Do You Own or Rent Your Home?

I’m always searching for different ways to communicate concepts. Ten years of delivering training will do that to you. Often a relatable metaphor can be very useful. We understand new concepts far more readily in terms of existing concepts. One metaphor that struck me recently addresses the difference between an enterprise IT solution and a cloud …

Model for Securely Moving to the Cloud

At InfoSec World 2016 in Orlando, I will be speaking on a model for securely moving to or developing for the cloud. A good model tells you not only what to consider when developing for the cloud, but also what surrounds that application. Knowing what surrounds the application is often required when moving to the cloud. As …

Migrating Business Critical Applications to the Cloud

We at The Virtualization Practice, LLC have migratedg our business critical applications to the cloud. How simple was that task? It was not as easy as we have heard from others, and not as difficult as some have had, but it was not as simple as move my VM and run. Why is this? What are the methods available to move to the cloud? How do they stack up to what actually happens. Theory is all well and good, and I have read plenty of those architectures, but when the shoe leather hits the cloud where are we? Here is a short history, a comparison of methods, and some conclusions that can be drawn from our migration to the cloud.

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?

Migrating to the Cloud: OpenStack or vCloud?

We, here at The Virtualization Practice, are getting ready to have a cloud presence. Since we ‘eat our own dogfood’ with a 100% Virtual Environment, we are gearing up to move some of those workloads into a hybrid cloud. We already use some cloud resources, but now is the time to look at other workloads. Why we are moving to the cloud is three fold: how can we write about various aspects of being a tenant in the cloud, if we are not one; a recent power outage at the grid level; and a upcoming data center move. Two of these reasons are all about business continuity with the first being what we do. While we already have a cloud running within our own environment, it is time to branch out.