Testing within the Virtual Environment

There has long been a debate about testing products within a virtual environment. Not just on how, but the why as well as the what to test. There are limits in some EULA’s as well on the reporting of such testing. This was the subject of the 7/25 Virtualization Security Podcast (#112 – Virtualization Security Roundtable) held Live from NSS Labs in Austin, TX. Where we delved into the issues of testing within a virtual environment. While the discussion was about security products, it is fairly straight forward to apply the concepts to other products within the virtual environment.

End User Computing within the Secure Hybrid Cloud

When we look at the secure hybrid cloud, the entry point to the hybrid cloud is the end user computing device, whether that device is a tablet, smart phone, desktop, laptop, google glass, watch, etc. We enter our hybrid cloud from this device. From there we spread out to other clouds within our control, clouds outside our control, or to data centers. How these devices authenticate and access the data within these various places within the hybrid cloud becomes a matter of great importance and has been a concentration for many companies. How we protect the data that ends up on the end user computing device is also of great importance.

Big Data Security Tools

On the May 30th Virtualization Security Podcast, Michael Webster (@vcdxnz001) joined us Live from HP Discover to discuss what we found at the show and other similar tools around the industry. The big data security news was a loosely coupled product named HAVEn which is derived from several products: Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise Security, and any number of Apps. HAVEn’s main goal is to provide a platform on top of which HP and others can produce big data applications using Autonomy for unstructured data, Vertica for structured data, Enterprise Security for data governance and hadoop. HP has already built several security tools upon HAVEn, and I expect more. Even so, HAVEn is not the only tools to provide this functionality, but it may be the only one to include data governance in from the beginning.

EUC Security: Much More Than VDI

On the 5/30 Virtualization Security Podcast, Shaun Donaldson, Director of Alliances at Bitdefender Enterprise, joined us to discuss end user computing (EUC) security and how their new Gravity Zone product ties their enterprise products together under one scalable management umbrella. This was a very interesting conversation on the subject of EUC security, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) security, and the all aspects of the the EUC stack. There are quite a few moving pieces in the EUC stack that is greater than your mobile device and the system it is accessing. There is a complete networking and political stack between the two and perhaps many systems you have to jump through to access your data.

How VirtuStream does Cloud Security

On the 4/4 Virtualization Security Podcast, Pete Nicoletti, the chief information security officer for Virtustream, joined us to discuss how VirtuStream does cloud security. VirtuStream runs some of, if not the largest SAP installations in the cloud for very large enterprises around the world. The key to VirtuStream is that they are an Enterprise Cloud that looks at everything from the Enterprise perspective, whether that is billing or security. For security, they have implemented many changes required by their customers and allowed the end-enterprise to dial that security to 11 if necessary. But what does VirtuStream do that is different from all others?