GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
FORGET
the haystack: The new analytics is searching the whole field
BORDER PATROL FOR BYOD
ALL ABOARD THE
E-LEARNING TRAIN
FEAR AND LOATHING
SEPT/OCT 2013 • ISSUE 20
AT QUEENSLAND HEALTH
ELECTION 2013: E-GOV FUTURES – QUIGLEY’S NBN EXIT INTERVIEW
Roundtable:
CLOUD THICK ON THE GROUND page 27
COVER STORY:
REGULARS
THE NEW ANALYTICS IS SEARCHING THE WHOLE FIELD
FEATURES
FORGET THE HAYSTACK:
Data has become the new currency for government agencies that find themselves amassing information at a furious and increasing rate. While the management of this data already presents significant challenges, its use in everyday operations and decisionmaking is coming into focus as increasinglycapable analytics tools empower real-time analysis and organisational change.
SPECIAL FEATURES
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BORDER PATROL TIME FOR BYOD
ROUNDTABLE: CLOUD THICK ON THE GROUND
Bring your own device (BYOD) programs are evolving at a pace of knots – but will they leave your security strategy out to sea? Without the right approach – combining technological device management with better control over enterprise data – they very well could. We weigh up the latest threats and solutions.
Empowered by the election of a Coalition government that has reiterated its commitment to cloud computing, the model continues its inexorable march into the heart of modern government IT. This roundtable unites a host of industry experts to share their thoughts on the increasing range of cloud options facing government agencies today.
2 Editor’s letter 4 News 47 Opinion: Ovum, Dimension Data, Esri, Nuance, NextDC, Objective, Remasys, Schneider Electric 60 NBN Update
17 Lessons from the Queensland Health debacle It has become the stuff of which legends are made – for all the wrong reasons. We pull some key lessons from the inquiry into this “worst ever” IT project. 18 Get your staff on the train With Windows XP expiring in 2014 and new, online training is more important than ever. We explore the latest in e-learning and training strategy. 58 Last words from Mike Quigley As the four-year head of one of the government’s highest-profile and mostcontroversial projects, Mike Quigley has stamped his mark on the NBN like no other. His resignation press interview sheds light on his successes and failures, and his thoughts on the project he brought to life.
CASE STUDIES 15 Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities A careful technology approach has empowered bring your own device (BYOD) policy at DSEWPC. 24 Australian Customs and Border Protection Services A high-volume passenger data system is enabling better visibility of passenger movements. 26 Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Uniting pockets of analytical skills is boosting operational performance. 56 Elections ACT An electronic polling-management system has dramatically improved productivity for ACT poll workers, and sped reporting of results. GTR SEPT/OCT 2013 | 1
Sometimes, you get what you ask for – and government IT executives are now paying the price for it as mounting executive expectations push them into big-data initiatives designed to suck the marrow out of steadily accumulating mountains of data. Increasingly capable cloud-storage options have provided a glimmer of hope in terms of managing the tens-of-terabytes data sets that seem to be springing up left, right and centre. But once that data is in place and being properly curated, deriving actual business value from it is requiring an increasing level of skill around what I lovingly call ‘the new analytics’. This is not your father’s analytics, in which data sets were painstakingly extracted, then massaged into reports spanning whole centimetres’ worth of perforated pages for you to peruse and analyse over the course of weeks. No, in today’s analytics data – unprecedented volumes of it – must be continually integrated into an ever-changing analytical context that provides real-time or near real-time reporting that must be as relevant as it is accurate. Throw in the constraints of privacy and data-management requirements as well as the practical issues around getting enough appropriate data scientists, and you’ve got yourself a real challenge. Mobile devices pose another complicating factor, since they foster the growing expectation of real-time access to information any time, anywhere. They’re a significant driver for productivity – but, empowered by bring your own device (BYOD) demands and new devices, they’re also presenting significant challenges when it comes to managing them efficiently and effectively. In this issue, we look at both the challenges of the new analytics and the latest thinking about mobile devices. Both are key megatrends in today’s IT industry – and if you haven’t firmed up your strategy in both areas, you may find yourself on the back foot soon enough. Scattered throughout the pages of this issue, we also look at the handing down of the investigation into the Queensland Health payroll systems fiasco; explore the success of an electronic voting implementation in the ACT that could set the standard for other state elections; catch up with the latest in training and e-learning; and find out how our border-patrol authorities are gearing up for a big-data revolution of their own. The need for efficiency in government will become particularly pointed as the new Abbott government continues to take to the public sector with a machete, putting additional spending pressure on every element of the federal government as it drives government into a new strategic posture. Expect to hear a lot about this in coming months – and do please drop me a line if you’d like to share how you’re dealing with the new normal.
