The latest reports surrounding the surveillance programs of the NSA and their International counterparts reveal that these agencies have been able to decode the encryption methods some enterprises and organizations use to keep their online data private.
While these headlines are likely disconcerting for those operating in the U.S. or using software applications from cloud providers, as stated in our recent press release and blog post, enterprises do not need to allow their fears to slow down or stop their cloud adoption.
More attention has been turning to tokenization recently as a strong approach to secure sensitive data. Tokenization, like encryption, encodes or conceals data so it is protected from unauthorized parties. But unlike encryption, in which a mathematical link back to the original data’s true form still exists; tokenization is unique in that it completely removes the original data from the systems in which the replacement tokens reside (in this case, the cloud itself). You can find out more information about tokenization on this resource page.
When implemented in its strongest fashion (a randomized token generation approach
Journey to the Cloud: An Insider’s Perspective
By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud
Our Journey to the Cloud blog has been live for a little over two years now, and I’ve had the privilege of running and managing it from the start. I wanted to touch base about the site, share my unique perspective from managing it, and hear from our readers about what we can do to make it even better.
Our goal from the very beginning was to establish ourselves as thought leaders in the industry by providing high quality content that was relevant and beneficial to IT decision makers. We wanted to make sure we let our authors keep their opinions and voice, while at the same time taking an unbiased, agnostic approach. The last thing we wanted to do was start blathering on about what a great company GreenPages is or bragging about the most recent award we won (it was being named to the Talkin’ Cloud 100 if you were wondering…). Over the course of the two years, we’ve posted over 200 blogs and seen the number of page views and shares across various social media sites increase drastically. We’ve brought in some big time guest bloggers such as ConnectEDU CTO Rick Blaisdell, CA’s Andi Mann, the Director, Advanced Analytics and Sr. Research Scientist at Gravitant, and more. We’ve incorporated a lot of video as well – in fact for whatever strange reason someone thought it was a good idea to let me host our Cloud Corner Series. We’ve covered topics ranging from cloud, virtualization, end user computing, BYOD, network infrastructure, storage, disaster recovery, shadow IT, project management, and much more.
Have there been challenges along the way? Absolutely. Have I had to go after people and chase them down, scratching and clawing until I get a blog to post? Yes. Have tears been shed? Has blood been shed? We’ll keep that to ourselves as it’s generally frowned upon by HR. And, yes, I have had to give William Wallace-like speeches to attempt to rally the troops. While there have been some challenges, all in all there’s been a great amount of enthusiasm and support from our writers to produce a high quality publication. For me, being in the industry for two years now with no previous technological background, the amount I’ve learned is ridiculous. Before starting at GreenPages, I would have rather listened to a Ben Stein Lecture or Bill Lumbergh explaining TPS Reports than read an article on software defined networking and the impact it will have on businesses in the next 5-10 years. I can see why our customers get excited to work with our consultants because they truly love and believe in the technology they talk about. I completely buy into their enthusiasm and passion and it makes me genuinely interested in the topics we cover. I’m in my mid-twenties and have, sadly, found myself out drinking at a bar with my friends having a great time before somehow winding up in a heated debate over the pros and cons of moving to a hybrid cloud architecture.
So, in case, for whatever deranged reason, you haven’t read all 200 of our posts, I’m going to list out my top ten from the past two years (in no particular order). Take a look and let me know what you think:
- Part 2: Want to Go Cloud? What’s the Use Case? This is part two of a two part series from Larry Kohan. One of the biggest concerns around cloud is the unwillingness to move everything in your environment to the cloud. In this post, Larry outlines specific use cases of when it makes sense for different companies to move things to the cloud (and when it doesn’t). He provides real, practical advice and doesn’t try to make it seem like every application is a good fit for cloud in every circumstance
- Evolving to a Broker of Technology Services: Planning the Solution The term “cloud brokerage” is being used more and more now. I like this post because we were talking about it a year ago in great detail. Broken down nicely and easy to follow.
- Colocation: 55+ living for your IT equipment This post is a great metaphor comparing moving your datacenter to a colo facility and people moving into 55+ communities. If building isn’t an option why not rent? Why have to deal with landscaping, plowing, or leaky roofs when you can be taking advantage of that early bird special?
- Cloud Corner Series -The Networking & Storage Challenges Around Clustered Datacenters Forget the content, take a look at the host!
- Is There Such a Thing as Just-In-Time IT? This post applies the concept of Just-in-Time manufacturing to the IT world. This is a main concept in our Cloud Management as a Service Offering
- The Mac Chronicles – A CTO Perspective CTO Chris Ward just ranting and raving about his experiences using a Mac. The passion…oh the passion
- Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, or DRaaS: Revisited This blog by Randy Weis actually ended up inspiring a new offering from GreenPages that we currently use. Yes, I will take some credit.
- Planning for Cloud Infrastructures: Build It and They Will…Not Pay For It? This post has the most views out of any on Journey to the Cloud. Must be something good about it, right?
- Going Rogue: Do the Advantages Outweigh the Risks? Rogue IT is one of the biggest concerns for IT departments right now. But should it be viewed as a negative, or an opportunity? What I like about this post is that it stemmed from a live Tweet Chat put on by Cloud Commons. John Dixon, who participated in the chat and wrote the post, got to go up against some of the best and brightest on this one.
