Automation of cybersecurity processes has become crucial with large scale deployment of sensitive workloads in regulated on-prem, private, and public cloud environments. Regulatory and standards bodies such as Payment Card Industry (PCI), Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and others govern the minimal set of cybersecurity controls that an organization must implement. To meet such requirements while maintaining business agility, organizations need to modernize from manual document based compliance management to automated processes for continuous compliance. This modernized process is called compliance-as-code. In this paper, we present an architecture for compliance-as-code based on a standardized framework. We identify several design choices and our rationale behind those. Specifically, we introduce a system for manipulating compliance information in a standardized manner and a data interchange protocol for inter-operable communication of compliance information. We demonstrate the scalability of our approach and briefly describe deployment and experimental results in real world settings.

Webscale services dealing with sensitive content are increasingly being deployed in public and hybrid cloud environments. At the same time, the impact of security breaches have also increased manifold averaging at USD 3.86M per data breach. To tackle such increasing risks, regulations and security frameworks are defined that an organization must comply with. Most of these frameworks are published in natural language text that run into hundreds of pages resulting into thousands of requirements and controls. When these frameworks undergo revisions, understanding the changes, and interpreting their impact consumes huge amount of time, effort and resources. In this paper, we propose a change management system that supports SMEs with AI-assisted automation of this extremely manual and time consuming activity. Specifically, we introduce the concept of live crosswalks – a framework that models complex relationships among security and compliance documents along with associated operations to manage the change. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and algorithmic techniques to transform the current document-driven, highly manual process into a data-driven interactive intelligent system. We present the overall design and demonstrate its efficacy over several hundreds of diversified controls through experimental evaluation.

Data privacy, security and compliance concerns prevent many enterprises from migrating their critical applications to public cloud infrastructure. To address this, cloud providers offer specialized clouds for heavily regulated industries, which implement prescribed security standards. A critical step in the migration process is to ensure that the customer's security requirements are fully met by the cloud provider. With a few hundreds of services in a typical cloud provider's infrastructure, this becomes a non-trivial task. Few tens to hundreds of security checks exposed by each applicable service need to be matched with several hundreds to thousands of security controls from the customer. Mapping customer's controls to cloud provider's control set is done manually by experts, a process that often takes months to complete, and needs to be repeated with every new customer. Moreover, these mappings have to be re-evaluated following regulatory or business changes, as well as cloud infrastructure upgrades. We present an AI-assisted system for mapping security controls, which drastically reduces the number of candidates a human expert needs to consider, allowing substantial speed-up of the mapping process. We empirically compare several controls mapping models, and show that hierarchical classification using fine-tuned Transformer networks works best. Overall, our empirical results demonstrate that the system performs well on real-world data.

IT service providers differentiate themselves through offering after-sales support for hardware and software products. Thus, businesses, including large corporations, have intricate work-flows for servicing such support requests while reducing man-hours needed. These work-flows generally operate through a ticketing system for resolving customer issues. A lot of man-hours are spent in searching old tickets for correct problem and resolution for such issues. Support requests pertaining to enterprise hardware are more challenging than desktop support for end-user products. Enterprise hardware requires deeper diagnosis involving several systems and expertise of multiple agents. In this work we propose a cognitive agent, Neev, which helps in mitigating the problem in a three-fold fashion (1) retrieving a summary of relevant ticket text (2) Tagging the relevant parts as a part-of-the-problem or a part-of-the-solution (3) Focusing on the precise problem and solution. We evaluate the performance of our system using a rank-based metric where a ticket extraction is successful if the problem or solution occur in the top-n suggestions. We report the results for varying top-n values for both problem and solution on varying severity of the tickets. We find that the accuracy for problem extraction in top-1 is 62% and it reaches 86% and 94% for top-3 and top-5 cases, respectively. Furthermore, the accuracy for solution extraction reaches 62% and 88% for top-3 and top-8 cases, respectively.

