There have been a large number of Announcements that have been made for VMworld Copenhagen with respect to virtualization and cloud security. This shows quite an interesting growth in the market, and that even 1 month apart there is still more to be announced within the virtual and cloud security spaces. There are three very interesting announcements that show further integration between vendors.
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an analyst, author, architect, technologist, and out-of-the-box thinker. As an analyst, Edward looks at all things IoT, big data, cloud, security, and DevOps. As an author, he has written about virtualization and security. As an architect, Edward creates peer-reviewed reference architectures for hybrid cloud, cloud-native applications, and many other aspects of the modern business. As a technologist, Edward creates code prototypes for parts of those architectures. Edward is solving today’s problems in an implementable fashion.
VMworld EMEA, IPExpo, The ExecEvent, Citrix Synergy, oh my!
This month (October 2011) there are a slew of conferences on virtualization and cloud technologies being held in Europe. The question becomes which to attend! If you are in the United States, this could be expensive considering the current Euro to Dollar exchange rate but if you are already in Europe one of these events is well worth attending, each has there own take and focus. But after the success of VMworld US, is there anything more to announce?
Virtual Environments on a Shoestring
Whether you are building a new or adding to an existing virtual or cloud environment on a shoestring budget, whether for work or for home use, there is quite a bit to consider before you purchase anything and it all boils down to your requirements which will dictate the technology you need for your virtual environment. In addition, this is a perfect time to address any deficiencies in your environment to not only address capacity issues, requirements, and security. Along with those considerations, planning the environment for the next three to five years can help shape the overall design. In fact that design, will be based on the answers from a growing list of questions.
Going to the Cloud Safely
Whether or not to put data into the cloud has been a debate since clouds were first formed. At a recent conference I was asked:
with all the security issues you brought up, why should I go to the cloud, I do not know the administrators, nor can I gain cloud visibility, so why go to the cloud at all? and if so which cloud?
There are a myriad of reasons to go to the cloud, not the least of which is politics or being told to go to the cloud. When the real question is:
which cloud services is my organization already using and how can I gain control over the data being placed into the cloud.
Link your Clouds using AFORE Cloudlink
AFORE Solutions has created AFORE Cloudlink, which won the Best of VMworld for Security at VMworld 2011 in the United States. Yet, many people were scratching their head saying, who are AFORE and why did they win. AFORE moved from a physical appliance to a virtual appliance about 3 years ago providing a way to move data between data centers in an encrypted fashion, which at the time was desperately needed. After three years they have made quite a few changes, but still have their core functionality, but now included data at rest encryption and the ability to stretch layer-2 and layer-3 networks between locations amongst others.
State of Secure Multitenancy Today
On 9/22 was held the Virtualization Security Podcast featuring Anil Karmel, Solutions Architect at Los Alamos National Library (LANL), to discuss their implementation of secure multi-tenant Cloud. LANL makes extensive use of the entire VMware product suite from vCloud Director down to the vShield components to implement their SMT cloud. They have also added into their cloud their own intellectual property to improve overall cloud security. It was a very interesting conversation about the state of SMT today.