Category Archives: Cloud & IT Management

Cloud & IT Management, Cyberoam, Denial-of-service attack, Guest Post, High Tech Security, Network security, Unified threat management

CyberOam Provides Critical Insight for Virtual Datacenter Administrators

Guest Post by Natalie Lehrer, a senior contributor for CloudWedge.

Organizations must provide reliable technical resources in order to keep a business running in an efficient manner. Network security is one of the chief concerns of all companies regardless of size. Although corporations are often pressed to earn profits, the need to protect all company related data at any cost should be a top priority.

Virtual datacenters can be susceptible to a variety of threats including hyperjacking, DoS attacks and more. The importance of keeping up to date on the latest server patches, security bulletins and being aware of the latest malware threats is more important than ever. Therefore, it is critical that all incoming network traffic is properly scanned in search of viruses and malicious code that could possibly corrupt or cause the malfunction of the virtual datacenter.

What is the Solution?

Network appliances such as Cyberoam can act as a unified threat management suite. In addition, Cyberoam scans as all incoming and outgoing traffic while producing detailed reports for system administrators. These granular reports list all virtual datacenter activity while providing logs that give forensic computer scientists direction on where to focus their investigations. Since any activities performed on virtual servers can be retained using Cyberoam, the audit process can provide a clear trail which will lead you to the culprit incase of a data breach. Cyberoam is not a reactive solution. Cyberoam proactively scans all incoming and outgoing data incase viruses and other harmful programs try to compromise and corrupt your entire virtual datacenter.

Security intricacies include intrusion protection services, specialized auditing applications and robust firewall features. Firewalls play an important role in keeping all harmful material from compromising virtual servers. Firewalls essentially block intruders while simultaneously allowing legitimate TCP or UDP packets to enter your system. Cyberoam allows administrators the ability to easily construct firewall rules that keep internal data safe and secure.

When you setup your virtual datacenter, it is important to utilize all of the features at your disposal. Sometimes the most obscure features are the most valuable. The best way to keep your virtual datacenter is safe is be on top of the latest knowledge. There have been reports that many IT professionals find themselves intimidated by new technology simply have not taken the initiative to learn all about the latest datacenter hardware and software available to them today. If you are trying to stay one step ahead of the game, your best bet is to learn all about the tools on the market and make your decision accordingly. Be sure to scrutinize any appliance you decide to utilize inside of your datacenter before adding it into your arsenal of IT weaponry.

Headshot

Natalie Lehrer is a senior contributor for CloudWedge.

In her spare time, Natalie enjoys exploring all things cloud and is a music enthusiast.

Follow Natalie’s daily posts on Twitter: @Cloudwedge, or on Facebook.

BMC, Cloud & IT Management

BMC ZipKit, Express Cloud Aim for Efficient, Cost Effective Entry Into the Cloud

As cloud computing goes mainstream, businesses of all sizes are looking for a fast, secure and easy on-ramp to leveraging the incredible power of the platform. To meet this demand, BMC Software today launched two new programs aimed at making it easier for customers to adoptcloud computing platforms.

BMC ZipKit and BMC Express Cloud are designed as out-of-the-box cloud platforms with the ability to rapidly scale a customer’s existing data center capability, helping customers to rapidly get more value from their existing infrastructure investments.

BMC ZipKit program includes a rich library of pre-built application components for the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and BMC Bladelogic Server Automation management systems. BMC Express Cloud program is a bundled solution that combines software, consulting services, and training to deliver customers an enterprise-class hybrid cloud, connecting a private cloud to Amazon Web Services, in 30 days or less.

Cloud & IT Management, Guest Post, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office 365, Office 365

Think Office 365 is a Maintenance-Free Environment? Not So Fast …

Guest Post by Chris Pyle, Champion Solutions Group

So you’ve made the move to Office 365. Great!

You think you’ve gone from worrying about procuring exchange hardware and storage capacity, being concerned about email recovery plans, and having to keep up with the constant maintenance of your exchange server farm and the backing up your data, to relying on Office 365 to provide virtually anywhere-access to Microsoft tools.

Sounds pretty good, and we won’t blame you if you’re thinking that your move to the cloud has just afforded you a maintenance-free environment, but not so fast.

