I am one of two representatives from CSC speaking at a SCADA Conference on Tuesday.
My focus, as usual, will be on the strategic reasons behind the movement to SCADA. Oops, perhaps I should back up. SCADA is an abbreviation for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It usually is used as a catch-all term dealing with computer controlled equipment or machinery (or plants or smart grids or, well you get the idea).
Many of these systems were controlled individually by locally provised systems and thus security, while relevant, wasn’t the most critical factor when designing such solutions. Now that many of these systems are managed over the Internet and an increasing percentage of what most would consider our/US economic critical infrastructure touches these systems, cyber issue have become a very hot topic.
So my presentation will focus on why this is happening and also touch a bit on some of the issues the Government is facing in this space. The second presenter from CSC is an industry expert in the utility, chemical and natural resource market and will provide some more detailed oversight and advice.
I adapted some of my past talks on this issue starting with my standard discussion about transaction cost economics and the internet and then push on to cloud computing.
I have started to try and generalize the concept of cloud computing and wanted to get some feedback from anyone who cared to give it regarding what I wrote up. This does NOT include the second part of the presentation which I mention above.
My thought is that in a sense every computer and in fact in a broader sense every aspect of an organization could be looked at as being part of a private, community, or public cloud. Your desktop could be considered a small, generally unoptimized private cloud for example.
For the purposes of this presentation, each ‘thing’ has a governance question relating to how decisions are made and a security question relating to how security is provisioned or at least who is responsible for the provisioning of it.
The purpose of this thought experiment ties back to my premise as to why cloud computing has taken off, transactional cost economics + some technological developments, and the difficulty in avoiding these implications.
The whole thing needs work but I think the direction I am heading is increasingly clear. All feedback welcome either as comments to this post or as emails directly to me.