News: Sky High Networks provides Cloud Service Security Ratings

There has been a dearth of intelligence reporting on cloud services and up until now we had to rely upon the Verizon Breach Report, Alert Logic’s State of the Cloud report, the Enisa and other reports, but even so there was nothing specifically about a given cloud service outside the lightly used Cloud Security Alliances STAR self-certification. Instead you must imply something about a given service. This has changed. Meeting this need is Sky High Networks.

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?

Gaining Visibility into The Cloud: Migration and Security

On many a Virtualization Security Podcast I tend to mention that we need greater visibility into the cloud to judge whether Cloud Service Provider security measures are good enough. But why should we bother? I am not saying we should not be concerned about a cloud’s security but that we should as tenants be concerned with clouds meeting our security, compliance, and data protection policies and requirements. Will a cloud service provider ever be able to meet a specific organizations requirements as well as the cloud service providers policies and compliance?

Virtualization Field Day Delegates Discuss Cloud Security and Compliance

The Virtualization Field Day delegates joined the Virtualization Security Podcast as guest panelists on 2/23 and the topic of the day was cloud security. There were questions about compliance, security of the tenant, and security of the administrators, and legal issues. There were answers from Rodney Haywood (Rodos), another Virtualization Field Day Delegate and cloud architect as well as the podcast standard panelists. So what did the questions boil down to?

Virtualization Security is NOT Cloud Security!

I and others look at Virtualization Security constructs with an eye towards Cloud Security, but they are not necessarily the same. Granted for some clouds, virtualization security can lead to cloud security but this really depends on how the cloud’s architecture. Even so, what we know from Virtualization Security WILL apply to Cloud Security and will be the basis for best practices. But you say, my cloud does not use Virtualizaiton? Ah ha, I say, but it is still a cloud? And that implies there are similar security concerns. This was the discussion on the 1/26 Virtualization Security Podcast.

Cloud: More Secure Than You Think?

At the end of last year and the beginning of this year the Virtualization Security Podcast featured two very different guest panelists to discuss cloud security, policy, and compliance: Phil Cox, Director of Security and Compliance at RightScale, joined us for the last podcast in 2011 and the George Gerchow of VMware’s Policy and Compliance Group, joined us for the first podcast of 2012. We asked is the public cloud ready for mission critical applications. The answer was surprising. Have a listen and let us know your thoughts.