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Data Security Concerns With Cloud Technology

Cloud computing in the 21st century promises to be what electricity was in the 20th century; cheap, plentiful and always available to compute resources to fulfill your every need. With any new technological advance however, there are always risks which could be exploited by those with malicious intent.

If you’re fortunate enough to have the resources within your organization to build and operate your internal private cloud, most of these risks would have been mitigated already as you still retain an element of control. Many other businesses are not in this position however, especially those in the small and medium sized sector, who are shredding documents to move to the cloud.

All of the security concerns we’ll be discussing below are not deal-breakers as such; the benefits of the cloud far outweigh any data security risks entailed in the transition to utility computing. As a decision maker, however, it is important to think about these issues before securely shredding everything and embarking on cloud migration, and finding out from prospective cloud providers how they will safeguard your data operations should be a key deciding factor on choosing your public cloud provider.

Data storage
Data should be securely encrypted when on your cloud provider’s servers, and also when in use and being processed by the cloud service. Forrester, a leading technology market research company, warns that few providers are currently able to guarantee data security and protection whilst it is being used within the application, and also what they do with the data after processing is complete.

Data transfer
Communications over the internet must be secured in any cloud transaction. On a browser, look for the “https” URL header when you connect to your cloud provider. In addition, always ensure traffic is authenticated and encrypted using industry standard protocols, developed specifically to secure internetworking, such as the Internet Security Protocol (IPSec).

Secure APIs
Also be aware of the software interfaces or application programming interfaces (APIs) that are employed in cloud services. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), an industry trade group, recommends learning about how your cloud provider integrates security throughout its offering, spanning activities such as monitoring and alerting services, data authentication and access control techniques.

Access control and data separation
You no longer have any personnel controls over people that have access to your data stored on the cloud provider’s servers. Make sure you consider the sensitivity of such data first to make sure that it is appropriate for release into the cloud. Gartner, a leading technology research and advisory company, also suggests asking for profiles of people who manage your data and the level of access they have.

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Dear Mr CIO, How Is 2013 Strategy Going So Far?

Dear Mr CIO, how is the year ahead planning program going so far? I know, sorry, it’s a tough one. The deployment and integration of devices, mobile connectivity points, virtual cloud-based desktop services, security, Big Data, tablets, mini-tablets and micro-mini-tablets (don’t worry, we made that last one up) all present a multiplicity of challenges.
The hyper-efficient CIO should look back on 2012 first and take stock of recent developments as the most prudent means of planning for 2013. Commonly agreed wisdom suggests that migration plans from XP to Windows 7 have now been put in place and (by and large) also been put into motion in most reasonably sized firms.

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Skytap Offers Ready-to-Go Cloudera Hadoop

Skytap, the cloud platform that offers virtual lab automation as a service, now has pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) templates in its library that can be used to spin up and manage physical or virtual clusters of up to 50 Hadoop nodes.
With complexity removed, the company claims a 10-node system should take no more than 10 minutes to deploy. In Cloudera system one node is always dedicated to Cloudera Manager.
The templates eliminate the time required to manually download, install, configure and network all of the required software and hardware components together.

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Making Sense of CES’s “Internet of Things” Trend

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was all about connected living with concrete examples of how an “Internet of Things” can transform our homes.
Despite promises of a “smarter home” as far back as the 1933 World’s Fair, we’re finally seeing an inflection point in its evolution, thanks to cloud and mobile computing. Many of the demonstrations at CES illustrate that with cloud, we have a platform we didn’t have in the past – and it’s a breakthrough.
Cloud is the platform to host the applications and the mobile platform connects the devices. With a cloud, televisions, computers and mobile devices can better connect to smart meters, lights, appliances, plugs and sensors within the home as well as with outside services.

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Dell Could Reportedly Go for $13.50-$14 a Share

Depending on who you listen to, Dell, once the world’s largest PC vendor
fallen on hard times, could have a deal to go private through a leveraged
management buy-out in place in the next six weeks (The Wall Street
Journal) or in the next week or two (CNBC).

On the other hand, Toni Sacconaghi, the ace Sanford Bernstein analyst,
thinks the whole exercise will come to naught because of the sheer size of
the ~$22 billion-$25 billion deal, one of the biggest LBOs of all time.

Besides the size of the deal, he says, “you have a pretty risky environment
in the sense that the PC marketplace is going through a lot of change right
now.”

The last word out of CNBC Tuesday was that Dell could be taken out for
$13.50-$14 a share, not the premium that most of the Street seems to be
anticipating. The Wall Street Journal waded in later agreeing.

