On 9/8 was held the Virtualization Security Podcast featuring Phil Cox, Director of Security and Compliance at RightScale, to discuss the impact of and need for automation of cloud security. Given that we create clouds by automating deployment of workloads we also need to automate the security of those workloads during the same deployment. This podcast delves into that need, and touches on where over automation is also a problem.
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.
Replication Round-up
Whether you use replication as a means of disaster avoidance or disaster recovery, replication of your virtual environment between hot sites has always been a win. With current technology it is even possible to replicate to a replication receiver cloud which could provide a measure of business continuity as well. So who are the players and who provides what service, and how do they do it?
Security in the Cloud Era
“The latest challenge on the security front isn’t necessarily an exotic new threat vector: it’s the attackers themselves. They’re organized, well-resourced and patient. And there’s no silver technology bullet to effectively combat them.”
This is a very important point, and one that I have seen at other security conferences for the last 5 years or so. However, attacks are possible because there is a lack of confidentiality and integrity of the data held within the systems under attack. So the system becomes the week point.
Agent and Agent-less Backup in the Virtual Environment
There is some debate amongst backup vendors on what defines an agent, some consider any amount of scripting to be an agent, while others imply it is what does the data transfer plus any amount of scripting necessary. Is there a need for both Agent and Agent-less within a virtual environment? This also begs the question, who is responsible for properly handling the application whose data you are backing up?
Cisco VM-FEX Limitations
The week before VMworld on 8/25 was the Virtualization Security Podcast featuring Greg Ferro (@etherealmind), CCIE to discuss Cisco VM-FEX and its impact on virtualization and cloud security. VM-FEX is a method by which the fabric of a UCS top of rack switch is extended to the VM, but only if the VM is using VMDirectPath. So does this impact Virtualization and Cloud Security in any way?
Collaborations abound at VMworld 2011
If there was one thing I saw and heard about at VMworld, was the number of third party collaborations that were taking place. While not explicitly stated by VMware at VMworld, the show floor had many different collaborations that were taking place. This level of collaboration shows a level of maturity within the virtualization and cloud vendor ecosystems. A maturity, that shows that the vendors understand the benefits of leveraging other companies to lower their overall costs while producing better and more attractive products. Some of the collaborations I saw where purely the resale of products, while others were integrations between products.