The Attack Seen Around the World

The attack seen around the world. In one of my more recent posts, I brought attention to the release, or better yet the data dump of exploits and hacking tools targeting Microsoft’s Windows OS, Linux, firewalls, and others. One of the main purposes of my post was to bring attention to the grave dangers that these exploits bring to the world and as such, I really hoped that there would be enough interest from individuals in the industry to get a copy of the exploits and contribute to the countermeasures that would be needed to defend against exploits to better protect and defend the companies and corporations that we all represent. I was absolutely sure that there would be many individuals around the world that would be reverse engineering the exploits for more devious purposes and it appears that we have just experienced the first, of what I believe, to be just the beginning attacks seen around the world.

Educate, Upgrade, Patch, or Else..

I had a debate with a fellow technologist at Dell EMC World this year about whether the cloud is more secure than any given data center not used by a cloud provider. The argument put forth was that cloud service providers often have better security controls in place, they can auto-patch systems, etc. All in …

Earnings for 1st Quarter of 2017

Can you believe we have reached the month of May already? Where does the time go? The end of April also is the time for some of the public cloud companies to release their earnings for the 1st Quarter of 2017 and as such, we have some numbers to report on from Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle and SAP. For full disclosure the sources that I have used for this post are as follows. The publicly released company reports, Cleveland Research, Factset Estimates and CRC Estimates. The SAP numbers have been converted to dollars for the comparisons and revenues being reported include IaaS and SaaS/PaaS that have been sold on an IaaS platform.

DockerCon 2017 Roundup

Recently I attended DockerCon in Austin, Texas. Docker has been gaining an increased amount of interest in the enterprise for both building new greenfield applications and migrating legacy applications. Docker has become synonymous with microservices-based architectures, but enterprises are mired in legacy applications. In my experience, well over 90% of all workloads in enterprises are …

Have You Heard about the Shadow Brokers Tools Dump?

Have you ever heard of the “Shadow Brokers”? Up until this weekend I had not really ever heard of the term “Shadow Brokers” but it appears the Shadow Brokers are a group of “hackers” that have really put a new spin on the term lost in translation. On Good Friday and ahead of the Easter holiday, the Shadow Brokers have dumped a new collection of files, which they have called “Lost in Translation”, containing what appears to be exploits and hacking tools targeting Microsoft’s Windows OS as well as Linux and firewall as well as other and at the same time they have presented evidence that the Equation Group had gained access to servers and targeted the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world.

Docker, Modernizing Traditional Applications

DockerCon 2017 was about modernizing traditional applications, or MTA. MTA is the lifting and shifting of traditional Microsoft Windows base applications into Docker containers. Its approach is reminiscent of 2009. For Docker to grow into brownfield data centers, this is a must. However, could it be doing more? If so, what is it doing that could …