CA World 2011, being held in Las Vegas next week, is a place to get a glimpse of how innovative technology is addressing the business challenges we need to deal with now, and those we will face in the not-too-distant future.

At CA Technologies, CA Labs performs research targeted at solving real problems. Its results sometimes yield enhancements to CA products, or a better understanding of how they could be used for greater impact. Occasionally, we create new techniques to improve software development, including addressing challenges presented by legacy code. We collaborate with leading universities, experts within our product groups, and our customers. I should have mentioned customers first, because we get our strongest motivation from them.

This is exciting stuff.

Let me provide some examples. If you are attending CA World, I encourage you to visit us in the Exhibition Center where we will be happy to describe the exciting research CA Labs is working on. Here’s just a glimpse of what you’ll hear about:

Role Optimization
Scenario: you are a systems administrator who must manage employees’ access to your organization’s complex network and processes, giving people just the right access to the systems they need to do their jobs. People change jobs, new employees come into the company. How can you easily see their access rights, and how can you easily modify them when needed? Would it help if you could literally visualize these access privileges and quickly manipulate them? A new visualization tool, produced by CA Labs research, is being incorporated into CA Role and Compliance Manager to bring machine and human intelligence together to engineer high quality role-based access control implementations in an enterprise. Here is a just-released video on YouTube that explains it further.

Insider Threat Detection
Just read the news to see examples of how destructive and costly is the damage caused by “bad apples” inside an organization. Employees must be given access into networks and allowed to do their jobs without a cumbersome approval process, but what if they want to create havoc instead? Research by CA Labs has created breakthrough technology that makes it easier to identify anomalous user activity and prevent insider threat attacks before they cause real damage – saving countless investigation hours by IT personnel. The technology detects user activity anomalies throughout an organization’s systems. Not all anomalies are “bad” or threats, but anything that is identified can be investigated further. We also have a video on YouTube that shows a fictional example of an insider threat scenario.

The Changing Role of the CIO
This is a unique research project for CA Labs, in that, along with CA Technologies Marketing and the Cranfield School of Management in the U.K., we conducted an extensive global survey of CIOs in organizations of various sizes, industries and experience to find out what they thought of cloud technology, and what their plans were for implementation. The analysis is ongoing, but some of the results of the survey can be found here. Through this initiative we hope to learn more about how CIOs plan and execute their technology strategy, the relationship between IT and business processes, and the value perception of IT by the C-suite in an enterprise. As we analyze the survey results and conduct follow-on interviews, we are also gaining further insight into the positioning of the CIO within the C-suite, and the ever-evolving strategic impact of IT.

Visualization
Fundamental IT management processes such as impact and root cause analysis, change and configuration management, and analysis of service level availability require IT staff to explore complex IT structures using models that are laboriously slow and hard to navigate. Interactive visualizations are more effective than other means, such as text-based interfaces, for representing components and their complex relations. To understand the challenge imagine a video game, but increase the number of objects being rendered and how they relate to each other by orders of magnitude, while still maintaining a responsive, near real-time feel for the player/operator. A CA Labs team has built the prototype tool Vizilla, a highly scalable method for efficient visualization of intricate IT environments that deliver relationship information more quickly and with greater flexibility, using natural and intuitive navigation metaphors. Some of our customers have already used the Vizilla prototype to explore their own complex data collections, and have provided useful feedback for its further development.

If you cannot get to CA World, please visit us at ca.com/calabs.