Email is a mission critical application that is relied on to power business communication and collaboration capabilities on a day-to-day basis. It is a vital component of modern business and being able to send and receive email is of paramount importance. If you were to make a list of applications to track and control configuration changes of, email would be at the top of that list.

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Tufin is spearheading a drive to help companies understand and overcome the network and security challenges involved in migrating data centers. The company has outlined three key challenges to effective data center migration faced by businesses – including application connectivity management, security and compliance – and how these can be overcome with the help of Tufin’s Orchestration Suite.

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The cloud has been central to the business workings of organisations. Reliance on the cloud as a central storage tool highlights the importance of security. With important data and documents and sensitive information stored away on the cloud, there is too much at stake. Intense effort and investment needs to be put into making sure cloud providers are providing these five main security features:

Standards based integration with identity management providers

Forming an integrated identity is crucial as it has become a key enabler, both to provision and de-provision access to company resources and data.  Having an identity solution for their management tools that allows fast and easy integration with existing processes used by the customer helps facilitate this. This is done through a standards-based mechanism such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, OAuth 2.0 with OpenID Connect.

Another benefit is the complete control over password complexity rules, expiration and the ability to require various forms of multi-factor authentication. In addition to standards-based integration, the service should also provide an easy-to-use, stand-alone multi-factor authentication (MFA) mechanism for those customers who don’t already have an existing identity management solution. This encourages the customer to implement strong authentication measures which can help prevent malicious actors from being able to take over control of their accounts.

Securing specific API cells

Allowing for the integration flexibility is something business users have come to expect from cloud providers, and many cloud providers regularly provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow customers to integrate management of their cloud service into 3rd party management platforms or their own internally built applications.

This flexibility enables business customers to mould cloud services around their unique business needs, customising workflows or integrating cloud automations into their existing corporate or customer-facing applications. This enhances business agility, and competitive advantage, as well as provides valuable business capabilities for customers.

However, this also opens businesses up to risk as it introduces additional attack surface that must be properly protected.  To safeguard against possible attacks, service providers should give customers API authentication mechanisms that are resistant to replay or man-in-the middle attacks and can be used to provide cryptographic validation of the API messages being sent. These authentication mechanisms should ensure that API commands can only be issued by properly authenticated endpoints, and that each message is authentic and hasn’t been tampered with using cryptographically sound techniques.

Multi-tier user management and billing

As businesses become increasingly complex, their needs become increasingly intricate as well. Cloud providers need to constantly evolve their services to match the expectations of their customers, especially in providing a flexible account structure that allows easy rollup of billing and usage information at the top level. All this while enforcing complete segregation of networks and hosts at the sub-account level.

The most important thing though is customer control – the customer should have complete control over which sub-accounts must be completely isolated, even from the parent account, and which sub-accounts are allowed to exchange data freely. This allows the segregation of production and development/QA, or perhaps meets a regulatory requirement that two different business units are prohibited from being able to share data between their systems.

Logging and reporting

Intricate services and functionalities are typically the focus of many cloud providers, and often, in their haste to meet customer expectation, they marginalise seemingly mundane tasks like collecting logging from the cloud environment and reporting.

While not a main focus of cloud providers, at a minimum, service providers should be able to provide detailed logging of all management actions performed through the provider’s user interface or through API calls. Access to this logging data should be provided both in the user interface as a reporting function, and in a real-time publish/subscribe method so it can easily be consumed by the customer’s existing log management system.

For those customers who don’t already have a well-developed log management and alerting mechanism, it would be ideal for the service to have an integrated add-on capability to perform log management and alerting within the customer’s cloud environment.

Patch management

Staying relevant with patches is extremely important for service providers, and they typically update their templates used to create new machines to stay up to speed.

Once a virtual machine is launched, however, the responsibility to patch the system falls to the customer. This creates a gap in expertise, where customers fail to take the cloud environment into consideration for their patch management tools, creating a window of opportunity for attackers.

To mitigate against this potential risk, customers should look for a cloud service provider that offers an easy, integrated option that provides patch and vulnerability management for the customer environment. This would include regular (monthly) OS and application patching, along with vulnerability scans run at a frequency as required by the customer, and a dashboard where the customer can view up-to-date statistics on security vulnerabilities while trending the environment over time.

