TDS Blog

Global Payments Breach Puts Spotlight on Cloud Security

There are a rising number of companies turning to the cloud to host their enterprise applications. The much vaunted benefits such as lower cost, reduced need for physical data center space, and flexibility undoubtedly make it an attractive option, but many factors should be considered before leaping in head-first.

With the development of our new tool, TDS CostModeler™, TDS helps its clients examine one critical factor, long-term hosting cost. This tool analyzes each application’s cloud migration cost and compares it to the cost of deploying the application in other environments, such as a private data center, or a colocation facility, allowing the client to understand the long term and short term costs of different options. The costs of cloud computing vary greatly depending on size and infrastructure environments, and therefore should not be considered the standard low cost computing option.

Another factor to consider is application security, which appears to be a growing concern in the industry. Just last month Global Payments, one of the world’s largest processors of MasterCard and Visa payments, fell victim to a cyber attack on its cloud-hosted solution, where about 1.5 million credit card numbers were stolen by hackers. At first there were reports of up to 10 million numbers stolen, but fortunately, after further investigation, that number has been brought down.

Earlier this year, Global Payments moved its hosting to Amazon’s EC2 cloud, which led some to question the host security’s involvement in the breach. It is still unclear whether cloud security is to blame, but it is bringing a lot of attention to the issue. The hackers got into the system by breaking the relatively unsophisticated knowledge-based authentication which gave them admin account access. Some experts are speculating it was the cloud provider’s authentication system that was broken into, not Global Payments.

Global Payments issued a statement claiming that although there was enough data stolen for fraudulent purchases to be made, names, social security numbers and addresses were not obtained in the attack. Although reassuring to some, this did not prevent Visa from removing the company from its registry of compliant service providers.

The recent security breach at Global Payments, alone, should not scare companies into avoiding the cloud altogether, but should bring awareness to the issue of cloud security. The good news is not all cloud providers are the same; different cloud providers approach security differently. This is just one factor to consider when designing your hosting strategy, and TDS can help you understand all the tradeoffs.

Agile ERP - Customizing ERP to fit your Business with Openbravo

Traditional ERP systems have been extremely complex and expensive to implement and difficult to customize to your specific business processes. Most ERP systems come with an all-or-nothing proposition making it difficult to tackle departmental challenges - for example, solving a warehouse challenge without disrupting the entire organization.

Whether your company is a manufacturer, retailer, wholesaler, or a services company, you likely could benefit from a more modular business management software that supports industry-specific requirements and processes. Openbravo is a comprehensive, adaptable and agile open source ERP broadly implemented across many different industries and market segments.

Openbravo's modular design means that it is easy to quickly implement a solution, then easily add functionality in the future based on business needs. And, because Openbravo is "open source," TDS can easily customize your solution and integrate Openbravo into your existing processes and systems. The Openbravo platform is highly configurable with configuration tools, open source tools and user configuration tools. Its “my workspace” design, built-in widgets and the ability to personalize and save new views of the data provide unparalleled flexibility.  

Some of the configuration and tuning tools available in Openbravo include:

• Jasper Reports - an open source report writer (similar to Crystal Reports functionality)

• Form Personalization and Named Views - the abilty for business users and IT staff to easily change the way forms and lists appear in Openbravo with zero programming and to save thise for use on a individual, role or company wide basis.

• Role-based Application Configuration and Access - allows you to define on a field basis what information is visible to and editable by user groups. 

• DB Visualizer - this open source tool will let your more DB savvy staff to directly interface with the underlying database schema.  This is useful in understanding the data strucuture for custom report generation.

• More advanced customizations can be developed using the Openbravo APIs, UI tools, widgets and web services taking full advantage of the Openbravo plug-in architecture and process scheduler.

Using this platform as a starting point, here are some ways that TDS has extended Openbravo for some of our clients:

• Magento eCommerce synchronization
• Integration with proprietary order handling systems
• Integration with proprietary accounting and ERP systems
• Business process engine to allow custom workflow implementation
• Advanced RMA functionality
• Integration with ADP payroll services
• Integration with time and attendance systems

TDS's application customization services can be used to create or tune Openbravo ERP to your industry or copmany-specific requirements. Openbravo is especially well suited to businesses in manufacturing, wholesale distribution, retail, eCommerce, and service companies.

