Security in Our Modern Times

Throughout all the years I have been working in information technology, security has been an area that engineers have striven to improve. As a result, we have make our environments as secure as possible. We have always looked to make the security of our systems stronger. Security has evolved over time. One example of this evolution is the …

It Slices, It Dices: It Is Analytics

RSA Conference 2016 is now done. There were about 40,000 attendees, 500+ vendors, and countless hallway conversations. Key to this year’s conference was analytics. You could not walk the show floor without hearing someone extolling the virtues of one analytics product or another. Analytics was big. Of course, that was not all there was on the show …

Secure Hybrid Cloud Revisited

After months of feedback and just in time for RSA 2016, I have finally finished the second version of my Secure Hybrid Cloud Reference Architecture. There are some  differences between the previous version and V2, but nothing major, as we are talking mostly about semantic changes. However, we did expand storage, add in SaaS-based clouds, and …

On Encryption

Amazon has made many changes lately to provide encryption for its Relational Database Service (RDS), adding the ability to encrypt existing RDS instances and shared data between partners. Database encryption, specifically for sharing, is very important, as is encryption at rest, which Amazon and other cloud service providers also provide. If you wish to control …

In Search of Breach and Security Reports

Part of  a security professional’s job is to do research on possible breaches and attacks. Some try to do this in a vacuum, others share data and information, and still others read reports generated by companies in the know. The granddaddy of such reports is the Verizon DBIR. Where are the reports related to our …