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Why it is vital to talk about security with your cloud provider

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Cyber security is currently centre stage – no matter where you turn, it is all over the news.

Just this last month we’ve certainly heard a plethora of stories about companies that have been affected by breaches and hacks. A UK telecoms provider experienced a detrimental cyber security attack where customers’ personal data was breached, and in a separate incident at the end of October, three e-tailers all encountered website disruption, with one of the e-tailers confirming this was due to a Bitcoin-based DDoS attack.

With the UK government also doubling funds to support cyber security programmes with plans to fend off more sinister threats, many businesses are realising the very real need to protect the sensitive and confidential data that they hold.

Therefore, focusing on cloud security within your company is not only justified but more important than ever. However, it can be difficult to determine the practical steps that cloud managers, CIOs and architects need to take to ensure cloud security for their enterprises.

Deploying workloads in the cloud does not necessarily present more security risks than deploying in the traditional on-premise data centre – as long as your company has the right security controls in place and you ask the right questions of your cloud services provider.

A partnership with your cloud services provider that is open and transparent about cloud security combined with ongoing support is the foundation for establishing, monitoring and maintaining cloud security. Many companies are simply not talking to their cloud service provider about security issues, nor are they demanding the data about their cloud resources that would help them monitor and maintain the required levels of cloud security that is so essential in the current climate.

Security discussions with your cloud services provider need to start with ground-level issues, like segregation of data from other customers, user access control and two-factor authentication, security of networks and firewalls, availability and performance SLAs, as well as data sovereignty issues.

The most pressing issue for many customers is also whether they’re covered for cloud-based disaster recovery in addition to their IaaS requirements. It is also important to not overlook the details, as customers and service providers also need to work together on very practical aspects of maintaining cloud security, including matters such as:

  • Scanning and reporting on network and server vulnerabilities
  • Detection and remediation of virus and malware intrusions
  • Encryption of servers and networks – with options for the customer to hold the keys themselves
  • Monitoring and reporting on firewall events and login histories

The good news is that there are a lot of advancements in cloud security which can negate cloud risks when matched with cloud service providers like iland, who are willing to work closely with customers to match specific security requirements to cloud infrastructure and services.

There is no doubt that cyber-attacks and security breaches will happen again to businesses in every sector – however they can be prevented, and this starts with the infrastructure implemented, and having an open line of communication with your provider. Organisations can move forward with their cloud initiatives and aspirations without getting held back by the security risks. Now more than ever it is really important to ensure that you have the right cloud security in place. 

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Sage One reaches 100,000 UK subscriptions, affirms cloud accounting uptake

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Accounting software provider Sage has announced it has hit 100,000 subscriptions of its cloud-based Sage One product, with the user base comprising more than half of customers already using Sage.

The numbers indicate the small business sector is alive and kicking when it comes to utilising cloud software, and Sage describes it as “one of many milestones that helps us to connect our customers to accountants and partners with real time and intuitive information about their business.”

“Our aim is to support businesses by providing the technology and ecosystem that they need to be successful and to grow,” said Stephen Kelly, Sage Group CEO. “Sage One is central to our strategy of addressing the white space opportunity of small and medium businesses which are not using any means of accounting software currently.”

Sage also took the opportunity to throw out a series of other highlights from 2015, including the launch of Sage Live, for more real-time accounting, partnerships with the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google among others, and ISV agreements with Xactly, DocuSign, and Apptus.

The small business approach to cloud computing has been analysed extensively by this publication in recent days. In particular, a survey from Clutch found nearly half of small businesses in the US do not use cloud storage. Most of the time, the main reason for this reticence is around security. Interestingly however, Oscar Arean, technical operations manager at disaster recovery firm Databarracks, argues that as managing security in-house becomes an increasing headache, cloud solutions make more sense.

Sage claims its UK subscriber base for Sage One is growing at 4,600 per month, while the company’s overall organic revenue grew at 6% for 2015.

