Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RAIKA (A.I. enabled knowledge analysis automation to increase resilience, security and performance of Enterprise ICT systems.)
Reporting period: 2020-10-01 to 2022-01-31
As we can feel it more and more by each passing year of the 21st century, ICT is one of the foundations of our civilization. When any outages happen, or any security breaches occur, they inevitably cause interruptions, often resulting in loss of revenues or customer satisfaction, but they may as well impact critical infrastructures or, even worse, cause a life threatening situation.
IT engineers who take care of these critical infrastructures, are working with complex deployments of interrelated and interconnected systems and technologies. They are tasked with ensuring that the systems and the services are always available, efficient and secure. Additionally they may need to work within the scope and requirements of specific regulatory compliance. For these tasks, they are using their own experience and also a wealth of available knowledge about the systems they are responsible for, in the form of Documentation, Support Knowledge Bases, Best Practice guides, Wikis, Online Forums, and Security Advisories.
RAIKA - The Runecast A.I. Knowledge Automation platform, has been created to address the growing complexity of ICT infrastructures, the need for better and adaptable security, and issue prevention.
It is designed as a powerful breakthrough technology, adding Artificial Intelligence and an end-to-end automation overlay to Runecast Analyzer. It can analyze a wealth of unstructured human readable data automatically, extracting the meaning to proactively identify potential issues and security vulnerabilities. This will bring tangible benefits to organizations, their customers and society:
• increased resilience and availability of ICT systems
• more secure systems
• efficiency and performance
IT engineers who take care of these critical infrastructures, are working with complex deployments of interrelated and interconnected systems and technologies. They are tasked with ensuring that the systems and the services are always available, efficient and secure. Additionally they may need to work within the scope and requirements of specific regulatory compliance. For these tasks, they are using their own experience and also a wealth of available knowledge about the systems they are responsible for, in the form of Documentation, Support Knowledge Bases, Best Practice guides, Wikis, Online Forums, and Security Advisories.
RAIKA - The Runecast A.I. Knowledge Automation platform, has been created to address the growing complexity of ICT infrastructures, the need for better and adaptable security, and issue prevention.
It is designed as a powerful breakthrough technology, adding Artificial Intelligence and an end-to-end automation overlay to Runecast Analyzer. It can analyze a wealth of unstructured human readable data automatically, extracting the meaning to proactively identify potential issues and security vulnerabilities. This will bring tangible benefits to organizations, their customers and society:
• increased resilience and availability of ICT systems
• more secure systems
• efficiency and performance
Within the first period of the action, the work was initiated across all of the work packages, with significant effort focused in setting up the needed infrastructure, defining the platform architecture and design. The initial Artificial Intelligence models and methodologies which were initially drafted were explored further and validated.
In the second reporting period, Runecast had very good progress on the technical side, with increasingly good coverage of new technologies. The collectors, parsers and knowledge dictionaries were developed as planned for the technologies covered in this action: AWS public cloud, Kubernetes and Dell VxRail. The Knowledge Dictionaries were also developed and a good amount of training data has been used for the AI models.
RAIKA allowed covering additional infrastructure technologies as planned in the project scope (AWS, Kubernetes, Dell VxRail), but it already also allowed expanding into infrastructures that were planned beyond the scope.
Beyond best practices and knowledge base articles, RAIKA allows also having a vulnerability management solution that can automatically analyze disclosed vulnerabilities in public portals like MITRE or vendor maintained pages and identify exposed assets and systems. The basic principle of vulnerability management fits very well into the knowledge automation framework that RAIKA provides, since all the information contained in the CVE articles can be parsed and analyzed with the same crawlers, parsers and AI modules.
The coverage of public cloud platforms that this project brought is essential for many existing Runecast customers which are migrating workloads from the on-premises VMware environments to the cloud, resulting in many upsell orders from these customers to cover their cloud environments also.
The plethora of features that were developed by building up and leveraging the new data models and architectures introduced in RAIKA helped solidify Runecast’s position as a “must-have” solution.
- The “Config Vault” feature helps engineers to easily browse all the key configuration parameters in all the connected systems, to manage configuration drift by easily tracking changes over time or comparing configuration parameters to pre-defined baselines.
- The Remediation actions automatically built using the RAIKA backend help user tackle the many issues identified in an easy way. Instead of fixing findings on hundreds of virtual machines manually, they can easily generate Powershell or Ansible scripts that can automatically fix the issue on all the objects within seconds or minutes.
The regulatory compliance coverage has been also greatly improved in the Runecast platform, through the new implementation of the RAIKA backend and data models. We are now helping customers with their compliance stance with:
- GDPR (for VMware, AWS and Azure)
- ISO27001
- BSI IT grundschutz (a regulatory framework mandatory for all public companies in Germany)
- Cyber Essentials (an effective, Government backed framework applicable in the UK)
In the second reporting period, Runecast had very good progress on the technical side, with increasingly good coverage of new technologies. The collectors, parsers and knowledge dictionaries were developed as planned for the technologies covered in this action: AWS public cloud, Kubernetes and Dell VxRail. The Knowledge Dictionaries were also developed and a good amount of training data has been used for the AI models.
RAIKA allowed covering additional infrastructure technologies as planned in the project scope (AWS, Kubernetes, Dell VxRail), but it already also allowed expanding into infrastructures that were planned beyond the scope.