EDITOR David Braue e: editor@govtechreview.com.au NATIONAL SALES MANAGER Yuri Mamistvalov e: yuri@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5008 ART DIRECTOR Annette Epifanidis e: annette@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5030 DESIGN & PRODUCTION Nicholas Thorne CONTRIBUTORS Natalie Apostolou, Kevin Noonan, Kelly Mills MELBOURNE OFFICE Level 8, 574 St Kilda Rd. Melbourne Vic 3004 PO Box 6137, St Kilda Rd Central 8008 Phone: 03 8534 5000 Fax: 03 9530 8911 Government Technology Review is published by CommStrat ABN 31 008 434 802
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Queensland Health payroll report slams worst-ever IT project Queensland’s high-profile payroll systems implementation was “a serious failure” and a “waste of public sector resources” that will stand as a high-water mark of IT project management failure and raises serious questions about IBM’s continued role in stategovernment IT, the inquiry into the ill-fated project has concluded. Headed by Hon. Richard N Chesterman, the $5m Queensland Health Payroll System Commission of Inquiry was opened on 13 December 2012, to explore the disastrous implementation of a payroll system that grew out of the push towards consolidating ITsupported business functions into a central shared services organisation. Queensland’s shared-services initiative, managed under the auspices of service-delivery firm Corptech, took on as one of its first major tasks the implementation of a new payroll system to replace the end-of-life LATTICE system used within Queensland Health (QH). In December 2007 IBM was appointed as a prime contractor of a planned $98m project with the understanding that the new QH payroll system would be live by 31 July 2008. After a series of disastrous missteps and the implementation of a new system requiring 1000 employees to manually process fortnightly pays for 80,000 QH staff, the project’s cost within the next eight years is estimated at over $1.2 billion. The current system is heavily manual and requires 1000 employees to process data to deliver fortnightly pays. The report, which runs to more than 250 pages, examined the process by which the system was specified, procured, implemented and ultimately stumbled to become a fiasco costed Queensland taxpayers over $1.2 billion, created extensive issues with a need for heavy manual remediation, and has still not been fixed. The system’s “failure, attended by enormous cost, damage to government and impact on workforce, may be the most spectacular example of all the unsuccessful attempts to impose a
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uniform solution on a highly complicated an individualised agency,” Chesterman wrote. “The replacement of the QH payroll system must take a place in the front rank of failures in public administration in this country. It may be the worst.” The report highlights the in-depth examination of the procurement, contract and project management, and settlement aspects of the project, with four core recommendations handed down that will be mandatory reading for any government IT manager. These include the need for forward planning for all legacy systems, to ensure “that decisions concerning them are not made in haste”; the use of the QH debacle as a reference to guide “specific attention” as to how its lessons might apply to proposed new projects; that the Queensland Government apply “an appropriate structure” for oversight of large ICT projects; and that QH begin planning to replace the failed system “immediately”. The full report is available for download at bit.ly/167qVN9.
Richard Chesterman’s investigation was scathing of Qld Health.
IBM banned from Queensland government contracts in QH fallout The Queensland Government has banned IBM from signing any new contracts as a government supplier until the company can improve its governance and contracting practices. The exceptional action comes on the heels of the final report of the Queensland Health Payroll System Commission of Inquiry, which concluded the $5m review of a disastrous IBM-led payroll systems implementation for Queensland Health (QH) that dragged on for years, ended up costing $1.2 billion, and ultimately delivered an inadequate and manually intensive system due to what the report found were systematic and ongoing failures of project management and governance. The project “must take place in the front rank of failures in public administration in this country,” the report concluded. “It may be the worst.” Queensland premier Campbell Newman put it another way in a statement announcing the ban on IBM: “It appears that IBM took the state of Queensland for a ride,” he said. Newman also outlined a number of other actions that would commence in the wake of the damning report, including potential legal action against adversely named publicsector employees; a review by the Integrity Commissioner into the absence of a probity adviser or conflicts register on the project; and a demand for union information about the oversight of representatives who failed to act to protect its members. The government will detail its response to the report’s recommendations in the next session of Parliament.
