ITasITis

On a call today, discussion turned to the open-ness – or not! – of today’s infrastructure architectures for “Living on the Web”, as Doug Neal of CSC’s Leading Edge Forum calls it. The comment was made that much of even today’s Microsoft-based infrastructure still embodies assumptions from the days of closed-network architectures.

What did we mean? Living on the Web – for major corporates such as BP and Aviva, who’ve been doing it for some years now – means accepting that the corporate perimeter is not the safe haven often assumed. Nor is it, in today’s business world, practical for business. Companies don’t do everything within the firewall these days. They partner, they outsource, they collaborate. The firewall, and the quasi-security mindset that goes with it, don’t facilitate this way of doing business. They get in the way. There are good reasons why the mindset is there, but they just make it harder to challenge!

BP is well recognised now for adopting the open Internet as its base infrastructure and for treating its user community as IT adults who can often make their own decisions – with support where home-based experience doesn’t translate to corporate needs. Resources that need to be protected are certainly protected, but much closer to source. Access through the firewall isn’t any longer an open sesame to vast swathes of corporate resources. As someone on the call commented, Port 80 is the hacker’s internet these days. And this approach has been audited to show it is more secure, not less.

But – to return to the point – many infrastructure professionals still work from the implicit, probably unrecognised and certainly unquestioned assumptions that it’s best to do it the same way as since the local area network was invented. And I called to mind some work done by a UK project called ANSA (Advanced Networked Systems Architectures) between 1985 and 1998. ANSA was one of the first projects to seriously examine what happened when systems no longer were located on a single computer, but were cooperative systems constructed from components running potentially anywhere worldwide. Internet-based collaborative systems are that, to the nth degree!

ANSA offered a set of assumptions which systems engineers made then, which have to be turned on their head in a distributed environment. We still need to be reminded of some of them: