Posted by
Christine Drake in
Cloud, Cyber crime, DataCenter, hybrid-cloud, IaaS, PaaS, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security, Threats, Threats from the Cloud, Virtualization
Sep 8th, 2011 |
7 Comments
We often hear that security and privacy concerns are the main inhibitors to cloud adoption. But what are the true threats? Is the cloud really more dangerous than your on-site data center? I would say that virtualization and cloud computing aren’t inherently more dangerous, but they have unique infrastructure that must be addressed when creating a security foundation.
There are similar attacks across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures—data-stealing malware, web threats, spam, phishing, bots, etc. So many companies are tempted to deploy their security for dedicated physical...
Posted by
Christine Drake in
Cloud, DataCenter, Deep Security, private cloud, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Virtualization, VMware
Aug 30th, 2011 |
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In my last blog post, I discussed some of the benefits of agentless security for virtual and private cloud servers. Today at VMworld, Harish Agastya, Director of Data Center Security at Trend Micro, conducted a presentation on Agentless Security for VMware Environments (listed on the Trend Micro VMworld page). Trend Micro released agentless antivirus in Deep Security at last year’s VMworld and has seen impressive results over the last year. With such success, today Trend Micro announced an extension of its agentless security with new agentless file integrity monitoring (FIM) in Deep Security...
Posted by
Christine Drake in
Cloud, IaaS, private cloud, public cloud, Securing the Cloud, Security, Virtualization
Aug 30th, 2011 |
8 Comments
There’s a lot of talk about cloud computing and cloud security this week as many people are attending VMworld in Las Vegas (follow Trend Micro at VMworld). But not all types of cloud security are best suited for all types of cloud computing.
When people generically refer to “cloud computing” they usually mean the public cloud. But what about private clouds or hybrid clouds? The May 2011 Trend Micro cloud survey results showed that companies are adopting all three models almost equally. Although there are certainly overlaps in security best practices across these models, there are...
Posted by
Dave Asprey in
Citrix, Cloud, Cloud-based Security, cloudbursting, Deep Security, hybrid-cloud, IaaS, PaaS, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Virtualization, VMware
May 25th, 2011 |
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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...
Posted by
Greg Boyle in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, Cyber crime, Malware, public cloud, SaaS, Securing the Cloud, Security, Threats, Virtualization
May 23rd, 2011 |
2 Comments
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...
Posted by
Bharath Chandrasekhar in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, DataCenter, private cloud, public cloud, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security
May 11th, 2011 |
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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”,...
Posted by
Bharath Chandrasekhar in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, cloudbursting, DataCenter, hybrid-cloud, private cloud, public cloud, Securing the Cloud, Security, Threats from the Cloud, Uncategorized, Virtualization
Mar 15th, 2011 |
9 Comments
Do you know what cloudbursting is? It is a concept where when you run out of your computing resources in your internal data center, you “burst” the additional workload to an external cloud on an on-demand basis. The internal computing resource is the “Private Cloud” and the external cloud is typically a “public cloud” for which the organization gets charged on a pay-per-use basis. When your deployment has the ability to do “cloudbursting” or spreading the load to the public cloud, you essentially have a Hybrid Cloud.
Hybrid Clouds can deliver a bit...
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
Dave Asprey in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, Malware, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Virtualization
Feb 10th, 2011 |
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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
Justin Foster in
Cloud, Cloud-based Security, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Virtualization
Jan 11th, 2011 |
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Drawing of London Bridge from a 1682 map. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Everyone is familiar with the traditional nursery rhyme, “London Bridge is Falling Down.” However, few know that it traces its roots back to a factual wonder of the medieval world.
In 1209 a massive stone bridge was opened over the river Thames. Quite different than the modern London Bridge we know today, this colossal structure was an engineering marvel of its day and included a chapel at the apex of the bridge.
It didn’t take long for people to realize the potential of this new prime real estate and by the late 1200’s...
