Real words or buzzwords?: Autonomous compute infrastructure - RBCS

This is the 62nd article in the award-winning “Real Words or Buzzwords?” series about how real words become empty words and stifle technology progress, also published on SecurityInfoWatch.com.

By Ray Bernard, PSP, CHS-III

We’re on the brink of a radical new approach to technology, driven by autonomous operations.

All-in-one RWOB

#1 Proof of the buzzword that killed tech advances in the security industry—but not other industries.

#2 Next Generation (NextGen): A sure way to tell hype from reality.

#3 Customer Centric: Why all security industry companies aren't customer centric.

#4 Best of Breed: What it should mean to companies and their customers.

#5 Open: An openness scale to rate platforms and systems

#6 Network-friendly: It's much more than network connectivity.

#7 Mobile first: Not what it sounds like.

#8 Enterprise Class (Part One): To qualify as Enterprise Class system today is world's beyond what it was yesterday.

#9 Enterprise Class (Part Two): Enterprise Class must be more than just a top-level label.

#10 Enterprise Class (Part Three): Enterprise Class must be 21st century technology.

#11 Intuitive: It’s about time that we had a real-world testable definition for “intuitive”.

#12 State of the Art: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.

#13 True Cloud (Part One): Fully evaluating cloud product offerings.

#14 True Cloud (Part Two): Examining the characteristics of 'native-cloud' applications.

#15 True Cloud (Part Three): Due diligence in testing cloud systems.

#16 IP-based, IP-enabled, IP-capable, or IP-connectable?: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.

#17 Five Nines: Many people equate high availability with good user experience, yet many more factors are critically important.

#18 Robust: Words like “robust” must be followed by design specifics to be meaningful.

#19 Serverless Computing – Part 1: Why "serverless computing" is critical for some cloud offerings.

#20 Serverless Computing – Part 2: Why full virtualization is the future of cloud computing.

#21 Situational Awareness – Part 1: What products provide situational awareness?

#22 Situational Awareness – Part 2: Why system designs are incomplete without situational awareness?

#23 Situational Awareness – Part 3: How mobile devices change the situational awareness landscape?

#24 Situational Awareness – Part 4: Why situational awareness is a must for security system maintenance and acceptable uptime.

#25 Situational Awareness – Part 5: We are now entering the era of smart buildings and facilities. We must design integrated security systems that are much smarter than those we have designed in the past.

#26 Situational Awareness – Part 6: Developing modern day situational awareness solutions requires moving beyond 20th century thinking.

#27 Situational Awareness – Part 7: Modern day incident response deserves the help that modern technology can provide but doesn’t yet. Filling this void is one of the great security industry opportunities of our time.

#28 Unicity: Security solutions providers can spur innovation by envisioning how the Unicity concept can extend and strengthen physical access into real-time presence management.

#29 The API Economy: Why The API Economy will have a significant impact on the physical security industry moving forward.

#31 The Built Environment: In the 21st century, “the built environment” means so much more than it did just two decades ago.

#32 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been a hot phrase in IT for several years, but do its promises hold true for the physical security industry?

#33 Software-Defined: Cloud-computing technology, with its many software-defined elements, is bringing self-scaling real-time performance capabilities to physical security system technology.

#34 High-Performance: How the right use of "high-performance" can accelerate the adoption of truly high-performing emerging technologies.

#35 Erasure Coding: Why RAID drive arrays don’t work anymore for video storage, and why Erasure Coding does.

#36 Presence Control: Anyone responsible for access control management or smart building experience must understand and apply presence control.

#37 Internet+: The Internet has evolved into much more than the information superhighway it was originally conceived to be.

#38 Digital Twin: Though few in physical security are familiar with the concept, it holds enormous potential for the industry.

#39 Fog Computing: Though commonly misunderstood, the concept of fog computing has become critically important to physical security systems.

#40 Scale - Part 1: Although many security-industry thought leaders have advocated that we should be “learning from IT,” there is still insufficient emphasis on learning about IT practices, especially for large-scale deployments.

#41 Scale - Part 2: Why the industry has yet to fully grasp what the ‘Internet of Things’ means for scaling physical security devices and systems.

#42 Cyberspace - Part 1: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.

#43 Cyber-Physical Systems - Part 1: We must understand what it means that electronic physical security systems are cyber-physical systems.

#44 Cyberspace - Part 2: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.

#45 Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Examining the differences in these technologies and their respective benefits for the security industry.

#46 VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: At first glance, VDI doesn’t seem to have much application to a SOC deployment. But a closer look reveals why it is actually of critical importance.

#47 Hybrid Cloud: The definition of hybrid cloud has evolved, and it’s important to understand the implications for physical security system deployments.

#48 Legacy: How you define ‘legacy technology’ may determine whether you get to update or replace critical systems.

#49 H.264 - Part 1: Examining the terms involved in camera stream configuration settings and why they are important.

#50 H.264 - Part 2: A look at the different H.264 video frame types and how they relate to intended uses of video.

