As we begin to study security, healthcare, and the cloud, we’re finding that cloud-based data storage systems are perhaps more secure than traditional on-premise systems. Most in the healthcare space have yet to accept this situation, and perhaps won’t accept it until more deployments occur.
The data is beginning to appear. According to Alert Logic’s Fall 2012 State of the Cloud Security Report, the variations in the threat activity are not as important as where the infrastructure is located. The report finds that anything that can be possibly accessed from outside, whether enterprise or cloud, has equal chances of being attacked because attacks are opportunistic in nature.
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Day Two at Cisco Live — Video Recap
By Nick Phelps, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pnAWdPH36g
Here’s the recap of Day 2 that I filmed down in Orlando at Cisco Live. If you missed it, here is my video from Day 1. I got a ton of great information out of the breakout sessions on Day 2…let me know if there are any questions, and I’d be more than happy to provide additional details.
Cloud changes how identity management services will be consumed
Andrew Kellett, Principal Analyst, Software – IT Solutions
In a recent report on the impact of cloud computing and identity-as-a-service (IaaS) on the identity and access management (IAM) sector (Cloud: Transforming the IAM Industry,July 2013), Ovum highlights the issues that traditional IAM vendors are being forced to address. The report demonstrates why the cloud will be a game changer for IAM over the next two years.
The report also shows that traditional platform vendors are coming under pressure from a new generation of cloud-based specialists that are changing the way that IAM services are and will be consumed in the future. They are also being pressured to extend their own offerings into the cloud to stay competitive. The report helps organizations to understand the changing dynamics of the IAM market and addresses the challenges of selecting an IAM solution that can deal with current and future identity management requirements.
The …
SYS-CON.tv Interview: SharePoint in the Cloud
“SharePoint in the cloud – that is what we do in a nutshell. SharePoint is a complex platform and we try and simplify that by saying we’ll take care of it, we’ll put it out there in the cloud and we’ll manage it for you,”explainde Rob LaMear, CEO & Founder of Fpweb.net, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Privileged Identity Management in the Cloud
Every cloud infrastructure can be home to potentially hundreds of thousands of vulnerable privileged accounts. The presence of automated hacking tools means improperly secured privileged logins are almost certain to give hackers free reign on the network and access to customers’ private data, within minutes of an incursion.
Until now privileged accounts and other file-based secrets have proven difficult to secure within large-scale, dynamic Cloud Service Provider (CSP) networks, and many still use humans and first-generation software tools to manage the task.
As a result, improperly secured privileged accounts provide an easily exploited attack surface for hackers and malicious insiders.
Ten Common Cloud Usage Traps
Many cloud users moved to the public cloud for cost reasons, but stay for the availability benefits. AWS (and other public clouds) offers users tremendous advantages in terms of elasticity – need another 100 servers? We can spin those up instantly. Unexpected CDN demand? No problem. Want to test something out? We’ll get the resources right away. In short, the public cloud offers users nearly unlimited capacity in a comparatively (to the old “order the servers from IT”) instantaneous manner.
However, along with the fantastic increase in availability, we have found that using a public cloud is far more complex than it first appears. As anyone who has tried to navigate through the AWS management console will attest, there are numerous opportunities for missteps. Unfortunately, the errors are rarely obvious and always sacrifice functionality. Here, organized by service, are 10 common and avoidable traps with a brief explanation of what each means and why each matters. Importantly, these are all readily identifiable through manual account inspection or with the help of an automated tool from CloudCheckr, Cloudyn, CloudVertical, or other vendors.
CloudCow Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that CloudCow has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
CloudCow is a comprehensive resource for cloud computing news, analysis and information. The online publication provides IT professionals and executives with access to the latest information needed to make cloud computing and IT business decisions within their respective organizations.
Twisted Pair Adds Private Call Capability to its WAVE Mobile Communicator
Twisted Pair Solutions today announced that it has added point-to-point Private Call capability to its WAVE Mobile Communicator application for smartphones and tablets.
With Private Call mode selected, users can use a secure, one-to-one PTT capability with any other member of a WAVE communications system. Once the Private Call is complete, either user simply hangs up and the device returns to its pre-call state.
Twisted Pair’s announcement comes as many organizations seek a secure, reliable replacement for Sprint’s iDEN push-to-talk (PTT) network which was decommissioned at the end of June.
“The enterprise customer wants seamless communication, from radio systems to telephony systems to PTT systems to workforce apps,” said Tom Guthrie, Twisted Pair president and CEO. “WAVE is the only platform- and device-independent PTT solution proven to deliver secure, high-quality communications for the enterprise.”
The WAVE Mobile Communicator turns your smartphone or tablet into an instant communication PTT device. When equipped with the WAVE Mobile Communicator, a smartphone acts like a multichannel radio handset that sends and receives secure audio. WAVE servers residing in an enterprise data center, in a cloud environment or, if needed, on an individual PC, manage audio processing, management and distribution. The Private Call capability further differentiates WAVE as an over-the-top PTT solution that combines the richness of enterprise communications with workforce communications while offering increased flexibility over proprietary solutions.
Customers may deploy WAVE as an on-premise enterprise solution or as a cloud service. Twisted Pair offers its own cloud service, called WAVE Connections, which subscribers can access over any carrier or WiFi data network.
Ignite Innovation: Turn Developers Loose on Hybrid Cloud
In the old world of IT, if you didn’t have hardware capacity or the budget to buy more, your project was dead in the water. Budget constraints can leave some of the best, most creative and most ingenious innovations on the cutting room floor. It’s a true dilemma for developers and innovators – why spend the time creating, when a project could be abandoned in a blink? That was the old world. In the new world of IT, developers rule. They have access to resources they can spin up instantly. A hybrid cloud ignites innovation and empowers developers to focus on what they need. A hybrid cloud blends the best of all worlds, public cloud, private cloud and dedicated servers to fit the needs of developers and offer the ideal environment for each app and workload without the constraints of a one-size-fits-all cloud.
OpenNebula 4.2 Beta Released
The OpenNebula Project has just announced the beta release of OpenNebula 4.2, the first update of the fourth series of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source solution for data center management and enterprise cloud computing. With a sysadmin-centric approach, OpenNebula is the open operating system of choice in the converged data centre, combining a powerful virtualization manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover, with the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of the enterprise cloud.
As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Flame Nebula (catalogued as NGC 2024 and Sh2-277) is an emission nebula in the constellation Orion. It is located about 900 to 1,500 light-years away from Earth.
OpenNebula 4.2 gives users and administrators an easy way to create, publish, share, and manage multi-tier cloud applications and automatically define auto-scaling policies based on service level metrics and time schedule. The new service flow functionality converts an infrastructure cloud into a powerful environment for the execution of elastic business applications.