TCO of the Cloud

What is the total cost of ownership, TCO, of the cloud? When we think of the cloud, we think of using applications in the cloud such as Salesforce, Box.net, and others. We may even consider using security as a service tool such as Zscaler and others. In some cases we also think of placing our own workloads in the cloud using Amazon and other tools. The real question that comes to mind is the TCO of the cloud? Not now, but long term.

Antifragile Systems: Designing for Agility vs. Stability

For many years, the focus in IT has been on building robust systems that invested heavily in avoiding failures. To accomplish this goal, methodical processes were implemented to guide IT through a list of known use cases so that systems could try to avoid failing and have a plan for recovery if a failure did …

Big Data Security

At the recent Misti Big Data Security conference many forms of securing big data were discussed from encrypting the entire big data pool to just encrypting the critical bits of data within the pool. On several of the talks there was general discussion on securing Hadoop as well as access to the pool of data. These security measures include RBAC, encryption of data in motion between hadoop nodes as well as tokenization or encryption on ingest of data. What was missing was greater control of who can access specific data once that data was in the pool. How could role based access controls by datum be put into effect? Why would such advanced security be necessary?