IT Security

CIO Strategy / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
05
Feb 16

The Register – After safe harbour: Navigating data sovereignty

Max Schrems has a lot to answer for. The Austrian is single-handedly responsible for bringing down a key transnational data agreement that has left cloud service providers scrabbling for legal counsel. This is either a good thing, if you’re a privacy activist concerned about intrusive US surveillance policies, or a confusing and worrying one, if you’re a provider or customer of cloud services.

Worried by the Edward Snowden revelations, Schrems questioned the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, on the basis that Facebook was collecting his data in Ireland and then moving it to the US for processing. The Irish DPC simply pointed to the Safe Harbour agreement and said that its hands were tied.

The case was bumped up to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which on October 16 ruled that Safe Harbour was illegal. Its rationale was that it enabled companies to share data for national security purposes but didn’t address whether the protections were strong enough.

More of The Register article from Danny Bradbury

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03
Feb 16

Baseline – Why IT Pros Give Tech Transformation a Weak Grade

Few front-line technology workers give their companies high marks for adapting to new, transformative tech, according to a recent survey from Business Performance Innovation (BPI) and Dimension Data. The resulting report, “Bringing Dexterity to IT Complexity: What’s Helping or Hindering IT Tech Professionals,” indicates that most organizations haven’t even begun to transform IT—or are just getting started. A major sore spot: A lack of collaboration and/or alignment with the business side, as most tech staffers said business teams wait too long to bring IT into critical planning processes. This, combined with a lack of funding and other resources, results in tech departments spending too much time on legacy maintenance and far too little on essential advances that bring value to the business. “Instead of ushering their companies into a new age of highly agile innovation, IT workers are hindered by a growing list of maintenance tasks, staff cutbacks and aging infrastructure,” according to the report.

More of the Baseline Magazine article from Dennis McCafferty

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21
Jan 16

Formtek – Cloud Computing: While Security Remains Biggest Concern, Security Tops List as Reason to Implement Cloud

A new study on cloud computing use by small and medium sized companies from Exact and Pb7 Research finds two surprising results.

The first has to do with security. Typically security is cited as the number one concern for why businesses avoid the cloud; but surprisingly, the Exact report found that security is also the number one reason cited by cloud adopters for choosing the cloud. It seems like some sort of love/hate relationship. The second interesting result is that, in general, businesses using the cloud are better off financially compared to peer businesses that aren’t using the cloud.

More of the Formtek post from Dick Weisinger

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15
Jan 16

TechCrunch – The Cloud’s Biggest Threat Are Data Sovereignty Laws

The beauty of the cloud is the promise of simplification and standardization — without regard to physical or geographic boundaries. It’s this “any time, any place, any device” flexibility that is driving rapid adoption.

However, new government regulations on data sovereignty threaten to complicate the delivery model that has made cloud computing attractive, presenting new concerns for companies with operations in multiple countries.

While the strike down this fall of the United States-European Union “Safe Harbor” agreement made most of the headlines, I see the recent localization law in Russia (which went into effect in September) as a more significant development. The law mandates that personal data on Russian citizens must be stored in databases physically located within the country itself.

With this ruling, companies that capture, use and store data must abide by specific laws or face the consequences of falling out of compliance. Russia is a warning bell. With currently 20+ countries also considering similar privacy laws, the landscape will grow increasingly complex for cloud providers, and more costly for customers, thus chipping away at the beauty of the cloud.

The Register – IT infrastructure on demand? Yeah right, say devs

IT operations remain completely out of touch with the needs of developers, with CIOs duped into believing a dusting of VMware magic will allow them to construct the sort of whitebox data factories that power the likes of Google, sandbox vendor QualiSystems has declared.

The vendor’s CTO Joan Wrabetz took aim at the industry’s collective self-delusion while unveiling the results of a survey of end-users at this year’s US and European VMworld events, which she said showed IT operations were utterly out of touch with what developers, users and businesses actually need.

The survey found that three-quarters of organisations take at least eight hours to deliver infrastructure to end users, while 43 per cent take more than a week. In 17 per cent of cases, developers can be twiddling their thumbs for more than a month while they wait for ops to carve out some infrastructure for that latest must have release.

Of course, the easy answer is to just spin it all out to the cloud. Except that the respondees reckon it is private cloud where applications are heading. Of the bods taking the survey, 30 per cent of application workloads are running in private cloud, a figure that is expected to grow to 40 per cent over the next two years.