Government projects rate well in 2013 iAwards A range of government initiatives have been recognised for their innovative use of ICT in the 2013 Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and Australian Computer Society (ACS) backed iAwards, announced at a dinner presentation at Crown Melbourne. The CSIRO took out the award in the Research & Development category for its work on Zebedee Mobile Mapping technology, which enables the 3D mapping of an area in real time as a person walks through it. CSIRO also took out a Merit award in that category, with the Australian e-Health Research Centre getting a nod for the computeraided ocular biomarker suite for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. Within the Government category, the Queensland Department of Community Safety, Transmax and the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads won for their Emergency Vehicle Priority project; Merit awards went to the Business and Industry Portal developed by the Queensland Department of Tourism, Major Events, Small Business and the Commonwealth Games as well as to the CSIRO Computational Informatics and Bureau of Meteorology’s Environmental Linked Data project. The Regional category was won by the Aurora for the Regions project, co-developed by Landgate, the University of Western Australia and the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services. Numerous government projects received Merit awards in other categories. The Smart Services CRC and University of Sydney received a Merit award in the New Product for the Cruiser Connected Surfaces platform, while Geomatic Technologies and Sydney Trains received a Merit award in the Industrial category for their work on GT AIMS in support of the Sydney Trains Mechanised Track Patrol process.
Also reflecting government innovation were the ISARS telehealth system, co-developed by the NT Government Department of Health and SRA, which received a Merit award in the Health category. The night also saw the introduction of a new industry-sponsored award, which will be introduced in 2014: the Hills Holdings-sponsored Hills Young Australian ICT Innovator of the Year. The full list of winners is available at bit.ly/1a5KhEy. Top: CSIRO’s Zebedee handheld 3D scanner won the R&D category Above: The Smart Services CRC and University of Sydney’s Cruiser Connected Surfaces platform was recognised in the New Product category. Below. WA-developed fire monitoring and prediction tool Aurora won the Aurora for the Regions project. Left: The Environmental Linked Data project reflects the analytical potential of open-data initiatives.
GTR SEPT/OCT 2013 | 5
Image CC BY-SA 3.0, Biatch.
Portland bulk port covered by cloud Victoria’s Port of Portland has adopted a completely cloud-based administration system from NetSuite that has replaced a number of legacy systems and is expected boost what is already $3 billion worth of bulk product annually moved through the largest deep-water port between Adelaide and Melbourne. The NetSuite system replaces financials from Epicor, accounts from Astea International, payroll from HR3, and maintenance from MEX with an integrated system that covers the administrative bases as well as integrating shipscheduling processes accessible to customers. Portland has also added integration with tools from NetSuite partners including i-Seaports for shipping, and Infinet Cloud for payroll. Considering that the port’s more than 300
a statement, there was great appeal to having a fully hosted solution that would free up those employees’ time. “As we are a small-to-medium business, NetSuite’s cloud-based solution was very appealing to us,” she said. “It means we can be cutting edge with the latest advancements in technology, without having to manage and upgrade it ourselves. We don’t have a full-time
components fully integrated with each other. Senior management has access to realtime performance data, with end-of-month reporting considerably faster and employees freed up from administration to focus on business development and other activities. Timesheets are automated and processed in half the time as in the past. “The introduction of NetSuite has also
annual ship movements have traditionally been managed with writing on pieces of paper, there was significant scope to improve the processes by which the port’s 55 employees kept the facility running. Given the port’s remote location, company accountant Kara King said in
IT person and we are in a remote location, so having NetSuite helpdesk at our fingertips is a big thing.” The system has already shown great promise for the operation, with ship movements tied in with business metrics and all
streamlined our data gathering and insight capabilities, saving us considerable time at month end with reporting,” King said. “We can now run reports whenever we want and that has freed up about 30 percent of our time that we can now focus on other core functions.”
