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The New Compliance World Order: Is Big Brother Dictating IT Policy Now?
A little bird filled us in recently on an interesting meeting at one of what we might once have called "bulge bracket" banks. In short, if you are working in a large financial institution in the United States you are likely to see some version of the "New Compliance World Order" soon.
The central premise of the IT strategy described to Zero Hedge is total, centralized control of all the informational assets of the firm. Translated: All documents, files, databases, spreadsheets and the like will reside on a central server and be accessible only by logging into the server and pulling documents as they are needed. Personal hard drives? Gone. Jump drives? Prohibited/disabled on client machines. To quote the attendee quoting another attendee at the meeting "You aren't going to have a C: drive anymore." Rumor has it that EMC Documentum will be the vendor of choice. This isn't new stuff, only the scale is unique. Many of the more paranoid hedge funds use similar technology today. But big banks? That's a pretty big project.
Why bother?
Apparently, this is coming directly from the government. The Treasury was mentioned specifically (though legal eagles may wonder about that). Why? One can only guess, but the off-the-cuff, whispered, outside-in-the-hall comment of one outside consultant present at the discussions may shed some light on the topic.
"This bank leaks like a sieve."
Certainly there are many reasons to centralize control over intellectual property. This seems, however, a bit excessive. It would, however, have the side-effect of clamping down on legitimate information leakage quite a bit. Having said that, it could very well have a deleterious effect on whistle blowing. And this is the "dual-use" paradox of technology like this. It makes the kinds of crimes Sergey Aleynikov is accused of harder to bring off, but it also squelches would-be whistle blowers. After all, from the perspective of the bank, the only difference between a whistle blower and an IP thief is the nature (civil v. criminal) of the legal actions after the incident.
There are, obviously, practical implications as well.
Who hasn't occasionally violated (often with the tacit acquiescence of one's superiors) employer policies on taking confidential material home over the weekend? Those days might be over. (As an aside, Zero Hedge Capital is going long late-night car service vendors and janitorial firms that service the big banks).
What happens when there is an internal network outage? All work in the firm ceases, and a 15 year veteran of IT slips into cardiac arrest? We are skeptical of centralized information processing. An errant backhoe (or late-night cleaning crew) can do quite a lot of damage if you are depending on a few lines into a centralized server. We thought the network computer model was dead long ago (and not just because Larry Ellison is a total asshole).
Think your bank is small enough to be immune? Maybe not. Word is, if you want SPIC insurance, you're a Documentum user.
(Is it ironic or sad that Deutsch Atkins, as I type this, is advertising whistle blower and wrongful termination services on Bloomberg radio?)
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The streets will flow with the blood of the Infidels.
I am Chumbawamba.
This is the best site on the whole wide internets
A lot of industries are already deploying this strategy for information management across/throughout the organization. Its the technology pendulum at work here Marla. Once upon a time when the PC wasn't around, corporations used mainframes and employees connected via dumb terminals. That is still in practice. Its easier to maange from an IT resource standpoint as well. Not everyone in business needs nor should have a "C" drive. Welcome to the world of ubiquitous computing.
This is really not a "big brother" thing at all. I used this at JP back in my investment banking days (no I'm not unemployed--yet). It makes a lot of business sense for the following reason:
There are countless other benefits which i don't care to spend time explaining but long story short: this has NOTHING to do with regulators, or "big brothers." this is just good proactive business sense. sorry guys...
Except that it's the Treasury pushing it on TARP banks....
That's an interesting point, i've never thought of that. It was directly after the bear acquisition (the one where the fed gave JP $29bn for) that JP did receive these documentum machines.... hmmm. You do spike my interest marla.
That's why I'm here.
Why shouldn't it be pushed on GS at this point? and who really cares who's pusihg it on the banks? Its a good idea. Its complete gong show that GS trading platform was lifted in the first place.
"teams can work virtually 27/7 and you never have to worry..."
Except where the extra 3 hours are coming from. Maybe that is a virtual 3 hours. Maybe that is why the banks and brokers are having a hard time with money. Maybe it's just a typo.... ;-0
Its called SOX 404 -- the 404 section of Sarbanes-Oxley. Whatever a corporation does that impacts the books, it has to be preserved so as to meet Federal rules of evidence (FRE.)
