staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Brian Wheeler

  • 12 Tips for Managing Your Multi-Cloud Environment

    12 Tips for Managing Your Multi-Cloud Environment

    No single cloud vendor has the perfect solution for your unique business situation. The only way to maximize the benefits of cloud services to your business is by dealing with several cloud providers and monitoring all of them simultaneously. That’s the IT equivalent of singing an aria while standing on your head and scrambling eggs. (Not really, but it can seem that way.)

    Here are 12 things to keep in mind when planning your company’s multi-cloud strategy:

    • Map your entire network, and then identify where the cloud fits in it. Get a clear picture of the cloud’s role in your overall system-management strategy to avoid having to backfill gaps in the data needs of business managers and other customers. Different lines of business will be best served by different cloud providers.
    • Work with vendors that respond quickly and positively to the unexpected. There will always be unforeseen situations when you’re stitching together multiple cloud services. Your partners should report regularly on the state of their services, enhancements, and new features.
    • Automate low-level monitoring and maintenance tasks. Two primary reasons for adopting cloud services are cost savings and more efficient operations. One way to achieve both is by reducing the amount of human oversight required to keep your systems humming.

    The potential complexity of multi-cloud management is shown in this flowchart encompassing the many elements that need to be stitched together precisely. Many of these low-level operations must be automated to optimize your strategy. Source: Carl P. Lehrmann, 451 Research

    • Follow your users. Pay close attention to how the “consumers” of your apps and systems are actually putting the tools to use. They are the best indicators of which processes are the biggest productivity boosters. You can also learn about any new services the users discover that help them get their work done faster, more efficiently and/or less expensively. This lets you get a jump on the kinds of tools the users are most likely to need in the future.
    • Double down on cost controls. You can’t control what you can’t see. Dealing with multiple vendors complicates the process for requisitioning new services. To avoid unnecessary impediments to quick implementation of useful new services, devise a purchasing process that is as flexible as the services themselves. However, not long after the service honeymoon period, evaluate whether each new service is proving to be worth the cost and whether there are better and/or less-expensive alternatives.
    • Application life cycle continues to dictate cloud migration. Data centers may be shrinking, but they are definitely not disappearing. For reasons related to security, compliance, insurance, and any number of other factors, some systems are staying in house for the foreseeable future. You certainly want to avoid attempting to lift and shift an in-house app to a cloud service, particularly one that is only a couple years old and thus hasn’t yet paid for itself. Once an older system is ready for a reinvention, it’s easier to make a business case for going cloud-native.
    • Take advantage of the power of pre-emptable virtual machines. Because they persist for no longer than 24 hours, pre-emptable VMs are a good choice for batch processing and fault-tolerant deployments, according to ComputerWeekly’s Matthew Cooter in a November 2016 article. Pre-emptable VMs are as much as 80 percent less expensive than Google’s regular instances, and their fixed price help companies plan and manage their costs.
    • Adopt an integrated data center management system designed for virtual environments. This is the only way to ensure your server, storage, network, security, operations and applications teams are working as a single unit toward common goals, according to Jay Litkey, president and founder of cloud service provider Embotics, in a November 21, 2016, article in Virtual Strategy magazine. Any organization structured around traditional physical infrastructure boundaries is destined to struggle with the shift to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
    • Identify the apps in your organization that are best suited to cloud-native implementation. Traditional apps are monolithic, run as VMs, use a scale-up architecture and are generally more difficult to develop, deploy and maintain. By contrast, cloud-native apps are more modular and service-oriented, comprised of collections of containers and services, based on a scale-out architecture, and easy to automate, move, and scale.

    Focus on the apps in your organization that will benefit most from a cloud-native approach, and wait on those that are better served by deployment on a traditional data-center platform. Source: TechTarget

    • Match your apps to the services that play to their strengths. Big-name services such as VMware and AWS have bifurcated to meet the diverse needs of their customers. For example, VMware’s vSphere-based Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is intended for traditional apps, and the company’s Native Hybrid Cloud is designed for modular, microservice-based systems. Similarly, AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Elastic Block Store, EFS file system and VPC private networks mimic in-house data centers, while the company also supports higher-level services such as NoSQL databases, BI processing, Hadoop-like clusters, message queues, push notification services, media transcoders and search engines.
    • Automate policy across cloud environments. The only efficient approach to use of multiple cloud services is to have a single standard for policies that are applied automatically to each environment. The policies cover such areas as virtual servers, workloads, data storage, traffic flows, compliance/regulation, reporting and security. It’s also easier to apply updates and changes when you have a single configuration across different infrastructures because the changes propagate seamlessly from environment to environment.
    • Vendor lock-in becomes a thing of the past. When you rely solely on one public cloud service, it can be difficult to migrate virtual machines and other resources to another service. Among the factors to consider are comparable read/write loads, data transfer needs and network latency. By relying instead on your custom combination of cloud services, all of which share policies and configurations, you find yourself managing the change instead of the change managing you.

    — Brian Wheeler

  • Cloud Security Tips: How to Prevent Hackers from Breaching Your Cloud

    Cloud Security Tips: How to Prevent Hackers from Breaching Your Cloud

    Recent data system breaches at Oracle and Sage reminds us all that the continuous threat of criminal hacking of cloud security systems is not abating. Rather, it’s becoming routine. Business managers, lawmakers and computing professionals must understand the motivation behind this activity if they want to protect business interests and thwart attacks effectively. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that the hacking community is a diverse and complex universe—a large variety of skilled players and several motivators. Only by understanding the motives of criminal security hackers is it possible to profile computer crimes. With solid profiles and some basic cloud security tips in hand, security professionals can better predict future activity and install the appropriate safeguards.

