Whether or not to put data into the cloud has been a debate since clouds were first formed. At a recent conference I was asked:
with all the security issues you brought up, why should I go to the cloud, I do not know the administrators, nor can I gain cloud visibility, so why go to the cloud at all? and if so which cloud?
There are a myriad of reasons to go to the cloud, not the least of which is politics or being told to go to the cloud. When the real question is:
which cloud services is my organization already using and how can I gain control over the data being placed into the cloud.
TVP Tag Archives
Monitoring from the Cloud
I have started the year 2011 out by looking at some of the different monitoring solutions available for us to have an insight into the health and welfare of the systems that we support. In your typical monitoring solution you would install the monitoring server in your environment and let the system discover all the devices in your infrastructure and or to control the licenses we would manually enter the devices that we want to monitor. Some of these monitoring servers solutions have to have a beefy box to begin with and all solutions will need a great deal of “tweaking” to control the number of false positives as well as time put in to be able to report on what exactly we care to be alerted about.
Digging out after a Snowstorm: Similar to our virtual environments?
Sooner or later that perfect landscape of white is marred by new mounds of snow and clear-cut paths through it to the various locations on the property. When you look at these paths and the snow is high enough, they look like tunnels. The large tunnels (driveway) meet smaller and smaller ones. The perfect landscape of snow is now marred. This is just how a firewall looks when you put holes in it to let through various services. The more services, the more tunnels and paths will be cut. When speaking about the cloud or virtual environments, the increase in paths and entry points becomes a serious issue.
Risky Social Behaviors akin to Multi-Tenancy Risks
Can we use some of this Risky Social Behaviors post to aid us in finding an adequate definition for secure multi-tenancy? Perhaps more to the point it can define how we look at multi-tenancy today. On a recent VMware Communities podcast we were told two things that seem contradictory to current security thinking. The first is that going to the cloud reduces your risk, and the second was that the definition of the cloud must include multi-tenancy.