Service Registries form a core component of Services Computing. They have been successful in enabling loose coupling among services by storing, managing and exposing interface descriptions of available services in a standard description language. However, existing service registries fall short of fulfilling the promise of enabling automatic service discovery and invocation and usually are tied to a particular web service technology. We present RegSOP that uses a novel approach of utilizing behavioral descriptions of available services as the basis for registering and discovering services. Behavioral descriptions can be classified and made available to the programmer at development time without committing to any particular service instance or underlying web service technology. Further, RegSOP computes different relationships among service behavior and automatically builds an ontology of service behavior. RegSOP, therefore, reduces the discovery process at runtime to a quick lookup of service classname. We present the design and implementation of RegSOP and report our evaluation of its capabilities.

The Spoken Web is a voice-based equivalent of the World Wide Web (WWW), developed by IBM Research Laboratory, India, primarily designed for rural and semi-urban people to provide information of value to them through their mobile or landline phones. This demonstration aims to present the use of VoiceSites for information creation and access for the rural population. VoiceSites can be accessed by calling a phone number and end-users can listen to the content over phone and navigate through voice or the phone keypad. While one demonstration is of creating a VoiceSite, the other is for browsing a multitude of VoiceSites that would also demonstrate conducting transactions across VoiceSites. We will also present the mechanism to search for content on VoiceSites. These demonstrations will help in presenting the concept of the Spoken Web, which we foresee, can have the same effect in the developing regions community which the WWW has done to the developed world over the last decade.

It has been a constant aim of computer scientists, programming language designers and practitioners to raise the level of programming abstractions and bring them as close to the user's natural context as possible. The efforts started right from our transition from machine code programming to assembly language programming, from there to high level procedural languages, followed by object oriented programming. Nowadays, service oriented software development and composition are the norm.

83% of the world population does not have access to Internet. Therefore there is a need for a simple and affordable interaction technology that can enable easy content creation and dissemination for this population. In this paper, we present the design, development and usage pattern of a VoiKiosk system that provides a voice-based kiosk solution for people in rural areas. This system is accessible by phone and thus meets the affordability and low literacy requirements. We present usability results gathered from usage by more than 900 villagers during four month of the on-field deployment of the system. The on-field experiments suggest the importance of locally created content in their own language for this population. The system provides interesting insights about the manner in which this community can create and manage information. Based on the use of the system in the four months, the VoiKiosk also suggests a mechanism to enable social networking for the rural population.

Many services taken for granted in the developed world are often missing from the developing countries. One typical example is that of map systems that form the basis of several location driven services. Its heavy reliance on content, provides a huge barrier towards building such systems. Further, in developing countries like India, the infrastructure typically has a history of unplanned development, leading to unorganized addresses and absence of standard naming conventions for roads. Detailed map systems such as online maps have only recently started becoming available but for major cities. Remote towns and villages remain out of reach till date. In this paper, we investigate a community-driven approach for creating maps in developing regions - following Web 2.0 principles, but not entirely relying on the existing Web. Our system, dubbed FOLKSOMAPS is an intelligent, community constructed map system, particularly architected with developing regions in mind. We present the design of FOLKSOMAPS, followed by an implementation of our proof-of-concept system. We present user studies aimed at understanding the uptake, usability and utility of FOLKSOMAPS. The results indicate a strong need for such a community-generated mapping ecosystem.

Websites in World Wide Web are primarily meant for visual consumption. Moreover, the wide variety of visual controls available make it harder to interpret the websites with screen readers. This problem of accessing information and services on the web escalates even further for visually impaired in developing regions since most are either semi-literate/illiterate or cannot afford computers and high-end phones with screen reading capability.In this paper, we present an alternate platform -- the World Wide Telecom Web (WWTW). WWTW is already being successfully deployed as a network of VoiceSites that can be created and accessed by a voice interaction over an ordinary phone. WWTW presents a whole new set of opportunities for delivering information and services to the visually impaired. We present a preliminary user study that leads us towards the belief that the Telecom Web can be the mainstream Web for blind users.