Silver Lake Partners is apparently the key private equity house Dell has been
negotiating with for the last two or three months. The other name that has
come up is TPG Capital.

The two might team to buy $2 billion in equity in Dell. Sacconaghi think it
would take $4 billion.

There’s reportedly no formalized bidding group yet. A sovereign wealth or
pension fund could get involved. The Wall Street Journal says JP Morgan
Chase is managing “the deal process” apparently as an advisor.

According to CNBC the $15 billion debt financing is oversubscribed.
Reuters says at least four major banks have been lined up by Silver Lake:
Credit Suisse, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays and the Royal Bank
of Canada.

Because of Michael Dell’s nearly 16% ownership position in the firm,
worth maybe $3.6 billion, he’s assumed to be in. Because of that conflict of
interest stockholders have no guarantee of getting the best price. He may be
kicking in additional financing perhaps from his multibillion-dollar personal
investment fund.

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How cloud generates seismic waves across the economics of IT

By Kai Gray, VP of Operations at Carbonite

I feel like tectonic plates are shifting beneath the IT world. I’ve been struggling to put my finger on what it is that is making me feel this way, but slowly things have started to come into focus. These are my thoughts on how cloud computing has forever changed the economics of IT by shifting the balance of power.

The cloud has fundamentally changed business models; it has shifted time-to-market, entry points and who can do what. These byproducts of massive elasticity are wrapped up in an even greater evolutionary change that is occurring right now: The cloud is having a pronounced impact on the supply chain, which will amount to a tidal wave of changes in the near-term that will cause huge pain for some and spawn incredible innovation and wealth for others. As I see it, the cloud has …

Cloud computing

Guest Post: A Wrinkle in the IT Universe

By Kai Gray, VP of Operations at Carbonite

I feel like tectonic plates are shifting beneath the IT world. I’ve been struggling to put my finger on what it is that is making me feel this way, but slowly things have started to come into focus. These are my thoughts on how cloud computing has forever changed the economics of IT by shifting the balance of power.

The cloud has fundamentally changed business models; it has shifted time-to-market, entry points and who can do what. These byproducts of massive elasticity are wrapped up in an even greater evolutionary change that is occurring right now: The cloud is having a pronounced impact on the supply chain, which will amount to a tidal wave of changes in the near-term that will cause huge pain for some and spawn incredible innovation and wealth for others. As I see it, the cloud has started a chain of events that will change our industry forever:

1) Big IT used to rule the datacenter. Not long ago, large infrastructure companies were at the heart of IT. The EMCs, Dells, Ciscos, HPs and IBMs were responsible for designing, sourcing, supplying and configuring the hardware that was behind nearly all of the computing and storage power in the world. Every server closest was packed full of name-brand equipment and the datacenter was no different. A quick tour of any datacenter would – and still will – showcase the wares of these behemoths of the IT world. These companies developed sophisticated supply and sales channels that produced great margins businesses built on some very good product. This included the OEMs and ODMs that produced bent metal to the VARs and distributors who then sold their finish products. Think of DeBeers, the diamond mine owner and distributor. What are the differences between a company like HP and DeBeers? Not very much, but the cloud began to change all that.

2) Cloud Computing. Slowly we got introduced to the notion of cloud computing. We started using products that put the resource away from us, and (slowly) we became comfortable with not needing to touch the hardware. Our email “lived” somewhere else, our backups “lived” somewhere else and our computing cycles “lived” somewhere else. With each incremental step, our comfort levels rose until it stopped being a question and turned into an expectation. This process set off a dramatic shift in supply chain economics.

3) Supply Chain Economics. The confluence of massive demand coupled with near-free products (driven by a need to expand customer acquisition) changed how people had to think about infrastructure. All of a sudden, cloud providers had to think about infrastructure in terms of true scalability. This meant acquiring and managing massive amounts of infrastructure at the lowest possible cost. This was/is fundamentally different from the way the HPs and Dells and Ciscos thought about the world. All of a sudden, those providers were unable to address the needs of this new market in an effective way. This isn’t to say that the big IT companies can’t, just that it’s hard for them. It’s hard to accept shrinking margin and “openness.”  The people brave enough to promote such wild ideas are branded as heretics and accused of rocking the boat (even as the boat is sinking). Eventually the economic and scale requirements forced cloud providers to tackle the supply chain and go direct.

