Long-awaited media coverage, from Tom Temin, host of The Federal Drive, (on Federal News Radio), about the Multilevel Secure (MLS) Ecosystem has now appeared.
The piece, which is also featured on Temin on Tech is the result of a briefing, which took place several weeks ago with Seagate’s Henry Newman. In it Seagate and the MLS Ecosystem is positioned as an example of approaches taking shape to address today’s cybersecurity threats, such as the one (still) affecting The Office of Personnel Management.
The article – which opens with a metaphor about risk assessment and the need to integrate software and hardware – ends on an optimistic note, suggesting the companies comprising the MLS Ecosystem represent a long-term solution to an industry-wide security problem. Excerpts appear below…
“Industry is starting to offer new approaches. The other week I was talking to people from Seagate, a disk drive and storage subsystem OEM. It’s part of a coalition of network equipment and software companies that contribute to what they call a Multi-Level Security Ecosystem. In the federal market, Lockheed Martin and Vion offer it as a secure storage and file system for high-performance simulation and modeling applications that fuse together large, disparate data sets.”
“Seagate Federal’s Henry Newman explains, the company built a set of services on top of SELinux to accommodate functions such as network communications, database access and data sharing across parallel file systems. So, for example, a large set of video surveillance could be engineered such that access to individual files can be restricted to certain individuals based on their authorities. Personally identifiable information, compliance information or intellectual property within a system can be made subject to access controls and auditing, while limiting the need for expensive hardware redundancy.”
“Other contributors to the MLE ecosystem include supercomputer makers Crayand SGI, log analytics vendor Splunk, and Altair, a maker of job scheduling and management software.”
“Government practitioners like to say security should be built in, not bolted on. But they usually bolt it on. The Multilevel Secure group is just one example, but it shows where systems deployment is heading where security is baked in.”
Visit Seagate’s Intelligent Infrastructure blog to learn more about the Multilevel Secure Ecosystem.