#51 H.264 - Part 3: Once seen as just a marketing term, ‘smart codecs’ have revolutionized video compression.

#52 Presence Technologies: The proliferation of IoT sensors and devices, plus the current impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, have elevated the capabilities and the importance of presence technologies.

#53 Anonymization, Encryption and Governance: The exponential advance of information technologies requires an exponential advance in the application of data protection.

#54 Computer Vision: Why a good understanding of the computer vision concept is important for evaluating today’s security video analytics products.

#55 Exponential Technology Advancement: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#56 IoT and IoT Native: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#57 Cloud Native IoT: A continuing look at what it means to have a 'True Cloud' solution and its impact on today’s physical security technologies.

#58 Bluetooth vs. Bluetooth LE: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#59 LPWAN - Low-Power Wide Area Networks: Emerging IoT smart sensor devices and systems are finding high-ROI uses for building security and safety.

#60 Edge Computing and the Evolving Internet: Almost 15 billion personal mobile devices and over 22 billion IoT devices operating daily worldwide have shifted the Internet’s “center of gravity” from its core to its edge – with many implications for enterprise physical security deployments

#61 Attack Surface: (Published as a Convergence Q&A Column article)An attack surface is defined as the total number of all possible entry points for unauthorized access into any system.

#62 Autonomous Compute Infrastructure: We’re on the brink of a radical new approach to technology, driven by autonomous operations.

#63 Physical Security Watershed Moment: We have reached a juncture in physical security technology that is making most of our past thinking irrelevant.

#64 Access Chaos: For 50 years we have had to live with physical access control systems that were not manageable at any large scale.

#65 AI and Automatiom: Will engineering talent, business savvy and capital investment from outside the physical security industry bring technology startups that transform reactive security to proactive and preventive security operations?

#66 Interoperability: Over the next five years, the single greatest determinant of the extent to which existing security industry companies will thrive or die is interoperability.

#67 AI Model : One key factor affects the accuracy, speed and computational requirements of AI

#68 Interoperability – Part 2: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.

#69 Interoperability – Part 3: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.

#70 Operationalizing AI: AI is not a product, but a broad category of software that enables products and systems to do more than ever before possible. How do we put it to good use?

#71 Shallow IT Adoption – Part 1: It’s not just about being IT compliant, it’s also about leveraging IT capabilities to properly serve the needs and wants of today’s technologically savvy customers.

#72 E-waste – an important security system design issue: Now e-waste is an important design issue not just because of growing e-waste regulations, but because educated designers can save enterprise security system customers a lot of money.

#73 LRPoE - Long Reach Power over Ethernet: A dozen factors have improved the business attractiveness of network cameras, making it more desirable to place cameras further from existing IT closets than the 328 foot limitation of standard Ethernet cable.

#74 NIST Declares Physical Access Control Systems are OT: Does it really mean anything that OT has joined the parade of labels (IT, IoT, and then IIoT) variously getting applied to security systems?

#75 Future Ready: Google sees the term "future-ready" trending up across many subject domains. But does that term apply to the physical security industry and its customers?

#76 Data KLiteracy: AI needs data. Thus, the ability of any department or division in an organization (including security) to use AI effectively depends on its ability to effectively obtain and utilize data – including security.

#77 Security Intelligence (upcoming): AI brings two kinds of intelligence to physical security systems – people bring the third.

More to come about every other week.

In spite of advances in data center automation and orchestration, data center staff continue to be overloaded, exponentially increasing the possibilities for human errors, system failures, and the security vulnerabilities that result from them.

“Autonomous compute infrastructure” refers to IT infrastructure (compute, network and data storage) that manages itself with minimal to no human action throughout its lifecycle.

This is the current state of information technology advancement and is highly relevant to organizations deploying electronic physical security systems, especially critical infrastructure organizations.

I’ll be speaking about this at the Converge Security Conference on Friday, September 30, 2022 in my 4 p.m. session titled, “Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of Security Convergence” at the at the Marriott Hotel near the Anaheim, Calif. Convention Center.

This and related topics are also part of the 3- to 5-year look ahead at the future of security leadership and physical security technology at the Global Security Operations event (GSO 2025) on November 2 & 3, 2022 at the Vari (formerly VariDesk) global headquarters in Irving, Texas.

This article is about automating the management of compute infrastructure itself, not about the automation of applications that reside on it. That’s a separate subject and will have its own article.

The Growth of Computing Virtualization
For over a decade cloud data centers, as well as on-premises data centers, have been utilizing virtualized computing environments whose management software takes any number of separate hardware resources (servers, networks and data storage) and aggregates them to create virtual resource pools – virtual servers, virtual networks, and virtual storage.

The virtualized resource pools are much easier to manage than individual hardware elements. As explained in this TechTarget article, the approach eventually became known as software-defined data center (SDDC), a term coined by former VMware CTO Steve Herrod around 2012.

