Trility Consulting: Reinforcing Cybersecurity with Resilient IT Infrastructure

Matthew D Edwards, Founder & CEO

IT companies today are realizing that treating applications, infrastructure and data as separate conversations is no longer enough to manage cost, complexity, increase throughput and value, or arguably most important, to predictably, auditably and continuously mitigate and manage security risk. Rather than focusing on one or the other, today’s focus has shifted to fully encapsulated, 100 percent software defined application and infrastructure stacks which are test-driven where possible and test-backed everywhere else. Trility Consulting implements value-driven cloud adoption frameworks defined to enable secure, enterprise-scalable, test-driven/backed, software-defined application and infrastructure stacks implementations. Matthew D Edwards, Founder and CEO of Trility Consulting discusses the trends and challenges in the cloud, security and IoT arenas and how their range of services aid in of predictable, repeatable and auditable results out of the box.

What are the major challenges that companies face in the IoT space?

Organizations are overwhelmed with a myriad of companies, devices, and services coming into the market at lightning speed. To stay ahead of the challenges there is a need for standardization of communication protocols, encryption, and security aspects. While companies are trying to transform their ideas into tangible business outcomes by adopting cloud and IoT, we are honing the technologies to save time and be more efficient and successful.

Could you elaborate on your range of services and methodologies?

First and foremost, we have a team of outstanding people. Great attitudes, great aptitudes and great experiences. Thereafter, our teams have experience in multiple industries which helps us see problems from different angles as we work with our clients. With expertise from embedded to application stacks to cloud, information security and IoT technologies, we provide services for all manner of “connected things” projects. We are also a certified AWS consulting partner with a bunch of experience in cloud engineering.

Interestingly, just because we can do all of these things, doesn’t always mean these are the most useful behaviors or skills for our clients. What we’ve found clients value the most is our ability to hear their current challenges, complexities and objectives; most importantly, customers need us to hear why they are unique and how they would like to win on their organization’s battlefield.

Whether we’re helping clients adopt cloud, building new solutions for them or refactoring and migrating what they have into cloud ecosystems, we start at the business problems/goals, bring multiple options to the table, offer best of breed recommendations and are prepared to coach and/or lead the client from where they are to where they’d like to go in a predictable, measurable and transparent manner.

Because of our partnership with AWS, we are able to take charge of creating, architecting, migrating, and managing a client's workload, data and application stacks in AWS ecosystems

As for how we do work? We’re really heavy on 100 percent software defined infrastructure while using test-driven development and continuous delivery behaviors. And a special ingredient in our portfolio includes a secure, enterprise cloud framework named Cloud ConfigTM from our partner company called IronBench (https://ironbench.io). With this tool we’re able to knock anywhere from eight to twelve months off most development projects simply because we’ve already done all of the baseline infrastructure design and development work up front so clients can get straight to building their desired software instead of spending months discussing infrastructure.

Please shed light in regard to cybersecurity threats and the services you provide to tackle these challenges.

It is normal to see companies build software solutions as quickly as achievable in order to get into the marketplace, beat their competition and gain market share and revenue. Unfortunately, we also frequently see companies believing that bad software architectures will just be accommodated by big infrastructure, quality can be tested into the system in arrears and security is something that can be done later after the software is built. Of course oversights happen as everything we are discussing involves people and we as people make mistakes. Thankfully, we no longer have to accept these behaviors as status quo.

When we work with clients, we introduce the ideas of 100 percent software defined infrastructure so that when infrastructure is created, it is always created the same way, every single time. And for infrastructure that must always meet regulatory/compliance standards such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS or NIST, we ensure the software-defined infrastructure always builds and deploys, supported by automated tests for validation purposes, according to said standards. In this way, information security is built into the operation from the first day.

Another example of how we help customers implement information security principles from the first day is in regards to vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. Instead of performing these behaviors once a quarter, once a year or “as needed”, we construct the continuous delivery pipelines to perform vulnerability assessments and penetration test behaviors on software check-ins, compiles or as every new software package is created. Predictable, repeatable, measurable and ready for audits on-demand.

Today it is easier to address these needs in the earliest of days than ever before and we thrive on helping clients solve these awesome challenges.

Could you give a case study to highlight the benefits of your cybersecurity solutions and services?

One of our clients works in the high-resolution satellite imagery sector. They were looking for a security-driven, software-defined cloud ecosystem solution which they could implement predictably, repeatably and auditably across their enterprise. They had already adopted a major cloud vendor ecosystem, but wanted to enable their developers, data and infrastructure folks the ability to build, bundle, and deploy full-stack software solutions in a way that had previously been inaccessible to them at this level. Using our Cloud ConfigTM tool, we helped them create a secured enterprise template for their cloud adoption behaviors. and since then they now operate upon and have launched three products into the marketplace. Working beside the client in a day to day manner, we helped them get into production in a way that regularly meets their regulatory/compliance needs, while enabling versioned, traceable autonomy for their team members.

What does the future hold for Trility Consulting?

We are continually enhancing our products and services based upon what we learn from our clients, as well as, working to stay on par, and ahead of, industry trends and futures. Concurrently, we are expanding our partnerships, sales and distribution channels, as well as, professional services portfolio to meet the current and anticipated demands in front of us. We’re in a great position to meet customers where they are today and where they would like to go in the future. And important to us as a team, we’re having a great time serving great clients!