I have written many times about the need for application-centric data protection and data-centric security. But what these both require is that our data protection, security, management, and networking are data-aware. We use applications, but we thrive on data. The more data we have, the more chance we can make use of it, which has …
Continue reading “Data-Aware Services: Oh, the Places We Could Go!”
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.
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?
“The latest challenge on the security front isn’t necessarily an exotic new threat vector: it’s the attackers themselves. They’re organized, well-resourced and patient. And there’s no silver technology bullet to effectively combat them.”
This is a very important point, and one that I have seen at other security conferences for the last 5 years or so. However, attacks are possible because there is a lack of confidentiality and integrity of the data held within the systems under attack. So the system becomes the week point.
The 6/30 Virtualization Security Podcast with Simon Crosby Founder and CEO of Bromium started with a discussion of SaaS security but soon went to a discussion of Data Security. Simon left Citrix not to long ago to form a new company, Bromium, to seriously look into how the hypervisor itself can provide better security for data manipulations than it does today. But first we started off with SaaS and how you can Identify the user within a cloud.
