Security and privacy as an OSS afterthought?

I often talk about OSS being an afterthought for network teams. I find that they’ll often design the network before thinking about how they’ll operationalise it with an OSS solution. That’s both in terms of network products (eg developing a new device and only thinking about building the EMS later), or building networks themselves.

It can be a bit frustrating because we feel we can give better solutions if we’re in the discussion from the outset. As OSS people, I’m sure you’ll back me up on this one. But we can’t go getting all high and mighty just yet. We might just be doing the same thing… but to security, privacy and analytics teams.

In terms of security, we’ll always consider security-based requirements (usually around application security, access management, etc) in our vendor / product selections. We’ll also include Data Control Network (DCN) designs and security appliance (eg firewalls, IPS, etc) effort in our implementation plans. Maybe we’ll even prescribe security zone plans for our OSS. But security is more than that (check out this post for example). We often overlook the end-to-end aspects such central authentication, API hardening, server / device patching, data sovereignty, etc and it then gets picked up by the relevant experts well into the project implementation.

Another one is privacy. Regulations like GDPR and the Facebook trials show us the growing importance of data privacy. I have to admit that historically, I’ve been guilty on this one, figuring that the more data sets I could stitch together, the greater the potential for unlocking amazing insights. Just one problem with that model – the more data sets that are stitched together, the more likely that privacy issues arise.

We increasingly have to figure out ways to weave security, privacy and analytics into our OSS planning up-front and not just think of them as overlays that can be developed after all of our key decisions have been made.

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