In a recent survey of 250 senior IT & business decision makers by Cloud Industry Forum, 61% expressed concerns over data security in the cloud, despite the fact only 2% have ever experienced a cloud-related security breach. Talk of the cloud and cloud technology has been rife for a long time now, yet there
are still many businesses that subscribe to out-dated
myths, such as data security.
The last few years have seen a marked increase in the
popularity of the cloud but for many it’s another tech
innovation that everyone tells them they need but that they
don’t fully understand. There’s a distinct hype surrounding
discussions on the cloud, but for the most part, they come
across as semi-intelligible fog, full of jargon fi lled techspeak,
with a lack of clarity about the business advantages.
In this whitepaper, we’ll lift the haze around the cloud and take
a straight-forward approach to explore the benefits, making it easy to determine if the cloud is right for you. We’ll clearly state the benefits of using the cloud as well as give an overview of the perceived risks and remove some of the common misconceptions.
In this eBook, we will uncover the specifics of how a
hybrid cloud solution can transform IT management so
that you can become the leader your business needs.
We will compare traditional and hybrid requirements with
respect to three critical areas: how you’ll govern the
system, the management tools you’ll need, and what
your management opportunities will be.
Cloud computing is a huge topic. It encompasses diverse models and technologies, even though users and the trade press tend to lump them under a common name.
For that matter, please note that we're still discovering many of the security issues which will challenge cloud computing!
Because cloud computing is still a work-in-progress. Because it is rapidly evolving, what I tell today you may quickly become irrelevant or obsolete.
Nonetheless, there's so much thrust behind cloud computing that we simply don't have the option of sitting back and waiting to understand address cloud computing security issues.
In a recent survey of 250 senior IT & business decision makers by Cloud Industry Forum, 61% expressed concerns over data security in the cloud, despite the fact only 2% have ever experienced a cloud-related security breach. Talk of the cloud and cloud technology has been rife for a long time now, yet there
are still many businesses that subscribe to out-dated
myths, such as data security.
The last few years have seen a marked increase in the
popularity of the cloud but for many it’s another tech
innovation that everyone tells them they need but that they
don’t fully understand. There’s a distinct hype surrounding
discussions on the cloud, but for the most part, they come
across as semi-intelligible fog, full of jargon fi lled techspeak,
with a lack of clarity about the business advantages.
In this whitepaper, we’ll lift the haze around the cloud and take
a straight-forward approach to explore the benefits, making it easy to determine if the cloud is right for you. We’ll clearly state the benefits of using the cloud as well as give an overview of the perceived risks and remove some of the common misconceptions.
In this eBook, we will uncover the specifics of how a
hybrid cloud solution can transform IT management so
that you can become the leader your business needs.
We will compare traditional and hybrid requirements with
respect to three critical areas: how you’ll govern the
system, the management tools you’ll need, and what
your management opportunities will be.
Cloud computing is a huge topic. It encompasses diverse models and technologies, even though users and the trade press tend to lump them under a common name.
For that matter, please note that we're still discovering many of the security issues which will challenge cloud computing!
Because cloud computing is still a work-in-progress. Because it is rapidly evolving, what I tell today you may quickly become irrelevant or obsolete.
Nonetheless, there's so much thrust behind cloud computing that we simply don't have the option of sitting back and waiting to understand address cloud computing security issues.
Cloud computing has arrived on the IT landscape with all the commotion of a Hollywood blockbuster in terms of its media coverage. The hype and chatter that this has caused has arguably not helped its initial growth and development as companies have been at the mercy of a mixed set of messages, some of which have almost approached the point of confusion in various cases.
Cloud computing has arrived on the IT landscape with all the commotion of a Hollywood blockbuster in terms of its media coverage. The hype and chatter that this has caused has arguably not helped its initial growth and development as companies have been at the mercy of a mixed set of messages, some of which have almost approached the point of confusion in various cases.
[Srijan Wednesday Webinars] 11 Things You Don't Know About CloudSrijan Technologies
Here's what most people already know about cloud: It's cheaper than owning tons of servers. You can scale up or down as per your business needs. And you don't have to worry about upgrades, patches and so on. As for security – the world's divided on that!
But is that all you should know?
