Start with SaaS Security: End with Data Security

The 6/30 Virtualization Security Podcast with Simon Crosby Founder and CEO of Bromium started with a discussion of SaaS security but soon went to a discussion of Data Security. Simon left Citrix not to long ago to form a new company, Bromium, to seriously look into how the hypervisor itself can provide better security for data manipulations than it does today. But first we started off with SaaS and how you can Identify the user within a cloud.

HP embraces AppSense for Reference Architecture

In a press release on June 29, 2011 AppSense announced that its User Virtualization Platform is now a core building block of HP’s new Client Virtualization Reference Architecture. Along with Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, AppSense User Virtualization has been recognized by HP as a crucial technology for a successful architecture that meets the goals for client virtualization.

Replication Receiver Clouds: Protecting your Data

Security in the cloud and the virtual environment is ‘all about the data’ and not specifically about any other subsystem. It is about the data. As such the data has something it knows (the contents of the data), something it is (its signature), and something it has (its digital rights) and since it has these three elements, the data has all it has identity. However, protecting the data requires us to put things between the data and the real world such as firewalls, and complex role based access controls, as well as methods to replicate the data to other locations in a non-intrusive mechanism. The goal to such replication could be to ensure multiple sites have the same data (such as a hot-site) or to have the data available in another locations in case of disaster.

Virtualized Replication: vSphere APIs Expand

As a delegate for Tech Field Day 6 in Boston, I was introduced to SRM Replication as well as ZeRTO a third party replication tool. They seem to be as different as night and day but are they? Both work within the vSphere environment to replicate virtual disks regardless of storage type, and apparently hook into the same location within VMware’s API stack. This shows a maturity of VMware’s API stack that until now has been unknown and secret. In this one area, Microsoft Hyper-V is beating VMware vSphere: The availability of well known APIs that are easy for Third Parties to use. I now see a change in VMware’s behavior, can they continue this growth?