IT departments are notorious for destroying anything and everything. Out of carelessness. The most humorous was a practice of "wiping" the disk drives on PCs when people left employment.
No quality control, no quality.
Some time ago, like when I was a student, all of the computers were in the "cloud." The PC thing really didn't start until the early eighties. Back then a Sysadmin/Root user was a fearsome persona.
total cost of ownership is a helluva lot cheaper when you go to a thin client based solution.
The devil is in the details.
Implementing major changes like will most likely increase risk in the short run due to operational / procedural / training issues. This stuff is easier said than done.
Anyone who has inclination to breach security will be more motivated to do the deed sooner than later. Could get interesting.
As an IT guy, I'm quite happy to see the "c drive" not be used for document storage. It's a logistical mess.
And it won't stop leaks. It will *look* better, but that's about it.
It seems to me once the document is checked out, there's very little that can stop it from propagating on the Internets.
As long as they'll hire me to babysit a Documentum installation, this works for me.
If anything, these banks will save boatloads in future legal costs. Tracking stuff through personal harddrives, etc, was a wonderful revenue generator.
Looks like the news of the past couple weeks was just prep work by the gubmint??
"dd is your friend". Linus Torvalds
The only thing surprising about this is that it took them so long to do it. They should have gone back to dumb terminals the first time that a customer database was stolen leaving their customers vulnerable to identity theft.
Between the Goldman Sachs story of the stolen code and this article, the part that has been most surprising to me is the seeming lack of respect for intellectual property and the need to protect information regardless of whether it is in the form of source code or data. I don't blame the IT workers of today for that. I blame the corporations that brought in TQM the purpose of which was to level their organizations - to rid themselves of the experienced people who had "legacy" knowledge. The "legacy" knowledge they eliminated was more than just the coding. It was business experience and business ethics, etc. What they did was to create an IT version of Lord of the Flys. And they deserve everything they got. And truth be told, I'm loving every minute of it.
Exactly. Ther eis no consipiracy theory here at all. Moving in this direction is justified for medical, insurance, military, and any other organization that wants tight control over its information. Give it up on this one Marla, you're shooting blanks.
When the Treasury shows up and tells you how to store your data and how to control access, where's the conspiracy? It's overt.
Sound like this might make it possible for every worker in the USA, and pretty soon, to fill out an online form to go to the bathroom, make a telephone call, or ogle the secretary. Also, it might make it possible for many offices to standardize all products and all thoughts. Think about the cost savings and the control: no more wasteful creativity and no more plain understandable language. We'll have the commies beat at their own game HA HA. Dilbert will have fun. Makes me think of the movie "Brazil".
Your youth and inexperience is showing Anon 5840. The Dilbert cartoons were written to document the stupidity of the implementation of TQM principles. TQM was the "new management philosophy" for IT. The IT disasters of the last decade have been the direct result of TQM. The decision to go back to a highly controlled environment for information security is the first sign I've seen of a return to sanity in the IT business.
Big Brother will be watching.
Just like 1984, your screen will be a TeleScreen with monitored video and audio surveillance a standard feature. Try to evade it, You Are Fired!
Welcome to the brave new world of Total Information Awareness.
Warning, do not stick a Post It note over the camera. The Human Rights Police will come get you.
I started using the Post-it trick a month back. Scary that they can turn on my camera at any time...
Duct tape.
Good post:
@
by Anonymous
on Thu, 07/09/2009 - 16:13
#5659
In a world of global outsourcing of hardware and the import of H1B visas any wonder events like this keep popping up? Didn't work well for IMF and World banks either, vis-à-vis India. Protectionism is a good thing
The lawyer commerical may be neirther ironic nor sad--could be prophetic.
this, quite frankly, is how all companies should be run. the only spooky piece about this is the size of the gargantuan companies involved. it's purely based on operational management as is pointed out often above. first of all, no hard drive, no distributed desktop support staff. second, backups and recovery of all data can be automated without human intervention if desired. thirdly, don't have to buy pcs. one gets the idea. you can go on all day with the cost of ownership benefits. i have friends selling this stuff to all of corporate america and it isn't conspiratorial.
