System HealthPhysical Health

“You’ve Got Me…Who’s Got You?” Lois Lane, Superman

Very often in the context of enterprise systems, the focus is on the applications running.  Behavioral security, data visualization and even endpoint management and intrusion detection all focus on what is occurring within the confines of an operating system.  These are incredibly important aspects of security and management and very smart people are working hard to make this area of the enterprise as safe as possible.

Behavioral security, data visualization and even endpoint management and intrusion detection all focus on what is occurring within the confines of an operating system.  These are incredibly important aspects of security and management and very smart people are working hard to make this area of the enterprise as safe as possible.

But there is more to the enterprise than just applications.

In talking with some large Oil and Gas companies, we discovered that the physical health of remote systems is critically important and, currently, it is being ignored at the enterprise level.  In those cases, primary and secondary valves would fail and only then would system monitoring kick in and tell them that the flow of oil (which is being measured by an APP) is having issues.  The solution, at that point, takes days to correct…and a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour in lost oil production.

In the healthcare space, there appears to be a capital asset tracking issue or, in better terms, nobody can seem to find the equipment.  This is not some extreme endpoint, rather it seems that up to 40% of the purchased equipment is “lost” even though it is connected – somewhere – in the overall hospital network.  This causes more equipment to be purchased, and then lost, in a vicious cycle.

Conversations with financial companies reveal a different physical issues – namely data flow bottlenecks.  While a lot of effort has been placed in application-level data processing, these capabilities disappear when looking at data flowing in transit between devices – especially under volume.  The solution has been to throw more equipment at the problem in a general sense without understanding where the core issues reside.

All of these challenges are what we call System Health.  Sure the applications are being monitored – but how about the devices upon which they rely for everything?  Where are the fail safes and management of device-level configuration, security and health monitoring?  By the time an application is sufficiently disrupted, it might be too late for that device.  Then admins run into business disruptions, many times costly, in order to remedy the situation.

Bear is providing an application-agnostic ability to identify and visually manage devices and their connections.  We think that knowing every device, the state of that device from a configuration/security/health perspective and control the core behaviors of those devices is critical as enterprises continue to grow.  Perhaps this ability is used to mitigate outages or find lost assets.  Maybe companies use it to visualize data flowing in a system to prevent bottlenecks or remove redundant, unused pathways.  Maybe other companies use this information to automate compliance efforts through an actionable compliance report.

We are not yet sure how this product will be used – we only know that ignoring the physical side of an enterprise is growing too costly to ignore.

If you have ideas on how people might use our product, please let us know!