Where were you on February 3, 2015 at 3:40 p.m. PST? Snowed in? Desperately trying to refresh Netflix? If so, you weren’t alone. It turns out even best and biggest companies experience failure from time to time. Despite the success of their Chaos Monkey approach to operations, the Internet streaming media provider experienced an outage for a little over an hour. Responses from users ranged from outrage to well, hysteria.
Monthly Archives: March 2015
Monitis Blog Reaches 1.6 Million Page Views @Monitis | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis, Inc., a provider of on-demand systems management and monitoring software to 50,000 users spanning small businesses and Fortune 500 companies, has surpassed 1.5 million page views on the SYS-CON family of online magazines, which includes Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Internet of Things Journal, and Big Data Journal. His home page at SYS-CON can be found at Montis.SYS-CON.com
Application Performance Management Insights | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
A well-oiled APM solution comes from correlating bottom-up monitoring (infrastructure monitoring) with insights from top-down monitoring (real-time application monitoring) all within the context of the end-user-experience (EUE). But from what angle should we be looking at APM as it relates to IT strategy?
Consider Australia for a moment. Is it a country, a continent, or an island? The answer depends upon your perspective, and, in much the same way, the unique spectrum of APM can be viewed as a framework, methodology, or platform. Understanding these attributes will help raise APM up the stack into the wheelhouse of IT Leadership for greater visibility.
Limited Time Offer: Work Smarter With the Ultimate Mac Pack Smart Buy Bundle! (79% Off Savings)
Buy or upgrade to Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac and get five more apps to make you and your Mac smarter. Work smarter, not harder. This quote is the basis for our Ultimate Mac Pack Smart Buy bundle, which begins on March 10th. With the apps in this bundle, it’s a certified smart buy […]
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Cloud Security Alliance Announces Cyber Security Guide
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), European Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), and TU Darmstadt has published a step-by-step guide for the attainment and security of cloud services. This report stems from ENISA’s 2013 report on governmental cloud use. This report details framework modeled into four phases, nine security activities and fourteen steps. Every member nation who follows this guide will, according to its authors, define and implement a secure government cloud. The authors used four nations as case studies to base their recommendations on: Estonia, Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom.
The focus of this report is what type of security framework is suitable for government clouds and how to execute them. If an infrastructure is fit for government use, then it is also fit for private company use as well, so long as it does not cost an excessive amount of money. Currently, there are very few European Nations who have the ability to adopt and execute cloud computing. Many in the private sector however have already begun to implement the cloud, yet it will still be many years before full execution is achieved.
Governments that have already been working with the cloud have adopted several cloud deployment models. Community and private clouds are the most popular, with hybrid and public clouds also being utilized. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are the most common cloud service model, and Platform as a Service (PaaS) will likely become more important moving forward. Of the e-government services that use the cloud, email was at the top of the list with other services, such as backup and archive, Identity as a Service (IDaaS), office applications, and citizen participation, follow on the list.
Security and privacy are the two key technology requirements for the aforementioned services. The UK government has taken drastic steps to overhaul the security classifications for government data to make it easier for service providers to construct more secure systems. Many corporations have heavily invested in complex data classification systems that have become an inhibitor to business. Simplification could make it easy to build a secure system without complicating the data classification.
However, security is not an easily resolved issue. For example, Germany has very strong privacy and security regulations. Because of this there has been quite a few service providers trying to build data centers there in order to hold German company’s data. The UK government has been making moves towards a similar position. A recent survey of parliament members in the UK found that many thought the idea of government data being stored in off-shore centers was inhibiting a greater use of cloud computing.
The next part of the guide covers the roles, logic model, and the plan, do, check and act phases of security framework. It points out how inputs, activities and outputs relate to risk profiling, architectural modeling and the security and privacy requirements. Many of these steps are no different than steps IT managers take when outsourcing systems or working with system integrators. However, in the guide the outsourcing focused on entire systems while cloud focuses on services.
The next section focuses on applying the steps from the previous section to government applications. They apply them to the four governments mentioned at the beginning of this article as a case study. The study proves that while in its simplest form, the cloud is about commoditization and common approaches, but in real applications there can be more than one way to solve a problem.
In conclusion, the report comes to some very important conclusions. The report does not say that it is urgent for the EU to adopt the suggested security framework. However without a coherent framework across all of the European Union, there will certainly be gaps in security that hackers can easily exploit. Also, this means that companies who wish to work in different EU nations need to continue to have a complex network, and sometimes even conflicting government requirements. It is now up to EU leaders to ensure than comprehensive standar
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How Red Bull North America gained its wings and flew to a different cloud storage provider
(c)iStock.com/franckreporter
Red Bull North America has chosen Egnyte as its enterprise cloud sync and share provider having replaced Box in a “huge” client win for the Mountain View firm.
One of the key draws for Red Bull was the use of Egnyte’s API to connect to the sales team’s iPads, enabling the team to work in the field as well as leveraging Egnyte’s back end storage.
The announcement represents a validation of Egnyte’s strategy going forward, with the company focused squarely on the enterprise – not indifferent to Box, it has to be said – and company expansion, opening up its European offices last year.
Ian McEwan is Egnyte head of EMEA. He notes the importance of securing Red Bull, particularly given previous relationships with other vendors.
