Category: Cloud Computing

Omni Cloud Strategies: The New Digital Frontier – Part 1 Introduction to Omni Cloud & The Rise of Multi-Cloud Environments

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The digital horizon is constantly evolving, and at its forefront is the transformative power of cloud computing. Terms like “multi-cloud” and “omni cloud” are not mere buzzwords but signify strategic shifts in how businesses approach their digital infrastructure. This article demystifies these strategies, placing them under the lens for a clearer understanding.

Tracing the Cloud Evolution

From the dawn of mainframe computers to the advent of internet-based cloud solutions, the narrative of cloud computing has been one of innovation and adaptation. Initially, the focus was singular – one business, one cloud provider. Today, the narrative champions competition, diversity of services and integration.

Defining Multi-Cloud

Multi-Cloud is the strategy of using multiple cloud providers, where each provider handles a separate, distinct workload or application. The motivation is often to avoid vendor lock-in, leverage specific features of each provider, or to ensure redundancy and risk distribution.

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Your Cloud journey and how to balance developer autonomy, platform manageability and security

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Most companies want to be able to innovate and grow quickly. But the ability to do so depends on the organization’s ability to balance developer autonomy with platform manageability and security. It’s not an easy task, but one that requires careful planning ahead of time. Here are principles every company should follow on their cloud journey:

The cloud is how companies innovate, scale and grow.

The cloud is how companies innovate, scale and grow. As a result, it’s important to balance developer autonomy with manageability of the platform. By allowing developers the freedom to create and innovate, you can get more out of your investment in technology. However, without proper controls and security measures in place, there are risks associated with this approach as well.

The cloud allows for continuous innovation through agile development practices—the ability for teams to rapidly develop new features or products that allow them to move faster than ever before. As a result of this rapid innovation cycle, developers need access to tools that allow them to keep up with changes across multiple programming languages (like Python, Terraform, Cloud Providers Native Languages) while ensuring compliance with industry standards like ISO, GXP, PCI-DSS or NIST regulations

The shift to the cloud can be overwhelming and confusing, especially as many organizations find themselves with a multi-cloud environment, which can lead to it’s own set of challenges.

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Cybersecurity and Cloud: Next-Gen Challenges and Risks and How Organizations Can Prepare Themselves

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Cybersecurity is a significant challenge in the cloud environment with the rapidly evolving threat landscape. Furthermore, with more businesses adopting cloud computing and its amalgamation with emerging technologies, the challenges have increased correspondingly. Hence, the focus should be on identifying these next-gen cybersecurity challenges and preparing to overcome them.

Cloud computing has improved IT efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. However, all these features have one common challenge, security. The problem with cloud computing cybersecurity is that organizations must correctly distinguish where the CSP’s (Cloud Service Provider) responsibility ends and theirs begins. This gap increases the organization’s potential attack surface and enables malicious actors to infiltrate information systems. This article discusses next-gen challenges and risks and looks at how organizations can prepare themselves to overcome them to keep critical information assets’ confidentiality, integrity, and availability intact.

(Image Source: Pixabay)
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Cybersecurity for Smart Cities: Challenges, Risks, and Security Best Practices

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Smart cities have become a reality today, with governments, businesses, and residents, making use of advanced technology to increase productivity and efficiency at home and the workplace and make lives better. However, the challenges to ensuring safety, security, and data privacy have risen proportionately, leading to the requirement for a unique cybersecurity model for smart cities.

A city using advanced technology infrastructure and other cutting-edge solutions to improve its operational efficiency, provide better services, and improve the lives of its citizens qualifies as a smart city. The technology ecosystem often consists of ICT (Information and communication technology),  IoT (Internet of Things), AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning), Blockchain, Cloud computing, etc. However, using the latest technologies has its challenges of cybersecurity risks, compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) of its citizens. Below is a closer look into cybersecurity risks in smart cities, their challenges, the threats they are exposed to, and the potential solutions to overcome such hurdles.

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What is Azure Governance? Let’s look at the fundamentals

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In this blog post, we will discuss the management and operational principles which underpin enterprise governance in Azure which is a necessity for successful cloud adoption and one of the first rails to enable a culture that facilitates digital innovation.

The core components of Azure management are the challenges of Enterprise Cloud Adoption and the components which make up the full set of governance capabilities in Microsoft Azure.

The Azure governance principles are a continuum of tasks, projects and initiatives, therein you build natively in Cloud and also migrate workloads into Azure, securing and protecting those workloads so that they are robust and resilient. You then proceed to monitoring these workloads, so that you can pick up any problems and ensure that they are consuming resources in a manner which is both performant and cost-effective.

