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.
TVP Strategy Archives
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an analyst, author, architect, technologist, and out-of-the-box thinker. As an analyst, Edward looks at all things IoT, big data, cloud, security, and DevOps. As an author, he has written about virtualization and security. As an architect, Edward creates peer-reviewed reference architectures for hybrid cloud, cloud-native applications, and many other aspects of the modern business. As a technologist, Edward creates code prototypes for parts of those architectures. Edward is solving today’s problems in an implementable fashion.
Logging within the Secure Hybrid Cloud
When we think of logging within the secure hybrid cloud, we tend to think of analytics, but there is more to logging than just reviewing the data there are also discussions on what to collect and from where as well as why collect the data? For security purposes we may start with collecting access data and work out from there, but most logs from complex systems such as a secure hybrid cloud include many different forms of log data and in some cases, not enough. Perhaps what log data you can retrieve may be a deciding point for hybrid cloud services as logs are used not only for audit purposes, but also for trouble shooting and forensics. What log data do you collect within your secure hybrid cloud?
Small Business Virtualization: Growth Through the Ages
As a small business we run a 100% virtualized environment and looking to migrate to a cloud, but the investment in IT to do this has been pretty substantial and for a cash strapped small business can be a many year process due to budget constraints and immediacy of other business needs. That is the key to a small business, the immediacy of business needs, but if you can step back and do a little planning, any small business can proceed along the journey from a physical environment to a software defined environment. There are many choices available to a small business depending on when they started this journey, existing investment, and where they wish to go. What choices are available now for a small business and where should we go as small business owners?
API Security within the Hybrid Cloud
The Hybrid Cloud has 100s if not 1000s of APIs in use at any time. API security therefore becomes a crucial part of any hybrid cloud environment. There are only so many ways to secure an API, we can limit its access, check the commands, encrypt the data transfer, employ API level role based access controls, ensure we use strong authentication, etc. However, it mostly boils down to depending on the API itself to be secure because while we can do many things on the front end, there is a chance that once the commands and actions reach the other end (cloud or datacenter) that the security could be suspect. So how do we implement API security within the hybrid cloud today?
Testing within the Virtual Environment
There has long been a debate about testing products within a virtual environment. Not just on how, but the why as well as the what to test. There are limits in some EULA’s as well on the reporting of such testing. This was the subject of the 7/25 Virtualization Security Podcast (#112 – Virtualization Security Roundtable) held Live from NSS Labs in Austin, TX. Where we delved into the issues of testing within a virtual environment. While the discussion was about security products, it is fairly straight forward to apply the concepts to other products within the virtual environment.
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?