AFORE Solutions’ goal has been to provide not only data at rest encryption but also data in motion encryption at all levels of the cloud stack, such that not even the cloud providers can see or change your data. This level of confidentiality does not exist within existing public or private clouds without a little …
Continue reading “News: AFORE Adds SecureVM and SecureFile to Cloudlink”
We have written before about HyTrust and its growing ecosystem of partners, but now HyTrust has acquired HighCloud Security, a provider of encryption and key management for the virtual and IaaS environments. HyTrust provides control and visibility into actions by virtualization administrators within a VMware vSphere or vCloud environment. With the acquisition of HighCloud Security, HyTrust now adds data privacy to its suite of tools. Initially, HighCloud Security’s encryption and key management will be separate products, but there are many ways in which the technologies can be combined. The purchase changes HyTrust’s unique stance in the industry.
In the past we have discussed the various aspects of the secure hybrid cloud, ranging from the data center through a transition stage and finally to and from the cloud. Unfortunately, picking just one security solution, or even one family of solutions, does not work, so we need to start thinking outside the box and pick the best based on our needs, which cover compliance as well as security. So how do we pick a security solution based on our needs?
When we look at the secure hybrid cloud, there seems to be a missing piece, a piece that is used to validate identity via the role based access control assigned to applications, data, and systems allowed to access that is dynamic instead of normal static firewall rules that are either port or vm-centric. The software defined data center needs security to move with it and not remain static. Yes we could manipulate the rules on the fly, but those manipulations require that we know who is using a particular VM at a given time and in the case of a server, the VM could be used by more than one user at a time, so we need something more dynamic. Privileged access to data needs to be enforced throughout the stack and not just within an application or by encrypting data. This is a key component of the software defined data center.
At the recent Misti Big Data Security conference many forms of securing big data were discussed from encrypting the entire big data pool to just encrypting the critical bits of data within the pool. On several of the talks there was general discussion on securing Hadoop as well as access to the pool of data. These security measures include RBAC, encryption of data in motion between hadoop nodes as well as tokenization or encryption on ingest of data. What was missing was greater control of who can access specific data once that data was in the pool. How could role based access controls by datum be put into effect? Why would such advanced security be necessary?
On the 4/4 Virtualization Security Podcast, Pete Nicoletti, the chief information security officer for Virtustream, joined us to discuss how VirtuStream does cloud security. VirtuStream runs some of, if not the largest SAP installations in the cloud for very large enterprises around the world. The key to VirtuStream is that they are an Enterprise Cloud that looks at everything from the Enterprise perspective, whether that is billing or security. For security, they have implemented many changes required by their customers and allowed the end-enterprise to dial that security to 11 if necessary. But what does VirtuStream do that is different from all others?
