Super Fast Flash Storage: One More Step Making the Cloud into a Mainframe

Posted by Dave Asprey in Cloud, DataCenter, Secure Data Centers, Virtualization Nov 3rd, 2011 | 2 Comments Check out this new release from Greylock Partners, which calls Pure Storage “one of the most exciting enterprise companies in the Greylock Portfolio.” Pure Storage makes a flash based storage array. Greylock is a solid VC – I’ve pitched them on startup ideas a few times over the years. I’m the first to admit that storage arrays might be the most boring part of cloud infrastructure, aside from layer 1 signaling mechanisms maybe. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see this launch. The reason is that I/O for storage is becoming a limiting factor in some cloud infrastructure....

What Are the True Dangers of the Cloud?

Posted by Christine Drake in Cloud, Cyber crime, DataCenter, hybrid-cloud, IaaS, PaaS, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security, Threats, Threats from the Cloud, Virtualization Sep 8th, 2011 | 7 Comments We often hear that security and privacy concerns are the main inhibitors to cloud adoption.  But what are the true threats?  Is the cloud really more dangerous than your on-site data center?  I would say that virtualization and cloud computing aren’t inherently more dangerous, but they have unique infrastructure that must be addressed when creating a security foundation.  There are similar attacks across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures—data-stealing malware, web threats, spam, phishing, bots, etc. So many companies are tempted to deploy their security for dedicated physical...

Agentless Security Gets an “A” on Its Report Card

Posted by Christine Drake in Cloud, DataCenter, Deep Security, private cloud, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Virtualization, VMware Aug 30th, 2011 | No Comments In my last blog post, I discussed some of the benefits of agentless security for virtual and private cloud servers. Today at VMworld, Harish Agastya, Director of Data Center Security at Trend Micro, conducted a presentation on Agentless Security for VMware Environments (listed on the Trend Micro VMworld page). Trend Micro released agentless antivirus in Deep Security at last year’s VMworld and has seen impressive results over the last year.  With such success, today Trend Micro announced an extension of its agentless security with new agentless file integrity monitoring (FIM) in Deep Security...

Ambient Cloud News: Skype protocol has been reverse engineered

Posted by Dave Asprey in Cloud, Cloud-based Security, Cyber crime, DataCenter, Deep Security, hybrid-cloud, IaaS, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Threats from the Cloud Jun 2nd, 2011 | No Comments This is pretty cool. I gave a talk last week at the Glue Conference in Denver about how ambient clouds ( http://cloudsecurity.trendmicro.com/good-clouds-evil-clouds-why-microsoft-has… )work and even used Skype as an example of a massive-scale ambient cloud. This case raises some very important new questions around ambient clouds. For instance, if you create an ambient cloud, one that you control using your own protocol, but where you have no control over when an endpoint may join it, what are the legal implications if someone else uses your protocol? In an open source world, slapping a lawsuit...

Did Amazon’s aggressive algorithms prevent customer data loss?

Posted by Bharath Chandrasekhar in Cloud, Cloud-based Security, DataCenter, private cloud, public cloud, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security May 11th, 2011 | Comments Off How difficult is it to run a public cloud service? As all of us know, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage on 21-Apr-2011 and that lasted for almost 4 days. Quite a lot of companies were affected and you can find the list here. The Internet was flooded with articles speculating what went wrong, whether cloud computing is viable in the long run, how Amazon services did not function as advertised, how the applications should be built, etc. While most offered their opinion in broad strokes such as “use multiple regions/clouds”, “use built-in redundancy”, “don’t use public clouds”,...

Should the Amazon Web Services EC2 outage impact cloud adoption?

Posted by Christine Drake in Cloud, Cloud-based Security, DataCenter, public cloud, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security Apr 27th, 2011 | Comments Off Last Thursday, April 21, 2011 Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) had an outage that impacted multiple Availability Zones. Thursday morning, Amazon issued a status update indicating that the outage was based on problems with replication mirroring: “This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new...

The Small Business Journey to the Cloud is Actually a Round Trip

Posted by Greg Boyle in Cloud, Cloud-based Security, DataCenter, hybrid-cloud, IaaS, PaaS, Privacy, Compliance and Identity, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Threats, Threats from the Cloud, Virtualization Apr 20th, 2011 | 2 Comments The Small Business Journey to the Cloud is Actually a Round Trip      By Greg Boyle, Trend Micro Global Product Marketing Manager Many small businesses are still uncertain about cloud computing. They wonder if it can help with their profitability without being extremely risky. Let’s start by defining cloud computing in small business terms. There are two commonly agreed upon types of cloud computing: 1) software-as-a-service and 2) infrastructure-as-a-service. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is cloud computing where the software you would normally install on your computers in the office is instead...

Scalability Testing In The Cloud

Posted by Justin Foster in Cloud, DataCenter, IaaS, PaaS, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Virtualization Apr 18th, 2011 | 1 Comment Not long ago, we set out on a mission to perform a full scalability test on one of our products (Trend Micro Deep Security). After some quick, back-of-the-napkin calculations we discovered that we needed somewhere in the order of 35 Dell 710′s with virtualization to complete our test. Finding that many available servers is a tall order for any company, and buying that many servers for a month long test was completely out of the question (try asking your managers for 35 servers and see how pale they go!). Naturally we turned to the cloud to help us out. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a good...

Dedicated Servers vs. the New Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instance

Posted by Dave Asprey in Cloud, Cloud-based Security, cloudbursting, DataCenter, hybrid-cloud, IaaS, private cloud, public cloud, Secure Data Centers, Securing the Cloud, Security, Smart Protection Network, Virtualization Mar 28th, 2011 | 3 Comments Amazon Web Services today announced the availability of dedicated compute instances within a VPC: Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances launched within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that run hardware dedicated to a single customer. Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of the benefits of Amazon VPC and the AWS cloud – on-demand elastic provisioning, pay only for what you use, and a private, isolated virtual network, all while ensuring that your Amazon EC2 compute instances will be isolated at the hardware level. Of course, the humor here is that Amazon didn’t...

What is Cloudbursting?

Posted by Bharath Chandrasekhar in Cloud, Cloud-based Security, cloudbursting, DataCenter, hybrid-cloud, private cloud, public cloud, Securing the Cloud, Security, Threats from the Cloud, Uncategorized, Virtualization Mar 15th, 2011 | 8 Comments Do you know what cloudbursting is? It is a concept where when you run out of your computing resources in your internal data center, you “burst” the additional workload to an external cloud on an on-demand basis. The internal computing resource is the “Private Cloud” and the external cloud is typically a “public cloud” for which the organization gets charged on a pay-per-use basis. When your deployment has the ability to do “cloudbursting” or spreading the load to the public cloud, you essentially have a Hybrid Cloud. Hybrid Clouds can deliver a bit...