While the cost-savings and convenience it may seem like a no-brainer, what many administrators often forget is that the cloud itself doesn’t make email management any easier – there are still a ton of tasks that need to be done to ensure usability and security.

Indeed while moving mailboxes to the cloud may be efficient and provide cost savings, it doesn’t mean administration ends there. Not by any means.

Not to worry, for starters Office 365 admins looking for a faster and easier way to handle mail administration tasks have a number of tools at their disposal, such as our 365 Command by MessageOps. 365Command replaces the command line interface of Windows® PowerShell with a rich, HTML5 graphical user interface that is easy to navigate and makes quick work of changing mailbox settings, monitoring usage and reporting (and did we say you don’t need to know PowerShell?).

From our users who manage about 1 million mail boxes we see the most effective 365 administrators break down maintenance and tasks into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly buckets. Breaking down tasks this way simplifies work-flow, and the best part is that this can be easily implemented into your routine and should heighten the value and success utilizing Office 365.

Here are best practices for getting started:

Daily: Mailbox Administrators are constantly responding to any addition, change, and removal requests for their Office365 accounts. The most common are daily tasks that are quickly resolved, for example “forgot my password”, “need access to folder X”, “executive Y is on maternity leave, can you forward her files”, and so on:

  1. Modifying Passwords

  2. Modifying Folder Permissions

  3. Mailbox Forwarding

  4. Creating Single and Shared Mailboxes

Weekly: Weekly task groupings are geared toward helping Administrators keep a watchful eye on growth and scalability, security, speed and access. For example, checking for new devices that are being added to mailboxes, comparing them from previous weeks, and verifying that the user did indeed add a new device, and not incurring a potential risk of theft or fraud:

  1. Review Top Mailbox Growth by Size

  2. Review Office 365 Audit Logs

  3. Review Mobile Security

  4. Review Shared Mailbox Growth- (shared mailboxes only have 10GB limit!)

  5. Review the exact location of their servers and their mailboxes within the Microsoft data centers

Monthly: OK, now you’re cooking with gasoline — with those annoying daily tasks and cumbersome weekly tasks out of the way, top-level Administrators turn their full attention to security and access, which we can never have a lapse in attention:

  1. They run reports and lists of all users last login date. They are checking for people who may no longer be employed with the company, thus eliminating the need for that mailbox and its associated cost from Microsoft. Or if there is limited use, they could move the end user to a less expensive Office 365 SKU, again reducing their overall O365 costs.

  2. From a security standpoint, they are running reports to see who is forwarding their mailboxes to external mailboxes, such as sending their email to their home email account (Gmail/Yahoo/ Hotmail, etc.)

  3. Review password strength and the passwords that are set to expire on a monthly basis, ensuring their mailboxes are safe and secure.

  4. Review mailbox permissions, and review who has Send As privileges in their organization. They are confirming with the end user that they allowed these people to have the ability to send email as them.

  5. Review which employees have Full Mailbox access privileges. They confirm with the end user that they do want those additional users to have full access to their mail and calendar.

Quarterly: See how easy this is now? You’ve cleared out the clutter, and made sure every box on the system is secure. You’ve taken the steps to keep the system running fast and true, with consistent access and performance across the enterprise. Now kick back, light a fat stogie and do some light clean up and maintenance:

  1. Group Clean Up, review all email groups to ensure they have active members, as well as review which groups have people in them that are no longer employed, or contractors that are no longer involved, which groups aren’t being utilized, etc.

  2. Review the Edit Permissions list.

  3. Review Non Password changes in 90 days.

Conclusion

Just because you’ve moved to the cloud it doesn’t mean management and maintenance of your mail boxes stops there. Many of these best-practices would require the knowledge of PowerShell, but who wants to deal with that? Save yourself lots of trouble and find a tool that will manage these activities, streamline your work-flow and jump-start your productivity.

Chris Pyle headshot

Christopher Pyle is President & CEO for Champion Solutions Group. He is also an active member of Vistage International, an executive leadership organization, and is a Distinguished Guest Lecturer at Florida Atlantic University’s Executive Forum Lecture Series.

Cloud & IT Management, Drupal, Multidev, Pantheon, Tools

Pantheon Forks the Data Center

Pantheon, the all-in-one Drupal platform, today announced the launch of Multidev, which cuts website management costs by letting teams instantly provision unlimited development environments in the cloud. Multidev does for a company’s website what software-defined data centers do for its infrastructure. Each member of a team can fork the entire stack of services that power a site on demand, developing in tandem on a single platform. As a result, large websites launch faster and cost less to manage over time.  

