The Virtualization Field Day delegates joined the Virtualization Security Podcast as guest panelists on 2/23 and the topic of the day was cloud security. There were questions about compliance, security of the tenant, and security of the administrators, and legal issues. There were answers from Rodney Haywood (Rodos), another Virtualization Field Day Delegate and cloud architect as well as the podcast standard panelists. So what did the questions boil down to?
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.
Future Proofing Data Protection
During a briefing of Quest’s new data protection announcements I started to think about the future of data protection. Quest recently announced that NetVault will now work with Exagrid devices and that there is now a Capacity Edition targeting SMBs and SMEs. These changes add some more capabilities to an existing product suite. While, these announcements do not necessarily merge with virtualization backup, the combination of Quest’s tools and partnerships do form an impressive view of the future with respect to Data Protection.
Fix the App or Add Hardware?
While participating in the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day #2, I was asking PureStorage on whether or not SSD based storage was throwing hardware at a problem that is better fixed, by changing the code in question? What brought this thought to mind was the example used during the presentation which was about database performance. This example, tied to a current consulting problem, where fixing the database improved performance by 10x. This alleviated the need for over all storage improvements. So the question remains, is using SSD, throwing hardware to solve a basic coding problem?
Application Aware Virtualization Backup
While participating in the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day #2, I was asking Symantec about Application Aware Backups. In other words, could one backup an entire application, regardless of how the application was defined. This concept goes hand in hand with Application Aware Security measures. We can always backup VMs and their data to remote locations, but can we backup or maintain the application interactions within a multi-VM Application regardless of how it is defined.
Application Security within the Virtual and Cloud Environments
Virtualization and Cloud Security architects, pundits, and writers like myself often talk about protecting the data within the virtual and cloud environments. However, in order to protect that data we need to be able to determine how the data will be used, accessed, modified, and eventually removed. So, how can we understand data security without understanding the application around it. But there is an even more fundamental problem, how do we define the application and the security measures we should take?
When to use a Virtual Firewall
The 2/9 Virtualization Security Podcast was a discussion on when would one use a virtual firewall. This was in response to being told that there are some people that would never use a virtual firewall for anything, and that got me thinking. Outside of the politics involved with using virtual vs physical firewalls, when would you use one? What are the cut offs, and best practices around using virtual firewalls. We were joined by Rob Randell of VMware to discuss this point.