GOONNNNNGGGG
Herrow. Good to see you going to owwaa pleferred modow. It rill be mucha a easiaaa to see rut re need to with dis new modow. Tank you wunning dogs.
BWAHHHhahahahahahaha
Ok, I don't often laugh at comments. You are messing up the DMA.
We do this in our three portfolio companies. We consider everything done on our computers our property. We did this because one of our sales managers erased a ton of information from his hard drive when we fired him. I finally understood why it was that when you left or got fired from a trading position, you were escorted to your desk and watched carefully as you collected your stuff.
I'm sure most Zerohedge types are anti-eminent domain, so I thought you might be interested in a Marketwatch column by Steve Gelsi, and my email to him:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- One of the nation's most ambitious infrastructure programs since the Eisenhower era appears headed for a showdown as state officials vow to fight a proposal that would give Washington more say over where to place high-voltage power lines.
With the government already spending nearly $800 billion on an economic stimulus plan passed last February and talk of more cash possibly coming in a new package, a few billion dollars to overhaul the nation's creaky power grid might not sound like much of a stretch.
But many obstacles stand in the way, ranging from the powerful "not-in-my-back-yard" syndrome at the local level to complications posed by regional power line and alternative energy efforts already under way around the country.
Q-Cells, Vestas Wind Systems
Wind power advocates argue new transmission lines are essential to meet a goal of 300 gigawatts of wind power by 2030 -- enough for 20% of the U.S.'s power needs.
Politicians from President Barack Obama on down have won votes pitching cleaner energy and green collar jobs as part of a global march toward a smaller carbon footprint. That overall push landed in the Senate this week as debate opened on whether proposed cap and trade legislation would help the economy or hurt it. See related story.
As the White House and Wall Street face the worse financial upheaval since the Great Depression, talk has risen of public works projects to mimic the massive job creation of the New Deal era of the 1930s and '40s.
Breaching the thorny topic of a new national power lines network, the chief of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission argued recently in Congress that Washington could follow the example of the 65-year-old Natural Gas Act, which helped build up the country's infrastructure to carry gas for power generation and heat.
"If the nation is to meet its (power transmission) goals, there must be a mechanism that, after the states have had an opportunity, allows a transmission developer to invoke federal authority to site the transmission facilities necessary to interconnect renewable power to the electric transmission grid and move that power to consumers," FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said at the "Future of the Grid" panel held by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce .
His view met resistance from Massachusetts public utilities chairman Paul Hibbard.
"The expansion of FERC authority into centralized resource planning and associated siting jurisdiction violates fundamental free market principles," Hibbard said.
Greater FERC eminent domain power would, "diminish or eliminate the proven benefits of competition in electricity markets, including the fostering of local renewable and energy efficiency resources, and would strip states and indeed whole regions of critical policy authority over energy resource planning."
Municipal and state public utility officials also argue that federal law now rests on their side, as they eye the courts as a likely battleground over the eminent domain issue.
Vermont Public Service Board Commissioner David Coen, speaking on behalf of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, cited the case of Piedmont Environmental Council vs. FERC.
In that lawsuit, the Fourth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals set a guideline that "clearly does not give FERC siting authority when a state affirmatively denies a siting permit application within the year," Coen said.
"Now, members of Congress and FERC, and their supporters, see the current energy and climate legislation as an opportunity to reverse the court's decision by providing FERC blanket authority to overturn well-reasoned state decisions made in good faith," Coen said in his Congressional testimony last month.
Ironically, one of the stumbling blocks to a national power grid appears to be the federal government itself, according to Rich Halvey, energy program director of the Western Governor's Association.
He said it's been taking states anywhere from three to ten years to get approval from FERC to site power lines across federal land.
"Efficient and expeditious processing of permit applications across federal lands needs to be a priority with federal agencies," Halvey said. "Still, even where federal land management agencies have tried to make processing of right-of-way permits a priority, the implementation of federal law has resulted in lengthy and inflexible federal permitting processes. Enabling FERC to pre-empt state siting processes will not fix the underlying problem."
MY EMAIL:
You don't know the half of it on eminent domain, which you discussed in your recent column. I know because I wrote the book on it, John Ryskamp, The Eminent Domain Revolt (New York: Algora 2006).
