New initiative is looking for a few good cybersecurity pros

Amid concerns that the U.S. has a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, a new consortium of U.S. government and private organizations aims to identify students with strong computer skills and train them as cybersecurity guardians, warriors and "top guns."

The consortium - including the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Air Force Association and the SANS Institute - on Monday announced a new initiative to identify, train and find jobs for students interested in cybersecurity.

The U.S. Cyber Challenge initiative will bring together three existing cybersecurity competitions for high school or college students and launch new in-person competitions, said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training organization. In addition, the organizers of the U.S. Cyber Challenge plan to offer scholarships to promising students and hook them up with internships and jobs, Paller said.

The initiative is a response to a growing concern that the U.S. will not have enough cybersecurity professionals in coming years, participants in a kick-off event said. Some experts have said the U.S. has about 1,000 world-class cybersecurity experts when it needs 20 to 30 times that many, Paller said.

The U.S. Department of Defense trains just 80 cybersecurity professionals a year, noted James Lewis, director of the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program.

The pipeline for cybersecurity professionals in the U.S. is "a trickle," said Richard Schaeffer Jr., director of information assurance at the U.S. National Security Agency. "It is a really, really, really, really tiny number."

Nations including China are actively recruiting and developing cybersecurity professionals, Paller added. Without training and development programs, the U.S. faces getting further and further behind, he said.

One of the goals of the initiative will be to promote cybersecurity careers as "cool," organizers said. Two of the existing competitions that will be part of the program, the Air Force Association's CyberPatriot Defense Competition and the SANS Institute's NetWars Capture the Flag Competition, use a video game format to draw students' interest.

"You can't find a kid today who doesn't know what 'Grand Theft Auto' is," said Sanford Schlitt, vice chairman of the board for aerospace education at the Air Force Association.

The association launched a limited version of its CyberPatriot Defense Competition in January. A second round of the competition, with registration closing in September, has attracted 270 high school teams from 44 states, plus Japan and South Korea, he said.

The NetWars competition, with high school and college students focused on attacking and defending computers, drew 80 competitors in its first round held in June, said James Shewmaker, founder of cybersecurity vendor Bluenotch and key developer of the game. The winner of the first round was able to find a vulnerability in the scoring system and give himself additional points, and organizers decided that was fair game, Shewmaker said.

While parts of the U.S. Cyber Challenge are still coming together, the organizers are getting offers of support from many groups, including Google and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Paller said. Companies and organizations can help in many ways, including helping to organize cybersecurity camps, he said.

The new initiative is the "best news story in cybersecurity," Paller said. "The Cyber Challenge is a step in the right direction."

EMC fine tunes its management software portfolio

EMC Wednesday introduced the fruit of many acquisitions, organic development and integration work with its Ionix IT management software and services portfolio, which the vendor says will help customers more easily control next-generation networks.

EMC Ionix consists of four IT management product sets: Service Discovery and Mapping; Service Management; Data Center Automation and Compliance; and IT operations Intelligence. The software and services in each category support automated discovery, model-based management, ITIL processes, integrated workflows, automation and root-cause analysis, according to EMC.

"Ionix is the result of a five-year strategy bringing together a range of products, with the Configuresoft product anchoring the suite with its data center automation technology," says Bob Quillin, senior director of marketing for EMC Ionix. "The integrations enable customers to manage across domains and monitor virtualization across all areas of IT, not treating it as a silo."

EMC Ionix incorporates technology recently acquired with Configuresoft and EMC products partly built on software from the vendor's Smarts, nLayers, Voyence and Infra acquisitions. Ionix also puts EMC's ControlCenter to work to manage performance and availability across network, storage, servers and applications as well as tracking end-to-end services. Part of the motivation to update its management suite now was the current need to manage virtual infrastructure alongside physical machines and the growing appeal of cloud computing, EMC says.

"Ionix is not just managing silos, but centralizing around management and using virtualization to drive management to the next level," Quillin says.

EMC's approach to incorporate virtualization technology into its management software could address a current pain point in enterprise IT management. Research firms such as IDC expect virtualization adoption to slow if enterprise IT customers aren't able to automate virtualization management and simplify the ongoing operations. Industry watchers say traditional management software products might not be built to adequately address more dynamic environments.

"HP and BMC are two leaders in the space for sure – but they built monolithic software to support monolithic physical infrastructures – and were built well before anyone even heard of virtualization, let alone the cloud," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, in a statement. "At every major disruption point, huge new market opportunities are created and the eventual winners tend to be the ones that are purpose-built for the new world order – not those who bolt-on functions to last year's model."

While Ionix would likely increase competition among EMC and management market leaders BMC, CA, HP and IBM, the vendor will still have to overcome challenges to be chosen as a primary management vendor. In an analysis of the management software market, Forrester Research commended EMC's progress and pointed out that more work needed to be done.

"EMC's recent acquisitions, such as nLayers and Voyence, have placed it as a leading configuration vendor, but broader management coverage is questionable. It has some great weapons in its arsenal with Smarts and now Infra, but it must accelerate its M&A expansion and internal development to capitalize on its assets and enter the elite class of anchors," reads the report "Managing the IT Management Software Portfolio," which was published prior to EMC's Configuresoft acquisition.

Updates, integrations and common platform support will be included in EMC Ionix products immediately.

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