Awareness-Based Security Management for Complex and Internet-Based Operations Management Systems

Abstract

Grounded on two use-cases from different domains of operations – aviation network management and service-bundling of small enterprises – the authors develop a management concept for increasingly complex business operations’ systems. These cases exemplify the convergence of new technologies and with this the arising of new organisational and managerial challenges representing both, risk and chance. Soon so-called “Things-that-Think,” profiting from future multi-core chip architectures and autonomously acting in the Internet, will become drivers of massive distribution and parallelisation of stationary and mobile operations’ architectures and lead to hybrid networks of humans, things and systems. These developments require elaborating and implementing new principles and mechanisms of operations’ management – not at least in order to manage holistic operations’ properties raising with the complexity like criticality, resource footprints, or, pars pro toto addressed here, security. The core of the authors’ argumentation is that the increase of operations’ complexity emerging from this combination of massive heterogeneity, distribution and parallelism, on the other side offers new chances of mastering complexity. For taking this change two concepts are paramount: intelligent peer-to-peer systems and self-aware system behaviour e.g. with regard to performance and for sure: security. Rather than struggling with the finally unavailing undertaking of controlling complexity, this chapter suggests implementing self-awareness as added-value service into complex operations’ systems with the goal of managing their “holistic properties” like external effects, criticality, as well as issues of security and trust.