Automation Weaknesses

Over the last few weeks I have been struggling with automating deployment and testing of virtual desktops for my own edification. This struggle has pointed out automation weaknesses which need to be addressed for automation and the software defined data center to succeed and not only be deployed from software but also self-healing and all the great things we associate with SDDC, SDN, etc. But current automation has some serious flaws and weaknesses. In essence, in order to automate something you must have a well known exact image from which to work.

News: Splunk App for Enterprise Security Updated

Splunk is well known for analyzing data in large volumes either within a local Splunk installation or within the Splunk Storm their cloud service. However, there has been a general lack of security related capability within both these tools. Yes they can correlate some security data, but requires a bit of hands on work to make happen. This has changed with the introduction of Splunk App for Enterprise Security v2.4. They now have some very powerful out of the box analysis for enterprise security and one that could solve a growing issue outlined within the latest Verizon Breach Report: the time it takes to determine a breach actually happened.

Medicine as a Service: Could this be the next cloud frontier?

Medicine as a Service: Could this be the next cloud frontier? For the most of the last decade there have been a lot of hospitals and medical services groups that have been migrating their workloads from physical servers to virtual servers and now are expanding from just a virtual environment to a more of a cloud computing platform and or services.

Cyber Defense: Using Virtual Desktops?

There was recently a rather heated twitter discussion between @Guisebule, @VirtualTal, and @Texiwill (myself) about using virtual desktops as a part of cyber defense. While this could be true, there is a need to ensure you know where your virtual desktop(s) start and end, not only within the network, but your applications in use. In addition, it is very important to fully understand the scope of a virtual desktop architecture as well as use.

Host Deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

Host deployments in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): How do you deploy the hypervisors in your company? There are several different choices from installing from a CD, network install and/or PXE, to name a few methods currently available. When there are not a lot of physical hypervisors to worry about the CD installation works just fine and the need for automated installation gets stronger in direct correlation to the number of hosts.