In this webinar, our speaker walks you through some of the things you must know about cloud. As your business grows, what are the things you must keep in mind? Are the costs linear? How secure is it? Can you ensure business continuity, cost effectively? Can you migrate to a different service provider easily? Learn insightful facts about cloud for business through this webinar video: http://goo.gl/JmM2G5
Cloud Considerations What you need to kn.docxmary772
Cloud Considerations
What you need to know prior to making the leap
Student
University of Maryland University College
1
CLOUD CONSIDERATIONS – WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW PRIOR TO MAKING THE LEAP
Cloud Considerations
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW PRIOR TO MAKING THE LEAP
Executive Summary
"By failing to
prepare, you are
preparing to
fail."
- Benjamin
Franklin
Wait! Before you move your IT operations to the cloud, there are a
number of considerations that you should take into account prior to
making the leap.
It is well known that hosting one’s own systems incurs costs in
facilities including power and cooling, and systems maintenance
including hardware, licensing, and support. Additional costs come
from staffing and day-to-day operations.
What if instead, you could stop paying for new hardware? What if the
worry and upkeep of the aging equipment belonged to someone else?
That's entirely possible by moving to the cloud. The servers are
physically managed by the cloud provider in their data center, and you
are just one of many utilizing those systems.
However, with a new environment comes all new tools and concepts
that you need to understand before making that decision.
Many IT organizations have attempted to make the transition and
failed due to lack of time allotted, lack of identifying project
requirements, or lack of knowledge to make an effective plan for
budget.
Some key factors need to be considered in order to determine if making
the transition to the cloud is the right fit for your company. In addition,
proper preparation, including anticipating additional costs and
allotting enough time to make the transition is needed in order to be
successful.
These factors include the following questions:
• Are your applications a good fit for the cloud and what will be
the approach to migrating them?
• Does your support team have the knowledge to support the new
environment?
• What security controls need to be in place to provide adequate
security and compliance with regulations?
• What other hidden costs could be uncovered and planned for?
If you consider these factors, allow time for planning, and budget for
failure, you may be successful in migrating to the cloud.
2
CLOUD CONSIDERATIONS – WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW PRIOR TO MAKING THE LEAP
Introduction
The cloud has become a household term over the past few years, but what does it really mean? As
defined by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), “Cloud computing is a model
for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable
computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be
rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
(Mell & Grance, 2011, para. 1). However, Microsoft’s Azure website puts it much more clearly by
stating, “Simply put, cloud co.
“The cloud: a mysterious new technology that magically fixes all my business problems.” While that’s probably what you’ve heard over and over, we’re sure there’s still the nagging voice in your head saying, “But really…what is the cloud?” That’s a fair question, as countless definitions of cloud computing appear everyday. Let us clear up some of the confusion by revealing five mysteries of the cloud.
Secure Computing in Enterprise Cloud EnvironmentsShaun Thomas
A look at how your business should approach computing in the cloud. This ebook highlights issues like data sovereignty, public and private cloud security issues as well as many of the myths that surround cloud computing.
Learn more at CloudUniversity: www.cloudservices.education
Maybe you heard that the cloud is a new technology that magically fixes business problems. And maybe you’re thinking, “But really...what is it?” That’s a fair question, as countless definitions of cloud computing appear every day. Let us clear up some of the confusion by revealing five mysteries of the cloud.
This presentation will give complete information regarding security issues related to cloud computing. To learn cloud computing fill up a simple form.
http://bit.ly/aDegGN
Open for Business: A Quick Guide to Starting Your Venture in the CloudKasey Bayne
The crew at Kashoo has put together this free guide to starting your new business in the cloud. From document store to project management (and yes, accounting too!), we recommend tools & tips for running your business in the cloud. Check it out and let us know what you think - answers@kashoo.com anytime!
Overcoming The Biggest Barriers To Cloud Computing?Bernard Marr
During the current coronavirus pandemic, cloud computing is playing an increasingly prominent part in many of our lives. From how we stay entertained, to socialising with friends and doing business, it’s fair to say that when things eventually return to normal many people will have a far greater appreciation of cloud and the way it empowers us to work, play and do business differently.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Alt. GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using ...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Generative AI Deep Dive: Advancing from Proof of Concept to ProductionAggregage
Join Maher Hanafi, VP of Engineering at Betterworks, in this new session where he'll share a practical framework to transform Gen AI prototypes into impactful products! He'll delve into the complexities of data collection and management, model selection and optimization, and ensuring security, scalability, and responsible use.
