CIO: Clunky security biggest bugaboo in 2010

As CIO at online brokerage Scottrade, Ian Patterson has a lot of issues to worry about. The hundreds of high performance servers that power the online brokerage's ticker systems are under continuous stress by ever increasing trading volumes. The server farm is simply getting too big to manage without rethinking the architecture. On the front end, his team is busy moving 1u servers into virtual machines running on server blades, which he says finally have the throughput at the backplane and chassis level to handle serving up Scottrade's static content. On the downside, he still thinks the data center management tool sets offered by the major systems vendors need work.

But what really bothers him, he told me in a recent conversation, is the sorry state of security.

If you don't run a data center and want to understand Patterson's frustration, just look at how security software works (or doesn't) on your Windows PC. Enterprise security systems don't run much better, he says.

Have you ever had security problems force you to reinstall everything from scratch? It "absolutely happens" in Scottrade's data centers, despite best efforts by top-notch IT staff to prevent it in the company's carefully architected facilities. "If you think about what security is doing to PCs, it's doing the same thing to servers," he says.

While Patterson's staff uses various security tools and systems that are supposed to help, they're far from adequate when used in a data center at scale. "You have more issues of server problems after putting out security patches than you do with just about anything nowadays," he says. In a high performance environment, where the business makes money by executing trades faster than the next guy, those problems can jeopardize the company's core business. But Patterson's colleagues in other industries feel the same level of frustration. "Having security on top of a set of CPU's, it's a thorn in the side of every CIO out there," he says.

Patterson's message to his data center equipment and software vendors in 2010: Start working together to deliver a more integrated solution. "I wish we could get the security companies to talk to the server manufacturers and the operating system manufacturers so that we could streamline the processes and the footprint that security is taking on our server farms and hosts." IT organizations should be able to keep performance up and still stay secure, he says.

I'm sure Windows PC users feel the same. While they're at it, perhaps the vendors could do something about those bootup delaying, performance sapping, destabilizing, download happy security tools for Windows PCs as well.