Trend Cloud Security Blog – Cloud Computing Experts

Chrome OS: So secure we don’t need security?

With the launch announcements of various Google Chrome netbooks, the focus of the press and security companies alike is beginning to take a closer look at the security promises made and also at some of the more ’media friendly‘ statements such as, “…users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates”.   Let’s have a look at some of the security features of Chrome OS:   1 – Get out of my playpen. Each process runs in its own sandbox.  Effectively this means that if an application is malicious or compromised, it is unable to interact with or otherwise affect... read more

Open Source Clouds Become Enterprise-Grade: Citrix and OpenStack

Today at Synergy, Citrix announced “Project Olympus,” effectively making open source clouds a more viable option for enterprises. In the past, it was cloud providers like Rackspace who tended to focus on open source cloud infrastructure, while enterprises tended to make more conservative choices where support contracts were available. The new support from Citrix, along with about 60 other supporting commercial hardware and software vendors, should go a long way towards helping enterprises see OpenStack as an enterprise-grade choice of cloud infrastructure. Enterprises can now get a Citrix-certified... read more

A Tale: The Snack Supplier, the Vending Machine, and the Cloud

I recently had an interesting chat with the operator of our snack vending machine while making a coffee in the kitchen. She was restocking our machine and had her iPad sitting on the table. In their 2 person company they now have 2 iPads and a PC. They do their inventory control and tracking while onsite at customer premises via the iPad. Then they sync it with their PC and, using an online storage solution they transfer it to the cloud; this then syncs with their online accounting package. Her reason was very, very simple: she wants to reduce the amount of time they spend on bookkeeping and back-office... read more

Did Amazon’s aggressive algorithms prevent customer data loss?

How difficult is it to run a public cloud service? As all of us know, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage on 21-Apr-2011 and that lasted for almost 4 days. Quite a lot of companies were affected and you can find the list here. The Internet was flooded with articles speculating what went wrong, whether cloud computing is viable in the long run, how Amazon services did not function as advertised, how the applications should be built, etc. While most offered their opinion in broad strokes such as “use multiple regions/clouds”, “use built-in redundancy”, “don’t use public clouds”,... read more

Do you have a migration plan for IPv6 yet? (part 2 of 2)

 IPv6 is growing rapidly. Chart from http://bgp.potaroo.net/v6/as2.0/index.html    Over the past few years, the growth of IPv6 has increased greatly. Already, there is about 100,000 times more space advertised on IPv6 as on IPv4. Well, that’s not exactly correct, since we “count” addresses differently. As of today, there are around 202,926,147,961,349 so-called “/64′s” being advertised on IPv6, vs 2,469,125,216 IPv4 addresses. The “/64′s” are the typical “end user” address space being advertised – each of which contains 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses! That... read more

IPv6 is here. How does this affect email?

Part 1 of 2 parts IPv6 will change how we use the internet, again. To the typical user, there is no difference; web sites work the same. But email is a different story. When using IPv6, addresses are allocated in a different manner. Most end-users today get one IP address, which is shared between multiple machines using a Network Address Translation (NAT) router. In IPv6, each user gets an address block – a /64 – of address space. This is great news, because end-to-end application on the Internet will work much better, and there will be no NAT in the way. A /64 is a huge amount of space –... read more