    Most security professionals are likely to spend much more time analyzing the technical and mechanical aspects of cybercrime than the social and psychological dimensions. Of course, it’s critically important to dissect malware, examine hacker tools and analyze their code. However, if we want to understand the nature of the cyberthreat, security professionals need to act more like criminal investigators. We no longer live in a world of mere glory-seekers and script kiddies. Some very serious thugs are now lurking in virtually every sector. So, it’s critically important to understand their motives and signatures, since these point to their targets and reveal their methods of operation.

    As you consider your business context, it’s important to frequently ask yourself this question: What exactly are the means, motives and opportunities for potential criminal hackers of my business computing systems? Getting a solid answer to this question is the key to identifying your most vulnerable assets and developing a security plan.

    The Sage Breach

    Earlier this month, Sage Inc. announced that hackers, using an internal login, had gained access to sensitive customer information including the names, addresses and bank account information of a few hundred U.K. customers. It’s undetermined at this point whether the hackers gained access to everything needed to cash in on their attack. But the Sage attack is just the latest in a wave of high-profile hackings in recent months, with victims ranging from enterprise IT vendor Oracle to cryptocurrency Bitcoin and even The College Board, creators of the ACT exam.

    According to many IT and computing system analysts, the top three hacker motives are financial, corporate espionage and political activism. In the remainder of this article, we look closely at the financial motive, and then we help you consider the best approaches to securing your cloud computing assets.

    Financial System Hackers

    You’re probably most familiar with this type of hacker, since they cause the most damage and are often featured in the news. The motive here is pretty obvious: make money the easy way, by stealing it. Financial system security hackers range in size from a few lone actors to large cybercrime organizations—often with the backing of conventional criminal organizations. Collectively, these thieves are responsible for extracting billions of dollars from consumers and businesses each year.

    These threats go well beyond the hobbyist community to a very high level of sophistication. All criminal attackers immerse themselves in a complex underground economy: a vast black market in which participants buy and sell toolkits, zero-day exploit code and malware botnet services. Vast quantities of private data and intellectual property are up for sale—highly valuable data that has been stolen from victims. A recent market trend is the sale of web exploit kits such as Blackhole, Nuclear Pack and Phoenix—which they use to automate drive-by download attacks.

    Some financial system hackers are opportunistic and focus on small businesses and consumers. Larger operations go to great lengths to analyze large enterprises and specialize in one or two industry verticals. In a recent attack on the banking and credit card industry, a very organized group was able to pull off a global heist of $45 million in total from an ATM—with an extreme degree of synchronization. These secondary attacks were feasible because of a previously undetected breach of some bank networks and a payment processor company.

    The Next Wake of Hackers

    Malicious hacker attacks are quite common nowadays, and often have tragic and highly disruptive outcomes. And these attacks are also inevitable, as more internet users utilize cloud computing and storage. This raises more concerns about combating the effects of hacking, and it will become increasingly critical in the future. There is ongoing debate as to whether basic cloud security tips are enough to prevent hacking threats. After years of extensive industry debate, it’s been found to be the same problem in a different location. So, if businesses can build reliable security and recovery methods, then cloud computing can be a serious consideration. Most importantly, the freedom, accessibility and collaboration that is available through cloud computing can far outweigh and mitigate the risks to your data security.

    Many cloud computing users assume their data is held safe by the security measures of their cloud vendor. But, hackers use code-cracking algorithms and brute force attacks to acquire passwords, and they can also access data transmissions that lack proper encryption.

    Ask yourself this question: Do you have solid infrastructure, processes and procedures to ensure reliable, high-security backups of your sensitive and business-critical data? If you can’t answer this question with confidence, then we invite you to read on a bit further as we consider various aspects of a top-tier cloud backup service.

    Your cloud backup service should process all data through encryption to ensure that it’s entirely unreadable by unauthorized users. It should only be possible to decrypt your data when you decide to retrieve it. Minimally, this means that data transmission should be done only through the SSL protocol and that strong passwords are necessary for information access and decoding.

    No system is hacker-proof, but the greatest benefit of cloud a backup service is the high-degree of readiness for recovery from a hacking event. Companies that specialize in cloud backup services reduce threats to your data by enabling full recovery of all business-critical data to its original state in just a matter of clicks. These backup companies replicate your cloud data and safeguard it in a separate cloud so that the likelihood of data loss from natural disasters and other threats remains infinitesimally small.

    Modern Cloud Security Tips

    Rock-solid facilities. Today, the best cloud application management solutions have standard built-in backups. Look for a provider that has robust, extreme-security data centers utilizing precise electronic surveillance and multifactor access control systems. The design of its environmental systems is important, also, to minimize the impact of any disruptions to operations. What’s more, multiple geographic locations and extensive redundancy add up to a high degree of resiliency against virtually all failure types, including natural disasters.

    Protection from the bad guys. The best providers not only provide super-strong physical protection for your backup data, but they also lock everything down with extensive network and security monitoring systems. Their systems include essential security measures such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and password brute-force detection on all accounts. Additional security measures can include:

    • Secure access and data transfer – all data access and transfers go through secure HTTP access using SSL.
    • Unique users – identity and access management features to allow you to control the level of access.
    • Encrypted data storage – encrypt your backup data and objects using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256.
    • Security logs – extensive, verbose logs of all activity for all users of an account.
    • Native Support – Native support for multiple platforms and systems including MongoDB, MySQL and Linux/Unix/Windows files.