Information Retrieval on the WWW is important because it is hard to find what one is looking for. There is a plethora of information available, and searching relevant information is a challenge. In the case of developing regions, we have the opposite problem: 1) Information availability of global markets is scarce. Most of the consumers and producers (of information as well as goods) are relegated to local markets in geographical vicinity. In order to reach wider markets, it is important for this local information to reach wider audiences. (Local information for global consumption LIG model). (2) At the same time, locally relevant information, such as delays in bus/train timings, mobile medical van schedule changes, electricity outage timings, is not easily available either. (Local information for local consumption LIL model). We introduce the term Information Uptrieval to address the reverse problem of acquiring, assimilating, aggregating and uploading global and local information that is relevant for developing regions to a platform that improves the reach of the information. While the WWW is an obvious example of one such platform, given the low internet penetration in such regions, we need to explore effective alternatives. Several innovative, but disconnected approaches have been attempted to address the information uptrieval problem, ranging from the use of DVDs (eSagu, http://www.esagu.in/esagu) through the use of wireless stations on motorcycles (First Mile Solutions, http://www.firstmilesolutions.com). Many of these have met with reasonable success in their pilot deployments.

As the number of telephony voice applications grow, there will be a need for a browser to surf the Web of interconnected voice applications (called as VoiceSites). These VoiceSites are accessed through a telephone over an audio channel. We present the concept and architecture of T-Web Browser, a World Wide Telecom Web browser that enables browsing the Web of voice applications through an ordinary phone. This browser will support rich browsing features such as history and bookmarking.

One of the several initiatives to bridge the digital divide in developing countries has been the deployment of information kiosks or knowledge centers in villages in rural parts of the country. These kiosks provide services ranging from email, chat and browsing to distance education programs, agricultural services and eGovernance services. A kiosk typically comprises of a computer with printer, web cam, multimedia system and Internet connectivity and is owned by a local entrepreneur. Moving away from the PC based kiosk model, we present an alternative platform to create and host such information kiosks in the telephony network. We call these as VoiKiosks and they are accessible through voice interaction over an ordinary phone call.

Services Computing is emerging as a new discipline. The acceptance of web services technology stems from the fact that services enable easy integration and interoperation of enterprise level distributed systems. However, currently software developers are forced to translate business level service requirements and encode them into programs using low level abstractions such as objects. We propose to introduce language constructs for Service Oriented Programming that would enable raising programming abstractions from objects to services.

Various sectors in developing countries are typically dominated by the presence of a large number of small and microbusinesses that operate in an informal, unorganized manner. Many of these are single person run micro-businesses and cannot afford to buy and maintain their own IT infrastructure. For others, easy availability of cheap labour provides a convenient alternative even though it results in inefficiency, as little or no records are maintained, and only manual, paper-based processes are followed. This results in high response times for customers, no formal accountability and higher charges. For the businesses this translates to lower earnings and losses due to inefficiencies. In this paper, we look at few such micro-business segments and explore their current models of operation, while identifying existing inefficiencies and pain points. We build upon the findings and propose an approach for delivering benefits of IT solutions to such micro-business segments. Finally, we present technology that realizes the proposed approach in the specific context of two such segments.

Web services provide an instantiation of the loosely coupled service–oriented architecture and facilitate the process of enterprise application integration by encapsulating information, software, and other resources. However, to exploit the true potential of web services, it is critical to develop technologies and tools for composing new services from existing ones. While numerous composition approaches have been developed in the past, very little has been done towards tooling. What is clearly lacking is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to ease the process of composition, thereby reducing development time and integration efforts. In this paper, we build on our previous work on service composition, and present an IDE for end–to–end composition of web services. We elaborate on the design of the IDE, describe its integration with existing technologies, and discuss its usability based on the findings of a user survey.

Traditional software development involves reusing and building upon off-the-shelf software libraries. This paradigm provides compile time availability of both, component interfaces as well as corresponding implementations. It enables developers to write programs that build on existing functionality without worrying much about the runtime. Service oriented computing presents a different environment that involves actively running components in the form of services. Here, a search step becomes necessary to first discover the component(s) that satisfy the specified requirements. Moreover, services may come up or go down dynamically leading to expiry of searched results which makes dependent programs highly brittle. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift from objects to services as first class entities. We present service matching techniques defined across design time and runtime. Using these techniques we define language level operations involving services as operands leading to a novel approach for services based software development.