- Top 10 Ways to Kill Your VDI Project Francis doesn’t try to sugarcoat VDI as if it’s the cure all for every organization. He explains how sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t…and how it’s not about delivering desktops, but rather, delivering applications.
To close this out…I want to hear from you. What can we do to make Journey to the Cloud better? Are there any specific topics you’d like to hear more about? Any specific authors you’d like to hear more from? How about any features or functionality of the site you’d like added, changed or improved? What have you seen on other sites that you like that we don’t have? Leave a comment here or tweet us at @GreenPagesIT or @benstephenson1
Portal Architects to Unveil New Skysync at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Portal Architects, creators of SkySync will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SkySync enables businesses to easily Sync, Copy, or Migrate Files across any on-site or cloud-based storage platform. With SkySync’s new file virtualization capabilities, organizations can perform federated searches across any number of connected systems at once. The search results are automatically aggregated into a single folder which can then be synced, copied or moved to any defined storage destination.
Application Security in the Cloud Is Still Cloudy
IBM shared a security related infographic via Twitter recently and in looking through the statistics (most of which are attributed to 2011 research, by the way) I happened to catch a statement claiming «The average company is attacked 60,000 times a day.»
IBM notes that «average» is average for the study, which consisted of mostly large enterprises, and while I’m certain there are still experts who would dispute this claim (it’s higher! it’s lower! That’s only an average of a subset of a selection of a …) for me it raised an interesting question with respect to attacks and cloud-based applications: If your application is deployed in the cloud, how do you if/when it’s being attacked? Perhaps more importantly, though, is whether or not you should know. After all, «the cloud» is taking care of all that infrastructure and networky stuff under the covers for you, right? And one of those «stuff» is addressing attacks.
Application Security in the Cloud Is Still Cloudy
IBM shared a security related infographic via Twitter recently and in looking through the statistics (most of which are attributed to 2011 research, by the way) I happened to catch a statement claiming «The average company is attacked 60,000 times a day.»
IBM notes that «average» is average for the study, which consisted of mostly large enterprises, and while I’m certain there are still experts who would dispute this claim (it’s higher! it’s lower! That’s only an average of a subset of a selection of a …) for me it raised an interesting question with respect to attacks and cloud-based applications: If your application is deployed in the cloud, how do you if/when it’s being attacked? Perhaps more importantly, though, is whether or not you should know. After all, «the cloud» is taking care of all that infrastructure and networky stuff under the covers for you, right? And one of those «stuff» is addressing attacks.
The Importance of Disaster Recovery Testing
In this business, we talk quite a lot about the importance of disaster recovery plans and strategies. Today’s organizations face a multitude of choices when it comes to building a disaster recovery (DR) plan to protect their data and provide business continuity in the case of outages and other disasters. Available options include building out a second data center/disaster site, populating a colocation facility with redundant hardware, outsourcing recovery to a hosting provider or utilizing cloud compute and storage for an on-demand recovery strategy.
The Importance of Disaster Recovery Testing
In this business, we talk quite a lot about the importance of disaster recovery plans and strategies. Today’s organizations face a multitude of choices when it comes to building a disaster recovery (DR) plan to protect their data and provide business continuity in the case of outages and other disasters. Available options include building out a second data center/disaster site, populating a colocation facility with redundant hardware, outsourcing recovery to a hosting provider or utilizing cloud compute and storage for an on-demand recovery strategy.
When Should We Switch to VPS
A middle-of-the-road solution between dedicated servers and shared hosting is a balance that makes a lot of sense for many businesses. Such a service exists and is called a virtual private server (or VPS). VPS offers webmasters a way to host their own server, but without the higher costs and complexities of dedicated servers. Here’s more about whether VPS strikes the right balance for you.
When a website uses shared hosting, it shares memory, hard drive space and CPU cycles with other sites on the same server. If one site gets hacked, there is a chance that other sites on the same server can get hacked. If one webmaster uses up all the server resources, other sites on the same server suffer. Some web hosts place hundreds of sites on the same server, so each site is at the mercy of other webmasters.
Before the breach: Cloud breach response best practices
One of the most difficult and damaging events that can occur for any business’ infrastructure is a breach. However, breaches occur when proper planning hasn’t gone into an infrastructure contingency plan.
There are several areas of consideration that need to be fully planned for before any IT strategy and data objectives can be balanced in the face of a potential breach: whether technical, HR, or compliance, have a response plan for each area is necessary before any problem ever arises.
In this post we will explore the technical considerations that go into breach planning. So where do you start in planning your cloud breach response?
Know where the data lives
Understanding what your data is, where it resides in your systems, and how the data flows is of the utmost importance when beginning your technical planning for breach protection. It’s surprising to considering that given the importance of …
Cloud computing and the Church: A match made in heaven?
In the week that Pope Francis decreed that atheists could still go to heaven if they followed their consciences, a new report has come to light showing how churches are taking up the cloud.
Four out of five large churches – comprising 1000 weekly attendees or more – are using cloud technology, with 55% of small churches currently in the cloud.
And the advantages are clear to see. Churches who are using the cloud to support online giving were almost two times more likely to see an upturn in donations. 72% of cloud-based large churches affirmed this, as opposed to just 41% of smaller churches.
Not surprisingly, the report also revealed a spike in engagement for churches in the cloud. Just over half (53%) of large cloudy churches stream their events, compared to just over 32% of those not utilising cloud.
The biggest growth however is in smartphone apps for engagement. Just …