Defense in Depth: Intelligence Gathering

Intelligence gathering is an oft overlooked aspect of system and data defense in depth. On the 7/12 Virtualization Security podcast we discussed new and old sources of such intelligence. We were joined by Urvish Vashi, VP of marketing, Alert Logic. Alert Logic has updated their report on cloud based security attacks. Add to this the yearly Verizon Breach and other reports, and we start to have a good handle on intelligence of past and possibly future attacks.

2012: The Year of Software Defined Networking

The start of VMworld 2012 and the biggest Virtualization conference of the year is less than two weeks away and the surge of marketing emails have started to arrive about all the new and exciting offerings that the venders and 3rd party companies are planning on showing off at VMworld. This is one of the things I enjoy the most about attending these conferences, seeing what’s new and to see the direction of the trends in virtualization. At last year’s show, VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, the trend that I saw was the advancements in storage and storage virtualization. My prediction at the end of VMworld 2011 was that 2012 would be the year for the network virtualization and or software defined networking.

Teradici to announce RDSH solution at VMworld San Francisco

Teradici today pulled back the curtain on a major new initiative, pre-announcing plans to introduce a new Remote Desktop Services Host (RDSH) solution later this year. Signaling that it is no longer content to focus exclusively on its PC over IP remote display protocol, instead looking to broaden its outlook as a provider of end to end remote desktop services.

3rd-Party Application Services – a sign of PaaS maturity

As mentioned in a number of posts, there is a clear trend away from Platform-specific PaaS (where you write your application to the platform) and Language-Specific PaaS (which provide support to one or possibly a couple of languages) to Universal PaaS, which is capable of supporting any language and any platform. There’s a little bit of a gray area, but we would include ActiveState Stackato, AppFog, dotCloud, GigaSpaces Cloudify, Red Hat OpenShift, Salesforce Heroku, Uhuru Software AppCloud and VMWare CloudFoundry in this category. These vendors differentiate themselves by providing a broad range of Application Services or Application Lifecycle Services.