Coalition would combine IT, 80 other procurement panels: report An elected Coalition government would target administrative overheads by combining more than 80 government procurement panels, to just one overreaching Commonwealth procurement panel with broad responsibilities and huge scale, reports have suggested. In a pre-election interview with IT industry journal ITnews, shadow parliamentary secretary to the leader of the Opposition Arthur Sinodinos flagged the changes as a way of trimming nearly $1 billion in administrative expenditure from a Tony Abbott-led government. The reformed procurement panel would be led by a ministerial advisory council comprising business, not-for-profit and consumer advocates, with the body administered by the Department of Finance. Staffing changes were yet to be determined, but Sinodinos confirmed that savings from staff redeployment were on the cards.
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Although IT was recognised as being a particularly specialised area of procurement, Sinodinos said it would be singled out as an area where particular arrangements might need to be made to ensure procedural integrity would be preserved. “We’re conscious the Government have made decisions about how to do IT that hasn’t
[sic] always gone as according to plan,” he told iTNews. The announcement comes on the heels of the July 2 launch by Victoria’s Coalition government of a new eServices Register, which will replace the state’s eServices Panel and ticks off a significant element of the state’s Victorian Government ICT Strategy. That register is based on the private-sector Ariba Nework and is now mandatory for use by government departments and agencies. By aggregating all IT suppliers into a common procurement interface, state minister for ICT Gordon Rich-Phillips said it will “provide a simplified process for Victorian ICT companies bidding for government work, and allow the Victorian Government to make more informed purchasing decisions from a greater range of suppliers as well as monitor the range and scope of eServices engagements.”
Ipswich City Council moves all IT into the cloud administers services for nearly 300,000 residents southwest of Brisbane. The new deal – which encompasses a multi milliondollar, multi-year commitment to Data#3’s ‘As a Service’ Cloud – will see all of the council’s systems moved into a cloud environment hosted both in Data#3’s Ipswich data centre and in a companion site in Sydney.
Image CC BY-SA 3.0, Clarebear
Queensland’s Ipswich City Council (ICC) has made a significant commitment to cloud-hosted services by committing to move its entire datacentre infrastructure to a cloud-computing model hosted by solutions provider Data#3. The deal reflects a significant change in operating strategy for the council, which
Hosted ECM solution targets small government agencies Enterprise content management (ECM) specialist Objective has released a cloudbased version of its flagship information management platform to cater for small Australian government organisations without the financial or deployment resources to implement the solution inhouse. Objective’s Objective ECM for Small Agencies comes preconfigured to meet federal and state public-sector informationmanagement requirements such as the National
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Archives’ Digital Transition Policy. This include a preconfigured business classification scheme, security model, functional terms and disposal schedule to ensure compliance with information-management requirements. “We’ve made ECM accessible for small agencies by translating the information management standards into a compliant and easily deployed solution by preconfiguring the system for information management best practice,” Objective CEO Tony Walls said in a statement. Preconfiguration of the complex ECM environment can save agencies up to six months of planning, design and deployment time, Walls said: “Essentially it’s an instant on solution,” he explained. “Delivered from the
ICC’s cloud commitment grew out of a tender, issued 24 months ago, for infrastructure and desktop support services. Data#3 worked with the council to expand the scope of that agreement, which now includes migration of all IT infrastructure and related project and support services. Data#3 managing director John Grant was enthusiastic about the deal’s scope and its implications for the company’s Technology Consumption Model, which he said in a statement is helping the company build customers “a fit for purpose Hybrid IT environment.” “There are few organisations of ICC’s size in Australia that have embarked on such an innovative datacentre transformation,” he added, “and we’re very respectful of the confidence ICC has shown in our cloud and in the ability of our team to migrate their datacentre technology to it.” Ipswich mayor Paul Pissale saw the contract as a natural next step for the council, which had already been working with Data#3 for computer and IT support services. “Moving to the cloud is the way of the future and affords council greater efficiencies, flexibility and reliability,” he said, also in a statement. “With the increasingly rapid rate of change in the way we do business, it made good financial sense for Ipswich City Coucnil to take this next logical step to store data in the cloud.”
cloud as a managed service, this new offering removes the traditional barrier to entry of the capital budget allocation and also ensures predictability of operational expenses for the life of the solution.” The platform is hosted within Australia to address data-sovereignty concerns, and managed on an ongoing basis by Objective Managed Services. A single, searchable document repository offers easier searching while ISO 27001 compliance and full audit logging support information-security requirements. The solution also includes Objective Executive for Tablet mobile access. Taken together, the hosted platform offers a “pragmatic and manageable” ECM solution, the company said.
