For its latest trick Amazon Web Services has launched CloudHSM so users – pointedly the enterprise – can up their data security and meet compliance requirements by using dedicated, tamper-resistant Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud.
The widgetry actually comes from SafeNet.
Amazon says the CloudHSM service lets customers securely generate, store and manage the cryptographic keys used for data encryption so they’re only accessible by the customer.
SoftLayer Now Powers Online Games for More than 100 Million Players
In the hypercompetitive online gaming world a couple of milliseconds of lag can be the difference between virtual life and death, and the inability to scale up with demand can kill an entire game title. In the last two quarters, more than 60 new gaming companies have moved to SoftLayer’s global platform, frequently migrating from commodity cloud platforms because of problems with cost, latency, availability and raw performance.
Hundreds of the top mobile, PC and social games with more than 100 million active players, are now supported by SoftLayer’s infrastructure platform. With SoftLayer, gaming companies can roll out virtual and bare-metal servers along with a suite of networking, security and storage solutions on demand and in real time. This choice and agility allows games companies to have the capacity they need exactly when they need it.
Virtualization Aids Health-Care Compliance
Associated Surgeons and Physicians, LLC in Indiana went from zero to 100 percent virtualized infrastructure and as a result, met many compliance and efficiency goals.
In part one of a two-part interview series, we discuss how a mid-market health services provider rapidly adopted server and client virtualization, and how that quickly lead to the ability to move to mobile, bring your own device (BYOD), and ultimately advanced disaster recovery (DR) benefits.
Associated Surgeons and Physicians found the right prescription for allowing users to designate and benefit from their own device choices, while also gaining an ability to better manage sensitive data and to create a data-protection lifecycle approach.
Survey Says 40 Per Cent of IT Managers Have Suffered a Cloud Outage
According to a survey by Kelton done for TeamQuest, nearly four in ten respondents reported having suffered a cloud outage:
Many survey respondents believe the reported outages could have been prevented. Capacity management is sighted as one way to minimize the risks associated with cloud computing, according to respondents in a survey from Kelton Research, commissioned by TeamQuest Corporation.
Fears of cloud insecurity “should not drive infrastructure decisions”
Alert Logic’s latest cloud security report has summarised that cloud security providers (CSPs) are “inherently no less secure than enterprise data centres”, and that cloud security threats continue to follow a consistent pattern.
In its State of Cloud Security Report, subtitled “Targeted Attacks and Opportunistic Hacks”, the network security provider observed over 45,000 security incidents and found that some things don’t change; Web application attacks are the biggest threat for IT infrastructures.
The top three incident classes, for cloud hosting providers, were Web application attacks (52%), followed by brute force (30%) and vulnerability scans (27%). This compares interestingly with enterprise data centres, which saw malware and brute force as the number one incident class (49%).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, brute force accounted for the most frequent type of assault, given brute force hackers try a wide variety of combinations in order to get in.
Regardless, the overall conclusion was …
Red Hat Partners with Correlsense
Correlsense, a Massachusetts application management and IT monitoring ISV, is partnering with Red Hat around OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
OpenShift customers and community will get access to SharePath, the Correlsense application performance management solution. Using OpenShift and SharePath together, developers and IT professionals should be able to manage applications from development through testing, deployment and production.
With SharePath, IT operations and development can use one tool to manage the performance of their applications after deployment.
SharePath is supposed to trace 100% of user transactions across multiple tiers and stacks, auto-detect interdependencies, and correlate the performance data on a single dashboard in real-time.
VMware Crosses the Rubicon Redux
VMware’s (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, efficiency and economy. Yet the bold move is not without risk.
In 2009 I talked about how VMware, through acquisitions and engineering, entered the security space despite a robust virtualization security ecosystem (see VMware Crosses the Rubicon – March 2009). VMware was threatened then by the new security challenges being brought into the production data center by virtualization and the inability of its partners to move fast enough to address them.
Challenges in Data Access for New Age Data Sources
The Big Data and Cloud “movements” have acted as catalysts for tremendous growth in fit-for-purpose databases. Along with this growth, we see a new set of challenges in how we access the data through our business-critical applications. Let’s take a brief look at the evolution of these data access methods (and why we are in the mess we are in today).
Back in the ’80s the development of relational databases brought with it a standardized SQL protocol that could be easily implemented within mainframe applications to query and manipulate the data. These relational database systems supported transactions in a very reliable fashion through what was called “ACID” compliance (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability). These databases provided a very structured method of dealing with data and were very reliable. But ACID compliance also brought along lots of overheard process. Hence a downfall – they were not optimized to handle large transaction requests, nor could they handle huge volumes of transactions. To counteract this, we’ve did some significant performance and throughput enhancements within data connectivity drivers that lit a fire under the SQL speeds and connectivity efficiencies.
Nirvanix Taps Zynga Exec as Its CEO
Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty has been named CEO of cloud, on-premise and hybrid storage house Nirvanix.
Starting next month she’ll replaces Dru Borden, who joined the company last year as strategy chief and was recently promoted. Borden will remain with Nirvanix as SVP of planning and development as well as a board member.
Chrapaty has been chairman of Nivanix since last November when Khosla Ventures became its lead investor. It is also backed by Intel and wants to take on Amazon and the analytics market.
SSD Comes to the Cloud
We’re now entering a world where cloud-managed big data is not just a topic of conversation in tech circles but a necessity for companies and service providers alike. Shifting data needs drive technological innovation. The truth is that as data gets bigger, older technology isn’t able to keep up with data production and storage. With servers, more cloud-based companies are ditching archaic spinning disk technology for powerful storage arrays fueled by solid-state storage technology.
This isn’t to say that there won’t be some significant challenges for early adopters of solid-state storage in the cloud. In fact, this is completely new technology few organizations are attempting to pioneer.