Good first day. Keynote was relatively interesting (even though I don’t fully understand why the presenters use fluffy “CEO friendly” slides and language in a room of techies) and had a few announcements. The one that caught my eye was the public announcement of the complex event processing (CEP) engine being embedded in SQL Server 2008 R2. In my book I talk about CEP and apply the principles to a BizTalk solution. However, I’m much happier that Microsoft is going to put a real effort into this type of solution instead of the relative hack that I put together. The session at TechEd on this topic is Tuesday. Expect a write up from me.
Below are some of the session notes from what I attended today. I’m trying to balance sessions that interest me intellectually, and sessions that help me actually do my job better. In the event of a tie, I choose the latter.
Data Governance: A Solution to Privacy Issues
This session interested me because I work for a healthcare organization and we have all sorts of rules and regulations that direct how we collect, store and use data. Key Takeaway: New website from Microsoft on data governance at http://www.microsoft.com/datagovernance.
- Low cost of storage and needs to extend offerings with new business models have led to unprecedented volume of data stored about individuals
- You need security to achieve privacy, but security is not a guarantee of privacy
- Privacy, like security, has to be embedded into application lifecycle (not a checkbox to “turn on” at the end)
- Concerns
- Data breach …
- Data retention
- 66% of data breaches in 2008 involved data that was not known to reside on the affected system at the time of incident
- Statutory and Regulatory Landscape
- In EU, privacy is a fundamental right
- Defined in 95/46/EC
- Defines rules for transfer of personal data across member states’ borders
- Data cannot be transported outside of EU unless citizen gives consent or legal framework, like Safe Harbor, is in place
- Switzerland, Canada and Argentina have legal framework
- US has “Safe Harbor” where agreement is signed with US Dept of Commerce which says we will comply with EU data directives
- Even data that may individually not identify you, but if aggregated, might lead you to identify an individual; can’t do this as still considered “personal data”
- Defined in 95/46/EC
- In US, privacy is not a fundamental right
- Unlike EU, in US you have patchwork of federal laws specific to industries, or specific to a given law (like data breach notification)
- Personally identifiable information (PII) – info which can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity
- Like SSN, or drivers license #
- In Latin America, some countries have adopted EU-style data protection legislation
- In Asia, there are increased calls for unified legislation
- In EU, privacy is a fundamental right
- How to cope with complexity?
- Standards
- ISO/IEC CD 29100 information technology – security techniques – privacy framework
- How to incorp. best practices and how to make apps with privacy in mind
- NIST SP 800-122 (Draft) – guidelines for gov’t orgs to identify PII that they might have and provides guidelines for how to secure that information and plan for data breach incident
- ISO/IEC CD 29100 information technology – security techniques – privacy framework
- Standards tell you WHAT to do, but not HOW
- Standards
- Data governance
- Exercise of decision making and authority for data related matters (encompasses people, process and IT required for consistent and proper handling across the enterprise)
- Why DG?
- Maximize benefits from data assets
- Improve quality, reliability and availability
- Establish common data definitions
- Establish accountability for information quality
- Compliance
- Meet obligations
- Ensure quality of compliance related data
- Provide flexibility to respond to new compliance requirements
- Risk Management
- Protection of data assets and IP
- Establish appropriate personal data use to optimally balance ROI and risk exposure
- Maximize benefits from data assets
- DG and privacy
- Look at compliance data requirements (that comes from regulation) and business data requirements
- Feeds the strategy made up of documented policies and procedure
- ONLY COLLECT DATA REQUIRED TO DO BUSINESS
- Consider what info you ask of customers and make sure it has a specific business use
- Three questions
- Collecting right data aligned with business goals? Getting proper consent from users?
- Managing data risk by protecting privacy if storing personal information
- Handling data within compliance of rules and regulations that apply
- Think about info lifecycle
- How is data collected, processed and shared and who has access to it at each stage?
- Who can update? How know about access/quality of attribute?
- What sort of processing will take place, and who is allowed to execute those processes?
- What about deletion? How does removal of data at master source cascade?
- New stage: TRANSFER
- Starts whole new lifecycle
- Move from one biz unit to another, between organizations, or out of data center and onto user laptop
- How is data collected, processed and shared and who has access to it at each stage?
