“Coalfire is a cyber-risk, security and compliance assessment and advisory services firm. We do a lot of work with the cloud service provider community,” explained Ryan McGowan, Vice President, Sales (West) at Coalfire Systems, Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
[slides] Agility for Digital Transformation | @CloudExpo @NewhouseConsult #Agile #DigitalTransformation
Successful digital transformation requires new organizational competencies and capabilities. Research tells us that the biggest impediment to successful transformation is human; consequently, the biggest enabler is a properly skilled and empowered workforce. In the digital age, new individual and collective competencies are required.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Bob Newhouse, CEO and founder of Agilitiv, drew together recent research and lessons learned from emerging and established companies, providing a road map for engaging our organizations in the creation and support of digital value chains.
American Airlines Turns to IBM for Cloud Tech
American Airlines, the ubiquitous airplane company in the US, has turned to IBM for cloud tech. Both the companies announced on early Tuesday morning that the airlines will use IBM’s cloud for some of its applications. Though neither company mentioned the complete list of applications that would be moved to IBM’s cloud, it is expected that American would move some of its legacy applications to the cloud.
The financial terms of the deal is not disclosed at this time, which is not that surprising considering that IBM is one of American’s cloud partners, and there is no exclusivity involved. So, American is free to strike a deal with other companies, and can even have a few cloud providers to host different applications, though there has been no mention of any other deal so far. Amazon is the market leader, though other providers like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and VMware are catching up.
This deal between IBM and American Airlines reflects the long-standing partnership of the two giants, that goes back decades. For example, when American Airlines wanted to introduce an online reservation system called SABRE, IBM was the one that developed and managed it for the airline company. This deep relationship is also partly why American chose IBM when it decided to move to the cloud. Going forward, both the companies are expected to further cement their partnership, and may even tap into IBM’s “Watson” – the artificial intelligence software that IBM is customizing to meet the needs of different clients.
A few months ago, American Airlines’ chief information officer, Maya Leibman, announced that the company would be embracing cloud soon to leverage the opportunities that come with it. This deal with IBM seems to be the first step towards achieving this goal. From this deal, it is clear that American has started on the process of modernizing its tech segment to keep in tune with the growing demands of its customers, who expect faster and a more reliable set of online tools. Also, its growing digital footprint necessitates a scalable infrastructure, that is best filled by a cloud architecture.
In fact, this airline is not alone in making this massive technological shift. Most companies world over are looking to move some or all of their operations to the cloud, with an aim to reap the benefits of such a move. As the volume of data grows, companies can choose to have their own data center or can store their data and applications in a service provider’s infrastructure. There are advantages and disadvantages in both the choices, so sometimes, companies prefer to store some data in their own data center and some in the cloud. American Airlines is also taking this hybrid approach as of now, as it plans to keep some applications on its own premises. But, that may change, depending on how this move to the cloud plays out for the company.
Thus, this is the first baby step taken by American Airlines to make a foray into cloud, and over time, the company may even move all of its applications to the cloud.
The post American Airlines Turns to IBM for Cloud Tech appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
What ‘Mr. Robot’ Can Teach Us About Incident Response | @CloudExpo #IoT #Cloud #Security
It is not often that movies and television shows give viewers the opportunity to explore the world of hacking and digital security in a realistic manner. After two seasons, “Mr. Robot” has attracted its share of IT professionals as well as average citizens. The show has offered numerous depictions that are of particular interest to those who make their living by protecting their organizations.
The critically acclaimed television series offers fictional situations rather than documentary evidence. However, the plots and actions of both the security engineers and hackers are realistic enough that they can send a shiver down the spine of any professional responsible for safeguarding their organization’s system and responding to incidents. This two-part post explores some of the most chilling incidents depicted on the show – incidents that are especially disturbing because they can and do happen in the real world.
[slides] #Microservices in @Docker | @DevOpsSummit @HPE #DevOps #AI #ML
Application transformation and DevOps practices are two sides of the same coin. Enterprises that want to capture value faster, need to deliver value faster – time value of money principle. To do that enterprises need to build cloud-native apps as microservices by empowering teams to build, ship, and run in production. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Neil Gehani, senior product manager at HPE, discussed what every business should plan for how to structure their teams to deliver.
Sweden confirms tax break for data centres following government study
(c)iStock.com/SorenP
Swedish data centre operators are to enjoy a vastly reduced electricity tax rate for providing their services after Sweden’s parliament confirmed new legislation.
The move will see the rate for data centres in Sweden move to 0.005 krona, or 0.00054 US dollars per kWh, as of January 1 2017 at a 97% cut.
Last year, a government-led study advocated the move, arguing that the data centre industry should be on an equal footing to the likes of manufacturing, which already has tax breaks on its power and electricity requirements built in. Speaking to this publication at the time of the report’s release Anne Graf, then investment and development director at data centre hub The Node Pole, noted her belief that all stakeholders were for the proposed changes – with the recent decision proving her assertions right.
The Node Pole, which is to be acquired by Vattenfall and Skellefteå Kraft, two of Sweden’s largest energy companies, has among its clientele renewable energy provider Hydro 66 – who claims it can offer colocation at half the cost compared to if they were based in London – and most famously Facebook, whose expansions in Lulea have been well documented.
Sweden’s natural climate and relative close proximity for European customers makes it an attractive proposition for potential customers, and according to Peter Ericson, chairman of the Node Pole, this latest development adds to the mix.
