News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
Richard Spires, CIO of DHS, provided written testimony on 12 services that they have moved to the cloud. The first service often moved to the cloud is email, which DHS has started by putting FEMA's email to the cloud. They have 8 private clouds already set up, and 3 services in the public clouds. The private cloud services are below: SharePoint as a Service - "We are currently migrating Headquarters and United States Citizenship and Immigration … [Read more...]
In this week's Blog Talk Radio, Bob Gourley and John Dodge talk about the new avenues of attack in the cyber world. In addition, they hit on the #cloudsecurity tweets of the week on Twitter. Highlights of the re-tweets are an interview with CIA CTO Gus Hunt and some thoughts on moving from a private cloud to a public cloud. The two also hit on topics like HP's integrated suite of security tools and the importance of testing applications, especially web … [Read more...]
During the recent GEOINT conference I spoke with SGI and Cloudera about the meaning of their recent announcement. They just announced a strategic agreement where SGI will ship Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Enterprise Management Suite factory installed on SGI Hadoop Clusters. Although this is good news for both companies there is better news for users of Apache Hadoop. Benchmarking of this Cloudera CDH/SGI platform … [Read more...]
John Dodge (@thedodgeretort) and Bob Gourley (@bobgourley) review the Enterprise CIO Forum's (@ECIOForum) top 10 Cloud Security Tweets of the week in the following podcast. Tweets selected by John included: zdnet: Will cloud security ever be sufficient? http://t.co/vLJjhFAY cloudsa: (ISC)² and The Cloud Security Alliance Expand Cloud Security Offerings to their Memberships... http://t.co/c80DntRK chrispirillo: How secure is … [Read more...]
There is much commentary right now about Facebook, social networking, and the meaning for the enterprise technologist. All of the tumult over Facebook's new features (frictionless sharing, the timeline, etc) inspired me to dig out an old post I had written for Huffington Post on what I called the "database society:" The dominant metaphor of the Cold War era was cybernetics -- the study of closed, self-regulating systems. At its heart, George Orwell's … [Read more...]
Mashable reports that Google has improved its IOS Google+ app: The search giant follows Tuesday’s Android update of Google+with a similar refresh to its iOS version, now available free on the App Store. What’s new? Like its Android cousin, the iOS version of the Google+ mobile app now supports Hangouts, letting groups communicate with each other using front-facing cameras on the iPhone 4 and iPod touch. In addition to Hangouts, the app offers better … [Read more...]
A recent IDG interview of Bob Gourley of Crucial Point and Andrzej Kawalec of HP delved into the problem of the "traditional" method of enterprise security, a paradigm under severe challenge. We can sum up the traditional approach as less a certain tactic, technique, technology, or policy than a way of viewing the world. As Gourley has noted, traditional enterprise security can be characterized with one of these bullets: Primarily exists below … [Read more...]
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously observed that most people can only maintain relationships at one time with 150 people. The average on Facebook is 120-230. And of that, only a fraction really matter to us. Penetrating a small circle is usually very difficult, especially if they are members of a network based around a tie that cannot easily be faked or replicated. Social media, however, is changing the security dynamics of "small" groups. By … [Read more...]
Enterprise security was once based entirely around the personal computer. A computer was the primary venue from which employees communicated, produced and exchanged data, and opened the company to risk. Now the widespread use of mobile computing devices for both work and pleasure has created security problems that we have previously explored. Thus, accepting the "death" of the PC--at least as a unitary device--is an imperative for modern enterprise … [Read more...]
Philip Ewing reports on a nightmare scenario for the Department of Defense. Suppose a worker’s Android phone is infected with malware, and she innocently plugs it into her work computer to charge and sync contacts. You can imagine the government IT workers turning green at the thought of thousands of unknown phones running unknown software being plugged into official computers, even when the workers doing it are being scrupulous about handling secure … [Read more...]