BAsed ApproAch to security is doomed to fAilure. insteAd, you need A continuAlly evolving plAtform of cApABility And to Be As Agile
As the AttAckers”anDrew nanSon, corviD
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Fact or fiction: HBO’s Silicon Valley ‘news’ reports are keeping technology hacks on their toesHBO has started publishing fictional technology news on Google – a move set to cause headaches for IT journos used to trawling the search giant’s news pages (or Computer Weekly, ahem) for their daily “scoops”.
The US TV channel’s falsified news output is being churned out as part of the publicity machine that is supporting the arrival on screen of series three of HBO’s Emmy award-winning sitcom, Silicon Valley.
The show charts the ups and downs of middle-out data
compression technology startup Pied Piper, while poking (not so gentle) fun at the activities of some of the Valley’s biggest players, research teams and company failures.
This week’s series opener, for example, saw one main character try (and fail) to kick a robotic deer to death, while the previous series saw another hapless soul kidnapped by a driverless car.
The deer incident has already been extensively documented by Code Rag, which has the look and feel of a genuine IT news site.
This prompts Downtime to ponder: how long will it take before some unsuspecting technology publication really gets duped by this fabricated set-up? n
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