Gold Coast joins IBM Smarter Cities Challenge fraternity Queensland’s Gold Coast City Council will become the third Australian city to receive long-term strategic planning consultancy from IBM after the council was named as a recipient of an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant. The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge program (smartercitieschallenge.org) is run globally to identify forward-looking cities that would benefit from IBM’s planning and consulting expertise. Six IBM experts will spend three weeks at Gold Coast City Council to review its planning and infrastructure strategy, and
to make recommendations as to the best technologies and practices to embrace to improve overall efficiency. Receiving the grant is timely for the Gold Coast, which will host the Commonwealth Games in 2018 and will have time to implement some of the findings from its work with IBM before that event. “The Gold Coast has a crucial role to play, not only as one of Australia’s major tourist destinations but as a fast-growing centre for international trade and entrepreneurship,” mayor Tom Tate said in a statement. “More than ever before, we have a responsibility to ensure the highest safeguards for the community’s welfare through the smarter use of technology within our response agencies and public infrastructure.” The grant was awarded on the basis of Gold Coast Council’s strong leadership and demonstrable track record in forward-thinking
initiatives,” said Miranda Scarff, manager, corporate citizenship and affairs with IBM Australia in a statement. “We’re looking forward to working with the Gold Coast to develop recommendations to assist one of Australia’s most iconic tourism hotspots.” Gold Coast’s appointment to the program follows that of Townsville in 2011 and Geraldton, WA in 2012.
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Ten-fold speed boost validates State Revenue Office Victoria’s Oracle platform refresh The State Revenue Office (SRO) Victoria has dramatically improved transaction processing time after revamping its online-services infrastructure in a systems overhaul based on Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine hardware and Oracle Fusion Middleware software platforms. The migration comes as SRO, which collects over $11b in revenue for the state each year, works to streamline tax administration with initiatives such as the introduction of self-service portals for payroll tax (PTXpress), land tax (LTXpress), and stamp duty and declarations of trust (Duties Online). Each of those user-facing portals will be shifted onto the Oracle Exadata platform (a server that grew out of Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems) to enable real-time processing and data access. This shift will offer a marked improvement on batch processing that could previously take up to 24 hours. Also to be hosted on the platform will be core systems like the SRO’s e-Sys revenue and tax management application; Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition; and other third-party applications. The new infrastructure will support high volumes of online transactions and has already cut batch processing time by three times, with business intelligence matching times cut by seven times. Backups run four times faster, and dev-and-test provisioning runs twice as quickly. “We’re extremely happy with what we have been able to achieve so far with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Fusion Middleware,” commented Paul Dulfer, CIO at the Victorian State Revenue Office in a statement. “Ultimately, our aim is to improve the level of service to both Victorian taxpayers and to the Victorian Government and this deployment is delivering on both fronts.” The infrastructure is also being used in a project that will build on the Oracle BPM Suite, SOA Suite and WebLogic Suite to automate a range of back-end processes, with additional taxation collection functions planned to be added in the future. “The SRO’s use of Oracle Exadata is an excellent example of the power of engineered systems,” said Robert Wickham, head of Exadata and Strategic Solutions with Oracle ANZ. “To achieve average performance improvements of 10 times and data compression of up to 28 times is a great achievement, as is the vast reduction in batch processing times.”