Based on Pantheon’s multi-tenant containerized architecture, Multidev spins up in seconds, with no need for additional infrastructure or virtual servers. For managers, that means freedom from bugs introduced by outdated databases or platform fragmentation, and from hearing, “It worked on my machine” from their team.

For developers, the process is easy. A team member hits ‘fork’ to provision a complete cloud development environment in seconds. What used to require a separate rack of hardware, now happens in seconds via software. Whether developing, testing or handing off a stable copy of the site for review, there’s no risk of overwriting or losing data. Multidev supports feature-branching, per-developer sandboxes, dedicated quality assurance environments and more.

“With Multidev we’ve eliminated the big reasons behind website launch delays,” said Zack Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Pantheon. “Multidev delivers on the promise of a software-defined data center for website development. It gives users the ability to spin up an entire new web stack including database, caching and version control for every developer on demand. Now even extensive and complex sites can hit their launch targets.”

Bitcoin, CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Content Management, Electronic money, Payment

MaxCDN Now Accepting Bitcoin

NetDNA LLC, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, today announced that MaxCDN is the first CDN to accept payment via Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency, enables instant peer-to-peer transactions, worldwide payments with low or zero processing fees. The community-driven software operates with no central authority – managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.

“Developers are a core part of our customer base and have been requesting this payment model,” said Justin Dorfman of NetDNA. “We’re strong believers in open source and part of that commitment is being responsive to developer requests. Bitcoin as the emerging “coin of the realm” for this community and we’re excited at the opportunity to be accepting Bitcoins.”

Cloud & IT Management, Interop, Talari, Talari Networks, Webinar/Webcast/Presentation

Talari’s Adaptive Private Networking Nabs Best of Interop Nod

Talari Networks has won the Best of Interop 2013 Award in the “Performance Optimization & Testing” category for its new Adaptive Private Networking (APN) 3.0 operating software, which we reported on earlier this week. The Best of Interop 2013 Awards were announced on May 7 at the Interop Las Vegas conference. For more information, visit: http://www.networkcomputing.com/interop/best-of-interop-2013-winners-announced/240154313?pgno=2.

The Best of Interop Awards’ Judging Committee, comprised of 16-award-winning IT editors and analysts, reviewed nearly 150 entries and selected winners based on products with significant technical impact and the most potential to advance the business technology market. Talari is showcasing its patented and dynamic APN 3.0 operating software to support its family of Mercury WAN appliances this week at Interop booth #2450, May 7-9, 2013, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

“The Best of Interop Awards showcases IT vendors pushing the boundaries of technology,” said Andrew Conry-Murray, editor of Network Computing. “Talari and each category winner demonstrates a commitment to innovation and has a compelling offering deserving of recognition.”

Cloud & IT Management, ControlTower, Data monitoring switch, Network management, Network Monitoring, Scalability

Ixia ControlTower Promises Comprehensive Visibility Via Single Interface to Cloud Facilities, Distributed Enterprises

Ixia has introduced its ControlTower architecture to help cloud hosting facilities and large enterprise campuses scale and rapidly deploy multiple segments for centralized, intelligent monitoring. The scalable ControlTower architecture provides a single user interface for comprehensive monitoring of network performance and security tools housed in dispersed racks or geographic locations.

The ControlTower architecture builds on the capabilities of the Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) network monitoring switches, which aggregate, filter, load balance and de-duplicate network traffic to intelligently connect data center and cloud provider networks with monitoring tools. This enables network operators to meet increasing bandwidth demands while retaining critical, packet-level visibility into application performance and security at line rate, all managed via a simple yet powerful central interface.

The ControlTower architecture extends the boundaries of the visible network beyond a single data center with a highly scalable approach that improves monitoring of distributed environments by providing:

  • Maximum efficiency: Powered by the Anue NTO’s custom dynamic data traffic filtering capabilities, network monitoring switches filter traffic upon ingress to reduce traffic on the interconnect links and the potential for dropped packets.
  • Simple usability and control: Ixia’s user interface presents the entire distributed visibility environment as a single switch, allowing administrators to add new monitored network segments with no added management complexity or overhead — making management of a large number of network segments just as easy as managing one.
  • Flexible deployment options: Using Ixia’s ControlTower architecture, network monitoring switches may be easily deployed in a single high-density stack, distributed across the top of multiple racks in a data center or distributed to multiple buildings in a campus environment.

