We have mixed feelings now, after the conclusion of the final review meeting and the BIECO project itself. Three years ago, the BIECO project started, and it was our first project in Cybersecurity.
A consortium of 13 partners was formed and we applied on a call on the Horizon2020 program, a Research and Innovation action. The consortium consisted of universities, research facilities and companies, all to push the boundaries of what is possible in cybersecurity. Three years and 9 Work Packages later, we were in front of our final review meeting.
We had an interesting role, as system integrators. 19 tools were developed as microservices, and Holisun had to design and develop an orchestration solution that could synchronize them and transfer information between all of them. The challenges were multiple, as the heterogeneous nature of the tools meant a lot of abstractions for the platform. Tools could be local, remote, synchronous, or asynchronous, accessible through REST or ActiveMQ, MQTT and so on. For this, we developed a highly flexible orchestration solution, conveniently named the “BIECO Orchestrator”. It is based on a Messages framework, that are abstracted units of information.
The Messages framework is one of the innovations that Holisun has researched for the BIECO Project. Through this framework, the tools can communicate as simple or as complex as needed, transferring files, data, commands, and responses. The BIECO Orchestrator also assesses the state of the system, through Heartbeat and GetStatus Messages, commands the execution of the tools, and even halts the system if something bad happens. The flexibility of this framework does not mean that performance is limited. Using a JMeter benchmark, we assessed that the BIECO Orchestrator can handle ~1500 messages per second, on a simple testing laptop.
Now, as the project concluded, we are very proud of what we have done. We showed that it’s possible to innovate today, even for a small company, if we are in the right place with the right people beside us. We entered as partners but left as friends with most of the participants in the project. We visited Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Austria, and we have seen the great things that everyone is doing. We are inspired to continue this journey to excellence in European Research.
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