I recently read the book Project Phoenix by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. If you are in development, IT, and Security it should be #1 on your reading list. In this book the authors discuss all the horrors we hear about in IT with a clear direction on how to fix them. There is politics, shadow IT, over zealous security professionals, over worked critical employees, lots of finger pointing. But there is a clear solution, at least as far as the story goes. We also know that DevOps works, most of the time.
TVP Category Archives
Delegate User Problem and Proxies
By far, the lowest hanging fruit of virtualization and cloud environment security is the segregation of your management control from your workloads. Separation of data and control planes have been recommended for everything from storage (EMC ViPR) up to the workloads running within virtual machines. The same holds true for cloud and virtual environment management tools, tasks, and functions. Up to now there have been very few choices in how such segregation could occur using properly placed firewalls or by using some form of proxy and the only proxy available was HyTrust. But this has changed. There are some other tools that will help with this segregation of data from control and do they give the level of auditing we require to solve the delegate user problem?
Internet of Things: Expectation of Privacy
For years we have had an expectation of privacy while using our computers, tablets, phones, email, etc. However, with the advent of big data analysis and everything being on the internet, the internet of things, there is no longer the veil that makes up an Expectation of Privacy.
News: Splunk App for Enterprise Security Updated
Splunk is well known for analyzing data in large volumes either within a local Splunk installation or within the Splunk Storm their cloud service. However, there has been a general lack of security related capability within both these tools. Yes they can correlate some security data, but requires a bit of hands on work to make happen. This has changed with the introduction of Splunk App for Enterprise Security v2.4. They now have some very powerful out of the box analysis for enterprise security and one that could solve a growing issue outlined within the latest Verizon Breach Report: the time it takes to determine a breach actually happened.
Cyber Defense: Using Virtual Desktops?
There was recently a rather heated twitter discussion between @Guisebule, @VirtualTal, and @Texiwill (myself) about using virtual desktops as a part of cyber defense. While this could be true, there is a need to ensure you know where your virtual desktop(s) start and end, not only within the network, but your applications in use. In addition, it is very important to fully understand the scope of a virtual desktop architecture as well as use.
Virtual Desktop Patching and Data Protection
Data Protection and patch management of virtual desktops, while not a sexy topic, is one that should happen on a regular basis within any organization implementing or working to implement virtual desktops. Recently, we have been testing virtual desktop software and there is a huge difference between patching and protecting data in a small number of instances and 1000s of instances. There are scale considerations as well as ease of use for file level and system recovery as well as issues with patching virtual desktops (not to mention other security issues).