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Cloud-based GIS boosts geospatial access A cloud-based geographic information system (GIS) platform from major supplier Esri Australia will simplify access to geospatial capabilities for government organisations of all sizes. Built using the widely-used ArcGIS platform but running on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud-computing platform, the Australiandeveloped cloud solution allows organisations to rent access to a full suite of GIS capabilities on a month-by-month basis. That’s a big change from conventional implementations, which require the solutions to be hosted internally and supported by specialised staff. And, says Esri Australia executive manager for professional services Jeff Robinson, it should significantly improve casual access to the benefits of GIS technology. “The hosted GIS solution removes the road blocks,” Robinson said in a statement. “Now, organisations such as smaller local government groups, engineering and construction consortiums and geographically dispersed agricultural enterprises can all easily deploy GIS capabilities – minus the regular infrastructure costs.” “As the GIS solution is hosted on the Amazon Cloud, it can be scaled up and down instantly to meet demand – whether it’s one user or one million users accessing the system.” The system has been used in anger before, with Brisbane City Council (BCC) testing it as far back as 2011. During that city’s response to the local flood crisis, Esri worked with BCC to build and deploy its BCC Flood Map. That map was accessed by more than three million residents and, thanks to the cloud-hosting design, had zero down time, Robinson said – “taking the pressure off BCC so they could focus their attention elsewhere.”
TechnologyOne claims 21 Oracle scalps with WA financial-systems win The loss of Western Australia’s doomed Shared Corporate Services project will see Oracle lose 21 state-government agencies as customers after local vendor TechnologyOne was named to supply cloud and on-premise financial-management systems in a significant contract win. The deal will see TechnologyOne – which already delivers its solutions to five WA agencies including WA TAFE, the Corruption and Crime Commission and Legal Aid – roll
out its OneGovernment software to support the transitioning agencies by the end of this year. WA departments covered by the deal include the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority; Ombudsman WA; Western Australian Industrial Relations Commission; Department of Culture and Arts; Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions; and many others. Three agencies – the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC), Tourism WA and Department of Water – will implement the software as a cloud-based solution, running entirely off of TechnologyOne-owned infrastructure and delivered on a software-as-aservice (SaaS) basis. WA’s Shared Corporate Services project was discontinued in 2011 after the newlyelected state government targeted the shared-
services arrangement – previously seen as a way of reducing costs while consolidating operations – for replacement after lingering questions about its effectiveness in practice. A report from the state’s Economic Regulation Authority recommended the system should be replaced. “TechnologyOne develops, sells, implements and maintains its own software, and this unique business model allows us to take complete responsibility for the success of each and every one of our customers’ implementations,” TechnologyOne executive chairman Adrian Di Marco said in a statement. “We have a 900-strong team in Australia with offices in every state and we are committed to delivering on budget, which is why we have around 150 state and federal government customers including the entire Government of Tasmania.”
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Mobile Devices
BORDER PATROL TIME FOR BYOD ● By Natalie Apostolou
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THE HOT AND FAST RISE OF MOBILE APPS AND SMARTPHONE UBIQUITY ACROSS THE DIGITAL POPULATION HAS CAUSED CIOS AND IT MANAGERS ACROSS THE LAND TO ADOPT OFTEN ROUGH-AND-READY APPROACHES TO WRANGLING EMPLOYEES AND THEIR OFTEN WAYWARD APP AND DATA PROCLIVITIES.
A
ccording to Gartner, as enterprise level bring your own device (BYOD) programs gain popularity, 38 per cent of CIOs expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016. By 2020, global figures suggest that 45 per cent of CIOs anticipate that their enterprise will have adopted BYOD programs. Unsurprisingly, the Asia Pacific is leading the global charge for BYOD adoption with Europe trailing. According to Strategy Analytics, in the Asia Pacific region BYOD volume exceeds 80 per cent of all business smartphones purchased either for or by business users. “BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades,” says Gartner vice president and analyst David Willis. “The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs.” Only three years ago digital content was still segmented by device or platform, but in 2013 content is held across a plurality of devices and activities. The challenge over the next five to ten years will be managing these environments – and the challenge for IT is to not only manage these applications, but to manage the data access. The heated issues of security threats and data leakage mean that BYOD is fuelling demand for mobile device management (MDM) solutions. These are increasingly seen as the panacea for enterprises and agencies to manage, secure and distribute specific mobile applications and apply policies to individual applications. For Oracle, it is the trio of social, mobile and cloud adoption that have changed the boundaries for security. “These have shifted the security perimeter and government departments and Australian companies need to re-think their security strategy,” explains John Vine Hall, director of security solutions with Oracle Corp. “It is not just about securing the device with MDM anymore; it has moved beyond securing the app or device, and now it is all about context.” Vine recommends three pillars that companies should adopt to manage security in this changing world: governance, access management, and directory services.
