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I remember back in the 90's that there was talk about building out a business focused Internet. I'm now starting to think that it's necessary. I know a lot of

I remember back in the 90's that there was talk about building out a business focused Internet. I'm now starting to think that it's necessary. I know a lot of people will just say that these companies just need to pay attention to security, but the problem is asymmetrical. Focusing on security is like being a pacifist when dealing with a hostile bully. You get your butt kicked a lot.

corty 5y ago
Business-focused? How should that do anything about security? Do you want to charge an entry fee that evil people cannot afford? Or just label it "serious business only"? Have things audited somehow? I don't think any of that would do any good.
- s5300 5y ago
  Presumably operating at a much lower level in general so attack vectors are greatly reduced.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  Yeahhhh. Honestly, "business-focused" decisions like cost-center accounting, and various schemes to save money, are really how we got into this mess. A lot of our appalling lack of computer security basically comes from the equivalent of a hospital administration refusing to allow surgeons the time to wash their hands. As "reductio ad absurdum" of a metaphor as that seems, that was actually the huge culture battle that got fought when germ theory came out - tons of medical practices refused to waste time on such "silliness". Over time it became a cultural norm, and then became a protected practice through professional guilds, and through law, so that even if hospital administrators push for surgeons to hurry up and fit more patients into a day (and they do), their prerogative to take their time and do it right is institutionally protected. We don't have anything like that in programming.
paxys 5y ago
How is a "business focused Internet" different from the internet? Why would it not have the exact same flaws?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  The business-focused internet: 1. Has enterprise-grade auditing and report generation. For what? Doesn't matter, nobody reads them. 2. Has an account manager for every open port. 3. Has IBM/Oracle style exponential cost increases for locked-in customers.
goatinaboat 5y ago
remember back in the 90's that there was talk about building out a business focused Internet. They exist. Radianz, BPIPE and several more.
jerf 5y ago
Almost every concrete way to manifest "building a business focused internet" is something that the businesses can already do, today. They aren't doing it. It doesn't do any good if your secretary needs access to the "business focused internet" and also has to get mail from the "normal" internet. The transitive nature of networks makes things very hard to isolate in practice. People and businesses are going to have to accept a lot more inconvenience to isolate things better, and that inconvenience is real money, too. The problem is you end up with yet another manifestation of a common business problem; if you take the time and money to build a secure business, that carefully isolates everything correctly, that hires good security engineers, that accepts higher costs of doing business, you'll be in a position to handle a cyberpocalypse better than your competitors and you will reap the benefits when that day comes. The problem is, you'll never survive to see that day come because you'll have been utterly outcompeted by your competition that cut corners and carelessly, but effectively, integrated their systems, and over-optimized their internal systems to function more cheaply day-by-day. You may have taken the time to build on the rock while they threw shacks up on the sand but they end up killing you before the storm comes.
- Animats 5y ago
  The first step is reliable backups. Preferably to write-once media. And both onsite and offsite. Hard backups aren't expensive. Not of everything. Just the important stuff. Maybe a snapshot of the whole business once a month in addition to transaction backups. Any business doing financial transactions should be backing them up to something like Blu-Ray disks. Preferably the blanks with the 1000-year lifetime. US banks are already required to do something like that, by the FDIC.
  - worik 5y ago
    That is much harder than it sounds. For one thing backups are no use if you do not test them. How often are you going to bring your systems down to test restorinig from backup? If you do not how do you know they work?
    - viraptor 5y ago
aaomidi 5y ago
No one is forcing you to connect to the internet really. Plenty businesses run their own private network.
yosamino 5y ago
A "business focused internet" is a security measure. That sounds a lot like "do not connect one's valuable and vulnerabe machines to the open internet" which is something one should aready be doing in the first place and one can and should be doing it right now with the current internet we have.

corty 5y ago

Business-focused? How should that do anything about security? Do you want to charge an entry fee that evil people cannot afford? Or just label it "serious business only"? Have things audited somehow? I don't think any of that would do any good.

s5300 5y ago
Presumably operating at a much lower level in general so attack vectors are greatly reduced.
Jetrel 5y ago
Yeahhhh. Honestly, "business-focused" decisions like cost-center accounting, and various schemes to save money, are really how we got into this mess. A lot of our appalling lack of computer security basically comes from the equivalent of a hospital administration refusing to allow surgeons the time to wash their hands. As "reductio ad absurdum" of a metaphor as that seems, that was actually the huge culture battle that got fought when germ theory came out - tons of medical practices refused to waste time on such "silliness". Over time it became a cultural norm, and then became a protected practice through professional guilds, and through law, so that even if hospital administrators push for surgeons to hurry up and fit more patients into a day (and they do), their prerogative to take their time and do it right is institutionally protected. We don't have anything like that in programming.

paxys 5y ago

How is a "business focused Internet" different from the internet? Why would it not have the exact same flaws?

whatshisface 5y ago
The business-focused internet: 1. Has enterprise-grade auditing and report generation. For what? Doesn't matter, nobody reads them. 2. Has an account manager for every open port. 3. Has IBM/Oracle style exponential cost increases for locked-in customers.

goatinaboat 5y ago

remember back in the 90's that there was talk about building out a business focused Internet. They exist. Radianz, BPIPE and several more.

jerf 5y ago

Almost every concrete way to manifest "building a business focused internet" is something that the businesses can already do, today. They aren't doing it. It doesn't do any good if your secretary needs access to the "business focused internet" and also has to get mail from the "normal" internet. The transitive nature of networks makes things very hard to isolate in practice. People and businesses are going to have to accept a lot more inconvenience to isolate things better, and that inconvenience is real money, too. The problem is you end up with yet another manifestation of a common business problem; if you take the time and money to build a secure business, that carefully isolates everything correctly, that hires good security engineers, that accepts higher costs of doing business, you'll be in a position to handle a cyberpocalypse better than your competitors and you will reap the benefits when that day comes. The problem is, you'll never survive to see that day come because you'll have been utterly outcompeted by your competition that cut corners and carelessly, but effectively, integrated their systems, and over-optimized their internal systems to function more cheaply day-by-day. You may have taken the time to build on the rock while they threw shacks up on the sand but they end up killing you before the storm comes.

Animats 5y ago
The first step is reliable backups. Preferably to write-once media. And both onsite and offsite. Hard backups aren't expensive. Not of everything. Just the important stuff. Maybe a snapshot of the whole business once a month in addition to transaction backups. Any business doing financial transactions should be backing them up to something like Blu-Ray disks. Preferably the blanks with the 1000-year lifetime. US banks are already required to do something like that, by the FDIC.
- worik 5y ago
  That is much harder than it sounds. For one thing backups are no use if you do not test them. How often are you going to bring your systems down to test restorinig from backup? If you do not how do you know they work?
  - viraptor 5y ago

aaomidi 5y ago

No one is forcing you to connect to the internet really. Plenty businesses run their own private network.

yosamino 5y ago

A "business focused internet" is a security measure. That sounds a lot like "do not connect one's valuable and vulnerabe machines to the open internet" which is something one should aready be doing in the first place and one can and should be doing it right now with the current internet we have.