It’s Deja Vu All Over Again in the Cloud

There is an old saying, “the definition of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over and expect a different result.” The way many enterprises are approaching the cloud, insanity would be a great way of classifying it. When we look across most enterprises, we see a collection of technologies from every era …

The War on PaaS

For over a year now, a large number of industry experts have been asking questions like “is PaaS becoming just a feature of IaaS?,” “is PaaS dying?,” “do you really need a PaaS?,” and “is PaaS dead?” This has raised great deal of passionate debate in Twitter-land and other social media outlets, although supporters of …

News: HyTrust Acquires HighCloud Security

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.

TCO of the Cloud

What is the total cost of ownership, TCO, of the cloud? When we think of the cloud, we think of using applications in the cloud such as Salesforce, Box.net, and others. We may even consider using security as a service tool such as Zscaler and others. In some cases we also think of placing our own workloads in the cloud using Amazon and other tools. The real question that comes to mind is the TCO of the cloud? Not now, but long term.

Securing the Hybrid Cloud

The secure hybrid cloud encompasses a complex environment with a complex set of security requirements spanning the data center (or data closet), end user computing devices, and various cloud services. The entry point to the entire hybrid cloud is some form of End User Computing device whether that is a smart phone, tablet, laptop, or even a desktop computer. Once you enter the hybrid cloud, you may be taken to a cloud service or to your data center. The goal is to understand how the data flows through out this environment in order to properly secure it and therefore secure the hybrid cloud, but since it is a complex environment, we need a simpler way to view this environment.