Posted by
Bharath Chandrasekhar in
Cloud, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Virtualization
Feb 28th, 2011 |
1 Comment
One of the delivery models of Cloud Computing is Platform-as-a-Service. In its true definition, a PaaS provider takes care of the underlying infrastructure including the VMs, OS patches, elasticity, auto-scaling, firewalling, etc and provides an API — and a language runtime — to which the programmer should write the code. The users of PaaS have no control over the underlying infrastructure, i.e. there is nothing “open” about it. The most prominent PaaS offerings are Force.com from Salesforce (Apex), Google App Engine (Python and Java), and Microsoft Azure (.NET). It is obvious...
Posted by
Justin Foster in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, IaaS, PaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Threats, Threats from the Cloud, Virtualization
Feb 14th, 2011 |
1 Comment
A year ago we posted a compendium of Cloud and Cloud Security resources. This posting has been consistently among the top hits to the Cloud Security Blog proving that, when it comes to Cloud the one thing we all need is clarity!
Two of the most useful resources for Cloud 101 make up the common body of knowledge for the CCSK certification:
Cloud Security Alliance: Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing
European Network and Information Security Agency: Cloud Computing Risk Assessment
Once you have the basics down, there are several industry organizations and groups which...
Posted by
Dave Asprey in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, Malware, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Virtualization
Feb 10th, 2011 |
Comments Off
Is Virtualization stupid? It forces guest VMs sharing a host to do the same things over and over, without sharing. It takes up countless hours of otherwise useful – and expensive – server time. Sure, it’s better to consolidate servers using virtualization than to leave them on separate hardware, but it’s still just plain wasteful when dozens of VMs on a single server suck CPU cycles to do the same things their neighbors are doing.
Why do we allow this? For security and flexibility reasons. The predecessor of desktop virtualization was the Citrix Presentation Server, which...
Posted by
Dave Asprey in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, Cyber crime, IaaS, Malware, PaaS, SaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Threats, Threats from the Cloud
Feb 6th, 2011 |
6 Comments
In a recent eWeek interview, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby described Conficker malware as “the world’s largest cloud.” He’s right. Cybercriminals use Conficker to create massive clouds of remotely-controlled PCs capable of carrying out a variety of cyber-attacks, including DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on a scale larger than any centralized cloud provider could. We tend to think about data center-based clouds with names like Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service, but the future of really big clouds looks more like Conficker’s very powerful networks of distributed...