Data Center Q&A with Tim Schutt, TDS Principal

Recently, Steve Gunderson, TDS Principal, and VP of Sales, interviewed Tim Schutt, also a TDS Principal, and the leader of our Data Center Relocation practice.  During their conversation Tim explored many of the questions he often hears from prospective relocation clients.  Some of the questions he addressed include:

• Should I do a single move, or multiple moves? 

• What can be moved together?

• Can I move everything in a cabinet all at once? 

• How will my application perform when I move to the new environment?

Tim also provided some tips for organizations about to embark on a data center relocation, foremost of which was that unless you have significant experience managing these kinds of moves you're going to be better off, and save money, by hiring a pro to help.  He opined that, "customers know their environment best, but for certain specialized aspects of relocation you need to get the right resources,for example: understanding insurance, building run books, creating the move plan, deciding who will be where and doing what on move day."

He went on to explain that, "even if you hire a company like TDS to help with your move, you still have a major role to play -- you know your environment best."

Tim also made suggestions for questions that he thinks customer should be asking him, and any other potential move providers, that he doesn't see very often, such as:

• How many moves have you done?

• Have you done moves similar to ours?

• Would we be able to meet the team before the move?

• How long would a move like this take? 

• Do you understand your allowable downtime?

• Ask about methodology and tools employed to minimize downtime.

• What is your strategy?

To listen to the entire podcast, which is just five minutes long, click here.

Agile ERP - Developer Topics and Glimpse into Openbravo DNA

Openbravo Manifesto - Transparency and Openness

Openbravo's Agile ERP is the most widely deployed web based, open source ERP platform.  What exactly does this mean to you and your business?   Well for one thing, it means you can start thinking about your ERP requirements in new ways –as a business enabler rather than a business blocker.  All too often businesses feel trapped by the sloth-like pace typical of “big ERP”.

So you may be wondering… is Openbravo that different, or is this really just marketing spin?   And as a first step to answering this question, a good place to get a glimpse of the Openbravo DNA is to take a look at the Openbravo Manifesto.  Openbravo believes in:

• Transparency: We think that transparency is key when you are working on an open source project and it is fundamental to boost collaboration among different project members.
• Openness: We believe in open standards, open protocols and formats, and open source as a more efficient way of developing, operating and integrating software solutions.
• Collaboration: We are open to any party that wants to collaborate with us, whether they are individuals, companies or institutions. We strongly believe in using cooperative ways of building business solutions.
• Excellence: We put maximum effort, dedication and care in everything that we do. We always strive for excellence.
• Gratitude: We are grateful for the active involvement and interest of our Community and for every contribution that we receive, regardless of origin, motivation, size and type.

I’m guessing you don’t find this type of vocabulary used by your current ERP vendor.  More commonly you will see extensive lock-in strategies at work with a relentless drive toward monolithic, closed systems.  One of the major flaws with traditional ERP is that they do not align with the level of change that is constantly going on in every organization.  Whether you are growing, consolidating, launching new products / markets or simply improving your operating efficiencies, you are likely being limited by “customer retention” strategies used by Big ERP.

Openbravo Transparency - Walking the Talk

Would you like to see some examples of the Openbravo core beliefs in action?  Here are some links to get you started: 

• Openbravo Roadmap: see what the Openbravo development team is working on.
• Openbravo Exchange: listing of the major commercial modules available in the Central Repository
• Openbravo Public Issue Tracker: report issues here and track their status.
• Openbravo Planet (Blogs): find great timely information about Openbravo.
• Openbravo User Voice: visit the Openbravo forum to suggest and vote on features
• Openbravo Twitter: follow us for frequent updates on all aspects of Openbravo

Openbravo Development Philosophy

Openbravo technology is built on these foundational principles:

• deliver great 100% web based user experiences, with "zero client install"
• use a model-driven approach to describe functionality in business rules (rather than code), making it easy to configure and extend
• support modular software extensions, enabling distributed development of functionality
• ensure easy upgrades from version to version, enabling full customer control of the application life cycle and a sustainable ROI
• support freedom of choice in deployment options, with scalable cloud or on-premise installations, to enable traditional, hybrid, and SaaS deployments across a wide range of company sizes
• build for the entire world, with full support for Unicode, multiple languages, multiple localizations, multiple currencies, and multiple organizations, accounting schema, warehouses, tenants, etc. in a single instance
• always build with best in class, mainstream open source technologies

Following these principles provides the greatest value, choice, and opportunity for all Openbravo stakeholders: end customers, implementation partners, open source community, investors, and employees.

