How Much Private Cloud Do You Need?

How much private cloud do you really need? A private cloud is all about the IT department getting out of the way of its internal customers, enabling business units and individual developers to provision their own VMs and get on with doing their jobs. But building and operating a private cloud is a complex, and therefore …

A Secure Cloud Framework for Non-Clouds

Is it possible to use a Cloud Framework to better secure your datacenter? Does cloud technologies provide a secure framework for building more than just clouds? We all know that virtualization is a building block to the cloud, but there may be a way to use cloud frameworks to first secure your datacenter before you launch a private, public, or hybrid cloud. In essence, we can use tools like vCloud Director to provide a more secure environment that properly segregates trustzones from one another while allowing specific accesses.

New Breed of Replication Receiver Clouds

There is an ever increasing number of data protection providers creating replication receiver clouds as they team up with cloud service providers. This could herald the end of on premise tape use for some enterprises, leaving tape to be used primarily by cloud providers. There are major benefits for Quantum, Zerto, Veeam, and others to form replication receiver clouds, but these clouds are not just or storage anymore. They could be purely for storage, but this is not a big win for the cloud service providers. So why would cloud service providers be interested in being a storage endpoint for data protection? Why are they concerned with backup and offering it as a service?

Link your Clouds using AFORE Cloudlink

AFORE Solutions has created AFORE Cloudlink, which won the Best of VMworld for Security at VMworld 2011 in the United States. Yet, many people were scratching their head saying, who are AFORE and why did they win. AFORE moved from a physical appliance to a virtual appliance about 3 years ago providing a way to move data between data centers in an encrypted fashion, which at the time was desperately needed. After three years they have made quite a few changes, but still have their core functionality, but now included data at rest encryption and the ability to stretch layer-2 and layer-3 networks between locations amongst others.

State of Secure Multitenancy Today

On 9/22 was held the Virtualization Security Podcast featuring Anil Karmel, Solutions Architect at Los Alamos National Library (LANL), to discuss their implementation of secure multi-tenant Cloud. LANL makes extensive use of the entire VMware product suite from vCloud Director down to the vShield components to implement their SMT cloud. They have also added into their cloud their own intellectual property to improve overall cloud security. It was a very interesting conversation about the state of SMT today.