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The world recently witnessed the WannaCry attack. This threat is a wake-up call to everyone that the danger of cybercrime is exponential.

While we need to be ready to see global attacks of this nature increase, the technology that is required to combat these hazards exists now. From vulnerability detection and anti-virus, device and network monitoring, to management tools and data backup, businesses remain in a never-ending battle to stay current as these threats become more complex.  

The key is to combine modern technology solutions, both preventative and reactive, so that protecting critical information systems and data is easily implemented and managed.  

The WannaCry wake-up call

Estimates put the number of countries affected by the WannaCry strain of ransomware at more than 100, with Russia’s Interior Ministry and the UK National Health Service being seriously affected. Effective security tactics rely on two core concepts – a focus on avoiding exposure and then forcefully responding and defeating the threat when it happens. 

The key term here is ‘when’ because new strains of ransomware will always be developed to exploit newly-discovered bugs.

Plan for a ransomware attack

Formulate and then implement a resolution so that the impact is minimal.  With a single PC, this could be isolating the device from the network to inhibit the infection from spreading, followed by wiping the machine, re-imaging, and then restoring the files and folders. 

For a large, disparate organization, this may involve taking numerous machines offline to immediately reduce the risk of the virus spreading, identifying, and resolving problem endpoints, followed by performing an audit and taking action to ensure every portion is patched and protected.

How to protect your data from cybercrime

The success of responding to and being prepared for an attack depends on controlling the situation. First, be sure to have a continuous approach to patch management, using an RMM solution to automate delivery of the latest operating system on all devices. Utilize web filtering solutions that protect users visiting malicious sites. Deploy a continuously updated and current anti-virus (A/V) solution to all managed desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. 

In addition, adopt other security solutions based on your needs and inform your team on behavioral best practices. Lastly, implement a backup and recovery solution with an enterprise-grade file sync and share (FSS) solution which can be used to help quickly recover from an attack.

While the number of victims targeted across the globe continues to grow and ransomware becomes more sophisticated, there are ways to fight back. Stay updated, informed, and aware, and your organisation can avoid becoming the next prey for the cybercrime criminal.

“We do one of the best file systems in the world. We learned how to deal with Big Data many years ago and we implemented this knowledge into our software,” explained Jakub Ratajczak, Business Development Manager at MooseFS, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Five years ago development was seen as a dead-end career, now it’s anything but – with an explosion in mobile and IoT initiatives increasing the demand for skilled engineers. But apart from having a ready supply of great coders, what constitutes true ‘DevOps Royalty’? It’ll be the ability to craft resilient architectures, supportability, security everywhere across the software lifecycle. In his keynote at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Jeffrey Scheaffer, GM and SVP, Continuous Delivery Business Unit at CA Technologies, shared his vision about the true ‘DevOps Royalty’ and how it will take a new breed of digital cloud craftsman, architecting new platforms with a new set of tools to achieve it. He also presented a number of important insights and findings from a recent cloud and DevOps study – outlining the synergies high performance teams are exploiting to gain significant business advantage.

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Containers are things for your things. That is true in the development world too – containers are things for your software, and, like containers for your things, software containers can help you be organized, efficient, and secure. Chris Morgan (@cmorgan_cloud), the Technical Director, OpenShift Partner Ecosystem at Red Hat, delivered a keynote at the 2016 All Day DevOps conference. Chris lives and breathes containers and recently discussed how they are transforming DevOps pipelines.

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“Suddenly a lot of companies started focusing on producing services in the cloud. I like to call it Cloud Native – everything is built for the cloud. The main concept there is to enable developers to work fast,” explained Ben Bernstein, CEO & Co-Founder of Twistlock, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Exclusive It is still early days for the potential of blockchain technologies to become apparent – yet according to Jeremiah Owyang, founder of industry advisory group Crowd Companies, blockchain is already showing its worth in the legal and supply chain industries.

Owyang, founder of Altimeter Group, has for the past three and a half years at Crowd Companies been helping organisations navigate the choppy digital waters of the ‘collaborative economy’. The latest project is a report on the business models of blockchain, written alongside Jaimy Szymanski, a research contractor at Crowd Companies and fellow Altimeter alumnus.

Owyang gives a very recent example to explain how and why the report came into being. Keynoting at a business conference in Cincinnati last week, he asked the audience whether they knew what blockchain and was and how it could impact their business. The near silence spoke volumes.

“While tech entrepreneurs and the crypto community understands and sees the opportunity, traditional, large companies are unsure of what it is and how it applies to them,” he tells CloudTech. “Sensing this market opportunity, we took on the challenge to explain blockchain to many industries.”

The 21-page report looks at 10 different industries, from energy to education and from food to pharmaceuticals. The legal industry, and the supply chain – adding transparency and accountability where the middlemen call the tune at a large cost in the latter – go ‘hand in hand’ with where blockchain is proving its value, says Owyang. “They’re also foundational underpinnings to most other industry applications that we’ll see in the long-term,” he adds.

“Using blockchain to store and validate data among multiple third parties, and execute contract terms accordingly, offers the greater opportunity for immediate disruption.”

The report also offers six cautions, with one of the more eyebrow-raising of these around the speed of verifying transactions – or, rather, the lack of it.

Listening in the audience at a blockchain event last Autumn, this reporter heard speakers discuss the benefits of Bitcoin and the technology underpinning it. Edan Yago, the CEO of Epiphyte, explained how his company helps banks, the great bastion of trust, and distributed ledgers, get along. He described how the problem of trust was being solved “like a liberal arts problem…in an entirely non-scalable way.”

