“Cloud adoption has been much more prevalent in SMBs, in small office and home offices, and yet those are the individuals that don’t have the resources to secure themselves when using cloud. So Leeward was created to give assistance and practical advice to those individuals and organizations,” explained Terry Woloszyn, Founder/CTO of Leeward Security Ltd, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Ipanema Technologies Updates Its Autonomic Networking System
Ipanema Technologies today released v7.1 of its Autonomic Networking System (ANS). This new release includes enhancements that improve application visibility, control, and performance, giving large enterprises, particularly those in the cloud, the ability to manage increased data volumes.
With ANS v7.1 using a new software architecture and faster Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Ipanema triples its high-end device performance (ip|e1800ax) reaching up to 20,000 new connections per second. This results in a throughput of 2Gbps alongside a classification system recognizing over 300 applications out of the box. Intelligent device clustering guarantees business application performance up to 10GBPS. As a result, companies are better placed to cope with the significant year-on-year traffic growth they are now experiencing.
Other additional ANS v7.1 enhancements include:
- Cloud application performance report. The new Cloud
Application Monitoring (CAM) report allows enterprises to understand
and control the cloud applications usage and performance from the user
perspective in the branch offices. - Virtual appliances (virtual|engine) that can be deployed as an
alternative to hardware appliances in virtualized data centers and
branch offices. ANS v7.1 enables hybrid deployments of physical and
virtual devices that work together to measure control and optimize all
application traffic across the enterprise.
For more information, visit: www.ipanematech.com
WAN Governance (blog) | Ipanema Users Group (LinkedIn) | Follow Ipanema (Twitter)
Cloud Can Impact Almost Anything, As Same-Day Dailies for Movie Shoots Shows
Aframe, a cloud video production platform company, announced that Laboratory in New York used Aframe’s professional video management service to deliver dailies of the soon to debut indie film “The Birder’s Guide to Everything” literally the same day – a breakthrough for global film and TV production teams. In the fierce competition to achieve stunning creative, Aframe’s ability to ingest, store, transcode, and deliver a link to a full day’s high-res footage to a 20-person team, in just hours let the artists focus on their art. After years of teams tolerating the delivery of raw footage from location shoots via overnight shipments a day or two later, Aframe’s private cloud finally made the term “dailies” true to its name.
A quirky coming of age film featuring Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley, “The Birder’s Guide to Everything” is a feature-length adaptation of the 2008 short “Aquarium” by director Rob Meyer, which won an honorable mention from the Sundance Film Festival. After spotting what he thinks is an extinct duck, a high school sophomore and bird enthusiast persuades two dorky buddies and the “new girl in school” to join him on a quest to locate the mysterious bird. Adventure ensues as the teen comes to terms with painful aspects of his family life.
During 21 days of shooting north of New York City, post house Sixteen19 processed and uploaded dailies to Aframe where they would be securely stored and accessible to all authorized team members. Within hours, a link to an H264 proxy copy of the footage was emailed to 20 collaborators on the film. This avoided the costly, time consuming practice of shipping HD disks overnight would arrive the next day or later, often too late to make fine yet vital adjustments to potential for costly-reshoots.
Using Aframe, Laboratory now had an easy and efficient means for everyone to view each day’s raw footage and make important decisions on production or acting nuances immediately with the next day’s takes. Collaborators could access footage anywhere, anytime, without the need for dedicated, costly on-premises systems, with one co-producer even viewing dailies on his iPad while working in Qatar.
“I’ve been waiting for this type of solution for a decade, and to me Aframe is simply genius,” said Dean Winkler, co-founder of Laboratory and post-production and VFX supervisor for “Birder’s Guide.” “Digital storage is a huge problem, with everyone throwing valuable hard drives into some carton in an insecure back room, which are painful and time-consuming to sift through and store, let alone share. With Aframe, we store the master in a secure cloud and let everyone look at H264 proxies immediately and at their convenience – making better use of otherwise idle time and getting the footage out when it can make the greatest impact.”
“We’re creating this film on a tight budget, and Aframe not only saved us money distributing dailies but was also a far better solution than using physical media,” Winkler continued. “Once you use Aframe, I can’t imagine you’d ever want to go back.”
SYS-CON.tv Interview: The Ever-Changing Cloud
“Most providers know that Intel is supplying the core technologies, infrastructures, and systems to support their cloud infrastructures,” noted Steve Orrin, Sr. Security Architect & Principal Engineer for the Cross Platform Technology group at Intel Corp, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
1024 Words: The (Non)Evolution of Computing Models
Hybrid-mobile #cloud is the latest attempt at modernizing what remains a relatively unchanged, decades old computing model
I was informed via e-mail that the «next big thing» is hybrid mobile-cloud (HMC), which is described as client being a mobile-native application and its server-side component being deployed in the cloud. I swear I’ve seen a fat-client + server model over an IP network before…
Big data is the future focus of the enterprise cloud
Recent technological developments improved the ways in which we can create and manage different types of digital data.
As more and more documents go online, better solutions are being offered by cloud service providers. While the simplest apps can generally solve individual necessities for storage space and file transfer, the problems still exist in corporate settings where the amount of data generated daily is much bigger.