Communications Mining Series - Zero to Hero - Session 1DianaGray10
This session provides introduction to UiPath Communication Mining, importance and platform overview. You will acquire a good understand of the phases in Communication Mining as we go over the platform with you. Topics covered:
• Communication Mining Overview
• Why is it important?
• How can it help today’s business and the benefits
• Phases in Communication Mining
• Demo on Platform overview
• Q/A
Climate Impact of Software Testing at Nordic Testing DaysKari Kakkonen
My slides at Nordic Testing Days 6.6.2024
Climate impact / sustainability of software testing discussed on the talk. ICT and testing must carry their part of global responsibility to help with the climat warming. We can minimize the carbon footprint but we can also have a carbon handprint, a positive impact on the climate. Quality characteristics can be added with sustainability, and then measured continuously. Test environments can be used less, and in smaller scale and on demand. Test techniques can be used in optimizing or minimizing number of tests. Test automation can be used to speed up testing.
Dr. Sean Tan, Head of Data Science, Changi Airport Group
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Unlocking Productivity: Leveraging the Potential of Copilot in Microsoft 365, a presentation by Christoforos Vlachos, Senior Solutions Manager – Modern Workplace, Uni Systems
6. Whenever mission critical applications are concerned, how "secure" cloud providers claim to be matters a great deal less than the claw back service level agreements (SLA) they
provide, or whether auditors can adequately evaluate their offerings against regulatory compliance criteria.
AWS outage. for everyone involved (not least Amazon’s own operations staff) it’s been a very long 4 days. What are the lessons to learn?
1. Read your cloud provider’s SLA very carefully ‐ Amazingly, the four‐day outage did not breach Amazon’s EC2 SLA. which as a FAQ explains, “guarantees 99.95% availability of the
service within a Region over a trailing 365 period.” Since it has been the EBS (elastic block storage) and RDS (relational dbase) services rather than EC2 itself that has failed (and all the
failures have been restricted to Availability Zones within a single Region), the SLA has not been breached, legally speaking. That’s no consolation for those affected of course, nor is it
any excuse for the disruption they’ve suffered. But it certainly gives pause for thought.
2. Don’t take your provider’s assurances for granted ‐ Many of the affected customers were paying extra to host their instances in more than one Availability Zone (AZ). Amazon
recommends this course of action to ensure resilience against failure. (Each AZ, according to Amazon’s FAQ, “runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is
engineered to be highly reliable. Common points of failures like generators and cooling equipment are not shared across Availability Zones. Additionally, they are physically separate,
such that even extremely uncommon disasters such as fires, tornados or flooding would only affect a single Availability Zone.” )
Unfortunately, this turned out to be a technical specification rather than a contractual guarantee. It will take Amazon quite some effort to repair the reputational damage this event has brought upon it. Justin Santa Barbara, founder and CEO of FathomDB was forthright in
his blog post on Why the sky is falling: “AWS broke their promises on the failure scenarios for Availability Zones … The sites that are down were correctly designing to the ‘contract’; the problem is that AWS didn’t follow their own specifications. Whether that happened
through incompetence or dishonesty or something a lot more forgivable entirely, we simply don’t know at this point.” While it’s easy to be wise after the event, Amazon’s vulnerability to this type of failure may have been visible on a deep‐enough due diligence exercise. As
Amazon competitor Joyent’s Chief Scientist Jason Hoffman notes on the company’s blog, “This is not a ’speed bump’ or a ‘cloud failure’ or ‘growing pains’, this is a foreseeable consequence of fundamental architectural decisions made by Amazon.”
3. Most customers will still forgive Amazon its failings ‐ However badly they’ve been affected, providers have sung Amazon’s praises in recognition of how much it’s helped them run a powerful infrastructure at lower cost and effort. Many
prefaced criticisms with gratitude for what Amazon had made possible, such as BigDoor’s CEO Keith Smith: “AWS has allowed us to scale a complex system quickly, and extremely cost effectively. At any given point in time, we have 12 database servers, 45 app servers, six
static servers and six analytics servers up and running. Our systems auto‐scale when traffic or processing requirements spike, and auto‐shrink when not needed in order to conserve dollars.”
4. There are many ways you can supplement a cloud provider’s resilience As O’Reilly’s George Reese points out, “if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn’t Amazon’s fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature
an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon’s cloud computing model.” It’s useful to review the techniques customers have used to minimize their exposure to failures at Amazon.