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Last-Minute Black Friday Business Rescue By @HZeitlhofer | @CloudExpo #APM #Cloud

In order to be ready for the Christmas season, online retailers typically bring their shops into shape right before Black Friday. Together with Cyber Monday this is the most important day in the retailer’s year.
Stilnest.com (@Stilnest) is a publishing house for designer jewelry, running their online shop on Magento. While the guys at Stilnest did a good job of preparing their environment, the interest in their products and, therefore, the traffic on their site, was much higher than expected. The shop even went down after one of the YouTube stars released a new video showing off her new jewelry line powered by Stilnest.

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Docker Containers OTA for IoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #DevOps #Microservices

Most of the IoT Gateway scenarios involve collecting data from machines/processing and pushing data upstream to cloud for further analytics. The gateway hardware varies from Raspberry Pi to Industrial PCs. The document states the process of allowing deploying polyglot data pipelining software with the clear notion of supporting immutability.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Shashank Jain, a development architect for SAP Labs, discussed the objective, which is to automate the IoT deployment process from development to production scenarios using Docker containers.

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Enterprise IT, HPE, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Synergy

HPE launches Synergy to help balance hybrid clouds

HPE street logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a new service aimed at helping hybrid cloud users strike the right work-cloud balance.

As companies adopt hybrid clouds, they will become increasingly aware that these half private half public clouds do not provide an instant one size fits all solution and HPE Synergy, it says, will give hybrids the fluidity to adjust.

HPE Synergy will work with existing systems from established brand such as Arista, CapGemini, Chef, Docker, Microsoft, Nvidia and VMware, said HPE in a statement. It will be available to customers and channel partners in around April 2016.

The new HPE Synergy service is an intelligent system with a simplified application programming interface (API). This combination of artificial intelligence and a portal will apparently create liquidity in the computing resources of the public and private cloud, meaning that conditions can be constantly monitored and adjustments constantly calculated. The upshot, according to HPE, is a system that can load balance between its public and private capacities and create the right blend for each set of circumstances.

Synergy creates resource pools comprising computing, storage and fabric networking capacity. These can be calculated for each case, according to its needs and the available resources. This capacity management is achieved through a system that can legislate for physical, virtual and containerised workloads.

According to HPE, Synergy’s software-defined intelligence self-discovers and self-assembles the perfect configuration and infrastructure possible (given the resources available) needed for repeatable frictionless updates. Meanwhile, the single unified API offers the chance to programme and control the bare-metal infrastructure as a service interface. The HPE OneView user interface acts as a window on the entire range of different types of storage that an enterprise might have.

The rationale is that everyone is going to hybrid computing, so it makes sense to help them move their resources across the border between private and public cloud as easily as possible, according to HPE general manager Antonio Neri.

“Hybrids of traditional IT and private clouds will dominate the market over the next five years,” said Neri. Clients will want the speed and agility of the cloud and the reliability and security of their own data centres. “With HPE Synergy, IT can deliver infrastructure as code and give businesses a cloud experience in their data centre,” said Neri.

Netwrix, News & Analysis

Lack of visibility in cloud makes IT pros nervous and insecure – report

Unauthorised access and account hijacking are the biggest risks that IT professionals associate with the cloud, according to a new global cloud security survey.

The survey, conducted on behalf of IT auditor Netwrix, asked 600 IT professionals from across the globe about cloud security, their expectations of cloud providers and what measures they take to ensure data security. The IT Pros, who work in sectors including technology, manufacturing, government, healthcare, finance and education said that migrating to the cloud scared them. The majority (65%) of companies are concerned about security and 40% worry about their loss of physical control over data in the cloud, the survey found.

By extension, 35% are presumably not concerned about the insecurity of the cloud, which could be a source of encouragement to many public cloud service providers in this relatively new market.

The biggest fear among the survey group appears to be about unauthorised access with 69% of the respondents thinking this is more likely to happen as a consequence of cloud migration. By the same token, 43% of the sample of IT pros worried about account hijacking once the cloud is being used. However, the number of IT Pros who said they would invest extra in the additional security of a private cloud were in a minority, with only 37% of organisations prepared to put devote money to the cause. A bigger proportion, 44% of respondents, cited hybrid clouds as their preferred transition model from an on-premise infrastructure to a cloud-based model.

When planning to enforce security in the new cloud model, 56% plan to improve identity and authentication management, while 51% will use encryption and 45% of medium and large enterprises plan to audit changes and user activity.

