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Government Agencies Leverage New Technology for Data Flow

By marketing@site-a.com

LAKE FOREST, CALIF., AUGUST 20, 2019 — PSSC Labs, a developer of custom High Performance Computing and Big Data computing solutions today shares how the CyberRax Data Flow Pipleline is helping various DOD organizations achieve their goals.

The Federal Government has spent decades collecting and storing huge data sets, covering everything from census and population records to crime reports and infrastructure data. The analytics retrieved from this data has assisted our government agencies in commissioning greater responsiveness and efficiencies at every level, making it truly invaluable to our society. Federal agencies simply can’t afford to suffer from computational roadblocks. Government servers need to be able to perform streaming analytics while also providing full control over their own data, especially when it comes to governance, security and performance.   

PSSC Labs, in partnership with Cloudera, is deploying the CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline as a truly turnkey system engineered specifically to meet the data transport needs and security requirements of Federal Agencies. The CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline comes complete with all necessary storage, network, operating system and application software including Cloudera Data Flow (CDF). CDF is built on top of Apache Nifi, a powerful and user-friendly data routing application originally developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). With CDF, users have the ability to create simple graphical models that direct data across multiple networks with all necessary data provenance required for the most secure environments.  

A Truly Turn-key Platform 

According to Alex Lesser, PSSC Labs Vice President, the real value of CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline is a production-ready platform out of the box. “What we see happening with the delivery of CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline is a significant reduction in time and cost, allowing federal agencies to see true value much sooner,” says Lesser. With 48 processor cores, 4 GB memory per core, 264TB RAW storage capacity and dual 10GigE network backplane, CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline can fulfill the most demanding environments. Federal agencies can leverage the engineering expertise of PSSC Labs high performance and high reliability platform. That’s why it only makes sense that government agencies including NASA, NIH, DOD and many more have partnered with PSSC Labs in an effort to quickly process, store, analyze and protect their massive amounts of data. 

The U.S. Air Force recently deployed several CyberRax Data Flow Pipelines for both their NIPR and SIPR networks. The goal of these deployments is to collect, transport, and distribute cybersecurity data from every Air Force installation worldwide on both NIPR and SIPR. This solution allows for data to be sent to multiple core locations and fed downstream to multiple cybersecurity tools for analysis. 

American Made

As an American manufacturer, PSSC Labs provides a level of security and trust that other foreign manufacturers simply lack. The CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline can be purchased via several contract vehicles including GSA, CHESS and NETCENTS. PSSC Labs is already working closely with Department of Defense agencies to help them achieve their operational mandate to ingest and direct data from disparate sources all with the required security provisions out of the box. We know that government servers need to be 100% operational at all time, without sacrificing speed, analytics, or security, which is why our team of engineers is available for support for the lifetime of your system.

About PSSC Labs 

For technology powered visionaries with a passion for challenging the status quo, PSSC Labs is the answer for hand-crafted HPC and Big Data computing solutions that deliver relentless performance with the absolute lowest total cost of ownership.  

 We are true innovators offering high performance computing solutions to solve the world’s most demanding problems. For 25+ years, organizations of all sizes and from a variety of sectors rely on PSSC Labs’ computing systems. We are proud to support many departments within the United States government, Fortune 500 companies, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.  

All products are designed and built at the company’s headquarters in Lake Forest, California. 

PSSC Labs and CyberSecurity Malaysia Team Up to Crunch Data and Crush Hackers

By marketing@site-a.com

National cybersecurity specialist agency selected PSSC Labs to combat cybersecurity threats

LAKE FOREST, CALIF., FEBRUARY 26, 2018 /PRWEB/ — PSSC Labs, a developer of custom High Performance Computing and Big Data computing solutions, announced today it was selected by CyberSecurity Malaysia (CSM) to help facilitate, manage, securely store and access massive amounts of cyber forensic data by building a custom turn-key cluster server.

CyberSecurity Malaysia is the national cybersecurity specialist agency under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI). The role of CSM is to provide specialized cybersecurity services that contribute towards a bigger national objective of preventing or minimizing disruptions to critical information infrastructure in order to protect the public, the economy and government services. CSM receives about 10,000 security incident reports each year. Recently, CSM has seen a growing number of cyber-incidents with fraud topping the list followed by intrusion, malicious codes and cyber-harassment. As of October 2017, CSM received 3,240 reported incidents on fraud; 1,781 on intrusion; 694 on malicious codes and 499 on cyber-harassment.

