Evolving regulatory compliance requirements can be a major headache for the IT teams responsible for identity and access management (IAM). Sarbanes Oxley, the wide range of privacy regulations and other federal requirements, have transformed IAM from a problem that keeps the chief information security officer up at night into a true business concern shared by all company executives. Knowing who has access to what information within your organization – and whether they should have that access – is a deceptively complex issue that has the potential to drive a wedge between even the healthiest of relationships across the business.
On the surface, it may seem as though the nuts and bolts of IAM should reside in a company’s IT department. This is because there are many islands of information stored in databases across the business that are managed and administered by the IT team. In addition, employee access to particular areas of the network is usually enabled and revoked by IT.
It’s a Wonderful Cloud-a Security Carol
Using the Holiday season as a way to educate about the cloud.
Happy holidays to all of you and may the season keep your perimeters protected, your assets secure and your networks free of nasty little elves!
Twas the night before Christmas
and all through the net
No access was stirring;
No hackers as yet.
Murphy in sales was showing his app
Tweeting and downloading with only a tap
I grumble and moan ‘cause I know it to be.
That his iPhone and iPad was BYOD
Then out on the site there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the help desk to see what was the matter.
Without my UniSec dashboard, I would not know
If the network alert meant friend or meant foe.
Cor’lating data from SIEM, Log and ID
Who’s accessing what assets was now clear to me
I knew it in real time where the problem arose
An old password, an account that we froze.
I saw the address was from Kuala Lumpur
Trying to suck data through an open back door
I plugged up the breach, no data would leak
No access tonight—not even a peek.
Cloud Computing: Red Hat Buys ManageIQ for $104 Million
Red Hat has bought itself a Christmas present – privately held ManageIQ.
It’s paying $104 million in folding money for the pleasure of what appears to be a made-to-measure glove. The two seem to be a perfect fit. The deal might close by the end of the year.
Red Hat approached the six-year-old UK-based start-up around September when ManageIQ, already a Red Hat partner, was starting to look around for more money to finance a deeper plunge into the channel.
ManageIO says it’s “channel-ready” now and eager to get out there and mix it up.
It brings Red Hat the real-time cloud management and automation it lacks. It’s in the center of Red Hat’s three hot buttons: Red Hat’s KVM Enterprise Virtualization, CloudForms, Red Hat’s hybrid IaaS solution, and OpenStack. It’s got a hybrid cloud bias, which should suit Red Hat to a “T,” since it’s bet the farm on hybrid. And it says it can set up its tent in an enterprise and help coax the user off Red Hat’s hereditary enemy VMware and on to Red Hat’s cheaper alternative.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Private PaaS Solutions
“It’s all about Stackato, our enterprise private PaaS solution. It’s all about making it really easy for enterprises to deploy and manage their own Platform as a Service,” explained Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Le Nouvel Observateur Digital Uses Openmix Hybrid CDN Strategy for News Cycle Load Balancing
Sudden traffic load bursts following the news is business as usual for an online news provider. When the news is hot, interruptions and heavy slow-downs are common things on various websites; which can mean loss of audience and consequently loss of revenues, forcing technical teams to constantly anticipate any possible incident.
The third most read news & politics media in France, as per a September 2012 Nielsen study, with almost 8 million unique visitors every month, Le Nouvel Observateur recently chose the Cedexis “Openmix” load balancing solution to roll out and manage its own hybrid CDN — a mix of their infrastructure at origin and their own cache servers spread among various webhosting providers with third parties CDNs.
Rolled out during the second quarter of 2012, Le Nouvel Observateur’s hybrid CDN strategy now includes two content origins, backed by Varnish cache servers, located at two French hosting providers whose performance had been previously measured with Cedexis Radar as being optimum for serving their French audience. A global CDN is also used, mostly to deliver content to their international audience.
Details can be found in a case study published by Cedexis.
How enterprise will win back data control in 2013
In 2012, we began losing our battle against data, as the amount of digital data being created, stored and shared reached new heights. At the same time, we witnessed a record build out of centralized infrastructure, as cloud vendors and enterprises built or expanded datacenters around the globe in an attempt to store and manage all this data. And the pace of both of these are only accelerating as we enter the new year.
This data escalation combined with the continued forces of consumerization and gamification of enterprise IT will lead to a clear mandate for CIOs and IT leaders in 2013: take back control of corporate data.
We will see a significant increase in investment around data management, particularly in data classification, storage, big data, and data protection. IT will also start saying “no” to the many rogue cloud platforms, data sharing and collaboration services being used by employees …
Demystifying the cloud security hype
You’re already using it
You may already be familiar with the term ‘Real Time Protection’, which could just as easily be labeled ‘Cloud Protection’. Simply put, when a vendor’s research team identifies a new email threat, the characteristics of the message are sent to all affected hardware appliances straightaway, so that the malicious content is immediately blocked. This all happens far ahead of the regular update by on-premise virus signatures.
Because they are outsourced, Cloud technologies can be implemented far more flexibly; it could also be referred to as an “elastic protection”. Conventional security technologies demand computing power from both onsite hardware and software. But when new threats emerge it means that much more computing power is necessary to take successful action against the threats from one moment to the next. This performance can be provided in the Cloud without having to replace or upgrade the customer’s …
What Is the Definition of Big Data?
Is Big Data a buzzword with no clear definition? Wikipedia defines Big Data as…
…a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications…
Here is a collection of 13 (unlucky?) other definitions of “Big Data” – from analyst firms, from government organizations, from technology publication and from technology vendors.
Top 10 Transformational Impacts of the Cloud in 2013
NJVC®, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia and supplier of Cloudcuity™ AppDeployer, and Virtual Global, a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions based in northern Virginia, have teamed up to offer the top 10 transformational impacts of the cloud in 2013—all of which will transform business and government in the biggest disruption IT has experienced in 25 years.
“The disruptive impact of cloud is uprooting old industries and making way for new ,” said Cary Landis, NJVC senior architect, Cloudcuity AppDeployer and Virtual Global CEO. Whereas change is not new, the rate of change may be accelerating faster than many imagined. “In the coming year, the cloud’s impact on business and government strategies will continue to accelerate, and it will be the biggest driver behind major IT decisions. This, in turn, will cause the biggest disruption to the IT industry in the past 25 years.”
Big Data in 2020
One of the things I look forward to most at Christmastime is the seemingly endless parade of predictions and year-in-review columns. You see them everywhere:
The Ten Best movies of 2012
2012: The Year in Bacon
Ten Brilliant, Surefire, Can’t-Miss Business Predictions for 2013
A Crystal Ball on the Cloud
Heck, we just issued a predictions release earlier this week. The bottom line is when I see a list, there’s a good chance I’m going to read it and tweet it, regardless of what it’s about.
Speaking of which, IDC and EMC just released a cool report called “The Digital Universe in 2020, that looks at the state of Big Data eight years from now. See below for a list of interesting insights. My only nit is that a report that looks forward to 2020 should at least contain one section about flying cars and our benevolent robot overlords.