Hybrid Cloud Security Is Bastionless (or "Who Moved My Moat!")

When we look at the Secure Hybrid Cloud, we notice a few things immediately, such as the need to look at how the data is moving, where the users are going, and the fact that they may never touch the data center component of the cloud at all. Our worldview has to change to be more user-, app-, and data-centric. Hybrid cloud security fails if we continue to consider our data center protections enough, as the bastions have moved and we may not know how that happened.

What Parts of the Market Appear to Benefit the Most from the Cloud?

Since the turn of the century, virtualization and cloud computing have become two of the best technological advances of the 21st century, so far. Now that the technology has matured, as well as become mainstream, have you ever stopped to ponder the question….. what part of the business market appears to be benefiting the most from the cloud?

Cloud Scale Apps, Cloud Scale Testing

While at Interop I participated in a Tech Field Day event where Spirent was talking about their new Axon product as well as the possibility of usage of Blitz.io. It was an interesting discussion but gave me some food for thought. As we move to cloud scale apps based on platforms such as Pivotal (EMC World was just down the street), OpenShift, and others, we need a way to test those applications at scale. Spirent and Ixia provide these tools, but would they be used in this new model.

12 Step Program to Enter the Cloud

On the 11/29 Virtualization Security Podcast Omar Khawaja the global managing principle at Verizon Terremark Security Solutions joined us to discuss Verizon’s 12 step program for entering the cloud. This 12 step program concentrates on the IT and Security admins working together with the business to identify all types of data that could be placed into the cloud, and to classify that data. Once this is complete, the next steps are to understand the compliance and security required to protect the data and to access the data. It is a Data Centric approach to moving to the cloud.

Threats and Risks in the Cloud

There are threats to the cloud and there are risks within the cloud. A recent article from Tech Target Search Security blog spurred several thoughts. The main claim here is that there are not enough people who can differentiate threats and risks enough to talk to business leaders who may know very little about security, but do know the business. I have been known to state that there are prominent threats to my data once stored in the cloud and that we should plan to alleviate those threats to reduce our overall risk. But what is the risk?

New Breed of Replication Receiver Clouds

There is an ever increasing number of data protection providers creating replication receiver clouds as they team up with cloud service providers. This could herald the end of on premise tape use for some enterprises, leaving tape to be used primarily by cloud providers. There are major benefits for Quantum, Zerto, Veeam, and others to form replication receiver clouds, but these clouds are not just or storage anymore. They could be purely for storage, but this is not a big win for the cloud service providers. So why would cloud service providers be interested in being a storage endpoint for data protection? Why are they concerned with backup and offering it as a service?