In my last cloud dependency article, I reviewed the need for ubiquitous networking. In this article, I look at the need for automated upgrades. I do not mean the need for automation in general, but specifically the need to automate any upgrade or update behavior. There are two sides to every cloud story: what the …
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How Much Insight Are We Missing from Our Environments?
How much insight are we missing from our environments? That is a question I find myself asking after being bitten by a new “bug” found in VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). There seem to be many people like me who discovered their morning was wrecked when the vCloud Automation Center 6.0 tenants became inaccessible and …
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Multi-Tenancy: Who is the Tenant?
There seems to be a myriad of definitions of who is a tenant when it comes to secure multi-tenancy. This debate has occurred not only within The Virtualization Practice as well as at recent Interop and Symantec Vision conferences I attended. So who really is the tenant within a multi-tenant environment? It appears multiple definitions exist and if we cannot define Tenant, then how do you build secure applications that claim to be multi-tenant?
Defining Tenants for Secure Multi-Tenancy for the Cloud
The panel of the Virtualization Security Podcast on 5/27/2010 was joined by an attorney specializing in the Internet space. David Snead spoke at InfoSec and made it clear that there was more to secure multi-tenancy than one would imagine. The first question was “how would you define tenant?” which I believe is core to the discussion of SMT as without definitions we have no method of communicating. Before we get to David’s response, we should realize that nearly every one has their own definition of Tenant for a multi-tenant solution.
Secure Multi-Tenant Virtualization – How to get there?
Due to what I stated during GestaltIT’s TechFieldDay, I was invited with Bas Raayman and others to discuss Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT) in more detail with Chuck Hollis at EMC World. In addition, during one of the Keynotes SMT was renamed from Secure Multi-Tenancy to Simple Multi-Tenancy. The current Cisco VMware Netapp solution is plainly not secure. During the TechFieldDay at Cisco, Cisco even claimed “we did not think about security” when designing the initial solution. Cisco is worried about Quality of Service, I.E. Bandwidth through out the system to the disk. Furthermore, their definition of ‘Tenant’ was quite a bit different than my own. So we should first start off by defining Tenant.