Services like Dropbox and SugarSync are primarily intended for individual consumers but there are other cloud services that focus on creating corporate data management solutions. The amount of digital data in companies and organisations grows at a very high rate and now many of them face the challenge of big data processing. This is why big data is increasingly becoming a focus of cloud industry.
Big data is a common name for huge amounts of digital data that cannot easily be processed and transmitted …
When encryption doesn’t mean more secure
By Ken Smith
I have had a number of clients reach out to me about how to implement whole disk encryption, SQL transparent data encryption, and encryption of VMware VMDK files in order to satisfy “data at rest” security requirements. My response is usually something like “Say that again?”
These types of encryption approaches are designed to better protect data at rest on media that may be accessible to individuals who are not authorized to access such data. This is usually some form of portable media such as a hard drive in the notebook computer, a portable USB hard drive, a USB stick, a backup tape, etc.
And by “at rest” we are talking about files that have been saved to media and are not currently open or active. So to summarize, these types of encryption solutions are intended to protect data at rest on some form of portable media …
When Encryption Doesn’t Mean More Secure
By Ken Smith
I have had a number of clients reach out to me about how to implement whole disk encryption, SQL transparent data encryption, and encryption of VMware VMDK files in order to satisfy “data at rest” security requirements. My response is usually something like “Say that again?”
These types of encryption approaches are designed to better protect data at rest on media that may be accessible to individuals who are not authorized to access such data. This is usually some form of portable media such as a hard drive in the notebook computer, a portable USB hard drive, a USB stick, a backup tape, etc. And by “at rest” we are talking about files that have been saved to media and are not currently open or active. So to summarize, these types of encryption solutions are intended to protect data at rest on some form of portable media or media that is generally accessible to individuals that should not have access to sensitive data stored on that media. What I’m seeing, however, is that this type of encryption is being adopted to address “encrypt sensitive data” compliance requirements such as PCI DSS.
The intent of such “encryption of data at rest” requirements is to protect specific data from unauthorized access whether it be via application access, network file system access, or physical access. If the sensitive information is on storage media that is physically secured in a data center and this data is protected with appropriate network file system access controls, then the only thing remaining is to render the data unreadable to any unauthorized party at the application access level. This is where column or field level encryption comes in. Only authorized individuals or processes have access to the sensitive information in unencrypted form, and only authorized individuals or processes have access to the decryption keys that allow such access.
Let’s switch back to whole disk encryption and SQL transparent data encryption. When a system that’s running either of these is brought online, all users of the system have access to unencrypted data. Not just specific users who have been authorized to access specific sensitive information, but all users. When a server running BitLocker has finished booting, every process and user running on that host has access to data that BitLocker is decrypting for them on the fly every time it’s read from disk. A SQL database server running TDE makes all of its data accessible to all processes and users that have access to the database. While the database is running, the encrypted data is decrypted on-the-fly for all to see. The decryption keys are automatically presented regardless of who is requesting them. This isn’t really “protecting specific data from unauthorized access with encryption” is it?
With the proliferation of virtualization and cloud-based systems, we are now seeing this same thinking applied to protecting sensitive virtual systems. For a VMware environment, VMDK files can be encrypted to protect them from unauthorized access and use, but this is also a method that’s identical to solutions like whole disk encryption and SQL TDE. The data is only protected after it’s been written to disk, the VM is not actually running, and the decryption keys are only accessible to specific services and users that require access to the sensitive data. In most environments, this is not the case.
This type of encryption does have its place. For example, in multi-tenant or public cloud environments, it may be desirable to only allow specific authorized hypervisors to use certain virtual instances. It may make sense for SQL TDE to encrypt every database write to disk if you are using a public cloud providers’ storage and backup solutions. It might be a good idea to use whole disk encryption on a system that is physically at risk of being stolen. But just throwing these types of solutions at a system because they have the word encryption in them and they are easy doesn’t always mean that you’re actually doing a better job protecting sensitive information.
MapR Goes to Europe
MapR Technologies, the Hadoop outfit, is launching European operations in
support of its growing community of customers and partners there.
Its new headquarters in London will provide MapR with a base for sales to
accelerate the adoption of its high-performance enterprise-grade Hadoop
distribution.
MapR CEO John Schroeder says, “There has been phenomenal Hadoop
demand across Europe.”
The new office will help support existing strategic agreements between
MapR and EMC, Google, Cisco and Amazon as well as system integration
partners across the region.
Cloud Bridges Gap Between Your Mobile’s SIM Card and Your Money
What happens when you cross a SIM Card and a Credit Card? You get SmartPass the new cloud based NFC-based payment system that allows cashless payments via the users smartphone.
Developed as as a joint venture of both Visa and Vodafone and recently unveiled in Australia, SmartPass is essentially an app. It is available to all smartphones on the Vodafone network that are equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) capability. Most mid to high end smartphones purchased over the past year would have NFC.
You get SmartPass the new cloud based NFC-based payment system that allows cashless payments via the users smartphone.
Developed as a joint venture of both Visa and Vodafone and recently unveiled in Australia, SmartPass is essentially an app. It is available to all smartphones on the Vodafone network that are equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) capability. Most mid to high end smartphones purchased over the past year would have NFC.
In addition to downloading the app you would need to order an NFC SIM card from Vodafone. The SIM card and the App work together with a cloud based user account that tops itself up from the users Visa or MasterCard before a payment.