Beyond best practices and knowledge base articles, RAIKA allows also having a vulnerability management solution that can automatically analyze disclosed vulnerabilities in public portals like MITRE or vendor maintained pages and identify exposed assets and systems. The basic principle of vulnerability management fits very well into the knowledge automation framework that RAIKA provides, since all the information contained in the CVE articles can be parsed and analyzed with the same crawlers, parsers and AI modules.
The coverage of public cloud platforms that this project brought is essential for many existing Runecast customers which are migrating workloads from the on-premises VMware environments to the cloud, resulting in many upsell orders from these customers to cover their cloud environments also.
The plethora of features that were developed by building up and leveraging the new data models and architectures introduced in RAIKA helped solidify Runecast’s position as a “must-have” solution.
- The “Config Vault” feature helps engineers to easily browse all the key configuration parameters in all the connected systems, to manage configuration drift by easily tracking changes over time or comparing configuration parameters to pre-defined baselines.
- The Remediation actions automatically built using the RAIKA backend help user tackle the many issues identified in an easy way. Instead of fixing findings on hundreds of virtual machines manually, they can easily generate Powershell or Ansible scripts that can automatically fix the issue on all the objects within seconds or minutes.
The regulatory compliance coverage has been also greatly improved in the Runecast platform, through the new implementation of the RAIKA backend and data models. We are now helping customers with their compliance stance with:
- GDPR (for VMware, AWS and Azure)
- ISO27001
- BSI IT grundschutz (a regulatory framework mandatory for all public companies in Germany)
- Cyber Essentials (an effective, Government backed framework applicable in the UK)
The impact of RAIKA as we see it now, compared to what we initially had in mind, is even more obvious, important and needed. There is a dire need for automated solutions like RAIKA, not only for the enterprise technologies we were planning to cover, but even more importantly on cloud, and other digitization enabling technologies and infrastructures.
The improved velocity and automation that the RAIKA platform and its components brought, allowed Runecast to cover even more technologies than what was initially planned:
- Microsoft Azure public cloud platform.
- Google Cloud Platform
- Operating systems(Windows, Linux) - This also allowed Runecast to help our customers with preventing exploits caused by highly critical vulnerabilities like the recently announced Log4j CVEs.
The architectural changes that were developed for the RAIKA project were not only useful in the context and scope of their planned purpose: to standardize and allow automated knowledge management but could be leveraged to deliver additional features and functionality.
Since our proposal was submitted, digitalisation has made a great leap forward. Largely triggered by COVID19 pandemic situation around the world, together with ecommerce, the workplace digitization has been one of the driving factors in advancing the digital era. Such a trend brings to the economy and society not only a great number of advantages, it also represents significant risks related to security of such digital environments and extraordinary energy consumption levels related to data processing, resulting in environmental impacts and high bills.
The healthcare industry was particularly stressed by the implications of the pandemic. Cyberattacks and unexpected outages impacted even more hospitals and their IT systems. In response to the pandemic, Runecast decided to help these institutions and provide full free licenses of Runecast Analyzer for six months. This initiative helped 75 hospitals, clinics, universities and public schools in 14 countries.
(more on: https://eic.ec.europa.eu/projects/runecast-offered-free-analytics-tool-hospitals-during-covid-19-outbreak_en)
We, the whole Runecast team are proud of what we achieved with implementing this project. This is not the end of the journey however for this initiative and for the people that worked on implementing RAIKA. Even if the platform is now enabling additional use cases and technologies to be covered, it has a lot of potential for incremental improvements. It can bring the power of AI enabled knowledge automation directly into the hands of engineers through an easy to use low-code policy management and digital assistants.
The improved velocity and automation that the RAIKA platform and its components brought, allowed Runecast to cover even more technologies than what was initially planned:
- Microsoft Azure public cloud platform.
- Google Cloud Platform
- Operating systems(Windows, Linux) - This also allowed Runecast to help our customers with preventing exploits caused by highly critical vulnerabilities like the recently announced Log4j CVEs.
The architectural changes that were developed for the RAIKA project were not only useful in the context and scope of their planned purpose: to standardize and allow automated knowledge management but could be leveraged to deliver additional features and functionality.
Since our proposal was submitted, digitalisation has made a great leap forward. Largely triggered by COVID19 pandemic situation around the world, together with ecommerce, the workplace digitization has been one of the driving factors in advancing the digital era. Such a trend brings to the economy and society not only a great number of advantages, it also represents significant risks related to security of such digital environments and extraordinary energy consumption levels related to data processing, resulting in environmental impacts and high bills.
The healthcare industry was particularly stressed by the implications of the pandemic. Cyberattacks and unexpected outages impacted even more hospitals and their IT systems. In response to the pandemic, Runecast decided to help these institutions and provide full free licenses of Runecast Analyzer for six months. This initiative helped 75 hospitals, clinics, universities and public schools in 14 countries.
(more on: https://eic.ec.europa.eu/projects/runecast-offered-free-analytics-tool-hospitals-during-covid-19-outbreak_en)
We, the whole Runecast team are proud of what we achieved with implementing this project. This is not the end of the journey however for this initiative and for the people that worked on implementing RAIKA. Even if the platform is now enabling additional use cases and technologies to be covered, it has a lot of potential for incremental improvements. It can bring the power of AI enabled knowledge automation directly into the hands of engineers through an easy to use low-code policy management and digital assistants.