SensorFu Teaser IV — Scalable Deployments
Proper testing of network isolation is getting close to impossible. But in this episode we meet Ossi and Sebastian, who are doing something about it. This blog post is the fourth in the series about SensorFu’s product teaser campaign.
Why Scalable Deployments Are Important
Proper testing… what does it mean? 1) It happens all the time instead of from time to time, and 2) the tests cover any network that is critical to the organisation.
Why is it getting close to impossible? Read on.
The Networks they are A-Changing
Truth to be told, they already did.
Remember the times when there was the Internet, a firewall and an internal network? Then we added the demilitarized zone. After that, things got a bit out of hand.
Large organisations now have hundreds of networks. Networks for logging, serving databases, storage and so on. Some are in own data centres, some are in the cloud, hosted by companies like Amazon, Google, etc. Then there are the sites which are geographically distributed.
We can not think networks and their access levels in linear terms anymore (e.g. “The Internet -> internal network -> even more internal network”). In the illustrations we may use a 2D matrix (see Figure A below), but in reality, networks are now multidimensional hypercubes with wormholes connecting the different dimensions to each other. Nobody understands how well the networks are isolated in practice. Want proof? Try to think multidimensional hypercubes with wormholes. There is your proof!
The Testing Methods — Haven’t A-Changed so Much
The illustration below demonstrates the traditional way and the approach SensorFu took. (BTW, can you spot a quality issue in the pic? You’re right, there is an ear instead of an eye. Our head of marketing-shenanigans will hear about this shortly!)
The challenge with the scanning is that it usually happens from one or a few places. SensorFu aims to maximise coverage. How to pull it off?
Problem Solved
Sounds like a science problem. Science fiction to the rescue! I got the tagline for the latest gif animation from Space Odyssey 2001. Next I dug my dusty VHS-tapes and watched all my flickery Star Trek recordings. They send these beacons through the wormholes and get telemetry back, if the beacon can establish a connection. With a push of a button!
Ease of Deployment is the Key for the Coverage
That is it! Testing network isolation should be as easy. Ideally, it would take virtually no effort at all to deploy the Beacon. Customers should not need to settle with “test what we can”. They should be able to test what they want. Easy deployment is the key for coverage. Nailed it! Ossi and Sebastian can figure out the remaining minor details, like how it is implemented. Ossi and Sebastian:
I’m gonna go and celebrate the breakthrough with a glass of synthehol.
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