“With mobility comes a much broader charter for data,” he explains. “The ability to have security around a company is less likely. Agencies really don’t have control of their data, they don’t know who is getting access to it and where from – so there needs to be a continuing focus on perimeter and input.”
Securing the new perimeter The security landscape has changed significantly and continues to do so. Government customers are moving away from that perimeter strategy. Oracle is increasingly being asked to provide more and more services that provide more transparency for data device management due to increasingly greater concerns about data security. These concerns are putting burdens on agencies around security controls. Vine believes the far more sensible approach is to look at where the data originates and put that security model at the data source: “Oracle Data Redaction is a solution we have that marks data on the fly, as it is delivered with the device.” One of the core issues that IT now needs to grapple with is that the ubiquity of the mobile device means that business and personal usage will be blurred and as such data protection needs to handle in an alternative way to simply locking down the full device. This conundrum is a heart of the paradigm shift in security that F5 Networks is seeing in the security landscape in Australia at the moment. The new security revolution, APAC solutions architect Adrian Noblett argues, needs to be an app-based initiative and not a device-led one. “Traditionally, the perception to protect the firewall has been the standard approach for IT departments,” he explains, “but the new world of cyber criminals has driven the need for organisations and their executives to re-think the firewall approach.” “Firewall rules have been traditionally defined as ‘bottom-up’ with the network as the primary focus. Today we find that applications are driving the business, so a ‘top-down’ approach starting with the application (layer 7) is what is needed for greater security.”
“Mobile is a symptom, it is not the cause,” Oracle’s Vine adds. “Organisations need to look at how that critical data got on the handset in the first place. It is about applying rules at the data source and that is the real issue. Customers are not in control of their data anymore.” He adds that in the BYOD context, putting rules around and little walls on each platform creates costs and complexity. “Rather than having a platform we are dealing with little islands,” Vine explains. “Mobility is actually about the data going out to those environments and acting accordingly not doing something with it after the horse has bolted.”
“Agencies really don’t have control of their data, they don’t know who is getting access to it and where from – so there needs to be a continuing focus on perimeter and input.” John Vine Brown, Oracle
John Vine
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Mobile Devices
“Security was always looked at in a network-centric view of the world; one of the things that has changed is that now it is not the infrastructure that has been targeted it’s the apps, it’s the data.”Adrian Noblett, F5 Networks
Adrian Noblett
“Security threats have always been placed at the seat of the network,” Noblett adds. “Security was always looked at in a network-centric view of the world; one of the things that has changed is that now it is not the infrastructure that has been targeted it’s the apps, it’s the data.”
Policy Power For a BYOD strategy to be effective, policies needs to be deployed that have sufficient grit that will keep employees observant. Any BYOD policy must clearly state the consequences of misuse or violation, and those policies must also provide IT with the means to act on violations quickly. Solutions from the likes of Good Technology (see case study) assist with that using swift action that ensures security and prevents data loss. Good Technology provides a mobile control console which allows IT staff to quickly fix any problems in addition to providing a comprehensive mobile security and device management solution. This includes over-theair device management, granular and consistent mobile security policy enforcement, and end toend visibility for troubleshooting and support. Every policy also comes down to organisation wide education with each user requiring an understanding of the implications of personal devices, the type of information that can be stored on these devices, and what is expected of them to meet pre- and post-authentication requirements. 14 | GTR SEPT/OCT 2013
As BYOD takes hold, manually distributed policies are a good start, but automated policy enforcement lets organisations leverage information from the devices themselves. This allows for a policy enforcement approach that’s based on real-time changes in device risk. Noblett reminds that applications are driving business and will continue to do so at a greater rate. “A security and BYOD policy that is focused on the application is a better approach and enables more optimised rules to be processed more efficiently,” he says. “Applications dictate how issues such as firewall rules are defined and managed, and not the other way round,” he adds. “However, it is not the traditional attacks that are the threat anymore. The violations are happening through the application protocols – not through back end hacking. Organisations will need to focus more on systematic configuration, change management and troubleshooting to reduce the levels of vulnerability in the network.”
