hello I'm professor wool today we'll
discuss how to share Network security
information with a wider IT community
using team collaboration tools so
imagine we have an organization that has
a sophisticated network security policy
management system and an SPM that is
connected to the security infrastructure
it connects to the routers firewalls and
is able to simulate the traffic and
respond to queries such as is traffic
allowed from point A to point B using
some protocol and the system would
simulate the traffic and provide the
answer where the traffic is allowed or
not this this type of system is usually
owned by people with the appropriate
credentials typically in the security
organization and so they have access to
this type of capability however there
are other people in the organization
that might have might benefit from the
access imagine you have a team
collaboration tool at your disposal and
the IT operations people use it to
troubleshoot problems in a network
so imagine user Jayne logging on to this
channel and saying the training system
is down I bet it's the firewall a
typical suspicion maybe somebody missed
configure the firewall and broke
something so user David jumps in and
says let me check how would they would
check well David is not part of the
security team David does not have access
to this system so he needs to contact
his colleagues that do have access so he
would either send them an email call him
on the phone and ask is is this traffic
allowed or not assuming he can get the
right person to respond quickly that
person would use the NS p.m. use the
user interface type in the requested
query the system comes back
the answer let's say that the traffic is
allowed and then David reports back to
his colleagues and moves on and this is
all fine and good except that there are
two humans in the loop here and it might
take them a little bit of time to react
maybe they're not at their desk who
knows so the process can be streamlined
well user Jill jumps in and says well
it's 2018 never mind all those old phone
technologies and types in the question
hey bot is HTTP allowed from this
address to that address what's this bot
thing well a good and SPM exposes an API
that is able to run these queries
automatically and provide the answers in
machine readable form and it's possible
to build a bot that runs inside the
channel an automatic bot that responds
to this English language question uses
the API to run the traffic simulation
query we get the result back and format
the output inside the channel in clearly
understandable terms here it says yes
traffic is allowed so user Jane our
suspicious user to begin with can say ok
so it's not the firewalls fault it's
something else maybe it's the database
maybe it's something else and so the
troubleshooting scenario continues to
resolution what what is the point here
the point is that using this API and
exposing the capabilities of the NSP m2
box running inside the collaboration
channel the same information that was
retrieved using manual human reliant
methods is now made available through an
API call almost instantaneously without
waiting for the person on the other end
to react so the whole procedure of
troubleshooting becomes much much faster
and I leave it to your imagination to
think about other types of scenarios
in such a channel you will benefit from
having access to such Network simulation
capabilities to achieve some other tasks
that a team needs to address thank you
for your attention