And while Openbravo includes a powerful architecture and provides an excellent foundation for business agility, there are also significant differences in how Openbravo operates internally when compared to legacy ERP.    For example, Openbravo leverages an agile development framework integrated with continuous development tools, testing and release methodology.   By leveraging Selenium automated testing and Jenkins continuous build systems (formally Hudson), Openbravo provides the ultimate in transparency of the development process. 

Those of you who are more developer savvy may want to check out the Openbravo build farm  to see the latest build status.  Others may simply want check out the latest Openbravo  release to validate current functionality.

By leveraging state of the art tools, a model driven architecture and full transparency including source code, Openbravo customers have confidence that they can deploy new features in a fraction of a time that it takes for the legacy ERP vendors to react. Openbravo provides a fully tested release on average once per month.   And since the product is maintained at the source code level, patches can be deployed much faster and in a more controlled manner than is possible with platforms built from archaic object code libraries and very limited access to the underlying source code.

Software Release Process

While Openbravo provides great flexibility, agility and power during the deployment and customization phase, you may opt for a more conventional approach when bringing software updates and upgrades into your production environment.  Of course this is entirely under your control with Openbravo. 

You can decide which modules to include down to the source code level and decide when to include them into your production environment. You may deploy critical updates immediately and defer less critical updates until they have been fully vetted and validated in deployments with other businesses.Learn more about maturity status and how this is integrated with Openbravo module management. 

Where can I get more Information on Openbravo POS?

Openbravo POS (previously called Librepos and TinaPOS) is a point of sale application designed for touch screens, supports ESC/POS ticket printers, customer displays and barcode scanners. It is multiuser providing product entry forms, reports and charts.

For single location deployments of just a few tills / cash registers, Openbravo POS is available as a free, open source community supported package (through forums, Wiki, etc).  If you are interested in a do-it-yourself type approach or have limited budget to evaluate, here are some links to help you get started:

• Openbravo POS Wiki
• Download Openbravo POS
• Openbravo POS Forum
• Installing Openbravo POS

Openbravo POS is also available for multi-store, multi-warehouse deployments bundled with Openbravo ERP Professional (a commercial grade, subscription based ERP system).  Here are some links to help you learn more about Openbravo Retail Solutions:

• Openbravo Retail / POS Product Information
• Openbravo Retail - Product Roadmap

If you are interested in a exploring the suitability of Openbravo Retail to your environment and would like to save some time getting started, you may be interested in purchasing the TDS Openbravo POS Support Bundle which includes 20 hours of advisory and technical consulting services.

Boston Data Center Event - Markley Group - April 28, 2011

Markley Group and TDS have invited over six thousand attendees from New England to join us at this 2011 Data Center event at One Summer Street.  

Principal consultants from TDS will be on hand discuss:

• Hybrid enterprise computing - mixed conventional, virtual, cloud and SaaS
• Data center migrations - managing moves - physical, virtual and cloud
• Managing the hybrid enterprise computing environment
• Considerations for application migrations - cost and complexity

Date

    April 28, 2011
    Seminars and Networking Time:  8:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
    Cocktail Reception: 3:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Managing the Hybrid Data Center

TDS Unified Monitoring Service

Before virtualization, understanding the inter-dependencies in a typical network environment was fairly straightforward.  A connected with B connected with C. 

With the proliferation of virtualization, compounded by clouds and SaaS applications, the challenge of maintaining continual visibility and control has put availability and performance of systems at risk.

 

While traditional monitoring tools provide availability and performance monitoring at the application, network and operating system layers,they do not provide sufficient visibility into virtualized and hybrid enterprise computing environments with multiple critical applications competing for shared resources.  There is a clear need for a more holistic  approach including unified monitoring, performance trending and unified alerting and event correlation.

TDS unified monitoring solves this need by providing a consolidated view of all internal and external services.  Built for complex, enterprise deployments, TDS tools provide visibility into both the end-to-end application environment and storage level to quickly detect and diagnose the root cause issues which are affecting service delivery.  Utilizing industry-standard monitoring tools, TDS provides a "single pane of glass" view of all internal and external services.

This unified approach identifies and isolates cross application impact (including network, storage, CPU,memory, etc.) that may not exist in the traditional environment, but do exist in a shared component, virtualized environment.

There are many considerations involved in managing a hybrid data center.  TDS unified monitoring addresses the need for a single, centralized view of overall data center performance and availability.