New threats on the BYOD block In the new era of security threats, Oracle’s Vine notes that cybercriminals are no longer the main game for government security concerns. There are currently four new protagonists and these new security threats need to be incorporated into any BYOD strategy:
1.
Organised crime: All about monetising information. Often after credit card data or any data that is low touch and automated.
2. Government insiders: Security breaches by employees within the organisation ie Edward Snowden and the NSA
3. Hacktivists: Security violation in order
to support their cause and use data as a hostage.
4.
The rogue employee: The employee that has a griped with the organisation and wants to disrupt security as a personal vendetta.
“Over the last five years, with everything getting webified and appified, application delivery is now part of the infrastructure,” Vine says.” Security really needs to step up – and with high profile situations like Wikileaks, the Sony data leaks and the NSA, it has all came to the fore.”
BYO apps and mobilesthe best way to tap it ● Time to look at the clouds. The adoption of BYOD/BYOA presents an opportunity for enterprises to reassess their IT infrastructure capabilities and future needs. The cloud and issues around security and collaborating with existing infrastructure demand new management considerations. ●
It will always be about the data, not the device. The critical technical management issue should be concerned with the app and the data, solutions that only encompass device security are already outdated.
● Track your people’s devices. Ensure visibility on what devices and technologies are entering the organisation by monitoring email and network access. ● Don’t be complacent. Don’t make the assumption that what is in place will solve your problems; the level of expertise behind building these threats is continuing to evolve.
BYO ECO FRIENDLY MOBILITY TASKED WITH CREATING POLICIES FOR THE PROTECTION OF AUSTRALIA’S ENVIRONMENT AND HERITAGE, THE DEPARTMENT OF SUSTAINABILITY, ENVIRONMENT, WATER, POPULATION AND COMMUNITIES (DSEWPAC), IS MORE CONSCIOUS THAN MOST ORGANISATIONS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT AND APPROPRIATE CONTEXTUAL AND SUSTAINABLE USE. THE DEPARTMENT’S 2,500 EMPLOYEES ARE MOSTLY BASED IN CANBERRA WITH ITS IT DEPARTMENT SUPPORTING WORKERS IN DISPARATE PLACES SUCH AS HOBART, KAKADU NATIONAL PARK AND CHRISTMAS ISLAND. Due to the stringent security requirements in government, the department had previously relied exclusively on corporate-issued BlackBerry devices for employee mobility. The rise of iPhone usage and other Apple devices in recent times, however, had forced DSEWPAC’s IT department to manually support a growing number of iOS handsets for senior executives. The bespoke approach was time consuming with initial device management approaches including the installation of applications on every single rogue device. DSEWPAC’s CIO, Al Blake, looked for a less resources-intense strategy to support a growing number of BYOD users. “We looked down the track and saw how phenomenal the demand was likely to be,” he explains, “and wondered what would happen when we had many hundreds or even thousands of smartphones to support. To further advance our BYOD strategy, we needed a management solution that is, as far as possible, device independent to alleviate the administrative burden while enabling greater mobile productivity.” The Department implemented Good Technology’s ‘Good for Enterprise’ solution, which provides secure email, calendaring, intranet and contacts along with mobile device management for iOS, Android and Microsoft Phone devices. The solution differs from stand-alone mobile device management solutions, as the
patented AES 192 end-to-end encryption infrastructure creates a military-grade secure data container on the device. In its deployment the Department administered one discreet data container, which can be remotely disabled or wiped with minimum effort without affecting the user’s personal information stored on the device. This BYOD solution allows the Department’s employees to use a handset of their personal choice, while keeping the administrative burden low and security high. The Good for Enterprise solution also allows organisations develop and manage their own enterprise app store. According to Blake, the user response has been positive with over 600 users on the Good for Enterprise platform. “Previously our employees had a BlackBerry in one pocket and an iPhone in the other,” he explains. “Now we can provide BYOD connectivity for a growing number of workers.” The solution’s distinct separation of corporate and personal data on the devices has meant that departmental employees can use a single device for both work and leisure aspects of their lives without threatening data security.
The Department also reports that employee productivity has increased, as BYOD has been extended to wider staff while satisfying a high level of data security requirements in government and easing the administrative burden.
GTR SEPT/OCT 2013 | 15
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