- Data Governance and Technology Framework
- Secure infrastructure – safeguard against malware, unauthorized access
- Identity and access control
- Information protection – while at risk, or while in transit; protecting both structured and unstructured data
- Auditing and reporting – monitoring
- Action plan
- Remember that technology is only part of the solution
- Must catalog the sensitive info
- Catalog it (what is the org impact)
- Plan the technical controls
- Can do a matrix with stages on left (collect/update/process/delete/transfer/storage) and categories at top (infrastructure, identity and lifecycle, info protection, auditing and reporting)
- For collection, answers across may be “secure both client and web”, “authN/authZ” and “encrypt traffic”
- Authentication and authorization
- For update, may log user during auditing and reporting
- For process, may secure host (infra) and “log reason” in audit/reporting
- Microsoft Privacy Standard for Developers 3.1
- Guidelines for creating notice and consent into applications
- Best practices for privacy that MS follows
- Other tools
- IT Compliance Management Guide
- Compliance Planning Guide (Word)
- Compliance Workbook (Excel)
- IT Compliance Management Guide
- Data Governance Website
Programming Microsoft .NET Services
I hope to spend a sizeable amount of time this year getting smarter on this topic, so Aaron’s session was a no-brainer today. Of course I’ll be much happier if I can actually call the damn services from the office (TCP ports blocked). Must spend time applying the HTTP ONLY calling technique. Key Takeaway: Dig into queues and routers and options in their respective policies and read the new whitepapers updated for the recent CTP release.
- Initial focus of the offering is on three key developer challenges
- Application integration and connectivity
- Communication between cloud and on-premises apps
- Clearly we’ve solved this problem in some apps (IM, file sharing), but lots of plumbing we don’t want to write
- Access control (federation)
- How can our app understand the various security tokens and schemes present in our environment and elsewhere?
- Message orchestration
- Coordinate activities happening across locations centrally
- Application integration and connectivity
- .NET Service Bus
- What’s the challenge?
- Give external users secure access to my apps
- Unknown scale of integration or usage
- Services may be running behind firewalls not typically accessible from the outside
- Approach
- High scale, high availability bus that supports open Internet protocols
- Gives us global naming system in the cloud and don’t have to deal with lack of IP v4 available addresses
- Service registry provides mapping from URIs to service
- Can use ATOM pub interface to programmatically push endpoint entries to the cloud
- Connectivity through relay or direct connect
- Relay means that you actually go through the relay service in the bus
- For direct, the relay helps negotiate a direct connection between the parties
- The NetOneWayRelayBinding and NetEventRelayBinding don’t have a OOB WCF binding comparison, but both are set up for the most aggressive network traversal of the new bindings
- For standard (one way) relay, need TCP 828 open on the receiver side (one way messages through TCP tunnel)
- Q: Do relay bindings encrypt username/pw credentials sent to the bus? Must be through ACS.
- Create specific binding config for binding in order to set connection mode
- Have new “connectionstatechangedevent” so that client can respond to event after connection switches from relay to direct connection as result of relay negotiations based on “direct” binding config value
- Similar thing happens with IM when exchanging files; some clients are smart enough to negotiate direct connections after the session is established
- Did quick demo showing performance of around 900 messages per second until the auto switch to direct when all of sudden we saw 2600+ messages per second
- For multi-cast binding (netEventRelayBinding), need same TCP ports open on receivers
- How deal with durability for unavailable subscribers? Answer: queues
- Now can create queue in SB account, and clients can send messages and listeners pull, even if online at different times
- Can set how long queue lives using queue policy
- Also have routers using router policy; now you can set how you want to route messages to listeners OR queues; sets a distribution policy and say distribute to “all” or “one” through a round-robin
- Routers can feed queues or even other routers
- What’s the challenge?
- .NET Access Control Service
- Challenges
- Support many identities, tokens and such without your app having to know them all
- Approach
- Automate federation through hosted STS (token service)
- Model access control as rules
- Trust established between STS and my app and NOT between my app and YOUR app
- STS must transform into a claim consumable by your app (it really just does authentication (now) and transform claims)
- Rules are set via web site or new management APIs
- Define scopes, rules, claim types and keys
- When on solution within management portal, manage scopes; set your solution; if pick workflow, can manage in additional interface;
- E.g. For send rule, anytime there is a username token with X (and auth) then produce output claim with value of “Send”
- Service bus is looking at “send” and “listen” rules
- Note that you CAN do unauthenticated senders
- Challenges
- .NET Workflow Service
- Challenge
- Describe long-running processes
- Approach
- Small layer of messaging orchestration through the service bus
- Challenge
- APIs that allow you to deploy, manage and run workflows in the cloud
- Have reliable, scalable, off-premises host for workflows focused specifically on message orchestration
- Not a generic WF host; the WF has to be written for the cloud through use of specific activities
Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 