Shot this late last year for Information Security Buzz. What are five information security new year’s resolutions for improving cyber security in 2016 and why?

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How do you securely enable access to your applications in AWS without exposing any attack surfaces? The answer is usually very complicated because application environments morph over time in response to growing requirements from your employee base, your partners and your customers.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO of Soha, shared five common approaches that DevOps teams follow to secure access to applications deployed in AWS, Azure, etc., and the friction and risks they impose on the business.

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(c)iStock.com/dolphfyn

Last week this publication reported Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) 51st price cut, lowering prices of C4, M4 and R3 instances in its EC2 cloud. Now, Google has responded, claiming it leads the way among the cloud giants.

“Developers running cloud-based apps and services will find out whether it’s a happy new year or not once they take a look at their bill,” Miles Ward, Google Cloud Platform global head of solutions wrote in a blog post. “In case you’ve been reading recent announcements and were wondering, rest assured: Google continues to be the price/performance leader in public cloud.”

Anyone thinking this was anything other than a thinly veiled dig at AWS would notice two paragraphs later, Ward writes: “While price cuts sound appealing on the surface, when you unpack the specifics of Amazon’s pricing model, it can be an unpleasant surprise.

“We often hear from customers who are locked into contracts and aren’t eligible for the new rates, or are stuck with instances that no longer fit their needs.”

No love lost there, then – but research would suggest the Seattle giant is a more likely leader. Even though AWS’ huge lead in the infrastructure as a service market was slipping slightly in 2014 before roaring back last year, it was Microsoft doing the catching up rather than Google, according to Synergy Research figures from the past 18 months. In July, the analyst house argued of the ‘big four’ – AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Google – that “no other company has been able to get close to these four in terms of data centre footprint, global presence and market power.”

Ward invites potential customers to use the company’s TCO pricing calculator to assess just how much they would be paying for AWS compared with Google. “We designed Google Cloud Platform pricing to be as flexible and beneficial to our customers as possible,” he said. “Our combination of lower list prices, sustained use discounting, no prepaid lock-in, per minute billing, preemptible VMs and custom machine types offers a structural price advantage that’s unmatched in the industry.”

Amazon also announced the launch of its South Korean data centre last week, with further expansion in India, the US, China, and the UK expected later this year.

(c)iStock.com/pederk

The extent of the proliferation of endpoints and how IT service providers (ITSPs) are reacting to it has been revealed in a new survey released by IT management provider Autotask.

More than half of the 1,100 global ITSPs polled (55%) said they have seen ‘significant’ or ‘steady’ endpoint growth, with four in five respondents saying they rely on cloud delivery to manage and secure endpoints.

90% say they offer cloud-based services while 55% say they expect between 11% and 50% growth in client cloud adoption during 2016. Of the cloud offerings ITSPs offer, endpoint management is however only the fifth most popular, behind backup and restore, email, disaster recovery, and hosting.

“Based on the results of this year’s survey, it’s clear that service providers realise the critical need to prioritise how they manage and secure endpoints,” said Patrick Burns, vice president of product management at Autotask. “This is a significant revenue opportunity for them. By ensuring networks of communication are running smoothly, ITSPs will also be in a position to play a more strategic, trusted role, with end clients.”

There are other issues which ITSPs face, according to the report. A quarter (24%) of those polled do not measure service response times, and 31% do not know their SLA first response time. This ties in to the increased demand for managed services as the key reason for renewal rates going up, alongside improved customer service levels and demand for cloud-based services. Similarly, more than half (52%) of those polled said they lose at least 25 hours per week to manual tasks, multiple databases, and on-premise systems.

Because of the explosive growth of DevOps, there is still a seemingly large amount of confusion on the topic. While I’ve written about this before [link to DevOps article], this article takes a shot at dividing things in a way that we naturally do as users, but vendors often fail to differentiate, simply because “DevOps” is a hot term, and it’s all too often about SEO and AdWords when vendors talk/write.

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Whether you like it or not, DevOps is on track for a remarkable alliance with security. The SEC didn’t approve the merger. And your boss hasn’t heard anything about it. Yet, this unruly triumvirate will soon dominate and deliver DevSecOps faster, cheaper, better, and on an unprecedented scale.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Frank Bunger, VP of Customer Success at ScriptRock, discussed how this cathartic moment will propel the DevOps movement from such stuff as dreams are made on to a practical, powerful, and insanely valuable asset to enterprises. You may call it DevSecOps, or SecDevOps, or maybe even DevOpsSec. Choose your own adventure.

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There is little doubt that Big Data solutions will have an increasing role in the Enterprise IT mainstream over time. Big Data at Cloud Expo – to be held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – has announced its Call for Papers is open.
Cloud computing is being adopted in one form or another by 94% of enterprises today. Tens of billions of new devices are being connected to The Internet of Things.
And Big Data is driving this bus. An exponential increase is expected in the amount of information being processed, managed, analyzed, and acted upon by enterprise IT. This amazing is not part of some distant future – it is happening today. One report shows a 650% increase in enterprise data by 2020. Other estimates are even higher.
Big Data at Cloud Expo New York is the place where you can see the technologies and use cases that are delivering Big Data to enterprise IT.

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