GoKawiilAnother frantic call at 3 a.m.: the Oracle Red Bull Racing Formula One team discovered an issue in the wind tunnel testing its cars. It's up to Ian Brunton, head of software engineering for aerodynamics, to troubleshoot the problem. Even when he's already shaken off the early-morning haze, the investigation could easily take an hour. But when it comes to racing, every second counts.
Many security-related considerations go into managing an F1 team. The tools, methods, and the infrastructure engineers use to design the cars require heavy investments and the team needs to secure information from leaking to competitors. And as they're moving fast on and off the racetrack, teams also need to ensure they don't wind up with breaches, malware, or other various threats. System credentials and identities must be protected.
"Cyber is critical in F1," Matt Cadieux, chief information officer at Red Bull Racing, tells Dark Reading. "It's an engineering competition as well as a driver's competition. There's a lot of investment and we need to protect our secrets and business continuity where we face the same threats that other companies do."
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Maintaining speed and efficiency securely while managing 2,000 people and thousands of servers and clusters – some on premises and some in the cloud – presents challenges. A broad set of applications and services, well over 100 service accounts, compounds the complexity.
Over the past year, Oracle Red Bull Racing implemented 1Password tools for automation, credential access, governed access, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) management with two goals in mind: Enhance speed and security. While they experienced some implementation challenges, Cadieux and Brunton agree the added automation accelerated processes that spilled over to car improvements as well.
Satisfying 100 Perfectionists
F1 is all about speed, but it's not restricted to amping up the car; it's the speed of business activities too. Users need to be productive and spend their brain power on how to make a faster car, instead of dealing with inefficient tools or downtime, says Cadieux.
"Rather than people being frustrated, saying IT is rubbish, which people occasionally do, we're trying to minimize that and pull all their brain power and energy into thinking about the car and underlying infrastructure issues," he says.
While it's easy to cut corners and deploy a system without authentication, it will "bite you" every single time, warns Brunton. Strong authentication allows users to design a car versus having to report a problem. "It affects people in my team too," he says. "It becomes a cycle of a problem."
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