Openbravo 3.0 Demonstration

Openbravo 3.0 includes an advanced web interface that streamlines navigation, simplifies data entry and provides user dashboards and widgets. Click on the graphic below to view a demostration of the new look and features of 3.0:

2009/2010 AFCOM Data Center Trends Survey Results and Analysis

AFCOM recently suveyed 436 member data center sites on eight of the hottest topics ranging from Greening and Data Center Consolidation to Performance Monitoring and Cyber Terrorism. 

• Greening -

•  
  • 71% are actively engaged in greening
  • Power Recovery - 60% 
  • Cooling Recovery - 51%

 

• Expansion
  • 60.3% require additional data center capacity within five years

Please view the tabulated results and significant findings below:

Chasm Between IT and Facilities is Growing

Think IT and facilities operating in silos is last year's problem? In some cases, it may actually be getting worse.

Last year I wrote Four Reasons to Get Facilities and IT on the Same Page. At the time, I was surprised by how little IT leaders knew about their real data center costs, and I suggested that these leaders would do well to talk to their facilities people to understand better where their money was going. I even showed how IT could help facilities by understanding their problems. Since collaboration between IT and facilities can provide immediate financial benefits to the enterprise without layoffs or the risk of IT outages, there's a lot in it for both groups to work together.

At least one would think.

But when I bring the subject up, especially with the press, I find that most believe the problem has already been solved.  "IT and facilities operating in silos is last year's problem, right?"  Wrong.  When I work with real world customers, I realize that the situation is bad and maybe even getting worse.

Why is there this disconnect between perception and reality? Perhaps it's because when the press looks for a story, it needs real-life case studies to make the story compelling and believable.  And, of course, it is possible to find companies where, in fact, facilities and IT are on the same page. Naturally, they're willing to go public with their stories.  But nobody is all that interested in going on record to talk about how they've made mistakes, how IT and facilities don't work together, or how they're pouring money down the drain by having both IT and facilities operate in a vacuum.

Don't believe there's still a problem?  Here are some real life examples illustrating what can go wrong when facilities and IT don't collaborate:

• I saw a company purchase a building because it looked like an attractive value and, as a bonus, it already had a data center the company thought it could use.  Because the facilities group knew IT needed a new data center, it followed the realtor's recommendation and purchased the building at a bargain.  After learning that their new data center would require an additional $17 million in upgrades to make it usable for IT, plus another $500,000 a month in WAN charges, the company decided a collocation alternative would be a better approach.  In the end, the company avoided that $17 million upgrade but it also ended up with a building it didn't really need. This could have been avoided with closer collaboration between facilities and IT.

• I recently visited a 9,000 square foot data center where something was amiss.  IT had requested Tier 3 level (N+1) redundancy so the facility would be concurrently maintainable. Facilities actually delivered what they believed to be a full Tier 4 environment (2N) with no single point of failure.  Besides costing the company over $500,000 more than it should have, the center actually did have a single point of failure, meaning it wasn't even a Tier 3 data center.  Another investment of $150,000 was required to correct the problem. 

• I've recently seen over 100 cabinets at one location ejecting hot exhaust right into the intake of other systems.  Besides subjecting these systems to the risk of premature failure, this made it necessary to run the data center much cooler than it needed to be just to head off cooling-related problems. This unnecessarily raised the PUE, resulting in an electric bill that was 30 percent higher than it needed to be. By now everyone knows about hot aisle-cold aisle alignment, but many legacy data centers—such as this one—haven't been reconfigured to take advantage of efficiency improvements like that just because IT and facilities are not communicating and are instead holing up silently in their respective silos. 

I have other stories like this; I see them every day.

Let's face it. Facilities typically reports to the CFO's office and IT typically reports to the CIO and when the CFO and CIO get together they have better things to do than discuss PUE, power density, cooling, ultrasonic humidification and data center tier ratings (although I'm sure they have a chat or two about budgets).

CFOs and CIOs expect their respective teams to do the right thing. We all understand that.  But maybe these teams need some top-down guidance to help get them moving in the right direction, together.

So I open this blog up to learn about your own experiences with IT and facilities.  Have you had any great successes or horror stories you'd like to share?

As always, I welcome feedback, questions and comments.  And if you know of other companies effectively enabling cloud computing with an impact on the enterprise you believe similar to those listed above, I'd be interested in learning more. You may reach me at cioblog@transitionaldata.com.