4) Going Direct. As cloud providers begin to develop strong supply chain relationships and build up their competencies around hardware engineering and logistics, they begin to become more ingrained with the ODMs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_design_manufacturer) and other primary suppliers. Huge initiatives came into existence from the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook that are focused on driving down the cost of everything. For example, Google began working directly with Intel and AMD to develop custom chipsets that allow them to run at efficiency levels never before seen, and Facebook started the Open Compute Project that seeks to open-source design schematics that were once locked in vaults.

In short, the supply chain envelope gets pushed by anyone focused on cost and large-scale.

…and here it gets interesting.

Cloud providers now account for more supplier revenue than the Big IT companies. Or, maybe better stated — cloud providers account for more hope of revenue (HoR) than Big IT. So, what does that mean? That means that the Big IT companies no longer receive the biggest discounts available from the suppliers. The biggest discounts are going to the end users and the low-margin companies built solely on servicing the infrastructure needs of cloud providers. This means that Big IT is at even more of a competitive disadvantage than they already were. The cycle is now in full swing. If you think this isn’t what is happening, just look at HP and Dell right now. They don’t know how to interact with a huge set of end users without caving in their margins and cannibalizing their existing businesses. Some will choose to amputate while others will go down kicking, but margin declines and openness of information will take their toll with excruciating pain.

What comes of all this? I don’t know. But here are my observations:

1) Access to the commodity providers (ODMs and suppliers) is relatively closed. To be at all interesting to ODMs and suppliers you have to be doing things at enough volume that it is worthwhile for them to engage with you. That will change. The commodity suppliers will learn how to work in different markets but there will be huge opportunity for companies that help them get there. When access to ODMs and direct suppliers gets opened up to traditional Enterprise companies so they can truly and easily take advantage of commodity hardware through direct access to suppliers then, as they say, goodnight.

2) Companies that provide some basic interfaces between the suppliers and the small(er) consumers will do extremely well. For me, this means configuration management of some sort, but it could be anything that helps accelerate the linkage between supplier and end-user . The day will come when small IT shops have direct access to suppliers and are able to custom-build hardware in same way that huge cloud providers do today. Some might argue that there is no need for small shops to do this — that they can use other cloud providers, that it’s too time consuming to do it on their own, and that their needs are not unique enough to support such a relationship. Yes, yes, and yes… for right now. Make it easy for companies to realize the cost and management efficiencies of direct supplier access and I don’t know of anyone that wouldn’t take you up on that. Maybe this is the evolution of the “private cloud” concept but all I know is that, right now, the “private cloud” talk is being dominated by the Big IT folks so the conflict of interest is too great.

3) It’s all about the network. I don’t think the network is being addressed in the same way as other infrastructure components. I almost never hear about commodity “networks,” yet I constantly hear about commodity “hardware.” I’m not sure why. Maybe Cisco and Juniper and the other network providers are good at deflecting or maybe it’s too hard of a problem to be solved or maybe the cost isn’t a focal point (yet). Whatever the reason, I think this is a huge problem/opportunity. Without the network, everything else can just go away. Period. The entire conversation driving commodity-whatever is predicated around delivering lots of data to people at very low-cost. The same rules that drive commoditization need to be applied to the network and right now I only know of 1 or 2 huge companies that are even thinking in these terms.

There are always multiple themes in play at any given time that, when looking back, we summarize as change. People say that the Internet changed everything. And, before that, the PC changed everything. What we’re actually describing is a series of changes that happened over a period of time that have the cumulative effect of making us say, “How did we ever do X without Y?” I believe that the commoditization of infrastructure is just one theme among the change that will be described as Cloud Computing. I contend, however, the day is almost upon us when everybody, from giant companies to the SMB, will say, “Why did we ever buy anything but custom hardware directly from the manufacturer?”

This post originally appeared on kaigray.com.  It does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of GreenPages Technology Solutions.

To Learn more about GreenPages Cloud Computing Practice click here.

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Don’t Stick Your Head in the Sand, Create a Proactive Security Strategy

The lack of a proactive security strategy is much like an ostrich putting its head in the sand. It is a matter of when, not if attacks will happen. As enterprise systems are exposed to substantial risk from data loss, theft, or manipulation, a proactive unified approach deployed and managed from the cloud can provide a better balance of data leakage prevention, protection of IP assets, maintenance of compliance standards versus cost/resource responsibility.
In business, data is currency. It is the oil that keeps the commercial engine in motion and databases are the digital banks that store and retrieve this valuable information. And, according to IDC, data is doubling every two years. But as the overall amount of data grows, so does the amount of sensitive and regulated data. All this data stored by enterprises requires high levels of security. Presently (again, according to IDC) only about a quarter of that data is being properly protected now. Like all currency, data must be protected.

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