Next, you invest in automated configuration to ensure that any changes to your workloads are holistic but also auditable and immutable. Governance ensures that your workloads and the platform on which they run are compliant with your company’s policies and regulatory obligations. This, in turn, creates a more robust enterprise platform, ready to receive new workloads and in turn, a becomes a hub for innovation with the necessary guard rails in place.

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Hyperscale Cloud in China? Microsoft? Mooncake? Alibaba Cloud? Gotchas, pitfalls and directions to successfully navigate it

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When Westerners think of hyperscale cloud providers, the usual suspects that come to mind are named Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle, and IBM Cloud. Seldom do you hear another name, which tends to be odd since it is already the world’s third-biggest cloud service provider according to the numbers: Alibaba Cloud. And with yearly revenue growth between 60 and 140%, they sure are catching up fast.

 

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However, to operate a cloud within China there are some hoops you need to jump and you have to collaborate with the regional administration. Provisioning and relocation times, thus, are fundamentally increased, in no little part since tasks must be directed by the local partners. The truth of the matter is that, while it is conceivable, receiving a cloud foundation that does not have a physical presence in China places organizations that operate in China at a colossal detriment.

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Are you a decisionmaker contemplating a migration to the cloud? This is what you need to consider and understand

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Information security aspects when moving operations from on-premise

So if you are reading this I will make some basic assumptions that you know about Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and perhaps even Alibaba Cloud, these are renowned hyperscale cloud vendors. Last few years cloud computing have been among the IT industries hottest topics. The term refers to on-demand access to computing resources provisioned by another provider. 2019 has been dubbed the year of migrations by several vendors and a pronounced advantage of cloud computing is that they tend to be highly available and easily scalable. For fast-growing business, cloud-computing has revolutionized the way they can work. Organizations typically lease cloud-based resources from outside the organization. Of course, it is also possible (but not as common) to host cloud-based services internally.

While cloud computing can be very cost-efficient and offer fast scaling, it’s challenged by the fact that resources will most likely be hosted outside of the business’ data centre and therefore, outside of the direct control of that business, increasing the complexity to manage risk and handle governance.

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Quantum cryptography and cryptography in a post-quantum world

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So in my previous article on quantum computing, we talked about where we are today, and where we are headed in regards to breakthroughs in the technology as well as touching on some basics of “what is quantum computing“. In this article, I explore what quantum cryptography and cryptography is like in a post-quantum world.

So, a refresher: quantum computing is set to transform cryptography due to the revolutionary, non-deterministic way of operating.

How will they affect existing cryptography algorithms and which options do we know today for doing cryptography in a post-quantum world?

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Quantum computing and cybersecurity: A quantum of solace or a massive threat?

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For as long as it has been in development inside the science labs of the universities, corporations and government agencies, quantum computing has been considered the next frontier in cybersecurity. Quantum computers are machines that do not work with classical electrical on and off-states but instead rely on quantum states that can be in several states at once, a circumstance known as „superposition(1)“. While they are still in their very infancy, their capabilities have been mystified over and over and it’s probably fair to say that quantum computing is one of the most misunderstood technological advancements of our day and age.

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Super-human data processing might hold good and bad in store for the cybersecurity field

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Within the ongoing arms race in the perimeter of information security, artificial intelligence and machine learning are two of the most promising innovations.

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While AI in common „personal assistants“, like those developed by Amazon, Alibaba and Google has recently reached levels at which it can convincingly make phone calls on behalf of their users, the capabilities of AI in the hands of defenders, as well as attackers, will likely evolve from buzzword to technology of significant importance over the next years.

On the defensive side, artificial intelligence powered intrusion detection will deliver the ability to pick up on anomalies within an organizations network or perimeters and raise alerts or even countermeasures much quicker than would be possible for any human security team. AI technologies supreme and literally superhumanly quick pattern recognition capabilities enable it to consistently collect intelligence regarding new threats, attempted attacks, acceptable user behaviour and constantly evolve its knowledge.   This does allow AI-powered intrusion detection mechanism to find the proverbial needle in the haystack (and react to it) much faster and more concise than classical signature-based intrusion detection systems or a human security analyst.

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Azure Security Center is a cybersecurity solution that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning integrating with the organization’s digital estate.

This does have a flip-side, of course: The same AI capabilities could be used to learn about specific defences and normal user behaviour pattern in an organization and mask the malicious behaviour so it will not be recognized by classical intrusion detection systems or human onlookers.

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