To facilitate, manage, securely store and access massive amounts of cyber-forensic data, CSM required an infrastructure upgrade. CSM security experts embarked on a worldwide hunt for a vendor partner and selected PSSC Labs to custom build a turn-key cluster server that could be delivered to Malaysia. With over 25 years of experience providing the most cutting edge HPC and Big Data computing solutions to customers including the US Army, NASA and other major US research universities such as Harvard, PSSC Labs had the precise expertise that CSM was looking for.

PSSC Labs engineers custom-built a CloudOOP Rax Cluster server solution to meet CSM’s requirements of a powerful ready-to-deploy system that would not be an energy drain. The tightly integrated CloudOOP Rax solution provides superior performance with a framework that enables a single view of diverse streams of security data, allowing CSM to rapidly detect and respond to emerging threats.

The complete system included ten PSSC Labs CloudOOP 12000 Data Nodes and three CloudSeek Name Nodes. All the necessary rack, 10GigE network switch and power connections were preconfigured and included. They also installed Hortonworks HDP Data Platform and Apache Metron which were preconfigured for the CSM team. Apache Metron is a streaming analytics application that makes it faster and easier for security operations personnel to do their job. It is a next generation SOC (security operations center) data analytics and response application that integrates a variety of open source big data technologies into a centralized tool for security monitoring and analysis. Total storage capacity of the system is 150 terabytes.

By using PSSC Labs hardware and system, CSM hopes to have high processing performance for central analysis in analyzing multiple incident images. CSM will also utilize the hardware to analyze and visualize large amounts of data for malware analytics where the size of data can be as big as 100gb/year and increasing, said CyberSecurity Malaysia’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Solahuddin Shamsuddin. “The PSSC Labs system will act as the platform for data processing and analytics as well as visualization. The visualization will be fed to stakeholders with dashboard access.”

To ensure the installation was flawless, CSM organized a Strategic Training and Working Visit to PSSC Labs in the fall of 2017. The participants were from the Digital Forensic Department in CyberSecurity Malaysia. They were trained on Big Data platform and technology by PSSC Labs engineers.

The PSSC Labs platform will also provide sufficient resources for CSM to incorporate AI into its offerings. Artificial intelligence will enable CSM to predict cyberattacks before they happen by detecting changes or anomalies. The country has a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals, and AI will act as a “force multiplier” to enable fewer analysts to identify, thwart and counter a far greater number of attacks. It will also provide analysts with “situational awareness” by identifying and classifying any backend limitations a system may have. Artificial intelligence enables a “proactive defense”, constantly monitoring for vulnerabilities that could be exploited for malicious purposes.

About PSSC Labs 

For technology powered visionaries with a passion for challenging the status quo, PSSC Labs is the answer for hand-crafted HPC and Big Data computing solutions that deliver relentless performance with the absolute lowest total cost of ownership.  

 We are true innovators offering high performance computing solutions to solve the world’s most demanding problems. For 25+ years, organizations of all sizes and from a variety of sectors rely on PSSC Labs’ computing systems. We are proud to support many departments within the United States government, Fortune 500 companies, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.  

All products are designed and built at the company’s headquarters in Lake Forest, California.

Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/02/prweb15236866.htm

 

PSSC Labs Featured in Cloud Tech News: Four industries where on-premises infrastructure beats the cloud

By marketing@site-a.com

Cloud computing has fundamentally transformed information technology by offering enterprises an allegedly cheaper, more flexible, and relatively maintenance-free alternative to purchasing their own IT infrastructure. However, despite the mad rush to migrate to the cloud, cloud solutions are not always the best or least expensive choice, particularly in industries that work with very large, complex data sets, perform many intricate mathematical calculations, possess invaluable digital intellectual property, or are subject to certain compliance standards.

Let’s take a look at four industries where in-house IT infrastructure still beats the cloud.