However, despite their fears, these IT Pros seemed to think cloud migration is inevitable with only 13% of organisations rejecting the idea of adopting of cloud technology in the near future. A large minority (30%) are holding out until cloud security mechanisms are improved.

“We wanted to find out what’s preventing cloud adoption,” said Netwrix CEO Alex Vovk, “true visibility of cloud infrastructure will help companies minimise security risks, take back control and accelerate cloud adoption.”

Enterprise IT, Helion, HPE, Managed Cloud Broker, News & Analysis

HPE says new Cloud Service Broker could put IT back in control

HPE office logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a new service to help clients regain control over their increasingly unwieldy cloud estate.

The new HPE Helion Managed Cloud Broker is a managed service that aims to simplify the management of cloud services across multiple workloads and providers. HPE says it allows businesses to provision, access, consolidate and securely control services. It’s necessary, it says, because companies are being over run as easily accessible cloud applications threaten to cause chaos in many IT departments as they bypass all controls.

New systems are increasingly being ordered and set up without the approval of the IT department, so the cloud threatens the security and management of IT estates. Cloud fever also undermines the potential cost savings achievable through a hybrid infrastructure.

The new Helion Managed Cloud Broker will give IT administrators control and instant visibility over their IT assets, be they traditional IT kit, private clouds or public services. The Cloud Broker will orchestrate all these assets and improve responsiveness, financial management and end-user satisfaction, claims HPE.

The Cloud Broker will support HPE’s entire Helion portfolio including the Managed Virtual Private Cloud, CloudSystem and OpenStack, as well VMWare technology and a range of public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The Cloud Broker service will be generally available in 2016 and charged as a pay per use system.

Features include a self-service portal with a direct interface to service providers. The Broker’s management options cover security, performance, finances, compliance, audits, catalogs, subscriptions and service requests. It also provides monitoring tools, dashboards and reports.

The service was built from HPE Cloud Orchestration Software, ITSM automation software and operations bridge software.

Cloud computing promises speed, agility and costs advantages but they’re soon lost in a sprawl of unmanaged, uncoordinated cloud instances, according to Eugene O’Callaghan, VP of Enterprise Services Workload and Cloud at HPE. “HPE unifies all enterprise cloud resources together, giving our clients a single view,” said O’Callaghan.

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Infrastructure as a Toolbox By @SoftLayer | @CloudExpo #IoT #Microservices

Countless business models have spawned from the IaaS industry – resell Web hosting, blogs, public cloud, and on and on. With the overwhelming amount of tools available to us, it’s sometimes easy to overlook that many of them are just new skins of resources we’ve had for a long time.
In his general session at 17th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, an IBM Company, broke down what we have to work with, discussed the benefits and pitfalls and how we can best use them to design hosted applications.

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Help Desk, IT Management, Managed services

Are Your Users Happy? Tips for Running a Successful IT Help Desk

What do you think of when you hear the term Help Desk?  Is it a room full of technicians with noise-cancelling headsets, logged into an IT Service Management (ITSM) system, talking with their hands and guzzling Red Bulls?  In your vision, do they appear haggard, glassy-eyed and stressed?  Do they participate in the corporate culture, or languish in that basement call center the rest of the company thinks is some super-secret laboratory?

That may seem a little outrageous, but consider this: Google and Bing searches on “help desk” don’t show a real human representative until almost 20 images in.  And even then, the images are stereotypical and generic.  So you have to ask yourself, is that how the rest of the organization sees your help desk team?  Are they relegated to anonymity?

Back when I started my career in the IT industry as a service technician in the 1980s, I was a pretty popular guy when I strolled in the door to solve someone’s computer issue.  I would come in with my bag of tools, some floppy disks, and my trusty degausser.  I was that guy who could perform the voodoo ritual that would breathe life back into their systems while they went off and filed something or made some sales calls, and, because what I did was largely a mystery to them, they were (generally) pleasant and patient.