You would never have heard any of this dissent 30 years ago, but now the middle class is worried about the facts. The assault on eminent domain is an assault on West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), which basically allowed health and welfare legislation. To show you how scared the political system is, John Roberts had to sign off on the holding in West Coast IN WRITING, during his confirmation procedure. When you need to do something like that to reinforce your regime, your regime is doomed.
Quite simply, suburbia wants more control over the facts. It's a very anomalous debate: basically, a lot of it is NIMBY, but the only way to achieve it is through new Constitutional rights, which suburbia in general does not favor. So it's a big fat struggle within the suburban mindset.
If you want to follow it specifically, look at housing. Under Lindsey v. Normet, housing enjoys only "minimum scrutiny." This means that government has nearly absolute power over housing qua housing, and individuals have virtually no individually enforceable rights in housing qua housing. This is true of nearly EVERY other fact: medical care, education, you name it.
The political system is terrified of any attempt to restrict eminent domain, because it in effect raises the level of scrutiny for the facts involved in the eminent domain seizure, and it ALSO opens the door to similar treatment for other facts.
What is really going on is that the scrutiny regime is OLD and is being replaced by a new regime I call the "maintenance" regime (because the word is used in West Coast itself).
We DO change constitutional regimes in the country, and if you want to brief yourself on the history of that, I recommend an article online by G. Edward White of the University of Virginia Law School, "Historicizing Judicial Scrutiny."
I assist in the opposition to a lot of government projects, aiming to speed the way for the new regime: Atlantic Yards, O'Hare-Bensenville. These projects have stalled, and I plan on stalling many more until there are new individually enforceable rights. The politicians loathe me and REALLY loathe my book. It's quite amusing.
Maybe someone will show Madoff a bid for his A/S400
Marla, You're a bright cookie are the other contibutors at Zero hedge, but to be honest woth you, its this kind of Conspiracy Theory crap that cheapens this blog at times. If you want to be respected and grow the ZH audience then enlist a better vetting process on what material makes it to the blog. I think we all can do with less "big brother is watching" low brow junk, and more with the technical analysis of the markets and invididual deals. Keep it real and keep it growing. Going all Scully and Mulder with article about dumb terminals and Big brother etc and this site will wind quickly up with the same visitor traffic that 3AM X-Files reruns get.
Since the site went up, the content hasn't been as good as it was prior to. Don't forget to spend less time on the site and more time on the content.
Fact: Treasury is requiring particular information technology setups in TARP banks.
Draw your own conclusions Agent Skinner.
Is it fact or hearsay? And when you say particular information technology, where are the specifics documented? The architecture doesn't need to be private information as it's a massive change that will require tons of communication. In fact when companies finally get around to implement those changes, they would no longer be in TARP, or would have folded in bankruptcy.
Though I can see why someone long on EMC Corp. might like "requirements" like this one.
You are partially correct Anon 5738. There is no conspiracy of 'big brother watching' in this story. But Big Brother is in fact watching. Research Fusion Centers. Research Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems. Research Real ID. Research Student Information Management systems for cradle-to-grave tracking and monitoring of "human resources". Research nationalized medical records - use and purpose. Research Global Information Society; global information infrastructure and loss of national sovereignty. Research Agenda 21.
None of it is X-Files. It's all very real.
Here is your technical analysis of the markets and the individual deal: The markets are rigged and if you are invested in the market, you are a moron because you can't win. You might as well just buy a lottery ticket because the payouts will be roughly the same. Sometimes you'll make a couple of bucks.. but most of the time you'll be fleeced.
5751: did you use any of that Xfiles stuff to track down my investments? Why don't you go buy a shotgun and ammo and hold up for the next 4 decades while all this gets worked out then. Its only money brother and there are opportunities to make money. If you analyse the opportunities you can make money. Thanks for coming out.
read hayek's the road to serfdom, tyranny cometh
I say keep looking for interesting leads Marla!
The investment world is full of MBA dweebs who REALLY want to believe everything is just the way they were taught in school. Deny ... lose money ... deny ... lose money ... deny ... as long as everyone else is doing it, it is fine with them.
The fact that the directive comes from the US government DEFINITELY smells fishy if you ask me. Nothing conclusive, but it is fishy enough that if you follow leads for a few more weeks and months, something might come of it.