(Twilio, for example, didn’t go down. Although the company hasn’t explained exactly what its exposure was to the affected North Virginia Availability Zones, it has described its architectural design principles in a first entry on its new engineering blog by co‐founder and CTO
Evan Cooke. These include decomposing resources into independent pools, building in support for quick timeouts and retries, and having idempotent interfaces that allow multiple retries of failed requests. Of course all this is easier said than done if all your experience is in
designing tightly‐coupled enterprise application stacks that assume a resilient local area network. Cooke’s post goes on to describe some of the characteristics that make Twilio’s architecture capable of operating in this more fault tolerant manner. To start with, “Separate
business logic into small stateless services that can be organized in simple homogeneous pools.” Another step is to partition the reading and writing of data: “if there is a large pool of data that is written infrequently, separate the reads and writes to that data … For example,
by writing to a database master and reading from database slaves, you can scale up the number of read slaves to improve availability and performance.” Another site that didn’t go down is NetFlix, which runs all its infrastructure in the Amazon cloud.
5. Building in extra resilience comes at a cost (Bob Warfield describes how a previous company used Amazon.com infrastructure in a way that allowed it to “bring back the service in another region if the one we were in totally failed within 20 minutes
and with no more than 5 minutes of data loss.” As he goes on to say, the choices you make about the length of outage you’re prepared to support have consequences for the cost your customers or enterprise must fund. “Smart users and PaaS vendors will look into
packaging several options because you should be backed up to S3 regardless, so what you’re basically arguing about and paying extra for is how ‘warm’ the alternate site is and how much has to be spun up from scratch via S3.”)
6. Understanding the trade‐offs helps you frame what to ask ‐ There are questions you should be asking to satisfy yourself that a cloud service you rely on is not exposing you to a
similar failure (or at least that, if it is, you understand this and are willing to bear the consequences in return for a cheaper cost). Referring to NetFlix’s practice of randomly killing
resources and services in order to test its resilience, Bob Warfield adds this advice:
“That’s likely another good question to ask your PaaS and Cloud vendors — “Do you take down production infrastructure to test your failover?” Of course you’d like to see that and
not just take their word for it too.”
7. Lack of transparency may be Amazon’s ‘Achilles heel’ ‐ Several affected customers have complained of the lack of useful information forthcoming from Amazon during the outage. BigDoor CEO Keith Smith wrote, “If Amazon had been more
forthcoming with what they are experiencing, we would have been able to restore our systems sooner.” GoodData’s Roman Stanek called on Amazon to tear down its wall of secrecy: “Our dev‐ops people can’t read from the tea‐leaves how to organize our systems for
performance, scalability and most importantly disaster recovery. The difference between ‘reasonable’ SLAs and ‘five‐9s’ is the difference between improvisation and the complete alignment of our respective operational processes … There should not be communication
walls between IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and customer layers of the cloud infrastructure.”
Amazon’s challenge in the coming weeks is to show that it is prepared to give its customers the information it needs to build in that resilience reliably. If it does not meet that need
and allows others to do better, it may gradually start losing its dominant position today in IaaS provision.
5
9. 9 Good Cloud
Driver 1
for those prepared to innovate, there’s the power of the cloud to increase competitiveness and
realize new opportunities.
Driver 2 there’s the threat posed by the cloud (and thos fast nimble cheap startups) to those
established businesses that are unable to innovate fast enough (eg consumerization trends.
BUSINESS CASE Something we'll come back to)
There is ample evidence that forward‐looking enterprises are thinking carefully about these threats
and opportunities.
They’re changing the way they organise IT and its relationship with the business.
Intuit generates more than half its $4+ billion revenues from connected services. SaaS.
Ginny Lee, CIO, explains that to support this growth in on‐demand capabilities, she “had to turn the
IT organization from a service provider into a change agent … I had to change the mindsets of
people within IT to make sure they know that their mission is to enable growth and a great
customer experience.”
Financial services giant Fidelity, which is using the cloud to provide employee portals to its clients
that combine customer HR data and benefit plans with relevant information about 401k investment
planning.
Xerox is cloud‐enabling its high‐volume printing systems to serve its customers better and open up
opportunities to provide turnkey marketing services to smaller companies.
Postage meterage provider Pitney Bowes faces falling spending on stamps and so is building a
secure mailbox in the cloud.