AWS Dedicated Instances, Hypervisor Security, and Multi-tenancy

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Randy Bias

Most everyone in the blog ecosystem has missed both the point and some of the economics of AWS Dedicated Instances that were recently announced.  Folks like The Register focus on how a single virtual instance can cost $109,324 for a year … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing | Tagged amazon, audits, aws, cloud, cloudscaling, commoditization, EC2, enterprise, predictions, Security, Storage, Virtualization | 1 Comment

More on Amazon’s SAS70 Type II

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Randy Bias

Amazon hasn’t been forthcoming since my last post on their control and control objectives, which is disappointing, but expected.  I still believe that transparency here is more important than security through obscurity.  Hiding the controls and control objectives doesn’t provide … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing | Tagged amazon, audits, aws, cloud, elastic compute cloud, Security, whitepapers | 1 Comment

Why is Amazon’s SAS70 Audit Bogus?

Posted on November 16, 2009 by Randy Bias

At first glance it seems like Amazon’s recent announcement of a successful SAS70 audit is grounds for celebration[1]. Certainly it has met with fanfare on Twitter and blogs. Unfortunately, a SAS70 audit isn’t what most people think it is. Worse … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing | Tagged amazon, audits, aws, cloud, sas70, Security | 23 Comments

‘Operators’ and ‘Administrators’

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Randy Bias

Operating and administrating Internet infrastructure is not the same. For the uninitiated it may seem that ‘operators’ and ‘administrators’ (systems or network) are not different, but there is one important distinction: The primary job of an operator is “risk aversion”, … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing, Technology | Tagged Networking, Security, Storage | Leave a comment

Can You Trust Cloud Computing?

Posted on October 17, 2008 by Randy Bias

A thoughtful blog posting from Khoi Vinh asks whether we can trust clouds given the current financial climate. It’s good to be cautious about trusting all of your data to ‘the cloud’, but you should already be evaluating your cloud … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing, Technology | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

CIO Concerns about Cloud Security

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Randy Bias

There is a little here on CIOupdate about CIO concerns with cloud security. The article is short and a little overblown in how both sides are represented. I’m currently talking to CIOs and CISOs at large enterprises and I’m not … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing, Technology | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

Another take on Web-Scale Computing

Posted on December 18, 2007 by Randy Bias

Greg Borenstein, principal behind Music for Dozens and out loud thinker sums up the potential long term impact of Amazon’s successful cloud computing model. It’s an insightful article and I think worthy of a close read, including the comments. First … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing, Technology | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

Micro Virtual Machines

Posted on July 12, 2007 by Randy Bias

Introduction MicroVMs are a technology I was playing with for the first product we considered spinning out, the Virtual Server Room, a sort of virtual appliance micro-cluster in a box made up of back office IT servers. I thought I … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged Security, Virtualization | 1 Comment

Securing Your Data on Amazon’s EC2

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Randy Bias

As a proof of concept, we’ve released a new Amazon EC2 ‘AMI’ (ami-34ba5f5d) that uses filesystem encryption (dm-crypt) for the ‘ephemeral store’. This image is available to the general public and we hope you get some good use from it. … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing, Technology | Tagged Security, Virtualization | Leave a comment