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Dropbox has announced availability on Windows Phone devices and Microsoft tablets, available on Windows RT, 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.0.

Windows now completes the set of mobile options for Dropbox, with the cloud storage product already available on Android phones, Kindle Fire, iPhones, iPads and BlackBerry phones.

The news comes as both companies look to solidify their partnership established in November last year. At the time this publication questioned the decision given Microsoft’s strong play on its own cloud storage product, OneDrive, now available unlimited to Office 365 subscribers.

Yet it makes more sense underneath the surface; Dropbox will look to gain a foothold in the enterprise market, while Microsoft looks for assurances it can ‘play nicely’ with other vendors. The announcement could also be seen as a timely one given Box’s imminent IPO.

Picture credit: Dropbox

This isn’t the only recent announcement Dropbox has made. Earlier this week the San Francisco based firm announced the acquisition of CloudOn, a mobile cloud collaboration tool.

“We’re taking the next step toward our vision of reimagining docs – by joining the Dropbox team,” CloudOn wrote in a blog post. “Our companies share similar values, are committed to helping people work better, and together we can make an even greater impact.”

At the time of the CloudOn acquisition, pundits questioned the Microsoft and Dropbox partnership. Forbes columnist Ben Kepes wrote: “[Office and Dropbox] is one partnership that never quite gelled in my mind – Microsoft has, after all, its own file sharing solution. With this acquisition, one wonders whether Redmond will consider its cosy relationship with Dropbox.”

Today’s announcement seems to change that. You can read the Dropbox blog post here.

IBM and Docker, Inc. have announced a strategic partnership that enables enterprises to more efficiently, quickly and cost effectively build and run the next generation of applications on the IBM Cloud and on prem via the Docker open platform for distributed applications. Enterprises can use the combination of IBM and Docker to create and manage a new generation of portable distributed applications that are rapidly composed of discrete interoperable Docker containers, have a dynamic lifecycle, and can scale to run in concert anywhere from the developer’s laptop to hundreds of hosts in the cloud.

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Joint products enable enterprises to protect their databases with Data Masking and provide controls over their environment with Enforced Version Control

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One of the great things about Logsene, our log management tool, is that you don’t need to care about the back-end – you know, where you store your logs. You just pick a log shipper (here are Top 5 Log Shippers), point it to Logsene (here’s How to Send Logs to Logsene) and you are done. Logsene takes care of everything for you – your logs stop filling up your disk, you don’t have to worry about log compression and rotation, your logs get indexed so when you need to troubleshoot issues you have one place where you get see and search all your logs from all your applications, servers, and environments. This is all nice and dandy, but what if your logs are special and you want them analyzed in a specific way, and not the way Logsene’s predefined index templates and analysis work? To handle such use cases we’ve recently made it possible for Logsene users to define how their logs are analyzed. Let’s look at an example.

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Many people may not realize that API Management solutions can be used for Single Sign-On integration with services like NASDAQ, using technologies such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. But, check out the Storebrand case study to see how this is done. NASDAQ interface: For its private customers in Sweden, Storebrand implemented an SSO integration with NASDAQ, the largest U.S. electronic stock market, which lists 3200 companies and trades some two billion shares per day. The Axway API Gateway solution enables customers who are logged on to the Storebrand site to directly access NASDAQ and carry out trades.

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SYS-CON Media announced that Splunk, a provider of the leading software platform for real-time Operational Intelligence, has launched an ad campaign on Big Data Journal. Splunk software and cloud services enable organizations to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine-generated big data coming from websites, applications, servers, networks, sensors and mobile devices.
The ads focus on delivering ROI – how improved uptime delivered $6M in annual ROI, improving customer operations by mining large volumes of unstructured data, and how data tracking delivers uptime when it matters most.

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Software Defined Storage provides many benefits for customers including agility, flexibility, faster adoption of new technology and cost effectiveness. However, for IT organizations it can be challenging and complex to build your Enterprise Grade Storage from software.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Paul Turner, CMO at Cloudian, looked at the new Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) market and how it is changing the storage world. Now Software Defined Storage companies can build Enterprise grade rack-ready appliances using commodity servers and still provide all the benefits of Software Defined Storage. You too can have Enterprise Grade at 1C per GB per month.

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