Cybersecurity

In the cybersecurity field, the ability to process extremely large data sets as quickly as possible is crucial, especially as cyber attacks shift away from “lone wolf” one-off hacks and towards highly organized, sophisticated operations carried out by well-trained cyber criminals. IBM estimates that the average organization encounters an average of 200,000 security event alerts each day. An enormous amount of computing power is required to run the SIEM systems that not only detect those anomalies, but also analyze them, separate the false positives from the possible attacks, and deliver actionable information to security analysts – way more power than even the most robust cloud solution could possibly deliver.

In addition to latency problems, the amount of bandwidth consumed would become very expensive, very quickly, making on-premises equipment the most cost-effective solution over time. On-premises cybersecurity hardware also prevents chain-reaction situations where client organizations end up getting hacked because the cloud vendor that their cybersecurity provider was using did.

Adtech

The internet has transformed the way in which consumers and businesses shop. Long buying cycles have been replaced by “just-in-time,” last-minute purchasing decisions, and advertising-weary prospects are using ad blockers, email filters, and DVR fast-forward functions to tune out traditional advertising. To reach these elusive prospects, companies are turning to ad tech, which employs extensive market research and big data analytics to deliver highly targeted marketing messages to qualified prospects at the precise time that they are ready to buy.

The complex data sets and high-level analytics that power the ad tech industry require computing power that is already beyond what any could solution could offer. As the industry matures, ad tech firms will require even more power and more storage space. On-premises equipment can be scaled much more quickly than cloud solutions, and latency problems are avoided.

The ad tech industry also faces intellectual property issues. As Amazon, Google, and other cloud providers enter the market research and ad tech spaces themselves, questions arise as to the safety of digital intellectual property stored on a competing company’s cloud service. Dropbox listed Amazon’s move into the file-sharing space as one of the reasons why it decided to ditch AWS for its own equipment.

Life sciences

The life sciences industry is grappling with a “data avalanche” of clinical results, disease states, scientific studies, and individual patient data, which results in stratospheric cloud bills and latency problems. Because researchers work on limited budgets, simply storing all of this data on the cloud could deplete a project’s funding – and that’s before anything is actually done with it.

Cyber security and compliance issues also come into play due to the sensitive nature of this data. Storing patient data on the cloud may result in an organization running afoul of HIPAA and other privacy regulations if the cloud provider gets hacked, even if the hack turns out to be the provider’s fault.

Finally, on-premises hardware, unlike cloud solutions, keeps running even if the internet is down, which makes on-site equipment a must for scientists who are performing research in remote areas where internet access is spotty.

Design and engineering

Much like cyber security, ad tech, and the life sciences, design and engineering involves performing intricate calculations on very large, complex data sets, as well as running memory-intensive software and generating terabytes of new data every day. A cloud solution would be both wildly expensive and far too slow. In particular, cloud servers offer very poor interdomain communication; a physical server equipped with a high-performance communication architecture such as Intel’s Omni-Path is less expensive than a cloud solution is less expensive and offers low communication latency, low power consumption, and a high throughput.

Design and engineering companies also face a constant threat from digital intellectual property theft; everything from new product prototypes to R&D data could be targeted by competitors, cyber extortionists, or even foreign governments. Digital IP is simply too sensitive to be stored in the cloud, especially since hackers are increasingly targeting cloud providers as the industry grows.

Beyond cloud-first hype, a balanced approach

Despite its drawbacks, cloud computing does have a place in many organizations’ IT ecosystems. Many companies use on-premises equipment to handle standard functions and store highly sensitive data and employ cloud solutions when they require additional capacity or to store less-sensitive data.

Instead of migrating to the cloud because it’s trendy, and “everyone” says it costs less and offers more flexibility than in-house equipment, enterprises should take a step back, consider their individual computing needs, and perform an objective cost analysis.

Source: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2017/dec/04/four-industries-where-premises-infrastructure-beats-cloud/

PSSC Labs Featured in Becker’s Hospital Review: Is cloud computing the best option to handle the life sciences data avalanche?

By marketing@site-a.com

While cloud services are becoming more sophisticated and customizable, they may fall short in handling the “data avalanche” that the life sciences industry is grappling with.

