Infoblox delivers Actionable Network Intelligence to enterprise, government, and service provider customers around the world. They are the industry leader in DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, the category known as DDI. We empower thousands of organizations to control and secure their networks from the core-enabling them to increase efficiency and visibility, improve customer service, and meet compliance requirements.
Yet more cloud shared responsibility misunderstanding apparent in new study
The clue is in the ‘shared’ part of shared responsibility: customers and providers have to work together to secure cloud data, yet new research shows two thirds of organisations polled export full responsibility for data protection, privacy and compliance on their cloud service providers.
The study, from Veritas, found that more than eight in 10 (83%) of the 1,200 global business and IT decision makers polled who plan to use infrastructure as a service (IaaS) believe their cloud service provider takes care of protecting their data in the cloud.
69% said they can place all responsibility for their data security in the provider’s hands, while more than half believe it is the cloud provider’s responsibility to securely transfer data between on-premises and cloud (54%) and back up workloads in the cloud (51%).
56% of those polled said they operate with a ‘cloud first’ mentality, compared to 43% who say they consider on-premises first before considering cloud. More than two thirds (67%) say they either already use or plan to use two or more cloud providers, with 42% at least aiming for three or more and 16% looking for five.
When it came to barriers against cloud implementation, lack of in house skills – cited by 38% of respondents – was most frequently cited, ahead of complexity with migration (37%) and limitations of legacy technology (36%). For factors which impacted cloud provider selection, data privacy, security and compliance, workload performance and uptime were key.
Yet the issues around what shared responsibility means have raised their head again. Let’s take Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two largest vendors, as an example.
“Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer,” Amazon notes. “This shared model can help relieve customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualisation layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates.
“The customer assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), other associated application software as well as the configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall.”
A post on Microsoft’s Azure security and compliance blog puts it this way. “Shared responsibility in public cloud is related to the fact that you have a partner when you host resources on a public cloud service provider’s infrastructure. Who is responsible for what (in terms of security) depends on the cloud service model you use.
“With IaaS, the cloud service provider is responsible for the core infrastructure security, which includes storage, networking and compute (at least at the fabric level – the physical level). As you move from IaaS, to PaaS and then to SaaS, you’ll find that you’re responsible for less and the cloud service provider is responsible for more.”
With GDPR on the horizon as well, businesses need to make sure they get this right. “Although cloud providers have a duty to ensure they help keep data secure and readily available, the ultimate responsibility of maintaining a compliance position with regulations such as GDPR lies with the organisation that owns the information,” said Jason Tooley, Veritas Northern Europe vice president.
Why did Akamai shift its focus to cybersecurity?
When you hear the word Akamai, the first thing that comes to your mind is its web traffic management system. Well, if you’re not familiar, Akamai is known for managing web traffic at busy sites, so the latency rates are low.
But today, Akamai is into a completely different line of business – cybersecurity. Why?
Companies like Apple and AWS began to have their own in-house solutions to handle traffic management, so they no longer needed the services of Akamai. In fact, this move made it difficult for Akamai to sustain its operations. So, it decided to give a shot at cybersecurity.
And that was probably the best decision by its management because it entered the market when cybersecurity was just beginning to grow. Also, there was a big need to fill the security gaps in the digital world, considering the many hacking incidents that were happening a few years ago. Specifically, the hacking of Target’s systems brought to the fore the immediate need to have sound cybersecurity solutions.
Due to these factrs, Akamai began to extensively grow in this business. Since it began operations, it has grown 27 percent year-on-year and today, it is making about $121 million in revenue each year. Undoubtedly, this is the strongest growing segment of Akamai’s business and one that is all set to grow even more in the coming years.
Akamai has created the right kind of products that will spruce the cybersecurity of companies today. For example, the Equifax breach exposed the records of more than 143 million Americans. A product called Kona Site Defender from Akamai is designed to prevent exactly such incidents from happening.
Also, this company is constantly working to improve its cybersecurity line of products, so it can stay one step ahead of hackers. So far, it’s been helping companies to protect their confidential data and through it all, has helped Akamai find its space again in an evolving tech world.
The post Why did Akamai shift its focus to cybersecurity? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
HashiCorp secures $40 million funding to bolster cloud infrastructure automation space
Cloud infrastructure automation is becoming an increasingly hot space. HashiCorp, a vendor based in San Francisco, has secured $40 million (£30.2m) to support its growing customer base and boost investment in its engineering and go-to-market initiatives.
The funding round was led by GGV Capital and Redpoint, with contributions from Mayfield and True Ventures. Scott Raney, partner at Redpoint, said his company believed HashiCorp was a “key component for making cloud adoption work” in the enterprise.
The company offers four primary products, alongside an array of open source offerings: Terraform, which focuses on infrastructure provision; Vault, for securing apps and infrastructure; Consul, for configuring applications across infrastructure; and Nomad for running any application on any infrastructure.
Among its customers are Adobe, Barclays and Comcast, with the company also having partnerships with many of the largest cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Total download numbers for its open source products stand at 22 million, the company says, with 150 updates released across its enterprise and open source suite.
“Broad usage of our products by operations, security, and development professionals has meant that HashiCorp products play an increasingly critical role for many large enterprises as they adopt cloud,” said Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp in a statement. “Our products provide consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure, so we are uniquely positioned to help enterprises address the realities of multi-cloud.