Probably 80% of the posters here haven't figured out yet that the markets are centrally manipulated. Real life is MUCH more weird than the stupid X-files, even if the vast majority of people would rather not find that out. I say follow your nose and follow the money!
I'm not really concerned that the Treasury is somehow going to be snooping on data, but:
1. The government should not be in the business of technology consulting.
2. This is a taking. Mandating particular expenditures on IT that has no legally mandated purpose is basically a tax.
3. What motivation could the government really have here? Is there some serious finding of Congress that gives us reason to believe information theft of the kind this sort of thing would prevent is causing these banks multi-million dollar losses? Fine. Where's the finding. Can I read it?
As for the other noise, its noise. If you see conspiracy theories in these basic concerns, just ignore my posts hereonout.
On a related note, the "most transparent administration ever" is continuing on it's roll. This new policy is probably just to save trees and document theft. Now, this is how you save the economy and the environment at the same time:
'Put nothing in writing,' Browner told auto execs on secret White House CAFE talks; Sensenbrenner wants investigationhttp://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Put...
Good luck with that.
I don't know much about IT, but while I can see the security of your info aspects of this. Doesn't this also eliminate work arounds, if for example a bank holiday is declared, or make it easier to suck money out if you were so stupid at to sign up for IRS access to your accounts for 941 withdrawals, or Prevent local banks from stopping the nationalization of 401K's or IRA CDs, if everyone is on only a couple of main frames with government mandated parameters, and protocols.... or am I just ignorant and paranoid?
All this decision is - is a return to the way things were before PC's and local networks came into use in the corporate environment. You could say that it is a return to the type of controlled and secure environment that existed in mainframe shops prior to the early 90's. This decision is a technical decision and has nothing to do with the business side of banking so your other concerns aren't related.
Thing is, there is already the force of government behind the way that one must manage data and documents: it is called privacy law, and there are multiple federal statutes in addition to common law and state statutes. And don't get me started on wiretapping.
One might be concerned when the government plays the role it is currently playing in the market, but suggesting that banks get into the 21st century with their data management doesn't bother me. Heck, law firms do this already. And more to the point, the second anybody gets sued, the chain of custody on the document had better be clean and you had better have a document "retention" (ie, destruction) policy in writing and being followed to the letter.
Seriously - this is just good old-fashioned damage control. There is nothing that we lawyers like better than a bunch of awol devices like palm pilots and cell phones, issued by the company, that contain company info. Then we get to see them! Chain of custody, folks. Keep it in mind. It's about to become very important with key documents at some of these institutions. . . . .
'Put nothing in writing,' (and avoid the cameras).
It worked for Heinrich Muller, he never got caught. Quite a feat for the head of the Gestapo when you have multiple nations looking for you.
I like the math questions. My favorite one is from 1984, 'How many fingers am I holding up?'
Meh, if I can see it, I can copy it...
I personally welcome this new initiative to seal our financial institutions from leaks and prying eyes. The harder they work to hermetically-seal their secrets, the more valuable those secrets will be, and the more people will want them. That makes for good television.
But this does make me wonder if perhaps the denial of service hack attacks of late are simply part of a much larger story that isn't seeing the light of day -- perhaps a 'national security' kind of story? If there's one thing we've learned this century, it's that there is no activity so reprehensible that it can't be justified with reference to national security.
And the really scary thing is, most of the time, as soon as they trot out those two words, everyone just begs to be fucked.
"Well, sure it's uncomfortable, but a dick in the ass sure does make us all feel safer now , doesn't it, dear?"
And as a side effect, the whole thing will be easier to outsource
http://zeropointfield.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/satyam-back-in-business/
Altough I understand some of the privacy/control issues with moving to a single "system" as someone who does the IT support for his firm I can understand the business/security reasons for doing so.
From a business point of view it costs alot of money to support PC's. At my firm with under 10 employees it's not an issue. However when you have hundreds of employees at your firm the costs start to add up pretty quickly. I think it's something like $1,600 per machine at most firms. A fairly substantial figure.
Not only is there a support cost associated per machine but when the user goes down there is a cost to the company. This can also be costly for the firm.
Of course all this assumes the firm is in one building now imagine supporting multiple users with multiple machines from multiple sites and you can imagine what happens to costs.