Data sets that are too large and complex for traditional data processing methods to handle are a sticky issue in the sciences, perhaps no more so than in the life sciences industry. From biotechnology to pharmaceuticals to medical device manufacturers, private-sector organizations and research institutions spend their days performing research and development tasks that produce terabytes of raw data gleaned from clinical results, disease states, scientific studies, and individual patient data.

This “data avalanche” must then be sorted, analyzed, and distilled into actionable information so that new medications, biomedical devices, and other products can be developed, refined, tested, and approved for sale as quickly as possible. Because of the gravity of the decisions that depend on this information — human lives are literally at stake – life sciences companies operate under some of the closest scrutiny and strictest regulations in the world.

To cope with the data avalanche and compete in an increasingly hypercompetitive global marketplace, many life sciences organizations are considering cloud computing solutions to increase their data processing power and storage capabilities. However, cloud solutions can often fall short in big data processing capabilities and result in cybersecurity issues, eye-popping monthly bills, and other problems.

Big Data = Big Cloud Bills
Cloud providers are quick to tout the alleged cost savings of using their services over purchasing in-house IT infrastructure. They claim that customers do not have to come up with large capital investments upfront and pay only for what they use, as they go. This works out well for some companies, particularly small start-up firms that are cash-poor and that aren’t dealing with very large data sets or highly complex computations.

However, cloud services such as AWS are notorious for sky-high monthly bills filled with hidden “gotchas,” especially for companies that require a lot of computing power. Deep Value, which develops complex research-driven trading algorithms, decided to run some numbers once their AWS bills began to exceed $70,000/month. In the end, they discovered that using AWS was 380% more expensive than purchasing their own high-performance computing equipment.

In addition to unexpected line items on their monthly invoice, cloud customers can also be hit hard by the indirect costs of performance problems and cyberattacks.

Cloud Performance May Not Be Up to Par
In the life sciences, the reliability and uptime of mission-critical systems are paramount, and a key marketing point of cloud services is the idea that customers don’t have to worry about maintaining their own equipment. Yet as cloud computing grows in popularity, cracks are appearing in its foundation. In February 2017, AWS suffered an outage that was so bad, it couldn’t get into its own systems to communicate with the throngs of customers that were knocked offline – all due to a misconfiguration on the part of an AWS employee.

The cloud doesn’t necessarily beat in-house infrastructure in the performance category, either, especially when processing enormous data sets. Cloud service providers typically run multiple servers in different locations, which can cause very serious latency issues when transferring large data sets and performing the highly complex calculations that life sciences companies run all day long.

The Dark Cloud of Cybersecurity Concerns
Over the past few months, an epidemic of AWS breaches impacted organizations large and small, including Verizon, the Republican National Committee, and a company called Talent Pen that processed job applications containing the personal information of thousands of Americans who held Top Secret security clearances. All of these breaches were due to the affected organizations (or their third-party vendors) not having configured their AWS security settings properly.

Cloud security settings can be very tricky, but even if an organization gets them right, they can still be hacked through no fault of their own. Because so much valuable data from so many different organizations is being migrated to the cloud, data centers have become highly attractive targets for hackers. Financial regulators and the tech industry are so concerned about the possibility of a major attack on AWS that in the wake of the February outage, they sounded the alarm over what they deem an over-reliance on the AWS service by the organizations that form the bedrock of American society, particularly financial companies.

The cloud security risk to life sciences organizations is three pronged: a cyberattack that brings down their cloud could leave them unable to operate; invaluable market research and digital intellectual property could be stolen by competitors or foreign governments; and a hack could mean running afoul of a myriad of government regulations and being hit with millions of dollars of fines and lawsuits.

In-House IT Infrastructure Means Optimum Customization & Control
Finally, cloud services suffer from customization and control issues. When using a cloud service, the ability to make changes is quite limited. Services such as AWS offer a menu of items that fit most organizations’ needs – unless those needs are highly specialized. Organizations that own their own computing equipment have complete control over their data environments and can act quickly to make adjustments or implement new features.

Rather than rushing to migrate to the cloud, certain life sciences organizations might be better served by investing in their own high-performance computing equipment to reduce their costs, improve their cyber security, and make the data avalanche work for them to accelerate innovation. Only a true comparison between the two can shed light on which option works best.

Source: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/is-cloud-computing-the-best-option-to-handle-the-life-sciences-data-avalanche.html