“As businesses continue to expand both their use of and reliance on secure, high-performing IT infrastructures, they are moving toward modular approaches that can include both internal and external cloud resources,” said Jim Frey, Vice President of Research for Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates. “Servers, storage and networking components are more often virtualized and can be activated as needed, and so monitoring strategies need to be flexible and scalable to keep pace. Distributed packet monitoring architectures such as Ixia’s ControlTower are critical for maintaining visibility in the face of dynamic resource provisioning and agile, hybrid environments.”

Ixia will demonstrate the ControlTower products at Booth No.1951 at Interop Las Vegas, May 7-9.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud & IT Management, Free, Rackspace Cloud, Stackdriver

Stackdriver Launches Intelligent Monitoring Service Public Beta

Stackdriver has launched the public beta  of Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring, a flexible and intuitive SaaS offering that provides rich insight into the health of cloud-powered systems, infrastructure, and applications.  The service features seamless integration with Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud and is optimized for teams that manage complex distributed applications.  Customers can access the service immediately via the company’s website at www.stackdriver.com.

Stackdriver’s engineers set out to build a solution that:

  • Monitors applications, systems, and infrastructure components,
  • Identifies anomalies using modern analytics and machine learning, and
  • Drives remediation and automation using a proprietary policy framework.

Edmodo, a leading social learning platform that runs on AWS, has relied on Stackdriver for several months.  “The technology stack that powers Edmodo’s online learning platform is very sophisticated. We use a variety of application building blocks, including AWS services and open source server software,” noted Kimo Rosenbaum, Infrastructure Architect.  “Before Stackdriver, we monitored our stack with many disparate tools, often designed without the dynamic nature of the cloud in mind.  With Stackdriver, we can monitor our systems, AWS services, and applications with one simple interface built for cloud-based services.”

Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring is available free of charge for companies using Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud.  Today, Stackdriver manages nearly 100,000 cloud resources and processes over 125 million measurements per day.  Nearly 100 customers, paid and non-paid, use the service, including Edmodo, Yellowhammer Media, Exablox, Atomwise, Qthru, and Webkite.

Asia/Pacific Rim, Cloud & IT Management, compliance, Data Loss Prevention, High Tech Security, New Zealand

SmartRulesR DLP Thwarts email Distribution of Confidential Info

New Zealand-owned cloud email security and hosting company SMX has released SmartRules DLP, designed to safeguard confidential information against unauthorized email distribution.

SmartRules DLP (Data Loss Prevention) is one of a number of new service improvements currently being rolled out by SMX, following research and development support from Callaghan Innovation.

SMX’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Thom Hooker, says the R&D funding has enabled SMX to accelerate software development in several key areas. He says SmartRules® DLP has been given urgent priority, following the recent security breaches experienced by Government organizations.

“SMX is the leading cloud email security solution used by Government organizations with around 60 Government sector customers,” Thom Hooker says. “SmartRules® DLP meets the most stringent compliance requirements with easy-to-use rule building and related compliance processes.

“Email makes it very easy for employees to accidentally – or intentionally – send sensitive documents to recipients outside the organization,” Hooker says. “By deploying SMX’s SmartRules® DLP, customers can define rules to block and report on employees attempting to send sensitive documents externally. SmartRules® DLP can be configured to detect visible data as well as scanning for hidden metadata. The use of hidden metadata tags inside documents makes it harder for users to subvert DLP rules looking for visible text – that is, by changing the document name.”

Hooker says SMX’s SmartRules® DLP can also detect sensitive content embedded in archives – such as .zip, .rar, .tar, .gz, and so on – and can be configured to block emails containing archives that cannot be opened – for example, password protected or unknown document types.

Another significant new enhancement to the SMX Cloud Email Security Suite, Hooker says, will be beefing up the SMX email hosting platform with enterprise-grade security, reliability and new features. SMX will offer 100 percent availability, as well as enterprise-ready tools such as shared calendars, online data storage similar to Dropbox, global address books and support for ActiveSync to sync contacts, emails and calendars with mobile devices.