WWW has made information accessible to computer users in various ways not imagined before. However; there is a huge pool ofpeople, especially in emerging economies, still untouched by this revolution and are either unaware of, or are unable or to join this bandwagon. Mobile phones are increasingly empowering the under-privileged to utilize data and services beyond the basic voice communication. However; factors such as high illiteracy rate, cost sensitivity, and user interface issues prevent these users from deriving benefits of available infrastructure and services. We have developed a novel system - VOISERV that enables ordinary telephone subscribers to create, deploy and offer their own customized voice-driven applications called Voic-eSites. The generated VoiceSites get hosted in the network for low cost of ownership and maintenance, and are integrated with advanced services available in the converged networks of today.

Web services simplify enterprise application integration by facilitating reuse of existing components for creating new services. In a dynamic environment, it is imperative to design a Web Service Composition and Execution (WSCE) system that adapts to failure of component services or changes in their QoS offerings. In this paper, we motivate a staged approach for adaptive WSCE (A-WSCE) that cleanly separates the functional and non-functional requirements of a new service, and enables different environmental changes to be absorbed at different stages of composition and execution. We use Synthy, a prototype service creation environment, to implement our solution and demonstrate its effectiveness.

Management applications such as accounting, intrusion detection, resource provisioning, etc. utilize various metrics to derive information needed for decision making. However, each such application is typically custom built to encode the data manipulation logic specific to the management task at hand. These custom solutions are non-reusable, non-shareable and become increasingly complex and hard to manage as they evolve to meet ever changing needs of the environment. We present metric service, a customizable engine that can be shared and configured to perform data manipulation operations for a wide variety of management applications. It allows application specific manipulation of raw metrics to be performed in the middleware itself and also enables integration of data from heterogeneous systems that may be geographically distributed. We also introduce MS-Policy, an XML based policy specification language that forms the core model of the proposed engine. It allows the data integration and manipulation logic, for a particular management task, to be specified in terms of metrics collection, aggregation and composition. We describe our prototype implementation and report the results of performance experiments

This paper proposes to enhance the modeling capabilities of DMTFs common information model (CIM). Currently CIM is used to represent a conceptual view of the IT environment, by modeling concepts related to elements to be managed. However, CIM object manager (CIMOM) implementations can utilize these models in no more capacity than as a passive database. We observe that a lot more management functionality could be incorporated into CIMOM middleware by enriching CIM so that it is able to represent process models in addition to data models. Using this representation CIMOM can be empowered to take on the role of an active decision-making entity, rather than just being a repository of management data. This enables embedding of powerful functionality in the middleware, which is currently custom-built by management applications instead. We demonstrate our approach by embedding an accounting process model into CIM, to realize an accounting system that can be customized for different scenarios.

The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. Application development is often done in an ad hoc manner, without standard frameworks or libraries, thus resulting in poor reuse of software assets. Web services have received much interest in industry due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web services composition tool can help automate the process, from creating business process functionality, to developing executable workflows, to deploying them on an execution environment. However, we find that the main approaches taken thus far to standardize and compose web services are piecemeal and insufficient. The business world has adopted a (distributed) programming approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into flows with a language like BPEL and invoked with the SOAP protocol. Academia has propounded the AI approach of formally representing web service capabilities in ontologies, and reasoning about their composition using goal-oriented inferencing techniques from planning. We present the first integrated work in composing web services end to end from specification to deployment by synergistically combining the strengths of the above approaches. We describe a prototype service creation environment along with a use-case scenario, and demonstrate how it can significantly speed up the time-to-market for new services.

This paper proposes extensions to DMTF's CIM Metrics model and introduces a new CIM schema for representing metering and accounting information. Usage accounting is an essential component infrastructure. It is needed for purposes such as resource provisioning, capacity planning, auditing, and for charging the customers. Though some efforts are underway in this direction, currently there is no standard defined which allows metrics and usage accounting information to be specified in a way that is uniform across management applications. This paper attempts to achieve that by formalizing the concepts involved, through an information model that is independent of the actual metrics used. The proposed information model enriches the CIM Metrics schema with the notions of composite metrics and monitoring records. Further, new classes have been defined to formalize the representation of metering and accounting information. We also describe some applications of the proposed information model.