Blockchain will help users send payments to other countries without incurring charges, Yago argued. Yet as the report reveals, while it can take up to 15 minutes to verify a transaction on blockchain currently, Western Union conducts 39 transactions per second. It is an “operational hurdle”, as David Thompson, Western Union EVP global operations and chief technology officer, puts it.

This will improve, however, according to Owyang, who added that the blockchain startups he spoke to in Cincinnati confirmed it was currently a weakness. “Verification speed will improve over time, and many financial institutions and partners are continually testing pilots on blockchain to see how fast transfers can occur while still maintaining their standards of security,” he says.

“In order for verification speed to get to where it needs to be, we’ll see not only the backend technology evolve but also partners working together – companies, government – to ensure legal and governance hurdles are overcome. In the meantime, companies are achieving greater speed of transactions and verification on blockchain by utilising private, permissioned chains.”

A graphic produced by Crowd Companies outlines the market opportunity (click the graphic to expand), while you can find out more here.  

Read more blockchain news at https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/.

As one company in the cloud monitoring space announces funding, another goes a different route: Microsoft has confirmed it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Israel-based Cloudyn.

The move will help Azure customers manage and optimise their cloud usage, as a blog post from Jeremy Winter, director of program management Azure security and operations management confirming the news explained.

“This acquisition fits squarely into our commitment to empower customers with the tools they need to govern their cloud adoption and realise the strategic benefits of a global, trusted, intelligent cloud,” Winter wrote. “Cloudyn capabilities will be incorporated into our product portfolio that offers customers the industry’s broadest set of cloud management, security and governance solutions.”

In a ‘message from the CEO’ missive, Cloudyn chief exec Sharon Wagner added: “When we started this journey, our goal was to build a great company, attract the best and brightest talent and provide the best business management solution for all clouds. We have strived to help our customers be their company’s cloud heroes, and hope we have succeeded.”

The news comes in the same week that CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based cloud service management provider, announced series D funding to the tune of $46 million (£35.8m). Unlike Cloudyn, however, CloudHealth’s open stance is to move towards IPO.

As a result, the space is certainly heating up. Mindy Cancila, Gartner research director, was quoted in a recent article saying that “interest in cloud management tools is very high right now.” This publication featured Cloudyn as far back as 2012 – the company was founded the year before – as one of the ‘cloud 300’ companies of movers and shakers in the then-relatively nascent industry.

Back then, as this blog from author Ray De Pena noted, Cloudyn only supported AWS, with Microsoft integration arriving later that year. Wagner told De Pena that his company could provide 41% cost reduction through price optimisation and ‘rightsizing’, restructuring assets for the highest value. In comparison, Winter noted one US-based Fortune 500 customer of Cloudyn had seen a 286% return on investment with regard to their cloud efficiencies.

The acquisition move was not unexpected by those inside the industry. In April, Israeli publication Calcalist reported (Hebrew) that Microsoft was negotiating the acquisition of the cloud monitoring and cost optimisation provider at a cost of between $50 million and $70 million.

Financial terms of the deal however were not disclosed.

SYS-CON Events announced today that CHEETAH Training & Innovation will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct. 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
CHEETAH Training & Innovation is a cloud consulting and IT training firm specializing in improving clients cloud strategies and infrastructures for medium to large companies.

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In less than six years, organisations that neglect the advantages of cloud infrastructure will most likely be in a minority. It’s not difficult to see why, really. Not only do cloud services save both time and money, they also have the potential to completely revolutionise how your business operates, opening up new opportunities and revenue streams that would otherwise remain untapped.

Cloud infrastructure provides for a more connected workforce supported by a professional IT helpdesk. Cloud also provides greater agility and flexibility allowing your organization to implement new technology rapidly.

As with any new endeavour, cloud Infrastructure comes with a risk. If you can’t protect the data, applications, and infrastructure itself, the benefits become secondary to security. While the cloud may not be quite as insecure as some of its early opponents seemed to think, that doesn’t mean it’s without security challenges.

Data ownership. Information leakage through third party SaaS applications, and data breach are just a few of the risks an organisation may face when moving to a cloud infrastructure.

Luckily, there are some easy to implement steps to ensure your organization is better protected:

Implement single sign on

Within the average organisation, there are 508 unique cloud applications in use. Can you imagine having to sign-on and authenticate with each one individually? A single sign on authentication process ensures your staff only needs to sign in once to use the entire suite of apps your business provides.

Understand employee needs

If an employee is using an unauthorised, third-party SaaS application, it means your apps aren’t meeting their needs. It falls to you to figure out why, and determine what can be done about it.

Containerise your business apps

By sandboxing critical applications from other apps on employee devices, you can minimise the risk of data leakage. This is typically not an issue for SaaS applications based in the cloud as little or no privileged information is stored on the device. Desktop as a service is also a good alternative to centralise sensitive data.  

Secure your business

Your cloud might be the most secure thing in your organisation – but that doesn’t matter if your network security resembles swiss cheese. To ensure you can safely use cloud applications or infrastructure, you first need to examine your network security. How strong are your firewalls? Is your IPS/IDS solution up to par? How often do you re-evaluate your security policies?

Be choosy with your vendors

Last but not least, the vendors you choose to work with represent an extremely important choice. Especially if you manage sensitive or critical information, it’s imperative that you determine each SaaS app or cloud service is provided by an organisation with high standards of data security.

The cloud isn’t as insecure as people once thought it was, and by utilising it you can supercharge your organisation. At the same time, it isn’t without its security challenges. It’s critical that you understand them – because that’s the only way you’ll overcome them.