The Digital Fortress Connecting Disparate and Siloed Networks

Finally, after years of yelling into tone-deaf ears, it’s all starting to come together. I once spent two days locked in a room with a top international cyber committee discussing the challenges with cybersecurity, literally yelling at them, “ALL OFF THE SHELF CYBER SOFTWARE FAILS AND IS FAILING!” No. It didn’t go over well but it had to be done. I’ve spent years in meeting after meeting with countless members of the Washington DC cyber world, including Homeland Security, pushing back on the continued use of off the shelf cybersecurity solutions. They simply do not work as we are all seeing today. It has become very clear to the public that our systems are vulnerable and continued hacking is having a crippling effect on our country, our personal lives, and the military as well as businesses of all sizes.

This article is a guest contribution by Phil Abraham, CEO and Founder of CloudFace LLC and Zerospace Labs and the newest member to our Executive Board of Directors.

While I am considered a supply chain guru, having lead supply chain projects at GM, Ford, Walmart, Kmart, Dominoes and founded/ invented Covisint, The Resource Group (Ascension Health), and Manugistics (which is used by 90% of the restaurants including McDonald’s), I have been a proponent of blockchain technology for the last 10 or so years. While I believe in the potential of the technology, I have yet to see it’s implementation at the level it needs to be to make a true impact on traditional systems. Because of that, I have been fairly standoffish when it comes to integrating blockchain technology.

In fact, when Dragonchain first reached out to me, my first inclination was to decline the meeting. I even told them that I usually don't take meetings with blockchain companies. But, there was something about Dragonchain that seemed different. I was intrigued by its architecture and its patents. The fact they are GDPR/CPPA capable and have quantum resistant solutions sealed the deal. I wanted to know more.

I have always believed in distributed ledger technology, I just hadn’t seen any blockchain solutions that I considered quantum-resistant or that were truly interoperable with composite architecture. Without blockchain companies having those capabilities, I couldn’t look a CEO in the eye and tell him that it was a good idea to migrate its data to any blockchain. Businesses have enough problems on their own without adding incapable blockchain “solutions” to the mix. We need the technology. I just didn’t believe blockchain was ready for enterprise.

I have found that the supply chain is traditionally the most vulnerable link in cybersecurity. It is also the most disparate and siloed. So, when I took a deeper look at Dragonchain’s architecture and then met with its team, I was both thrilled and relieved. I realized I had finally found the last piece of the puzzle that would solve my interoperability dilemma. The issue has plagued me for 30 years, well before blockchain was a known term. Now, I was finally able to connect disparate/siloed networks and supply chains in a quantum secure manner.

In November I joined forces with Dragonchain as a board member and advocate. I chose to align with Dragonchain for a number of reasons. Of course, interoperability and the ability to connect disparate/siloed networks and legacy systems was important. And the team is great. But, security was by far the most crucial. I knew that this strategic partnership with Dragonchain would solidify the completion of the CloudFace Digital Fortress which is designed to provide super-secure cyber solutions for the entire system. This will bring cyber protection to businesses, supply chains, healthcare, and blockchains that are quantum computing attack-proof. We’re going beyond cyber protection to solving the compression issues of 4G to 5G and data/network camouflage challenges. We’re embedding a polymorphic random number generator, the holy grail of solutions. I was on a call last week with a large hospital network and five minutes into the call their CTO said to me, “I didn’t realize these kinds of solutions existed.” The truth is until recently, they didn’t.

The Digital Fortress solution started to come together when I was asked to help interface between Dr. Al Carlson and specific entities in Washington DC that had been struggling to understand these innovative solutions. Dr. Carlson has done significant work for many agencies in Washington DC and was the Chief Scientist/Chief Technology Officer at the NSA. He has a strong background in the military, especially in war gaming scenarios. With his Ph. D. in electronic circuit boards, mathematics and in computer science, Dr. Carlson is considered one of the top three mathematicians in the world in set theory and its application to ciphers. He is the only person to have designed practical polymorphic cipher engines, which is the best and strongest polymorphic cipher that exists. Since that fateful meeting, Dr. Carlson and I have become close friends and now we are partners through CloudFace.

CloudFace LLC has a license to take this patented cipher technology to market with Dr. Carlson. We are blending other technologies, like Dragonchain’s quantum resistant blockchain platform to create an unhackable Digital Fortress. Dr. Carlson’s algorithm is battle tested by a team of Ph.Ds at the NSA. On several occasions they tried to penetrate the Digital Fortress all from different angles and were unsuccessful each time. (Watch for the full report on their findings coming soon.)

Given recent cyber/cloud security hacks and supply chain vulnerabilities, the timing for our Digital Fortress coming to market couldn’t be better. According to Cybersecurity Ventures the cost of global cybercrime damage will reach $11.4 million per minute in 2021. And, a recent report from the Fortune Business Insights predicts that the global AI market will grow at a rate of more than 33% per year, rising from around $20 billion in 2018 to upwards of $200 billion by 2026.

We are uniquely positioned to help secure and dramatically improve network security and functionality for companies, especially in the healthcare sector. The data flowing through the hospital system is the most vulnerable and is seeing unprecedented attacks. The penalties are astronomical for personally identifiable information (PII) breaches. I have seen first hand the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the existing infrastructure.

It’s not hyperbole to say the healthcare system is a horrible mess. It’s as if the entire system was specifically designed to keep the system bottled up.

Loma Linda University Medical Center

My work at Loma Linda University Medical Center gave me insights into all the departments within the hospital down to the suppliers and vendors that support that system. This includes the software and technology used internally at the hospital as well as the software and the architecture that serves as the foundational software for the supplier-vendor health care community.

In healthcare, as a rule, traditionally not even 1% of the costs as a percentage of net patient service revenue can be driven out. At Loma Linda University Medical Center we demonstrated that costs can actually be driven out, substantially at that, to the tune of 20% at the low end and as high as 80%.

The key element in what I achieved for Loma Linda is that I made dramatic improvements in patient outcomes all without touching the patient/doctor relationship, which is very hard to do. With significant improvements to reimbursements, this innovative technology saves Loma Linda over 30 million dollars annually.

The work is not finished. Now that I have Dragonchain’s interoperability I can truly connect all the disparate and siloed networks, allowing them to talk to each other, transfer assets, and execute payment settlements further driving down the costs.

This Loma Linda project demonstrated that innovative solutions can be achieved when a fresh look at the architecture that supports these complex systems embraces the appropriate technology(s).

Digital Fortress

From Healthcare to Fintech this multiple discipline technology will have a significant impact in addressing cybersecurity and supply chain vulnerabilities. The technology provides self-reporting real-time audits with audit trail proof and chain of custody, connects disparate systems and siloed networks, and can tokenize assets. The effect is increased and incentivized organizational efficiencies as well as improved user experience and patient outcomes all while driving down the service cost and maximizing the return on investment.

There is nobody else in the marketplace besides CloudFace and Dragonchain who have assimilated quantum computing resistant cybersecurity, cloud, AI, IoT, predictive/behavioral analytics, supply chain, data integration, network interoperability database management, and blockchain. By combining these multiple disciplines into one service inside a quantum computing resistant ecosystem CloudFace, Dr. Carlson, and Dragonchain have literally built an end to end infrastructure as a service inside a Digital Fortress.

We will be able to achieve things in this space that others haven't been able to do, in part, because they didn’t have the technology. Here’s to 2021 and the launch of our Digital Fortress.