Why and how to display information: object constructor

Ruslan Rakhmetov, Security Vision

For work and in everyday life we may encounter different types of program interfaces and cards/pages, tables and graphs, incident analysis tools and other ways of data visualisation, which we will call ‘objects’. In the first part of the article, we will look at several ways of creating such objects, which we have generalised as ‘constructors’, and then we will analyse the pros and cons of each constructor.

Because of the great variety of solved tasks and the needs of each user, employee or ordinary person there appeared 4 ways to create various objects, their visual representation and display from different sides:

-The first way is related to the application of external tools on top of existing systems. For example, films to be shown in Russia are often translated from the original language, changing the developer-director's interface to the one that will be more convenient and understandable to the user. In IT systems such a superstructure serves, for example, BI-systems, which, using simple and fast technologies, are able to visually and accurately draw various data from different sources. This method is not exactly connected with changing the source objects, as the result is a qualitatively new thing - graphics instead of numbers. The statistics depicted on the graph is still the same, you will most likely have to look at numbers to analyse it, but high-quality and fast visualisation simplifies and speeds up the work of any analyst, no matter if you are studying the ratings of friends on Kinopoisk or the demographic statistics of 2022 compared to 1922.

-The second way is to write programmes, or rather a certain code that will call functions and build interfaces line by line. When you use any programme on your computer, you use the interfaces that the developers of the application have designed for you. Only the programmer-developer has the privilege of influencing the appearance of the objects and interfaces that he or she has designed. To simplify teamwork and the transfer of source code from one developer to another, various guidelines for normalising code writing (some even integrated into the programming language itself) and object-oriented programming have emerged.

-The third way offers the user a completely different approach - with the help of no-code tools (zerocoding) it is possible not only to transform data from one form to another (as with BI tools), but also to think through external views of interfaces, programmes, asset and incident cards, vulnerability remediation instructions and other objects. Now it is possible to make a prototype of a program without knowing a programming language or a website without writing HTML markup rules and colours in CSS.

- Thefourth method is intermediate between the second (classical development) and the third (programming without writing code) - part of objects is described using simple and accessible to all tools, and the other part - with the help of development. For example, this is how the interface of Bitrix24 is arranged, where you can move and rename almost anything, but to integrate with a self-written programme you will have to ask the developers to add the functionality to a future version of the product.

Regardless of what you do, you are likely working with different entities. From a risk manager's point of view, an entity might be a page in a familiar interface that shows who owns a system and what larger IS it is a part of. For IT specialists - tables with the list of the company's technical assets under repair, software installed on the computer, user account, list of operating system updates on an important server and other parameters. For an IS specialist, objects will be cards with incident descriptions, tables with interconnected technical vulnerabilities, graphs of connections between users and systems, or graphs for searching anomalies.

In our understanding, an object constructor is a tool for describing anything in the form of cards, lists, tables, pictures and other elements. You can compare working in such a constructor with drawing a floor plan, creating a presentation in PowerPoint or front-end interface of a website on Tilda. Above we have analysed 4 main types of constructors, and now let's understand their limitations and capabilities.

Fig. 1 - BI and coding

The very first way is to change the visual style of data, for example, creating a chart based on tabular data in Excel. It is understandable to almost every confident PC user, and allows you to translate large arrays of numbers and lists into graphical form. To search for anomalies in network traffic, it is convenient to graph incidents by several parameters, e.g. X-Y view for two variables of interest, and to see ‘peaks’ of activity on a time scale. The use of BI tools generally solves such problems.

The second method is more labour-intensive and requires knowledge of programming languages. You can create an automatic programme that will monitor incoming traffic from the company and block suspicious emails. This is how anti-spam solutions work. If the task is to block data transfer outside the company, then solutions analyse outgoing traffic using different protocols, as DLP systems do. Each vendor uses its expertise to create such programmes, and it is not only about information protection tools (see here, here, here and here), but also about operating systems and mobile applications. Despite the wide variety, we can highlight the fact that to make changes to such objects you need to ask developers to add this or that element to the interface, which means that adapting such products to your requirements can take a long time or cannot be done at all. That is why large organisations replace third-party solutions with their own developments, but it is not always beneficial for smaller organisations.

Figure 2 - ZERO- and LOW-coding

The other two approaches address the problem of high skill requirements of employees when adapting off-the-shelf solutions to their needs. In general terms, zero- and low-coding tools are based on the fact that no scripts need to be written for development or development can be carried out on a minimum scale that each customer can define for himself in a comfortable mode. Tools of this class allow you to create objects from ready-made blocks, change their composition (set of properties, performed actions) and appearance (even fonts, colours and styles).

For employees of IT departments such solutions have been developed to manage the process of inventory and data collection on the company's assets: they can be easily supplemented with their own products and data sources, as well as executable scripts to solve point tasks, such as changing the life cycle status, analysing the host workload or managing accesses of user accounts.

For the IS department, low-code has developed tools for cybersecurity threat analysis, incident management and vulnerability management. In such products, you can easily adapt the object card by adding any new parameter, preparing a new response scenario or adding a new solution to the ecosystem being created. You can also count on the developer's expertise, but in the long run it is always better to have an adaptive tool that is not tied to external solutions, is not limited by the vendor's playbook and is simply easier to perceive for a user who does not have an 80-level programming skill.

People no longer have to program to create mockups of mobile and web apps: you can create a prototype in minutes, there are already hundreds of object creation offerings. We hope that your task can be solved succinctly and simply, without resorting to complex development, and that you have the ability and means to engage experts who year after year try to make their services better and more convenient.