With the diversity of cloud’s available today, data being sent from one to another could appear to be a hodge-podge of security. As one colleague put it recently when I asked what he was expecting to maintain integrity of data in motion between clouds:
“… what kind of kludge can things end up being when you have multiple connections to multiple hybrid clouds all doing different things” — Steve Beaver
So how does data transfer between the clouds? Is it a kludge? or can it be done using a uniform security policy, procedures, and protocols while maintaining Integrity and Confidentiality and auditability?
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.
vCenter Operations: Integrated and Secure?
VMware released 3 versions of vCenter Operations, standard, advanced, Enterprise. We have already discussed the abilities of vCenter Operations vCenter Operations – vSphere Performance, Capacity and Configuration Management with Self Learning Analytics but is this an integrated and secure implementation of monitoring or do we need more security than what is provided?
At the time the first article was written there was a bit of vital information we did not have available to us. That is how to access vCenter Operations Standard or Advanced in a multi-tenant manner, that has now been provided. vCenter Operations Alive functionality can be accessed directly from a web browser using your VMware vCenter Credentials, which allows you to see the Alive status of any VM you have the permissions to view. This capability is a huge capability, as it now allows me to provide a non-vSphere Client mechanism to view the status of the virtual environment.
Security as a Service: Is it Safe?
Last week I spoke with two different Security as a Service vendors, each with their own approaches to security as a service. The first company I spoke to was CloudPassage who just exited stealth mode in time for RSA Conference, and Zscaler who is a well known company. Both provide Security as a Service with a similar approach by a different design. Both make use of large grids or computers to do all the heavy lifting of security, but from there they differ completely. While there is some overlap in the products, the different designs show us multiple ways to implement Security as a Service.
Latest SMT design requires Complete Visibility by Admin! Yikes!
I just finished reading, yet another Multi-Tenancy Design/Overview that claims to be secure or trusted. While I will agree that this particular design does cover Availability and some GRC (Governance, Regulatory, and Compliance) it is severely lacking in Integrity and Confidentiality. The design even went as far as saying the cloud/virtual administrator requires “COMPLETE VISIBILITY.” I was really taken aback by those words. Why does an administrator need ‘COMPLETE VISIBILITY?’ Which leads me to the question is Integrity and Confidentiality possible within any cloud or virtual environment? Or is it purely based on TRUST?
If so this is an appalling state of virtual and cloud environment security.
Carrier Grade Cloud Providers – The Benefits/Issues
In July 2009 I wrote an article entitled Cloud Computing Providers — are they content providers or carriers? and in January of 2011 Chuck Hollis wrote an article Verizon To Acquire Terremark — You Shouldn’t Be Surprised. Now with the Terremark acquisition almost complete and RSA Conference 2011 also over, at which I talked to Terremark about the benefits of belonging to Verizon, a picture is starting to emerge. Yes, my predictions in 2009 make sense and still hold forth today, but is there more of an impact than we realize?
vCloud Security
On the 2/24 Virtualization Security Podcast we were joined by Davi Ottenheimer and Michael Haines of VMware to discuss vCloud security. This is of quite a bit of interest to many people these days. As VMware adds more and more Cloud functionality, how to secure the environment is becoming more and more important. The podcast started with the question what aspects of the cloud do customers want secured. The answer was intriguing to say the least.