“Our commercial customer base has grown significantly over the past 18 months and this funding will allow us to invest aggressively across the breadth of our organisation and with a particular emphasis on customer support and success,” added McJannet.
You can find out more about HashiCorp here.
[session] @YahooGemini Test Automation | @CloudExpo #DevOps #AI #ML #DX
Gemini is Yahoo’s native and search advertising platform. To ensure the quality of a complex distributed system that spans multiple products and components and across various desktop websites and mobile app and web experiences – both Yahoo owned and operated and third-party syndication (supply), with complex interaction with more than a billion users and numerous advertisers globally (demand) – it becomes imperative to automate a set of end-to-end tests 24×7 to detect bugs and regression.
In their session at 21st Cloud Expo, Jenny Hung, E2E Engineer Manager at Yahoo Gemini, Haoran Zhao, Software Engineer at Oath Gemini, and Lin Zhang, Software Engineer at Oath (Yahoo), will describe the technical challenges and the principles we followed to build a reliable and scalable test automation infrastructure across desktops, mobile apps, and mobile web platforms on the cloud. We also share some best practices for advanced automated testing of web and mobile applications.
[session] #Monitoring with AI | @DevOpsSummit @SignifAI #AI #ML #DevOps
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Guy Fighel, Co-Founder and CTO at SignifAI, will dissect a few real-world examples where not knowing what you don’t know led to massive outages and service disruptions. He’ll explore how despite the fact that modern DevOps teams have multiple monitoring tools, hundreds of metrics instrumented and are capturing billions of data points… downtime still happens.
How about instead of implementing more monitoring, we bring forward a future where DevOps teams can augment their existing tooling with AI and machine learning to draw richer correlations across events, metrics and logs to surface insights about threats to uptime that aren’t even being monitored. Or put another way, how DevOps teams can get closer to a state of «known knowns!”
[session] Enterprise #IoT and #DigitalTransformation | @ThingsExpo #IIoT #M2M #DX
Enterprises have taken advantage of IoT to achieve important revenue and cost advantages. What is less apparent is how incumbent enterprises operating at scale have, following success with IoT, built analytic, operations management and software development capabilities – ranging from autonomous vehicles to manageable robotics installations. They have embraced these capabilities as if they were Silicon Valley startups.
As a result, many firms employ new business models that place enormous importance on software-based innovations. They require not only skilled occupations, such as data analysts and DevOps professionals, with more technical skills, but also middle-level employees with more software and computing acumen. Both large and small firms operate differently.
[session] Software-Defined Servers | @DevOpsSummit @TidalScale #SDN #SDS
In their session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Michael Berman, VP Engineering at TidalScale, and Ivo Jimenez, Engineer at TidalScale, will describe how automating tests in TidalScale is easy thanks to WaveRunner. They will show how they use WaveRunner, Jenkins, and Docker to have agile delivery of TidalScale. Michael Berman is VP Engineering at TidalScale. TidalScale is developing a scale up compute and resource architecture for customers to perform big data exploration and real time analytics.
[session] The Cross-Cloud Data Fabric | @CloudExpo @Elastifile #DX #CloudNative #Analytics
As hybrid cloud becomes the de-facto standard mode of operation for most enterprises, new challenges arise on how to efficiently and economically share data across environments.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Dr. Allon Cohen, VP of Product at Elastifile, will explore new techniques and best practices that help enterprise IT benefit from the advantages of hybrid cloud environments by enabling data availability for both legacy enterprise and cloud-native mission critical applications. By reviewing common hybrid cloud usage scenarios and their active and inactive data challenges, we will answer the common question on many IT managers’ minds: “Do I really need to re-architect everything when adopting cloud?”
Google and Cisco team up for hybrid cloud partnership
Google and Cisco have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership in something of a first for the networking giant.
The partnership will enable Cisco’s customers to deploy applications and services across both on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform.
Alongside this, the increasing importance of open source was cited in the joint offering, with developers being able to leverage managed Kubernetes, as well as Istio, to secure, manage and monitor microservices.
Writing in a blog post, Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco’s cloud platform and solutions group, outlined the reasons behind the move. “One of the things that makes hybrid hard is that while cloud generally abstracts underlying hardware and resources, these abstractions are different in various clouds,” he wrote. “It’s actually a good thing – enabling the rapid innovation and expansion of cloud platform capabilities that we’ve seen over the last several years – but those differences can become a real hindrance for enterprises implementing hybrid cloud.
“It’s with these challenges in mind that engineering teams from Cisco and Google Cloud started working together on a new solution,” Compton added. “The result is a solution that will deliver cloud agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support.”
Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google Cloud, wrote similarly. “This partnership to enhance existing on-premises infrastructure and extend it to the cloud addresses tough operational problems that enterprises have traditionally struggled to solve,” Boden wrote. “It also takes advantage of Cisco’s best of breed capabilities, including the ability to extend Cisco’s network and security policies and configurations and monitor application behaviour across hybrid cloud environments.”
Google’s cloud push under Diane Greene – who said earlier this year the company was able to catch up to Amazon Web Services (AWS) within five years – has been concerted. In July, CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts amidst the company’s ‘impressive’ cloud assets, the number of its big cloud deals – worth more than $500,000 – had tripled year over year. Among its most recent customer wins was marketing automation software provider Marketo, who went all-in on Google’s cloud in August as part of a wider six year alliance.
The companies said the solution will be available to a ‘limited number’ of customers during the first part of 2018, with general availability being rolled out later in the year.