“You’re always on the back foot,” he tells CloudTech. “From our relationships with Red Bull it was taking a slightly different tact. We started talking with them, we started to see some key use cases that we could convince them to switch from Box, from that perspective we then went into a pilot, and from thereon in it was a no-brainer for them to change over.”
The process picked up on a key concept for Egnyte; while cloud collaboration is extremely important to organisations, if users are offline, or want to access files and folders from a desktop that needs to synchronise to main storage behind the firewall without the need for a VPN, it becomes more difficult.
“I think what Red Bull, like a lot of other customers, are looking for is a better way to collaborate and a way for technologies to co-exist,” McEwan explains. “The strategy is not to just go to the cloud, it’s a matter of having the flexibility to put the data on any storage, render it through any device, anywhere, whether you’re on or offline.
“So when we start engaging with customers, particularly established [ones] who have already got existing relationships with vendors, it’s about focusing on two things; trust and understanding that we believe we can better meet their business needs, and how we are going to help them be more efficient.”
Egnyte wouldn’t divulge the exact number of employees using the system, however McEwan did note Red Bull – with an overall employee base of more than 8000 – signed up for the capabilities across the whole organisation.
It remains however an important win, with McEwan noting the transition from Box to Egnyte had gone “extremely well.”
“When you look at Red Bull versus a small organisation with two or three employees, every single customer that comes to us is very unique, and we want to keep them as long as you can,” he says. “When you look at global enterprise customers it’s about being able to work with them. When we go into customer engagements it’s about a partnership and not necessarily about a sales organisation just selling to a customer and moving on.”
Organisations are aggressively adopting cloud – but can’t find the right security roadmap
(c)iStock.con/yvon52
90% of users polled in the LinkedIn Information Security group claim they are either very or moderately concerned about public cloud security.
The survey, sponsored by CloudPassage, aimed to give a comprehensive examination of current security mindsets from a more than 250,000 respondent base with a broad section of company sizes, experience and cloud mindset.
Here are the key stats:
- 71% of respondents are either in planning stages, actively implementing or in production with cloud environments. Hybrid cloud deployments are most common with 7 out of 10 respondents using both private and public clouds in their organisation – 71% hybrid, 17% private cloud, 12% public cloud
- Cloud adoption barriers are general security concerns (45%), data loss and leakage risks (41%), loss of control (31%), legal and regulatory compliance (29%), and integration with existing IT environment (29%)
- The biggest security threats in public clouds are unauthorised access (63%), hijacking of accounts (61%) and malicious insiders (43%), while the key factors for cloud security were consistent security with other IT infrastructure (60%), continuous protection (58%), and affordability (26%). 7% of respondents said there were no new security resources required
The most popular cloud workloads according to the respondents were storage (45%), computing (42%), business apps (40%), virtualisation (33%) and networking (33%). Email (45%) is the most frequently stored corporate information in the cloud, followed by sales and marketing data (42%), intellectual property (38%) and customer data (31%).
When asked how they were going to plan their security needs when moving to the cloud, partnering with an MSP who will provide the resources (34%) was the most popular. Using security software from independent software vendors, and adding security staff dedicated to cloud was also popular.
The overall effect is an interesting one, particularly given the security outlook of the respondents, and the security worries they face. “This cloud survey represents a first glimpse into exactly what types of concerns are keeping security professionals up at night,” said Holger Schulze, the founder of the Information Security LinkedIn group in a statement.
“It’s clear from the survey results that a vast majority of organisations are investing aggressively in cloud computing technologies, while at the same time, have not figured out the complete security model to give them continuous, consistent protection in these environments.”
DevOps Institute Certification @DevOpsDotCom | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
The DevOps Institute (DOI) launched on Monday with the mission of serving as the premier source for aligning industry standard quality DevOps training and examination services for enterprise IT. The Institute is led by a Board of Regents who will oversee DOI’s offerings in an effort to codify and promote DevOps’ best practices and standards that enable enterprise IT to deliver more value faster to their customers.
The initial Board of Regents includes Gene Kim, Lori MacVittie, Sanjeev Sharma, Helen Beal, Rohit Antao, Gary Gruver, Lou Hunnebeck, Matthew Selheimer, Donna Knapp and JP Morgenthal. They join co-founders Jayne Groll, Lisa Schwartz and Alan Shimel in leading the DevOps Institute to fulfill its mission.
Bangladesh: A Country Transforms with IT | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Born out of a nine-month war of liberation in 1971, Bangladesh is a parliamentary democracy and a predominately Muslim country. After years of being a center for textile manufacturing, the country of 180 million is now on a mission to become a regional information technology powerhouse. Paralleling this focus, in February 2015 the government approved the National Information and Communication Technology policy, which seeks to establish clarity and accountability through the expansion of information and communication technology (ICT). This policy also aims at making Bangladesh a mid-income nation by 2021 and a developed nation by 2041.
Internet of Things Smart Products | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
Michael Porter, author of the most highly regarded of all business strategy theories, Competitive Advantage, describes how there are now three distinct eras of how technology can be defined to impact upon the ability to achieve this advantage.
Michael makes two very important points. The first point is that there has previously been two eras and now there is a third – the first being when corporations started to use IT for automation purposes, described in this 1985 article, followed then by when all of this IT became interconnected via the Internet, described in this 2001 article. Then in this 2014 article Smart Connected Products he describes a third era, the Internet of Things.
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