When SaaS Goes Awry

Recently, I have had a spate of calendar issues from various sources and of various types. Some calendar entries are given the wrong time zone, others show up on one device but not another, and some have no email capability embedded. All of these issues occur when various calendar services are used by those sending …

Making Do: The SMB Perspective

Small and medium business and enterprises often make do with what they can do today while dreaming about tomorrow. Most SMBs look to have communication tools in place both for communication with the outside world (email, the Web, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.) and for communication between team members (email, IM, etc.). Most of this can …

Disaster Recovery Communication

During a recent Twitter conversation about disaster recovery and business continuity testing, I began to consider how we communicate during a disaster. We do so not with normal communication methods, but more often than not with an interrupting form of communication—one in which constant requests for updates, criticisms, and outright demands for attention are directed …

Security Wrapped Data

On the July third Virtualization Security Podcast, we discussed mobile security with Harry Labana, CPO of CloudVolumes, and Ben Goodman of VMware. Actually, it was not necessarily about mobile security as much as it was about security in accessing corporate data from mobile devices, regardless of device and location of data. What came out of …

Protecting ITaaS Consoles

There has been quite a bit written about Code Spaces and how unauthorized access to its ITaaS console granted enough permissions to delete everything out of Amazon, including backups. There are lessons here not only for tenants, but also for those vendors who create ITaaS consoles, such as VMware (vCHS, vCD, vCAC, vCenter, Orchestrator, etc.), …

Lessons We Can Learn from the Code Spaces Attack

It was all over the web on June 18: Code Spaces went off the air, as we discussed during the Virtualization Security Podcast on 6/19. The reasons are fairly normal in the world of IT and the cloud. They were hacked. Not by subverting the Amazon cloud, but in ways considered more traditional—even mundane. An …