{Register for Geoff’s upcoming webinar, “IT Help Desk for the Holidays: The Strategic Gift That Keeps on Giving”}

There is a new reality today, one born out of the following facts:

  1. Little productive work can be done without a functioning system today
  2. Users are more sophisticated with the basics of computer functionality
  3. Systems are more integrated and inter-dependent
  4. Remote support capabilities and call center technologies have matured greatly

These are not unique to IT; there are many parallels to other industries.  Are you more patient today when visiting the doctor, getting your car serviced, or when your Internet goes out?  Or do you find yourself self-diagnosing, visiting the forums, or fiddling with the cables first, and then when you do call or visit the specialist, you’re frustrated and impatient?

With these new realities, IT help desks have to mature to maintain value and provide good client satisfaction.  Our customer base is better educated, more dependent, and less patient than in the past.  However, we have new technologies to reduce wait times and improve resolution times and can leverage data and analytics to identify trends and predict usage demands. I’m actually hosting a webinar next week to go over strategies for reducing wait times and improving resolution times if you’re interested in learning more.

The development of help desk services has been traditionally based on user counts and request quantities: X amount of users placing Y amount of requests equals the number of people I need to staff my service with. But there are other factors that can complicate that seemingly simple calculation, such as the ebbs and flows of requests by time of day, day of the week or month of the year, usage spikes due to new platform and application roll outs, and the geographic dispersion of users to be supported.  Other factors include the types of requests and length of the typical resolution cycle, technologies being consumed, potential complications from BYOD and mobile workforce requirements, and the quality of support artifacts.  And that doesn’t even consider staff burn out, attrition, and career advancement impacts on delivery capabilities.

So, as the person responsible for the delivery of a seemingly basic, vanilla and anonymous service, how do you create something that is world-class, aligned to your specific business outcomes, and is the face of all IT support to a sophisticated, diverse and impatient workforce that needs to work anytime, from anywhere on any type of device?  Seems a pretty daunting challenge.  Here are some tactics you can use:

  • Consider starting at the end. What is the desired business outcome from your help desk service? Ask the question of the line of business owners, determine their individual needs, and correlate that into a prioritized list of requirements. Is speed-to-answer the most valuable? Or is it resolution time? How much can you rely on their users to self-service?
  • Think like a services provider, not as a member of the organization. If you had to craft a solution that provides a consistent and predictable outcome, but that can flex non-linearly as demand changes without impacting your SLAs, how would you do that? What challenges may impact your service delivery capability, and how can those be dealt with proactively?
  • Determine what information is critical in self-evaluation of your service delivery, and in demonstration of value. How would you share that with the rest of the organization, and how can that be leveraged for continual improvement? Your constituents should feel empowered to opine and provide feedback, but equally as important is how you assess yourself.
  • What can I achieve within the given budget? Do I have to downgrade service levels, or can I save money by utilizing lower cost resources and enabling them with better documentation and support artifacts? What are the trade-offs?
  • Think creatively. If I move some services to a provider, can I improve the overall experience by re-dedicating the internal team to more complex issue resolutions or provide a more robust, hands-on response? Will providing end user training based on issue type allocation reduce the help desk need and create a more sustainable service?

Above all else, set the proper expectations, be realistic, and don’t over-commit.  At the root of it, help desk is a human experience, and since all humans are bound to be imperfect, so will your help desk.  While the prevailing perspective may be that they are automatons toiling away in some deep dark lair, we know that they are the face of all we deliver to our constituents.

Interested in hearing more from Geoff on how to run a world-class help desk? Register for our December, 10th webinar!

 

By Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services Business Development

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How Free Apps Can Destroy an Organization By @IanKhanLive | @CloudExpo #Cloud

I didn’t want to be so dramatic, but I couldn’t help but be completely honest as well. The end possibility is that your entire organization may suffer the fate as Sony Pictures, Target, Anthem and others that have been shaken by hacks and vulnerabilities in their networks. In some cases it has been analyzed that hackers sat in for months stealing data, until they chose to tell everyone about their presence. That’s probably one of the reasons that websites like WikiLeaks are constantly able to churn document after document, exposing one thing or the other. Without supporting any of these and staying neutral, enterprise IT does face a daunting task of protecting the fort from everything out there. It’s not that enterprise IT is not doing their job. The fact remains that end users within organizations are causing a huge disruption by adding consumer-level apps to their work life. The advent of BYOD and a harmless Wi-Fi connection to your work Internet is all that is needed for the hacks to start happening.

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