Neil MacDonaldI attended a breakfast presentation this morning given by Schneider Electric on the topic of facilities and energy intelligence. Essentially, they are tearing down the monitoring silos of energy, fire, lighting, data center power, HVAC and physical security monitoring to deliver a unified dashboard for facilities and energy management.
As I listened to the presentation, I was struck by the parallels by the parallels between the presentation and our research on Enterprise Security Intelligence (and most recently in this research note for clients, on Application Security Intelligence).
What are some of the common elements?
- Tearing down the silos of monitoring
- Expanded use of sensors and collectors for more detailed monitoring
- Detailed repository created from the monitoring information
- The use of correlation of the information to generate actionable insight and prioritized actions for the administrator
- The ability to model proactive “what if” scenarios against the models and historical data
- The ability to look at patterns over time for insight (in their case for predictive failure analysis, in information security’s case to look for anomalies).
Interesting. These are almost exactly the same types of deliverables we expect from enterprise security intelligence.
Conclusion: I believe the need for “intelligence” is becoming ubiquitous across all aspects of business and IT … and in this case, facilities and energy and in our case, information security.
Category: Information Security Next-generation Data Center Security Intelligence Tags: GartnerDC, Information Security, Next-generation Data Center, Next-generation Security Infrastructure
1 response so far ↓
1 Joe Capes December 10, 2010 at 9:44 am
Neil, glad to hear you enjoyed the breakfast sessions “Managing your data center for maximum availability and efficiency.” You raise some strong parallels between facilities, energy management and enterprise security intelligence. The conference was a phenomenal event, and I had many interesting conversations with data center owners and managers. I had the opportunity to lead a session on cooling trends earlier in the week, and have included some of my thoughts on the discussions from that session and the show in general here: http://schneiderna.amplify.com/2010/12/10/perspective-from-gartner-data-center-conference-%e2%80%93-power-and-cooling-top-of-mind-with-decision-makers/
Joe Capes, APC by Schneider Electric