PROTECTING THE SEAMS:MILITARY DOCTRINE APPLIED TO APPLICATION AND NETWORK SECURITY

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Presented at Showmecon 2014 by

Paul Vencill

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.” – Balthazar Gracian Military doctrine often speaks of attacking the seams — the weak points where two organizations meet and have to coordinate. Seams are notoriously difficult to protect because of the inherent risks and challenges associated with information sharing between two organizations. The US Military has doctrine to train its soldiers how to properly coordinate with their sister organizations to keep the bad guys from slipping through the seams; can the same be said of your IT organization? This talk will focus on the risks and risk mitigation strategies for three common ‘seams’ in integrating new technology into your stack: coordination between the app developers and the sysadmins who will have to maintain it in production, configuration management of all of the dependencies for the application(s) being fielded, and the management of defects/errors in the system and its dependencies.