Have You Heard about the Shadow Brokers Tools Dump?

Have you ever heard of the “Shadow Brokers”? Up until this weekend I had not really ever heard of the term “Shadow Brokers” but it appears the Shadow Brokers are a group of “hackers” that have really put a new spin on the term lost in translation. On Good Friday and ahead of the Easter holiday, the Shadow Brokers have dumped a new collection of files, which they have called “Lost in Translation”, containing what appears to be exploits and hacking tools targeting Microsoft’s Windows OS as well as Linux and firewall as well as other and at the same time they have presented evidence that the Equation Group had gained access to servers and targeted the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world.

Docker, Modernizing Traditional Applications

DockerCon 2017 was about modernizing traditional applications, or MTA. MTA is the lifting and shifting of traditional Microsoft Windows base applications into Docker containers. Its approach is reminiscent of 2009. For Docker to grow into brownfield data centers, this is a must. However, could it be doing more? If so, what is it doing that could …

On-Premises Serverless Needs More Services

I wrote a little while ago about running a serverless platform on-premises. I have since realized that there are a few more things that we need before such a platform is useful. Serverless is just a way of doing application code execution. Most applications need more than execution. At minimum, they need some sort of storage …

VMware rolls back its borders with a flash sale of vCloud Air

In a not-too-unexpected move, VMware has announced the sale of its Public Cloud division. It is well-known that vCloud Air has been struggling. In a deal expected to close in Q2 2017 they have offloaded it to French Cloud hosting provider OVH. OVH defines itself as one of the largest cloud service providers in the world, …

Enterprises Operate Their IT; Hyperscalers Build Their IT

There is a lot of talk of having enterprises build and operate IT infrastructure the same way hyperscalers do. AWS, Google, and Microsoft can build and operate cloud platforms that are very cost effective. The logic is that enterprise businesses can use the same techniques to build and operate their own efficient data centers. I …

Moving Home and Troublesome Files: Issue with Cross-Cloud

You may or may not be aware that I have just moved house, and, me being me, I have not done it by halves. My family and I up’d sticks to the other side of the world, and we landed in Perth—not Scotland, but Australia. Call it a cross-cloud migration; this obviously was fraught with difficulties …