“This parliamentary decision sends a clear message that Sweden is serious about becoming the green home of the internet and taking global cloud service leadership over the short and long term,” said Ericson in a statement. “The combination of low electricity prices, a competitive tax rate and the abundance of renewable energy provides a case for a long-term investment climate that is extremely competitive.”
The break will apply to new and existing data centres which exceed ‘at least a 0.5 [megawatt] capacity, measured as installed effect excluding cooling facilities’, according to the press materials.
Read more: Swedish government study advocates tax cut for data centre providers
Protecting against ransomware in the cloud: A guide
(c)iStock.com/Maciej Noskowski
A recent survey of 500 businesses revealed that nearly half were brought to a standstill by a ransomware attack within the last 12 months. Ransomware is computer malware that installs covertly on a victim’s computer, executes a cryptovirology attack that adversely affects it, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt it or to not publish it.
Recently, there has been more and more documented evidence that ransomware is on the rise – particularly in the UK which is being used as a sort of testing ground to the point whereby ransomware has become the number one threat facing UK organisations in 2016. Companies that depend on instant access to critical data and would suffer severe business impact if they lost IT systems during the time it would take to respond to an attack should be most worried. With adoption of cloud computing for more mission-critical use cases growing, IT leaders are naturally concerned about protecting against ransomware in the cloud as well as on-premise.
Not only are ransomware attacks becoming more frequent, the methods are becoming more sophisticated and harder to identify. With email still being the number one attack vector and a reported 85% of organisations admitting to suffering from three or more attacks in a year, it is imperative that organisations have in place a robust disaster recovery and back-up plan, as well as deep security and multi-layered protection to protect cloud workloads.
To this point, here are four ways to protect your organisation against ransomware:
Cloud backup and disaster recovery
The best defence against ransomware is to outwit attackers by not being vulnerable to their threats in the first place. This means backing up important data daily and having a disaster recovery failover plan in place, so that even if your IT systems get locked, you won’t be forced to pay to see your data again.
While backups are useful, they won’t necessarily make a ransomware attack painless. If affected by ransomware, customers can restore data from a previous unaffected machine version backed up by their cloud service provider from a point in time before they were affected. However, while data is available, business as usual may not be restored until production systems are clear of any ransomware effects.
This is where cloud-based disaster recovery comes in. It enables organisations to failover production to a cloud service provider in the event of a ransomware attack and restore production systems within minutes or even seconds. The most common method of providing fail-safe replication of data between two systems is journaling whereby the system software keeps a running list of storage “writes” in a special log file called a journal. This method enables granular restoration of virtual machines from specific points in time to enable you to failover to a point in time before the ransomware attack.
Advanced cloud security
In order to protect your organisation against this rising threat, it is imperative for business leaders to ensure that on-premise levels of security are available in the cloud. Threat protection features that are vital for organisations to consider include anti-malware with web reputation, host-based firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, integrity monitoring and log inspection.
In addition to this, virtual patching and stateful firewall capabilities are necessary to ensure virtual machines are protected at a network level, and log inspection plus file integrity monitoring in turn boosts compliance efforts. These advanced security features should be combined with alerting, reporting and remediation to prevent ransomware attacks from wreaking havoc.
Just say no
The primary method of infecting victims with ransomware is via email, with 93% of all phishing emails now containing encryption ransomware. Cybercriminals will spam victims with emails that carry a malicious attachment or instruct you to click on a URL where malware surreptitiously crawls into your machine. Ransomware hackers have also adopted another highly successful method that organisations must be aware of, malvertising, which involves compromising an advertiser’s network by embedding malware in ads that get delivered through web sites you know and trust.
Employees must be trained and educated on how to spot such attacks and every organisation must put in procedures to continuously spread knowledge about how to avoid becoming a victim.
Multi-layered protection
Some cloud providers offer multiple layers of protection against ransomware and other nefarious attacks. In addition to the advanced security features outlined above, other measures such as two-factor authentication and role-based access control ensure the highest levels of access security via the cloud.
Furthermore, encryption technology is highly useful to ensure data protection alongside vulnerability scanning, which performs periodic penetration testing to ensure that web servers and networks are not vulnerable to attack. Another factor to consider is multi-level network security enforcing network segmentation in order to improve security.
Editor’s note: On December 13 iland and partner Trend Micro are delivering a webinar on the rise of ransomware and how companies can protect themselves against ransomware attacks in the cloud. You can find out more here.
Log Data | @CloudExpo #BigData #Analytics #ML #AI #DigitalTransformation
Logs are continuous digital records of events generated by all components of your software stack – and they’re everywhere – your networks, servers, applications, containers and cloud infrastructure just to name a few. The data logs provide are like an X-ray for your IT infrastructure. Without logs, this lack of visibility creates operational challenges for managing modern applications that drive today’s digital businesses.
Smart Manufacturing Is Cloud Computing | @CloudExpo #IoT #Cloud #DigitalTransformation
As cloud computing simultaneously transforms multiple industries many have wondered about how this trend will affect manufacturing. Often characterized as “staid”, this vertical is not often cited when leading edge technological change is the topic. This view, however, fails to address the revolutionary nexus of cloud computing and the manufacturing industry. Referred to as Digital Thread and Digital Twin; these cloud driven concepts are now driving this vertical’s future.
[video] IT Strategy with @CDSGlobalCloud | @CloudExpo #IaaS #Cloud #DataCenter
“We are the public cloud providers. We are currently providing 50% of the resources they need for doing e-commerce business in China and we are hosting about 60% of mobile gaming in China,” explained Yi Zheng, CPO and VP of Engineering at CDS Global Cloud, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.