Also since each user's machine probably has something the company wants to lock down or update imagine pushing out updates to thousands of machines in dozens of locations. It can be done fairly economically nowadays but it's still alot of trouble.
If you use "virtualization" technology where the multiple "virtual" machines are run on a single server. So as far as the user is concerned he is running is own "computer" however in real life there could be hundreds of "machines" on a single server. Saving you the support and energy costs of supporting hundreds of machines.
With virtualization it's also possible to give the user's "virtual" access to key files. For example if a user has access to your corporation's primary application he may in theory be able to delete the whole directory. However with certain "virtual" technology he really doesn't have "real" access to the information and can delete his virtual directory without affecting the "real thing".
Lest we should forget security is also an ever present problem. We've all heard the stories of some worker who loses a laptop with 500,000 social security numbers. With a virtual machine once the user's laptop is gone his previous authentication get's invalidated and the thief is only left with a computer. On the Blackberry's this feature is very powerful I can push a button and perform a wipe of a VIP's device elimanating whatever important dat is on there.
I agree there are certain undesirable consequences to centralizing information but it can have important business and security benefits for the firm in question and its customers.
If this is such a great idea, creating hundreds of new efficiencies, securing vital information, and absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of markets, then riddle me this: why hasn't it already occurred? The government all of the sudden came up with an incredibly brilliant idea that no one had ever sat down and thought about? All this money spent on IT and it takes a G-man in the Treasury Dept to push it forward? That's more of a conspiracy theory than anything else.
Just for your own peace of mind, assume that any cockamamie scheme coming from the government is moronic, half-baked, completely inefficient and costly as shit. The only question you have from there is whether it's sinister.
I'll riddle you that. A central mainframe with dumb terminals attached and highly controlled access was the way corporate systems were managed before PC-mania hit. It was back in the day when programmers were professionals and the software worked - or heads rolled.
PC's, local servers and distributed data introduced incredible vulnerabilities to the corporations. It was malfeasance and breach of fiduciary responsibility to both customers and shareholders for them to be so cavalier with what is in fact, the beating heart of their organization - their systems.
I'm amused that banks don't do all of this already. In fact, I bet most of them do at some level already. At my job, we've implimented a lot of centralized processing because it is so much more efficient for a team working together and for the work to be audited immedietly.
The world of IT is about enabling choices for the users within the organization. There is always going to be pushback against the idea of centralized computing based on ignorance, pride and paranoia, but there are some legit problems with it from a technology perspective. Sometimes they can be expensive problems or very time intensive and deep planning problems, and often result in bickering between CTOs and CIOs.
For the concerns mentioned though;
1. If you want to work from home, log in to the VPN. If it's on paper you should have it scanned, stored and sent back to Iron Mountain before sundown.
2. If the internal network goes down or a backhoe cuts fiber have a fucking backup plan that's more extensive than your current plan. In either case mentioned, most people would still be unable to do a lot of work because they're already networked to a domain anyway.
3. Every Database, Excel File, Everything that is business related SHOULD reside on a central server. The issue here is where you want to put out the fire; When a local computer fails and takes an hour to recover, reimage, reinstall and release or when a server fails and you take a half an hour to recover, reimage, reinstall and release (thanks to the inherent advantages of server data replication recovering a server is fast now)
4. As for whistle blowing, if the company expects employees to get any work done, then they'll never truly be able to lock down everything. There are both financial and efficiency limits on how much you can restrict the ability of employees to diseminate information if you're letting them see it in the first place. Now that I think about it, if a job could be performed without anyone needing to make a judgement call and retaining the information that led to that decision it could be handled by technology.
Now the whole aspect of the government pushing it is absurd. Some banks are not going to be able to impliment any of this without money and changing the organizational structure of their business. Does anyone really believe banks want to change that?
Tyler. Wipe this thread off the blog. Its rediculous.
Marla, do you think your bue tooth headset is "encrypted" Give it up man. Anyone can get any info, in any system if they have the skills and tech in place. Anything is available at anytime. The question is how motivated is the person(s) to get at it.
Then why push a centralized system?
(I don't have a bluetooth headset. Makes me look like more of a Star Trek fan that I am willing to admit I am).