VMware – The Business Case for Cloud Automation

Automating private cloud infrastructure management helps improve the efficiency of cloud operations and deliver big CapEx and OpEx savings. The following infographic puts some numbers on the return on investment for cloud automation technology, derived from a wide range of customer case studies.

Check out the Infographic for some eye opening statistics.

More of the CIO Vantage post from VMware

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30
Dec 15

ZDNet – IT managers: we’re hurting for more cloud and DevOps skills

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “two-speed” IT, in which one part of the job is to help with all the cool stuff, such as digital presence and data analytics, while the other part is to deal with the traditional IT maintenance stuff — upgrades, patching, coding, security and so forth.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like two-speed IT is a 50-50 split in time and resources. It’s more like 80-20, in favor of the maintenance side.

That’s the conclusion from a survey of 200 IT executives just released by NetEnrich, which surveyed larger organizations with at least $400 million in annual revenues. The survey finds plenty of adoption of newer approaches that could help shift IT’s emphasis to the digital side — particularly cloud and DevOps. Nearly 97 percent of respondents said they’re moving applications and workloads into public, private or hybrid cloud environments, and 68 percent said that DevOps methodologies have been integrated well into their traditional IT and tech operations teams.

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

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29
Dec 15

TechRadar – The public cloud is not safe – and it’s your fault

Love the headline. This article shines a light on IT professionals taking responsibility for their own systems security.

What has the cloud ever done to you? General enthusiasm for moving huge tranches of private, sensitive company data onto the public cloud seems to wax and wane. It waxes as prices drop, new pay-as-you-go business plans emerge and new SaaS products go online, and it wanes when the media cover an Ashley Madison or a TalkTalk hack – and there have been plenty of those in 2015.

Security concerns remain the most common reason for businesses avoiding public cloud services, but providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM insist that their clouds are safe. That only leaves one weak link – the people who work for the businesses that use them. If the cloud isn’t as safe as it should be, it’s your fault.

According to analysts at Gartner, 95% of cloud security failures by 2020 will be the customer’s fault. “Only a small percentage of the security incidents impacting enterprises using the cloud have been due to vulnerabilities that were the provider’s fault,” says Gartner’s report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing.

More of the TechRadar post from Jamie Carter

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28
Dec 15

The Register – 2015: The year storage was rocked to its foundations

Storage year in review, part 1 The storage market in 2015 went through strategic foundation-shaking turmoil as the external shared disk array storage playbook was torn to shreds.

It was a bewildering year, with rampaging and revolutionary activity at all levels of the industry. It’s best looked at from the ground up, starting with the technology vision, moving on to raw media, and then systems (arrays), applications such as Big Data, and finally suppliers.

We look at technology visions and galloping media development here. Part two of this review of storage events in 2015 will cover systems, applications and suppliers.

Technology visions
There were six technology visions that exercised the industry’s mental sinews in 2015.

First, the all-flash data centre idea has definitely taken off as a vision that could be achieved. Pioneered by troubled Violin Memory it has been expanded on by Kaminario and HDS, and is related to the flash and trash concept.

Primary data is stored in flash with the rest being held in cheap and deep storage. When that cheap and deep is in the cloud you have an all-flash, on-premises data centre. When some/all of it is held in less-expensive flash, think 3D QLC (4 bits/cell or quad level cell), with the rest in the cloud, then you have an all-flash data centre too.

More of The Register article by Chris Mellor

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21
Dec 15

JaxEnter – Finance IT: The future of microservices, DevOps and the cloud in banking systems

JAXenter: What sort of changes are you witnessing in finance IT right now – and do you see buzzwords like cloud, microservices and DevOps playing a large role in this area in future?

Peter Lawrey: The buzz in fintech is still around performance and efficiency. In particular, IT developers are interested in cool new technologies but are looking to find way to justify their use to their managers. Many would like to migrate from Java 6 or 7 to Java 8 and see this as a big enough challenge.

While I don’t see financial institutions using external clouds like AWS as much as other industries, I believe they should be making more use of private clouds. Deploying services to new systems and even downsizing legacy systems is staggeringly harder than it should be. Clouds would be really helpful. A Bank can run their own cloud and still control the machines in use.

More of the JaxEnter post from Coman Hamilton

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.