Secure Your Data at the Edge with CBT and HPE

Secure Your Data at the Edge with CBT & HPE

Learn how CBT chooses HPE GreenLake to enable wearable technology that keeps workers at oil refineries safe and efficient. A CRN interview with CBT’s President and COO, Rob Schaeffer, and HPE’s CTO, James Morrison.

 

 

Transcript:

Katie Bavoso, CRN:

Hello, and welcome to our interview. I’m your host, Katie Bavoso from the channel company. The growth of public cloud adoption means more opportunities and abilities to innovate across nearly all industries. But it also means more potential risk. The number of records exposed in 2020 exceeded the amount in 2019 by 141%. And many of the companies impacted had public cloud connections, as it becomes more necessary to rely on the cloud and process and store your data there, security of that data is top of mind. That’s where processing data at the edge comes into the conversation. For more on this, I’m joined today by James Morrison, a distinguished technologist at the cybersecurity office of the North America CTO for HPE. And of course, Rob Schaffer, President, and COO of CBT, an HPE Partner. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate your time. First of all, tell us what is happening with informational technology and operational technology at the edge. And of course, how is CBT at the forefront of this marriage of tech.

Rob Schaeffer, CBT:

You’re exactly right. Security is at top of mind for everybody. And with the advent of edge and more compute being done outside of a data center, relying on technology is critically important. We have more and more security risks, entry points, and challenges. And that brings us really to the operational technology side of things. We talk about use cases, human capital performance, machinery and equipment, physical locations, and the tie-in where sensors and wearable technologies are new entry points for security risk. At CBT’s refinery of the future, a petrochemical refinery down in Texas, the use cases had to be built all-around employee safety. Employee safety is the umbrella and underneath that, you have connected worker, which is relative to human performance, and human capital, condition monitoring and asset integrity for the equipment and the machinery that make up these refineries and last are the physical locations, which are the sensors that monitor the entire location.

KB:

How does HPE give you the solution, services, and support that you need to address customer demands at the edge while still offering affordable and repeatable solutions?

RS:

So in the importance of our relationship with HPE, it is the quality of solutions. And we’re really glad that out of HP Labs and HP engineering, we continue to get the best in class compute and storage platforms, and the best in class wireless technology that really is kind of the genesis of security. And we get to wrap this into not only as a service, but it really helps because the convergence of OT and IT is the edge. And HPE brings us industry-leading solutions that allow us to deliver for our joint customers.

KB:

James, let’s talk a little bit about security and the reason why we’re all here today. The public cloud is obviously an incredible innovation, so much happens in it. But that’s just the point, so many people have access to it and with that knowledge, something could happen. First of all, tell me what are the risks of the public cloud? And how does HPE address security concerns by computing at the edge?

James Morrison, HPE:

Criminals are targeting aggregations of data so one of the things they’re looking at is: How can I disrupt a company? And where’s that data stored? Security is becoming much more focused on data and workload. Anywhere data is aggregated, that’s a target. And so even in public cloud offerings, the criminals are trying to launch ransomware attacks and denial of service attacks. What’s kind of interesting going forward is that companies want to use that public cloud to take their data into a secure area. And so by 2025, 80% of our data is created at the edge. How do I safely move that data from the edge into my data center or into the cloud? That’s been our challenge. When we talk about security at the edge, we have to recognize that our edge is going to utterly be changing. Work from home has changed that conversation. And so we have to make sure that we can identify all traffic, you can’t have a random IT product generating additional traffic that I can’t recognize. So what we did was through some of our Aruba products, we have the ability to look at the entire traffic pattern on that edge every object gets a fingerprint it gets identified, then what I can do is I can then try to identify what’s abnormal. And if you don’t have a good fingerprint around what’s normal, it’s very hard to identify what’s abnormal.

KB:

What additional security layers has HPE implemented into its end solutions to ensure they go that extra mile to protect end-user customers’ data?

JM:

As I was saying were becoming much more data-focused and data security-focused. In each one of our servers, we can build the server based upon the workload that’s anticipated for that server. In addition, now with our Aruba offering, and we purchased Silver Peak last year, we can integrate our server, storage, and network all into one main interface. You know that your HPE offering is working across the entire enterprise. And we really believe as we go forward, we’re offering everything we can do for security in the cloud. And we double down on that with our GreenLake offering with what we call Project Aurora, which takes that silicon root of trust and takes security into the operating system and the virtual machines so that if any one of those is modified inside of our Greenlake managed services, we can instantly recover it back to the last known good.

KB:

James, Rob, thank you both so much for your time today. It was a pleasure to talk to both of you. Good luck, we look forward to seeing what each of you bring to the channel together in the near future. And of course, thank you at home for watching. If you have questions or want to learn more, simply visit the web address on your screen. I’m Katie Bavoso, take care.

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