The Resulting Data Center Explosion
In the 10 years following, continuing advances in computing hardware and virtualization software have given us the ability to create very large pools of virtual CPUs and GPUs, virtual RAM, as well as software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS) all connectable at gigabit speeds.

These can be assembled as large clusters of connected high performance virtualization appliances, providing highly scalable pools of each type of computing resource.

The evolution of software to automate and orchestrate the complex configuration and management for the vast amount of hardware resources being virtualized has made it possible to manage the elements of large virtual systems via a single pane of glass (same computer screen).

These continuing advances in computing have helped fuel the data center explosive growth required to support the ever-growing number of software applications and systems of increasingly greater size and complexity.

However, in spite of advances in data center automation and orchestration, data center staff continue to be overloaded, exponentially increasing the possibilities for human errors, system failures, and the security vulnerabilities that result from them.

Fortunately, these very computing advances have made possible the development and use of artificial intelligence software capable of managing vast amounts of virtualized IT infrastructure with minimal involvement by IT staff, eliminating traditional staff errors and reducing deployment times to a fractions of what they have been.

Autonomous Compute Infrastructure
Autonomous compute infrastructure is the IT world’s equivalent of the self-driving vehicle. It is the intelligent (i.e., AI-based) automation of IT infrastructure management workflow that used to require highly skilled and specialized IT personnel.

“Autonomous compute infrastructure is a continuum”, says Dell Technologies in its highly insightful point of view paper introducing the concept in February of 2021, which it explained further six months later in a white paper titled, “An Introduction to the Autonomous Framework by Dell Technologies.”

This paper describes a six-level Autonomous Framework for IT operations, from no automation to full autonomy. It also provides background information, expands upon each level of this framework, and provides some considerations for the road ahead.

Autonomous Infrastructure Self-Management
Basically, autonomous compute infrastructure refers to the degree of self-management of an IT infrastructure deployment throughout its lifecycle.

This goes way beyond redundancy-based fault tolerance, self-healing networks, and so on.

It includes, for example, the ability to expand a security system deployment by adding new compute, storage, networking or security device hardware, and having the existing pools of virtual resources automatically expanded and reallocated to existing applications, without any system downtime or system performance degradation.

Thus, autonomous compute infrastructure can maintain itself at 99.9999% (“six nines”) uptime – which allows a total of 31 seconds of downtime per year.

Such infrastructure self-management could include automatically copying a virtual machine running security applications from one physical server to another to achieve higher performance from a newly added server in the resource pool, without any application interruption.

This kind of change would be based on AI predictive analysis of system performance and application utilization trends.

The automation capabilities would also report on predicted future needs for system expansion, or reallocation options for of newly developed spare capacity. Specifying the extent of self-management can be accomplished by a single IT staff person, instead of the formerly required team of IT specialists

Pivotal Change in IT Infrastructure Management
I believe, as Dell says, “We’re on the brink of a radical new approach to technology, driven by autonomous operations (AO) that will enable businesses to radically delegate all manner of low-level, repetitive and non-strategic IT tasks to intelligent technology.”

Because we are all familiar with automobiles, Dell was able to leverage our understanding by likening the autonomous compute spectrum to the various levels of autonomous driving.

Radical New Technology Approaches
Dell very accurately makes an additional analogy relating to the vehicle industry.

Jon Siegal, senior vice president, product marketing, Dell Technologies, wrote, “The creation of the internal combustion (IC) engine changed society forevermore. At the time of its inception, most people would have been unaware that history was in the making. That it would birth a hypermobile society, opening the floodgates to all manner of cars, trains, airplanes. That it would pave the way for rapid trade and consequently greater prosperity. That it would revolutionize agriculture and transform farming, resulting in more food at lower prices. And that it would remove limits to how far we could travel through physical effort.”

Siegal continues, “Similarly, business leaders today may not realize that they’re presiding over such a key moment in time. We are on the brink of a radical new approach to technology, driven by autonomous operations (AO), that will enable businesses to finally ‘take control by inversely, letting go’.

With AO, businesses can radically delegate all manner of low-level, repetitive, and non-strategic IT tasks to intelligent technology and in the process, experience the thrill of reaching new heights, by exceeding limitations that were once out of reach. By partnering more extensively with machines, businesses can also improve employee productivity and satisfaction, and ultimately the customer experience.”

I encourage you to read the rest of the Siegal’s article, “Making history with autonomous operations” because although the discussion is around the broad business impacts of autonomous compute infrastructure, much of the article is highly relevant to our considerations of the current and near-future states of electronic physical security systems.

Utilizing the Autonomous Compute Infrastructure Framework
There many ways for physical security practitioners to use Dell’s autonomous compute infrastructure framework, such as evaluating one’s own current infrastructure, evaluating vendor product roadmaps, and prioritizing specific elements and capabilities of security systems in upgrade planning.

More broadly, it provides a cross-domain perspective for digital transformation stakeholders, and a touch point for discussions relating to physical security’s participation in the organization’s digital transformation efforts and initiatives.